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Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

NINbuntu 64 posted:

There are multiple Dutch studios on Kickstarter because they're using connections they have in the States to work under a US bank account. Not everyone has those connections.

You mean like contacting a bank and asking for an account? It's only ludicrously hard the other way around as State has started tracking down tax-dodgers and their demands for oversight generally don't meet the banks expectations.

If they mean corporate EIN/SSN and incorporation, then there is a charge connected with that, but it's also chicken feed compared with fund-raising.

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Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

A Steampunk Gent posted:

When Derek Smart is taking you to task, I think you need to stop and consider where things went wrong.

He's the Sarah Palin of games development. I think you're offering him far too much credibility considering how he used his 22+ years in game development.

Dishonesty in Kickstarters? Never.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

KuroKisei posted:

I just stumbled across a KickStarter for Deus Ex Machina 2. It was definitely not what I was expecting and has nothing to do with the Eidos Deus Ex franchise. It has voice acting by Christopher Lee and looks like an old hippie's LSD trip. Apparently it is the sequel/reimaging of a game from the 80s that has a modicum of success. I'm really just not sure what to think after watching naked people in the fetal position flying through coloured psychedelic hallways and then hovering through the air in a hanging-on-a-cross position collecting floating needles.

I still have the soundtrack for this, although the original game may have been given away with a ZX spectrum that I donated to someone's electronics project back in 2007. The upshot is that in a totalitarian future along the lines of Huxley's Brave New World (and bearing in mind that dystopian futures were an eighties thing), there is a glitch in the machine that produces a human that can fight the regime through a series of minigames representing the 7 ages of man. The game would run after you synced the 'soundtrack' during the intro with an external tape recorder.

The minigames were generally plate spinners (touch an object to make it spin faster, and the spin would decay) or jumping games; timing your jumps on a constantly moving track. The whole thing was timed to run to the length of the audio cassette and you'd get your score at the end of it. Brave concept for the time, it came packaged in a vac-formed case containing the game and soundtrack tapes. The soundtrack was notable for the list of people involved, although Ian Dury's constant mispronunciation of 'Machina' soured it slightly.

Ultimately there wasn't a lot of replay value as you had to play the whole thing through in one shot, but it was something that attempted to push the envelope. I seem to recall that it might have had a relationship with Leslie Crowther, but the early 80s computing scene was filled with characters. Look up the Frankie goes to Hollywood game for some :catdrugs:

Edit: Mel Croucher, not Leslie Crowther. Noted for dressing up in a pink suit and being a bit mad.

Edit #2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwJBsYJ16IE - First part of the first half of the game.

Hav fucked around with this message at 14:27 on May 28, 2013

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Orzo posted:

Wait, $50,000 for Frontiers? What? How can they possibly expect to complete the game on that small of a budget? Also, from $100,000 to $125,000 will apparently take them from a single player game to a 4-player multiplayer coop game?

Don't get me wrong, what they have looks great and is definitely impressive. But I'm highly skeptical of the budgeting and timelines.

I'm in the same boat; that's a very low budget for the scope, but I tossed some cash in as my 'risky' kickstarter for the week.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Spiky Ooze posted:

I don't know if it's fair to target Doug Tennapel's jerky personal views. I mean if you expect it to be a part of the product he makes, sure. But if not, why do we have to be all zero tolerance about a human being? Everyone's got flaws.

'We' don't, but some of us choose to vote with the only thing we have left, a wallet.

Not supplying money to dangerous bigots is a personal choice.

I've backed Void Destroyer - looks interesting enough, but the budget is hella low, so my expectations are on a similar level. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1718477862/void-destroyer

Hav fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Jun 26, 2013

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

seorin posted:

I expect we'll hear more soon enough, but for now, they're probably scrambling trying to fix it instead of sitting down and explaining all the details. Maybe I'm too much of an optimist?

Assume incompetence before malice. I've had production issues before now and it's a balance between telling people what's going on where you might not have all the information, and trying to fix the issue, all the while with the complaints piling up.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Peas and Rice posted:

Apparently backing kickstarters entitles you to the final product at a discount these days.

