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NmareBfly posted:See, this is why I have an issue with the way stretch goals are sometimes presented. I think it's too early for a lot of these projects to be locking in features. I guess the only real risk is that backers start to freak out and demand refunds because it turns out that X gameplay type didn't make final release, and the resolution for that would be between the dev and the backers. Some stretches seem crazy optimistic to me is all -- but I doubt adding a bunch of qualifiers like 'For 10K more we'll TRY to implement this feature' will do a good job of pushing the total up. When you pitch a game to a publisher, you'll have a list of certain features that you're going to include, and you'll be beholden to those requirements. If you make a change, you need to both get approval and communicate the reason for that change effectively. With a kickstarter game, you don't need actual approval, but you do need to communicate the reason for that change. Orzo posted:All I'm saying is that Game A and Game B look and feel very different (the aforementioned 'dramatic' difference). You disagree, that's fine. And it's the willingness of a developer to make two completely different games (again, you'll disagree with the premise that they are that different) based on a stretch goal that turns me off to it. From an implementation standpoint, they're not completely different, they're very similar, sharing much of the same core functionality and structure, and you're assuming that developers don't want to make all the goddamn games, all the time, forever, which is pretty much the opposite impetus of every developer I've ever worked with. Literally the biggest issue any game faces is feature creep, which is developers going "wouldn't it be cool if..." and then adding a feature. Their initial vision is a high-level, grand idea, but the implementation of that and the scope are subject to change. Stretch goals with this kind of feature creep are probably the most responsible method of feature creep ever, in that their approval and funding is driven by actual market information and not some exec in a suit who knows what is hip with the cool cats these days. Ultimately it boils down to this: mutata posted:"b-b-but the developer's VISION!" which is fine for a personal opinion, but it's based upon an emotional response that is strongly disconnected from the reality of making videogames. There is no initial design that survives development fully intact and unedited or improved.
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Dec 4, 2012 21:09
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bomblol posted:Oh, that's cool, I had already pledged to this. I don't get the hubbub over online... These types of games blow to play from hundreds of miles away with the bad netcode that indies usually manage, way more fun of a couch with friends/family/lovers. Well thanks for backing it! To be honest we don't really want to add online networking to the game, not only is it a nightmare, but the experience of dungeon crawling within punching distance is the best, in my humble opinion. ...but with the sheer amount of people asking for it, it's hard to figure out what to do, and see how large of a portion of the market they represent. you are honestly only the second person to tell me that online is not a bonus to them.
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Dec 4, 2012 22:01
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argument about Blizzard in another thread, you have a whole loving subforum for it.
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ChaoticKitten posted:Well thanks for backing it! To be honest we don't really want to add online networking to the game, not only is it a nightmare, but the experience of dungeon crawling within punching distance is the best, in my humble opinion. If you think adding online is going to be that much of an issue you're probably better off not promising it. It'll lose you some pledges, but I think future sales of the game would be hampered from all the bad press about your lovely netcode if it turned out you couldn't get it right. I think you'd be better off leaving it for a sequel or potentially an update. Maybe play around with it when you are developing the full game and if it works, fantastic, if it doesn't then you haven't pissed off all the people who only pledged because you said it would be in. I'm not a backer of your Kickstarter and online play wouldn't necessarily interest me anyway, so take my suggestion with a grain of salt. 
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Dec 5, 2012 01:06
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chiefnewo posted:If you think adding online is going to be that much of an issue you're probably better off not promising it. It'll lose you some pledges, but I think future sales of the game would be hampered from all the bad press about your lovely netcode if it turned out you couldn't get it right. I think you'd be better off leaving it for a sequel or potentially an update. Maybe play around with it when you are developing the full game and if it works, fantastic, if it doesn't then you haven't pissed off all the people who only pledged because you said it would be in. They aren't promising it. They're putting it at a stretch goal that is literally 20x their initial development costs, and looking at their other stretch goals it's easily the most ambitious and resource-intensive, such that I'm sure the 10k that buys 4 extra character classes (multiple times) is not going to go exclusively to implementing those character classes.
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Dec 5, 2012 02:17
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ChaoticKitten posted:Well thanks for backing it! To be honest we don't really want to add online networking to the game, not only is it a nightmare, but the experience of dungeon crawling within punching distance is the best, in my humble opinion. To elaborate on my previous opinion: I feel online play is much more conducive to a lengthy lifetime of a game. If someone I'm playing with day in and day out (girlfriend/lan buddy etc.) join me for twenty sessions, we're probably out of things to do in the game by the end. But if I meet a new stranger online whose sense of humor I like, and who happens to also have your game, I'm much more likely to play again and have a new "unique" experience with the game. Either way, I actually have an important question before backing: A custom weapon/hat - will they be available to everyone if I design them? Also, how moddable is the game? As harsh as it sounds, can I short-change you after the release by making a popular weapon mod?