Generally that's true and your 'reward' for backing the project rather than just waiting for it to be launched. Why use the word 'entitled' like that?

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Great Rumbler posted:

Satellite Reign [aka It's Totally Syndicate But We Couldn't Get the Name] just went live:

Looks pretty interesting, but it's outside of my price range for the relatively small number of game shots.

quote:

Some of us have worked together for nearly a decade! Collectively, we have worked on a wide range of genres and notable titles including the Syndicate series, GTA IV, Darksiders II, Star Wars, L.A. Noire, and many more.

There was Syndicate and Syndicate Wars, unless they're referring to the EA 'reboot', and I'm not sure what Star Wars they're referring to. It's on my watch list.

Edit: persuadatron might have been a slightly more recognizable name from the game-breaking weapon we all loved...

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe
Just wanted to mention that it looks like Eterium (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1989266212/eterium-a-space-combat-sim-for-windows-pc?ref=activity) is going to miss it's funding goal.

Gameplay video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Z1DxbG1bU

I have no dog in this fight other than I backed it, I just wanted to let people know about it.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Jordan7hm posted:

Wait it really is ok to ask for living expenses?

I suspect that it's fine to ask for whatever you want. Whether you get it or not is down to the people you're pitching to. In most cases, Kickstarter's are funded by people who think that a hundred thousand is an enormous amount of money, especially if it's getting there in $10 increments. It's very basic cognitive dissonance that I personally don't get into when I fund kickstarters because it's not my money once I click the pledge button.

I think the majority believe that they 'own' the developer for their $10; I just want someone to successfully break the publishers grip on what they perceive I want.

edit:

yodzilla posted:

If I were to tell my wife that I'm planning on living off 30k a year now we'd have some serious issues.

Yep. Plus the whole 'healthcare' issue that makes it so much fun here. You'd be looking at $10k deductables on most of the healthcare that you could find on ridiculous premiums until 2014-ish. The UK doesn't have that problem in terms that PAYE individuals tend to subsidize the healthcare for other people. Getting a bill of around $500 is not unusual for an ambulance trip in the US, let alone any treatment cost.

Hav fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Jul 30, 2013

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Jordan7hm posted:

Living expenses is just so drat vague. I've lived on 15k / year and I've lived on 70k / year, and I'm sure others have had even wider swings.

Like you wouldn't believe. I've had to make choices between cigarettes and food before now, and I simply don't know how I spent six months living off ramen noodles and baked beans. Luckily I was renting my own place there, so didn't gas anyone too badly.

I'm pretty comfortable now, but I remember those days with fear and clarity...there's simply no way I could function that way again, having a family to support these days; however, part of the industry _uses_ the relatively low self-worth of the younger developers ('get into games writing!', 'Carry skills with you!', 'opportunities') to push content into whatever the current engine is.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Shalinor posted:

Nice!

Really glad that one funded. Yeah, there's been a lot of space ship'y games on Kickstarter overall, but that one felt properly Wing Commander-esque.

It has all the elements of the earlier Wing Commanders, which is one of the reasons that it attracted me, that and 'Enemy Starfighter' are shaping up to be really good single player space fighters.

Gone are the days when I had to struggle with Darkstar One. Bwhahahahahahaha.

edit: holy fuckballs, they scraped in with $810 over?
edit2: He's saying a beta should be out in August; that's pretty impressive.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Jedit posted:

Wouldn't using a photo of a missing person while claiming to have the same first name as that person be a criminal offence? It is in the UK.

Surprisingly crackers and spammers are noted for their outright flauting of laws.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe
I'm probably very much alone, but I just asked for a refund off my third kickstarter that arbitrarily decided to sign me up for 'backerkit' without my consent, as I'm pretty drat hardline about people passing around my personally identifiable information. I consent to kickstarter's use, and I kinda have a contract with the owner of the kickstarter, but playing fast and loose with emails and names is kinda shady.

Backerkit have been great at (telling me that they're) deleting my information, but does anyone else believe that this is a bit skeevy?

edit:

I saw the CLANG conversation, but it seems that you didn't see the full horror of the update (first since April);

Subutai posted:

We've hit the pause button on further CLANG development while we get the financing situation sorted out. We stretched the Kickstarter money farther than we had expected to, but securing the next round, along with constructing improvised shelters and hoarding beans, has to be our top priority for now. We hope we'll be able to make an announcement on that front soon. In the meantime, if you're still interested in helping the next generation of swordfighting games move forward, have a look at the STEM Kickstarter now being run by our friends at Sixense. We've contributed to an update on their Kickstarter that will explain some of the reasons we are excited about what they're doing.

Now, a lot more detail for those who are interested.

THE FINANCING PICTURE IN GENERAL

Loyal donors may be curious as to why an apparently promising game is difficult to finance. The answer has a lot to do with the current state of the video game industry. While we have been working on CLANG, two major video game publishers, THQ and LucasArts, have gone out of business. Others have fallen on hard times. The current generation of consoles is coming to the end of its life cycle. Rather than invest in innovative new titles, the still-surviving publishers tend to keep their heads down, grinding out sequels and extensions to well-worn AAA franchises.

The overall climate in the industry has become risk-averse to a degree that is difficult to appreciate until you've seen it. It is especially bemusing to CLANG team members who, by cheerfully foregoing other opportunities so that they could associate themselves with a startup in the swordfighting space, have already shown an attitude to career, financial, and reputational risk normally associated with the cast members of Jackass.

To a game publisher crouched in a fetal position under a blanket, CLANG seems extra worrisome because it is coupled to a new hardware controller. Not that you can’t play it with mouse and keyboard--you can--but we’ve been clear from the beginning that the swordfighting problem can’t really be solved without new hardware. Coupling the success of CLANG to concurrent developments in hardware adds an additional element of perceived risk that is off-putting to the small number of people who are still willing to even consider funding games.

Which is why supporting Sixense’s STEM project is the most effective way to help CLANG: it will get the next generation of hardware out on the market, reducing the element of perceived risk and, we hope, clearing the way for us to pursue our own quest to find financiers who have steady nerves and other anatomical prerequisites. Moreover, it embodies a number of upgrades that we specifically asked for and that will improve CLANG in specific ways.

CLANG and STEM

OUR STANCE ON UPDATES

As some of you have quite reasonably pointed out, we have gone a long time without updates. This doesn't reflect our ideal of how to go about communicating with our donors. It is a consequence of the very nature of fundraising. Even in favorable circumstances, the search for funding can last a staggeringly long period of time. At any given point in the fundraising process, one or more conversations is underway with possible funders; each of these conversations tends to spread out over a span of months and to turn into its own separate drama complete with moments of hope and reversals of fortune. The dreaded term "next week" makes frequent appearances in emails. All of those interactions are, of course, confidential. Sending out a vague update about inconclusive, ongoing conversations with potential investors doesn't seem nearly as attractive as waiting a couple more weeks for a deal to actually come through, and then making a triumphant announcement of that. We have been in exactly that holding pattern since early 2013 when we began the fundraising quest in what we believed was a timely fashion, i.e., long enough before the exhaustion of the Kickstarter funds that we believed we had a healthy safety cushion.

WHAT WE CAN SAY ABOUT OUR CURRENT STATUS

Is the CLANG project dead? At what point do you put a toe tag on an indie game and call it finished? Opinions on that might vary, but in our opinion, the project doesn't die simply because it runs out of money. Projects run out of money all the time. As a matter of fact, game industry veterans we have talked to take a blithe attitude toward running out of money, and seem to consider it an almost obligatory rite of passage.

The project isn't dead in dead-parrot sense until the core team has given up on it and moved decisively on to other projects. Other events such as declarations of bankruptcy can also serve as pretty reliable markers of a project's being dead.