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Dec 5, 2012 02:17
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ChaoticKitten posted:Well thanks for backing it! To be honest we don't really want to add online networking to the game, not only is it a nightmare, but the experience of dungeon crawling within punching distance is the best, in my humble opinion. Thanks for being honest and letting us know your thought process. I can totally understand why you wouldn't want to include online by default or even want to do it. Totally agreed that playing in person is more fun but unfortunately local coop is kind of awkward for PC unless you have one already hooked up to your tv. It's also difficult to get everyone together nowadays, at least with my friends since we all live in different cities. The game does look great though, I love the lighting effects with the 2d.
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Dec 5, 2012 02:50
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Tagichatn: We aren't seasoned veterans of the gaming industry, so we have to always maintain the stance that we don't -really- know what the pants we are doing, and that other people might know better. Sometimes that is not the players, sometimes it is :P Legend of Dungeon would be a lot of fun to play online for many people, we've been talking about it since we started doing the kickstarter and getting requests fot it all over.. we have to decide whether we want to make that goal more attainable or not, and as much as it complicates things, we are leaning towards it. chiefnewo: we have done networking before, and we only want to do it if there is enough of a supporting group of players. What we want to see is if people want to play our game online badly enough to tell everyone they know. Ulgress: the kickstarter rewards are available in everyone's game, so no penis hats! I also agree with your statement about the lifetime of a game. That aspect is part of the reason we are thinking about changing where in the stretch goals networking should be. The other thing we are thinking about is porting the game to consoles, though we might need some type of publisher for that. We are new to this level of response to a game, and are not sure our brains are working properly. We don't want to make a promise we can't keep! even now talking with you fine humans, I feel a little overwhelmed that this is about a game I'm making @_@ (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 5, 2012 04:36
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ChaoticKitten posted:If people paid 200k for FTL, why not 100k for ours with an overworld? I know what you mean regarding netcode being a nightmare, I'm adding multiplayer to my game as a stretch goal for the same reason. I've noticed that people tend to expect stretch goals to be realistically attainable and based on the cost of developing the additional feature. 2000% funding is unlikely now with 11 days left, but people would probably want to know why it would cost an extra 50k to add online/LAN play. If that's what it costs to hire a developer where you are then fair play, but it helps people's confidence to tell them how you arrived at that figure. Definitely have to remember to back you for $10 though, the game looks awesome. Reminds me a bit of an old public domain game called Knights 2.4.2 on the Amiga. Any plans for a competitive split screen mode?
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Dec 5, 2012 06:37
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ChaoticKitten posted:chiefnewo: we have done networking before, and we only want to do it if there is enough of a supporting group of players. What we want to see is if people want to play our game online badly enough to tell everyone they know.
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Dec 5, 2012 07:27
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Not to derail the game development chat, but does anyone have any ideas why the Sportsfriends kickstarter is faring poorly? They're weird game concepts, but JS Joust shows up in the headlines on gaming news sites fairly often, and I've seen videos of Hokra and Pole Riders before the kickstarter happened, so I'd assume the name recognition would have netted more donations.
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Dec 5, 2012 07:33
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I donated to you guys because the game looks great and out of Vermont solidarity (woo!), but to have network play would be incredible because being in Vermont sometimes there is not a huge crowd of people to play games with
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Dec 5, 2012 07:51
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Closet Cyborg posted:Not to derail the game development chat, but does anyone have any ideas why the Sportsfriends kickstarter is faring poorly? They're weird game concepts, but JS Joust shows up in the headlines on gaming news sites fairly often, and I've seen videos of Hokra and Pole Riders before the kickstarter happened, so I'd assume the name recognition would have netted more donations. Here's my personal opinion regarding why I don't care about this Kickstarter. I don't want to say it's because they all look terrible, but they ALL look either terrible or twenty minutes worth of gimmick. They don't look so much like games as they do things that earn weird indie games awards for 'innovation' or whatever Space Giraffe is internet famous for. And for their big name Joust game, it really seems that peripherals on a PC don't get the same draw that they do on a console. As well, a lot of the attraction to these particular games probably can't be very well conveyed without actually being involved in person.
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Dec 5, 2012 08:33
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Drifter posted:Here's my personal opinion regarding why I don't care about this Kickstarter.
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Dec 5, 2012 09:14
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I don't mind the concepts, what puts me off is that they seem to require advanced setup for just quirky silly fun games. If you look at the Release Plans section, different games need different hardware, special setup, controllers, bluetooth, PlayStation Move, limited availability, etc. I imagine I'm not the only one that would rather just get something that you can just pick up and play (which is where these games shined, in expos and cons where it's all already setup for you).
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Dec 5, 2012 14:08
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Pier Solar HD's Kickstarter ended just now with an extra $100k in case anyone was wondering.
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Dec 5, 2012 15:32
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Rainfall's Kickstarter ends in 8 hours. Hopefully they'll get enough for that Desert King arc.
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Dec 5, 2012 19:01
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Nyphur: FTL was a perfect storm. and we aren't expecting to sell the same way, which is why we were offering such massive stretch goals early on. The 100k mark was for more than just networking, there was going to be an entire world to explore with multiple dungeons and story arc's etc. a stand alone server you could run , etc. Because everyone was so focused on the online aspect(not even recognizing the over we have re-organized the goals and removed networking from the overworld. We aren't going to do a split screen mode, the competitive aspect is already there in the sense that your scores are compared at the end and you have limited resources as you play together. This whole Kickstarter thing is very much a learn as we go process.
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Dec 5, 2012 19:55
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As a footnote on the Alpha Colony drama (the $28 short project), the project creator is now saying that $50,000 wasn't enough for the game he wanted to make and was advertising, but he needed $100k or $150k. He was just kind of hoping that the kickstarter would be overfunded, otherwise he'd have go back on a lot of the game's promises and make it smaller and overall shittier. So now I'm glad his project didn't get funded. That's a pretty loving awful attitude to have for a Kickstarter project. If you're asking for people to donate to your cause, the least you could do is be honest about what that money will get. There's an article on Giant Bomb about this: http://www.giantbomb.com/news/a-day-late-and-28-short/4468/ Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Dec 5, 2012 |
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Dec 5, 2012 20:43
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:As a footnote on the Alpha Colony drama (the $28 short project), the project creator is now saying that $50,000 wasn't enough for the game he wanted to make and was advertising, but he needed $100k or $150k. He was just kind of hoping that the kickstarter would be overfunded, otherwise he'd have go back on a lot of the game's promises and make it smaller and overall shittier. Wow. That sounds like a great way to tank his credibility forever -- even if that were true why would he admit it publicly? He could have just said "oh well" and disappeared into the aether.
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Dec 5, 2012 20:46
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I edited a source into my post: http://www.giantbomb.com/news/a-day-late-and-28-short/4468/ So if they did get the extra $28, the game the backers got would have been a shadow of what was promised.
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Dec 5, 2012 20:47
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To be fair, he went from an initial goal of $500k to $50k. That's a big cut, even though he meant $100k. Still, the whole affair wasn't properly handed -- had they gone with $100k from the start we wouldn't be having this discussion now.
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Dec 5, 2012 20:49
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Jesus Christ. I thought they were douchebags before, asking half a million in exchange for promises of a MULE successor and really lovely promo art, but this is just disgusting. Edit: Holy gently caress, do people at Giantbomb actually read the articles before posting comments? Bieeanshee fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Dec 5, 2012 |
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Dec 5, 2012 20:52
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SupSuper posted:I don't mind the concepts, what puts me off is that they seem to require advanced setup for just quirky silly fun games. If you look at the Release Plans section, different games need different hardware, special setup, controllers, bluetooth, PlayStation Move, limited availability, etc. I imagine I'm not the only one that would rather just get something that you can just pick up and play (which is where these games shined, in expos and cons where it's all already setup for you). Yeah, this. I think I would really enjoy playing Joust for example, but I don't have a PS3, don't have any moves, etc. The amount of extra money/setup/etc makes the bar too high for something I doubt I'd get to play that often anyway.
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Dec 5, 2012 21:47
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Other than the blatantly obvious, what could have the people at Blackfoot Studios have done to get their Ground Branch to pass their Kickstarter goal?