In the case of CLANG, none of this has happened yet. When a couple of promising leads fell through for us in a short span of time circa May, it became obvious to us that our essential people would have to find other ways to keep body and soul together during an upcoming span of time, of indeterminate length, during which the CLANG project would be unable to pay them. They chose to find temporary work in the Seattle area, rather than giving up on CLANG altogether and seeking permanent jobs.

We are working on CLANG as an "evenings and weekends" project until such time as we get funding for a more commercial-style reboot. Paradoxically, we feel better about the future of CLANG now than we did when the clock was ticking down. Then, we were feeling under pressure to make decisions that might not have been in the project's best long-term interests. Now that the pressure is relieved, however, we can operate more calmly and look for ways to set this thing up in a sustainable way. Meanwhile, the publishing side of Subutai continues to fulfill its obligations and transact business normally.

LESSONS LEARNED

--Kickstarter lock-in. Kickstarter is amazing, but one of the hidden catches is that once you have taken a bunch of people's money to do a thing, you have to actually do that thing, and not some other thing that you thought up in the meantime. In our case, what it meant was that in April of 2013 we were still executing on a strategy that we had come up with at the beginning of 2012. A conventionally funded company would have changed course several times during such a long span of time, adapting its strategy to what was happening in the market. --the Neal Stephenson fan obfuscation hypothesis. The potential financiers most likely to talk to us are Neal Stephenson fans. Once they have actually met Neal and gotten their books signed, it turns out that they are not really that interested in our project. But they don't want to make Neal Stephenson feel bad and so they don't give him any useful feedback; instead they just go dark. In the meantime we have wasted a huge amount of time on them. We were slow to cotton on to this. --we don't match the profile, or the timing, of their fund/investment strategy. VCs have extremely specific requirements and generally cannot color outside those lines. --we simply haven't talked to that many potential investors yet. It is time-consuming and a small number of people can only do so much of it. --they assume we don't actually need the money. This might actually be a variant of the Stephenson fan obfuscation hypothesis. We frequently encounter a sort of wall of incredulity that Stephenson could really be having trouble obtaining funding for a swordfighting game project. --the prototype/demo is underwhelming in its current state. We always knew that this would be the case, but there is little to be done about it since we are trying to build a new game play mechanic from scratch, not just re-skin a familiar mechanic. In other words, this is not a failure of execution our part, but some might consider it a tactical mistake, arguing that we should have put more into gameplay and less into fundamentals. We're comfortable with the direction we went, since without fundamentals we don't really have anything new to offer. --the "fruit fly among the elephants" problem. A small startup can be founded and pass through its entire life cycle, including death, during the time that it takes a large entity to make a decision and draw up the legal documents. It is almost impossible to get large company employees to feel even a mild sense of urgency about anything. --Potential investors/publishers are worried about our team. This hypothesis is the one we hear most frequently from sympathetic people within the industry. Video game investors are extremely team-conscious. Our team punches above its weight, but the amount of the KS raise wasn't sufficient to staff up a full-sized group, leaving us vulnerable to the criticism that the team is missing certain elements. Of course, the answer is "we'll hire some awesome people once we get funded." In the climate of anxiety that seems to pervade the industry now, however, any perceived risk factor is sufficient to torpedo a pitch, and so all such discussions end up following the template of the justly famous "Tesla pitches VCs" video.

Why bother to keep trying at all then? Because the advent of new hardware in this market is soon going to make the existing blockbuster game franchises look old and tired, at which point people will be looking for something fundamentally new to make buying that new hardware worth it. What will our approach be, now that we've bought ourselves some time? We doubt it is productive to subject CLANG to comparison shopping before the jaded eyes of generic VCs. Our approach needs to be more selective. But it is almost impossible for a small group, focused on making a game, to obtain the sort of Olympian perspective on the game funding landscape that is needed to identify the right sorts of investors quickly enough to be of any use. Our only efficient choice is to keep doing what we're doing and wait for the right investor to come along. The right investor for CLANG is one who has some pre-existing interest in what we are doing. This might be as simple as a personal fascination with swordfighting or sword games, or something more strategic such as a connection with a hardware-based strategy within the video game industry. Finding people like that takes time, which is one reason we ran out of it. Some team building might help, but, keeping in mind video game publishers' extreme focus on all-star teams, the only people who could really help us in this department would be ones with truly first-rate credentials--people whose mere association with a project can bring in investment dollars--who are willing to take a chance on something that might or might not get funded and work without pay in the meantime.

What can people do to help? Probably not that much, unless they happen to be qualified investors or superstar game programmers looking for an adventure. If you are one of our Kickstarter donors, then probably the most helpful thing you can do, as far as the CLANG team is concerned, is to be patient. We always knew that this was going to take a while and that we'd hit some bumps along the way. And we feel that the decision we've made is much better than the alternatives which were to [a] quit, [b] panic and sell out, or [c] get into a bad relationship with the wrong investor.

Sincerely,

The CLANG team

It's horribly flawed; talking about the current economic crisis in the same breath as THQ and LucasArts seems to miss the point of what happened to both of those companies and it really looks like Goons called it.

"Kickstarter is amazing, but one of the hidden catches is that once you have taken a bunch of people's money to do a thing, you have to actually do that thing"

Hav fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Sep 23, 2013

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Yeah, Backerkit is legit, it just offers a lot of fulfillment tools, and with reward structures for Kickstarters getting so complex, having some service like that is essential. Unless Kickstarter actually provides the tools needed to manage things properly, services like Backerkit will be fairly standard, and Backerkit is at least well-known and established in that regard.

I'm slowly turning around to them; they've responded to my requests to have my details deleted a lot quicker than the actual kickstarters themselves. My problem is that a trust model by default (ie _assuming_ that backerkit is serviced and throw a modicum of protection on their database), which I think you can see the problem with. Being given a fait accompli regarding information I gave in good faith to one entity being passed to another is beyond the pale.

I'm used to operating in HIPA/PCI environments, so I could be taking it far more seriously than I should.

zaphod42 posted:

There's no point wasting time refactoring code to make more sense when you already understand it as-is and you're the sole guy working on it, better to just get it fixed and working.

*wince* The single biggest cause of tech debt, especially in an acquisition environment, is simply accepting that it has to work. I'm still struggling with old tech debt and brittle code from a seven year old acquisition because of the valley of urgency between 'It's not broke, why fix it' and 'we want to get this feature in'; the latter involving enough regression testing that you want to stab yourself to death with a spoon. And it's depressingly common.

Bieeardo posted:

I can't tell whether that is delusion or frantic rear end-covering.

Feels like a combination of the two. They seem to have fallen far short of where they wanted to be, and are blaming pretty much everything *except* the overreach. Depressingly, whereas OUYA actually got a product out, these guys appear to have produced a demo and called it quits. Certainly the 'We'll get it finished, just be patient' seems bizarre in the face of both the stated goal and where they got to.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

A Steampunk Gent posted:

Not to keep harping on with the same example, but that is exactly what the numerous boycotts of South Africa were - a total refusal to engage with the citizenry of the country in order to shame them for the policies of their (elected) government, so again, I don't see how you can denounce one without denouncing the other. Agreed though that putting it up then pulling it is a pretty bad turnaround.

It was easier to do in the eighties. This poo poo now just looks dumb, especially when you're targeting supporters inside Isreal.

The whole thing is heavily nuanced and really shouldn't be part of a Kickstarter. Keep your politics to politics, and away from fundraising for something completely different.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

EA Sports posted:

Sonys recently announced vr spec was about the same as the planned oculous. hope it works without the ps4.

Sony has a loving awful habit of trying to make everything proprietory. I'm hoping that they've finally learnt their lesson after the memory stick, minidisc, cameras....

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Install Windows posted:

Memory stick and Minidisc were actually used by a bunch of companies. The vita cards on the other hand...

Erm. Well, I had a Technics minidisc player, so people took them on, but it didn't go very far because licensing was a _bitch_. Then they introduce NetMD, but the software rotted. I have to run a windows 98 VM to be able to use the NetMD at all. They even tried to continue the pimping with UMD.