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Dec 5, 2012 22:32
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Aratoeldar posted:Other than the blatantly obvious, what could have the people at Blackfoot Studios have done to get their Ground Branch to pass their Kickstarter goal? They did add single player/co-op late in the campaign as a reward for all backers but maybe that was too late or maybe people weren't as convinced that it would be the key focus. Launching after TAKEDOWN probably didn't help either, and they also had a higher goal, so maybe those two hurt. Other than that I can't really think of any differences between TAKEDOWN and Groudn Branch that would suggest why the latter failed. Maybe "from the developers of Halo Reach" brought in a lot of backers for TAKEDOWN, for some reason.
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Dec 5, 2012 22:50
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Bieeardo posted:Edit: Holy gently caress, do people at Giantbomb actually read the articles before posting comments? Giantbomb still encourages "first post"(though not those words), so no, not really.
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Dec 5, 2012 23:05
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Alfalfa The Roach posted:Rainfall's Kickstarter ends in 8 hours. Hopefully they'll get enough for that Desert King arc.  EDIT: Oh they gained $250 in the time it took me to make this post. Hurry and up your pledges if you want that stretch goal I guess!
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Dec 6, 2012 03:08
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:As a footnote on the Alpha Colony drama (the $28 short project), the project creator is now saying that $50,000 wasn't enough for the game he wanted to make and was advertising, but he needed $100k or $150k. He was just kind of hoping that the kickstarter would be overfunded, otherwise he'd have go back on a lot of the game's promises and make it smaller and overall shittier. Best I can figure is this. He's been working on that game for something like 10+ years, and at this point, it has become this impossible to hit dream project for him. Hence the giant price points, rafts of features, and being unable to accept chopping it down to something more reasonable. ... but all that to the side, it still kinda bugs me that he could have hit the $50k pretty easily, if he'd just stuck to his plan of launching mid-Saturday. By rushing it and launching Thursday Midnight or whenever, he not only blew any initial shot at Monday press, but the thing ended midnight Saturday when everyone was out doing midnight Saturday stuff. That is the huge take-away: Any of you running Kickstarters, plan your drive's beginning and end to fall at press-friendly, backer-friendly times. If you screw that up, you're sunk. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Dec 6, 2012 |
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Dec 6, 2012 03:21
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Zereth posted:Less than 30 minutes to go and they're $500 short. Oh no, they didn't make it! I guess they can't add their new feature since they didn't get the arbitrary amount of money that they decided on to get more people to pledge. Without that extra $178 all they'll be left with is additional unfinished art and a mere "Desert Prince" story. Too bad.
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Dec 6, 2012 05:41
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Karim's decided "close enough," I think there were a few paypal pledges that hadn't resolved or something like that, but either way, there are enough funds for the additional character art for the side arc. On that note, that went way better than we were thinking and thanks to the goons who pitched in.
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Dec 6, 2012 05:50
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Shalinor posted:That is the huge take-away: Any of you running Kickstarters, plan your drive's beginning and end to fall at press-friendly, backer-friendly times. If you screw that up, you're sunk. I'm just looking at his campaign more thoroughly now and spotted some more problems that I think people can learn from. These are all things I've also seen in other failed projects this year: Start your video with the game: The game is what you're kickstarting, and if someone's already on your page it's what they want to know about. The Alpha Colony video gets 1 minute and 35 seconds in before anyone explains what the game is about. It starts with a filmed intro about how games used to bring families together in the 80's and then looks at the game's art style, and some people aren't going to be patient enough to get past that. I had the same problem with my video (which dropped to under 15% of people watching it all the way through) so I re-organised it to frontload the key features and gameplay and it definitely helped. Explain what you need the money for: It may seem like common sense that games cost money to develop and distribute, but you seriously have to tell people why you need their money. I've seen some great pitches fall flat because they just didn't explain what the money was going to be spent on. If you're showing completed gameplay in the video, it's especially important to say that what you're showing isn't finished and explain what you need money to finish. A lot of people only want to fund projects that wouldn't be possible without Kickstarter, so if that's the case then you need to say it. Don't make too many pledge levels: You need to very carefully construct your pledge levels, don't give people too many similar options to choose between, and keep the text as short and simple as possible. Alpha Colony had 26 separate pledge rewards, 10 of which were below $100 where most pledges happen and most of which were walls of text. Most people just want a digital copy of the game at a pledge level which is at or below the retail price, and every other pledge just has to look fair and value for money. It probably didn't help Alpha Colony's case that they made the desktop version an extra $5 (not sure why) and had to duplicate loads of pledge levels to accomodate it. Some of the reward increases didn't seem very good value either, like charging $5 extra for a soundtrack download or wallpaper. Account for additional costs: I know the developer has already come out and said he wouldn't have been able to make the game for $50,000 and that has a lot of people annoyed, but it would have been worse than that. Up to a few percent of pledges will allegedly bounce after you succeed, and you have to account for the price of delivering physical rewards. Everyone seems to promise things like stickers and tshirts, but tshirts are expensive to make (cutting into the pledge) and good luck individually posting 500 stickers if your project takes off! Most people are pledging to your project because they want you to be able to finish your game so they can play it, not because you're going to send them some gimmick item. A good rule is to not put any physical rewards under $100. Gamasutra did an interesting survey looking into some of the reasons people didn't back projects on Kickstarter. When you think about it, they're all common sense and we've all rejected projects for similar reasons.