Memory Sticks....I don't recall anyone supporting them other than Sony. Do you recall who?


Weird thing is that I love minidiscs, still. God knows how I'm going to convert the archive now.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

moot the hopple posted:

I have dim hopes it will be good but it's been one of my Kickstarter regrets so far.

I backed it when it was just on Desura. It's been a very long time coming, but not quite as long as Interstellar Marines.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Testekill posted:

I wonder if the Xenonauts dev team just went "gently caress, IT'S ACTUALLY GOOD" when the XCOM remake was released.

I felt bad that I hadn't test driven Xenonauts in a while, so I started off a new game.

It's pretty good, as long as you go in expecting a faithful reproduction of an xcom game with some subtle, yet welcome differences. Soldiers now get templates ('Assualt', 'Rifleman') for their loadouts, meaning you can set one soldier as a template and assign the same equipment on a click.

The soldiers themselves level up as usual, and there are medals for achievement which give them character, and they have some interesting descriptive text ('Previous regiment', 'Combat Experience'). The paper dolls themselves have different faces, but an androgenous body, which is a little jarring.

You can recruit new soldiers from a neat little spreadsheet so you can prioritize attributes.

The xenopedia entries are pretty good, although I would have preferred larger text for the 2560 x 1600 screen.

The interception minigame off the geoscape (no globe, but a 2d map of the world) is tedious and I've been autoresolving to avoid having to constantly repair jets. One neat feature of the geoscape is that you see little ghost markers turn up on the globe where there is UFO activity and a little explanation ('Strange lights seen at sea, Sailors afraid to put to sea'). There's also a running total for the number of casualties in each country, which makes me fear the worse.

There's a rivalry between the scientists and the engineers, the lead scientist particularly is a jerk, and the engineers appear to be communists. I'm just glad we have a common enemy.

The tactical game is pretty much XCOM. IGO/UGO, reaction fire, percentage to hit based on the shots fired and number of TUs allocated, kneeling and fog of war/sightlines. It's tight and controls well, with no overt bugs so far. The AI is nothing to write home about at the moment, but it's early days.

Grenades are available without having to open the inventory through a 'quick grenade' menu, which was cool, and night missions give you infinite flares (last ~5 rounds) on the same menu. The suspense in night missions I haven't really had since the original.

Win conditions for the crashed UFOs are interesting; kill all the aliens OR hold the saucer for five turns. Hopefully that will reduce the bug hunt.

Downsides are that the individual soldier icons look samey, and the old problem of map variability. All in all it's come a long way.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

codo27 posted:

The Carmageddon pre-alpha started yesterday for us backers. It was all looking good, but once the race loaded up the game became unplayable. Went to about 1-2 fps. If I waited long enough, on certain camera angles you could play, but when the main area of the level hove in view, again it nearly stopped. Its pre-alpha, so what can you expect. High hopes all the same, the little bit I did get in was fun. Nuns and penguins flying everywhere.

Yeah, I think you're getting warts and all to start with, but I have faith in Stainless. I'm not masochistic enough to play Alphas, though.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

ookiimarukochan posted:

All of Lovecraft's stuff has been public domain in Europe for 6 years. They're probably in the public domain in the US too (lots of his stuff didn't have copyright registered, and the stories that were didn't seem to have an extension made), but as the recent Sherlock Holmes case showed that doesn't stop estates from trying.

Some of the mythos actually dates to fairly recently and is still under copyright, the question marks that remain outside of the definite public domain works (his books) are the status of what was transferred to Arkham House in 1947 as nobody seems to know. If there is copyright on the short stories, it'll run out in around 2030.

In short, it's a bit of a mess. Chaosium still owns the trademarks on a couple of concepts and licenses to Fantasy Flight, and the 'modern' extensions are usually down to their individual owners.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Bruceski posted:

Is "sue me for libel in England" a good idea? I have no idea how bad their laws actually are, but the things I've heard over on this side of the pond are pretty defendant-unfriendly.

Depends where you are on the damages spectrum, and there's been a bunch of noise about libel reform after the whole chiropractor debacle. It's still a vast amount of sound and fury from two sets of people that thoroughly believe they're more important than they are. It's something that happens when you get narcissists together.

Taking your legal laundry to the social networks is likely to prejudice the outcomes, too, proving that they're loving idiots.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Tracula posted:

"Rise of the Fallen" is probably the most generic subtitle I've ever read.

'Fall of the risen' was taken.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

crazypeltast52 posted:

Listen the this guy. I'm going to have the gooniest book ever on my coffee table, but I want it to be a high quality goony coffee table book.

Did you check for the hardback pledge level?

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Dissapointed Owl posted:

I like that both parties are making big effort posts trying to convince people and my god it's very entertaining. Nobody is walking away from this unscathed, but the backers are still getting their promised goods so it's all good in my book.

It feels like a pair of bullies starting victimizing one another and are escalating things as hard as they can.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Falcon2001 posted:

Grim Dawn is recently early accessed, I think. I played a bit of it and found it be like Titan Quest but different, for better or worse.

It's a very standard ARPG that for some reason managed to stop all forward motion through one playthrough by not acknowledging my killing of a boss. Four times. So I dropped it. I'll probably go back and take another look, but Diablo III, Van Helsing 1 + 2 and path of exile are all finished and lack overt jank. The upgrade system is 'okay', but nothing to write home about.

It's very much an also-ran, IMO.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Mirificus posted:

You're writing the book with Microsoft Word!?? That's your problem. It is not a DTP application suitable for publishing, it's barely capable of writing letters.

Most 'writers' tend to even eschew it as a bunch of poo poo that gets in the way of getting the words down, and generally they don't have any truck with 'DTP'.

Pubbies really make me feel good about myself.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Cicero posted:

PSA: Elite Dangerous is good, you guys.

So. Good.

I know it has its own thread and everything, but since it was a kickstarted game I figured I'd gush about it a bit here too. Just got the standard beta and the core ship mechanics just feel right.

Also pimping divinity original sin. I was skeptical as dragon commander fell short for me, but so far it's turning out to be an awesome homage du baldur's gate, and has some fairly deep gameplay. One of the Kickstarter success stories, it's been at the top of the steam bestsellers list since the early access release.

Wasteland 2 is also pretty solid and feels like an updated fallout.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Cicero posted:

Yeah this is also true. Having distance between home base and your coders in terms of geography, time (scheduling meetings with India is obnoxious), and culture/language makes running projects much harder.

I should probably drop this derail now though. :v: Suffice it to say, outsourcing isn't a panacea to high programmer costs.

I'll contribute this and then shut up about it. There's a couple of other things; getting what you wanted out of outsourced developers tends to rely on having a tight contract because they frequently stop returning your calls, and the quality is spotty, mainly because they're coming out of programming boot camps. I've got a range of projects in various states of crapness coming back to the us from outsourcing in Eastern Europe and India. Effectively the cheap commodity programmer gold rush has somewhat ended.

There's also rising distrust over the NSA which is going to somewhat Balkanize programming in the near future.

Finally, programming is a highly variable field, which is a bitch when trying to hire. We have a series of randomly selected exercises that we have to give the candidate in person, mainly because we get the same identical researched answers if we give people notice. Programming is filled with narcissists that are completely unable to estimate their time effectively and are self taught; neither are terrible problems if they're inside a tight team, but a single programmer like that won't achieve anything.

Tippis posted:

“Code typist” vs. “UML diagram sketcher”. :D

Pretty drat close, although engineers usually come with a computer science degree or applied experience in systems design. Systems architect usually spends the most time around UML, but those roles are beginning to get subsumed as programming moves from very tight planning, to the fail fast iterative cycle of agile.

All of the above are criteria I apply to Kickstarter, unless I gut-reacting to something.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Shalinor posted:

Are you kidding? This show is amazing. A+. Would not back and eat popcorn and watch again.

It's not a proper kickstarter fight until the accusations of trolling come out.