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Dec 6, 2012 06:06
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psy_wombats posted:Karim's decided "close enough," I think there were a few paypal pledges that hadn't resolved or something like that, but either way, there are enough funds for the additional character art for the side arc. edit: Hope to see you on Greenlight once you have something that looks good in motion. Cicero fucked around with this message at 07:44 on Dec 6, 2012 |
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Dec 6, 2012 07:28
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:I edited a source into my post: http://www.giantbomb.com/news/a-day-late-and-28-short/4468/ This has been a thing I've been worried of since the DoubleFine Kickstarter. Originally, mind you, Tim Schaefer's goal of 400,000 for a game was extremely small for a game budget. Like, incredibly tiny. Especially with spending 100k on a documentary and the rest on the game. But still it ends up being a thing where expectations rise with the money investment. He was just going to make a really dinky slapped together game at that price and film it, which was supposed to serve as a "a-ha" to how game development works for the common guy. And then it turned into a success-story and he actually had to deepen his concept with the budget for the game. This is a perfect example of what happens when people take the wrong message from Kickstarter: You should never aim too low for your money. You will end up disappointing everyone. You can't expect to pull in millions if you're not really famous in gaming.
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Dec 6, 2012 15:50
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I dunno, I think even a dinky little adventure game from Tim Schafer still would have been awesome. Although what we are getting is going to be much better.
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Dec 6, 2012 16:03
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IShallRiseAgain posted:I dunno, I think even a dinky little adventure game from Tim Schafer still would have been awesome. Although what we are getting is going to be much better. It would have been, but 300,000 doesn't pay for many salaries. I mean, just think how long you can stay employed for that sum and divide it until it comes to roughly a year and that's how many people he could probably employ, unless 300,000 dollars is your yearly salary or something.
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Dec 6, 2012 17:07
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Mordaedil posted:It would have been, but 300,000 doesn't pay for many salaries. However, I do believe that they were asking for that initial amount because they had a major cancellation and were facing layoffs and needed some money to keep people employed.
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Dec 6, 2012 17:15
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Mordaedil posted:It would have been, but 300,000 doesn't pay for many salaries. I mentioned this earlier, but it's been stated that a developer man-year at a studio costs ~$100k. The "professional" Kickstarters have pretty much all come out with team sizes in line with that estimate. coffeetable fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Dec 6, 2012 |
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Dec 6, 2012 17:16
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Shalinor posted:That is the huge take-away: Any of you running Kickstarters, plan your drive's beginning and end to fall at press-friendly, backer-friendly times. If you screw that up, you're sunk. I would also say all this feedback shows the guy does not have project management skills.---being an idea guy and/or developer isn't the only necessary skillset required to get a game thru Kickstarter and deliver accordingly. I think we've seen too many lately that are "designer, writer, artist,developer" job functions mentioned (and even many omitting anyone actually doing any developing entirely) and it's just assumed other skillsets are lesser/unnecessary to be successful.
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Dec 6, 2012 20:04
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coffeetable posted:I mentioned this earlier, but it's been stated that a developer man-year at a studio costs ~$100k. The "professional" Kickstarters have pretty much all come out with team sizes in line with that estimate. Yeah, but nowadays you can't really make a quality large game without at least a graphics designer, a UI designer, a couple coders, a PR guy, a sales guy, a logistics guy, and so on and so forth. The most basic team you can get down to is at least a coder and a graphics designer, or just a coder, if we're talking basic pixel graphics, but the game needs to have a very concise scope and it won't be a very large project. Generally, at least. There's that LOVE guy, and people like Toady, that are more an exception than the norm.
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Dec 6, 2012 20:35
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I think Frictional Games gives a better idea of what a small studio can accomplish. They made Amnesia with like five total employees, including a sound guy thousands of miles away.
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Dec 6, 2012 22:27
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