Edit: Looking at the project for the first time, I wouldn't touch that with a 10' pole. They're looking at a multi-platform + physical media release for $50K? This is so scammy it's not funny.

Hav fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Jul 21, 2014

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Oceanbound posted:

They got over $23000 on the 19th and 20th without getting new backers, so the funding is itself somehow part of the scam.

Stake up enough money to make it look like you're going to hit your funding and other people will throw in; it feels like manipulating the herd effect, but there's no way this is a real team/project. Some of those screen comparisons are too close to be 'inspiration'.

Drifter posted:

They explained that by saying people made a lot of dupe accounts for a buck and are removing them as other people back.

:henget:

They'd need a bunch of people to achieve that effect. I can see a Reddit wave jumping on the bandwagon for a buck, but that's ridiculous.

Edit: Dailies
https://www.kicktraq.com/projects/1577656602/areal/#chart-daily

edit: It's back, my bad.

Hav fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Jul 22, 2014

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

JossiRossi posted:

I really hope that you are joking instead of being the literal personification of the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

There's not a lot that can fail for $40 million, other than the dreams and hopes of a thousand nerds. At this point it's merely whether the fake nongoods appreciate in price or fall.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

sinking belle posted:

That's really cool. On an unrelated note, for most of last year I didn't have enough money to eat

You should kickstart something. Apparently I'll throw money at a bunch of half-arsed ideas. Or dial down from your steak and lobster diet.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

floofyscorp posted:

Freelancers/contractors often get paid on a per-day basis.

Hourly is more usual, though.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Levantine posted:

Unsung story finally updated after months of silence. I hope the weird scammy kickstarters have raised some awareness that, hey, you might want to communicate with your backers! It sounds like they are very,very early in the process though. It sounds like they had little more than an idea when they Kickstarted:

Everytime I hear the word 'consultant', I hear a tiny cash drawer ringing.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

The Cheshire Cat posted:

The problem is that kickstarter backers apparently think that game developers should basically live like sweatshop workers and exist only to deliver games to their supporters.

Gaming is still a preserve of the young, and that's where your salary expectations tend to start, so the assumption is that people start around $30,000 ($28,000 for a family of four), which is pretty close to the poverty line. It doesn't help that the bigger companies love to splash around money on sponsorship, creating the viewpoint that the income from games far outweighs any upfront funding.

A while back there was talk of the sales devaluing the games; while it was treated with a certain amount of derision, it's actually managed to create a sliding scale of value where the amount charged during the kickstarter may not be realized on release; hell, they even go on sale quicker.

Edit: ^^^ Police did raid his house in Belize over underage girls, but he accused the police of being on a witchhunt. None of his other behaviour would point to him having a robust sense of responsibility, and the stuff that came out from the biochemical researcher was jaw-dropping.

Edit 2: http://www.vice.com/read/john-mcafee-bath-salts-belize-murder-fugitive-gregory-faull

Hav fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Aug 6, 2014

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Gaspy Conana posted:

I guess what I'm trying to say is, for the love of God, account for living expenses or your life will be weird.

And don't get sick.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe
So, out of nothing other than vicarious curiousity and having a very minor run-in with the developer when I stated that I thought it was overly ambitious, I'm interested in the progress of Skyjacker

This was the initial kickstarter that failed;
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/digitilus/al-skyjacker

They followed this up with the starship Constructor project that got funded;
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/digitilus/skyjacker-starship-constructor

Then tried to start up the original kickstarter again, which again failed;
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/digitilus/skyjacker-space-combat-sim

They managed to hit greenlight;
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=184306161

But it's all gone quiet since the end of 2013, with the release deadline being third quarter 2014. Anyone know how it's progressing?

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Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

SupSuper posted:

It's progressing very slowly, given they have barely secured any funding, so I doubt they'll hit that release. But they still post signs of life in their forums: http://www.digitilus.com/forum/index.php?action=forum

Yeah, given that the last developer post was April 2014 and they appear to be moving from the Ukraine to the US, I think it's largely dead. I was just wondering if anyone had actually backed any of it, or had any more insider information.

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