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Noyemi K posted:A game I am on staff for was successfully kickstarted so far with almost 225% funding and 12 days to go. Visual novels typically have low and manageable budgets and don't seem to sink into hell as often as other projects do, which is one reason I like working with VN developers. VN's aren't really my thing but congrats on getting more work 
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Aug 30, 2016 19:45
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I did the music for the demo almost a whole year ago 
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Aug 30, 2016 19:47
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Noyemi K posted:I did the music for the demo almost a whole year ago Oof. Uh. Good things come to those who wait
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Aug 30, 2016 20:01
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Having now read through some of The Untold History of Japanese Video Game Developers, it is an amazing mess. That's not to say it doesn't have some interesting material, but the whole thing is really badly presented and can be a real slog to read through.
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Aug 30, 2016 21:11
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Having now read through some of The Untold History of Japanese Video Game Developers, it is an amazing mess. That's not to say it doesn't have some interesting material, but the whole thing is really badly presented and can be a real slog to read through. The real problem is that this whole thing probably poisoned the well for some one else to try to do a similar book. I always loved learning how early developers worked to try to get around the many limitations of the NES/SNES/etc to create what we consider now to be classics and now that opportunity might be gone forever.
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Aug 30, 2016 21:19
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Having now read through some of The Untold History of Japanese Video Game Developers, it is an amazing mess. That's not to say it doesn't have some interesting material, but the whole thing is really badly presented and can be a real slog to read through. Is that the one where he keeps asking extremely creepy questions (well, the same extremely creepy question) of every single developer? I stopped reading that and purged it from my library, hopefully keeping me off various watch lists.
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Aug 30, 2016 21:38
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Having now read through some of The Untold History of Japanese Video Game Developers, it is an amazing mess. That's not to say it doesn't have some interesting material, but the whole thing is really badly presented and can be a real slog to read through. The only upshot to that stuff being used in the NES book is maybe with an editor involved I'll be able to read the actual interesting parts without wading through that mess.
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Aug 30, 2016 21:44
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gschmidl posted:Is that the one where he keeps asking extremely creepy questions (well, the same extremely creepy question) of every single developer? I stopped reading that and purged it from my library, hopefully keeping me off various watch lists. What was the question?!
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Aug 30, 2016 21:46
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Inspector_666 posted:What was the question?! Basically what they thought of the fact the Oppressive West would censor their underage anime porn.
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Aug 30, 2016 21:53
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BexGu posted:The real problem is that this whole thing probably poisoned the well for some one else to try to do a similar book. I always loved learning how early developers worked to try to get around the many limitations of the NES/SNES/etc to create what we consider now to be classics and now that opportunity might be gone forever. To be honest, I doubt this book would have ever gotten made otherwise, so we should be happy with what we have. For some reason there's plenty of books written about video games in western countries which say the same things over and over, but very few English books that go deep into the Japanese scene, other than maybe a chapter, a few anecdotes, and the same stories being shared over and over (did you know that Pacman was based on a pizza?). I feel like there's a lot of material that isn't in English and probably never will be. Outside of this book, the only other publisher that really goes deep is Pix n Love. I don't think those books sell well, so maybe there just isn't any real demand for that side of gaming history.
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Aug 31, 2016 00:25
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Original_Z posted:To be honest, I doubt this book would have ever gotten made otherwise, so we should be happy with what we have. For some reason there's plenty of books written about video games in western countries which say the same things over and over, but very few English books that go deep into the Japanese scene, other than maybe a chapter, a few anecdotes, and the same stories being shared over and over (did you know that Pacman was based on a pizza?). I feel like there's a lot of material that isn't in English and probably never will be. Outside of this book, the only other publisher that really goes deep is Pix n Love. I don't think those books sell well, so maybe there just isn't any real demand for that side of gaming history. The main reason books like these (or even just articles like these) aren't commonplace is that they're simply not practical for any publisher running on a tight budget, be they a magazine publisher or a boutique book publisher or what have you - they take way more work and time to coordinate, they cost a lot more to produce and if you're strictly talking interviews then there's a very real risk that you'll go to the effort to interview someone only to find out that they can't or won't give you anything worth printing. I think the demand from the audience is certainly there and there are plenty of people who want to and would be very good at producing such material, it's just a matter of finding the money to do it. (The other issue, of course, is that the people most suited to writing this stuff all move into real industry jobs ASAP and lose the desire or the time to do any of this poo poo.) The most efficient and immediate way to bring Japanese gaming history to english-speaking audiences is simply translating Japanese-produced material like books and magazines and so forth, I feel, but that has its own issues.
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Aug 31, 2016 02:02
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al-azad posted:On the other hand the C64 book is well collated with opinion pieces by the game's creators and other industry insiders so maybe Sam Dyer has enough wherewithal to reign that dude in. The backer update for the NES book makes it sound like all the involvement that the Jason guy is having is contributing already written excerpts from his book series, so maybe he won't have a real chance to make this a tire fire
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Aug 31, 2016 03:22
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Noyemi K posted:A game I am on staff for was successfully kickstarted so far with almost 225% funding and 12 days to go. Visual novels typically have low and manageable budgets and don't seem to sink into hell as often as other projects do, which is one reason I like working with VN developers. I'm sure this will be fine and all, but good god does half of the text box being a nametag irritate the hell out of me.
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Aug 31, 2016 04:17
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Having now read through some of The Untold History of Japanese Video Game Developers, it is an amazing mess. That's not to say it doesn't have some interesting material, but the whole thing is really badly presented and can be a real slog to read through. I have this book and the DVD with videos he made during the trip. They're gloriously awkward, but there's tons of interesting sights in them. Some bits have been posted to YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyXaJvw_-B0 The first book is really good, and I need to find the time to read the second volume.
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Aug 31, 2016 11:02
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Double Fine sent out a Kickstarter update saying that the special edition Broken Age box is finally going into production, so it looks like I'm finally going to get the thing I paid $120 for. Now to decide if I want to put it on ebay or something. I never finished Act 1 of BA and everything I heard about Act 2 makes me never want to play it, but I the Documentary was great and I want the bluray set for that.
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Aug 31, 2016 12:02
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Veotax posted:Double Fine sent out a Kickstarter update saying that the special edition Broken Age box is finally going into production, so it looks like I'm finally going to get the thing I paid $120 for.
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Aug 31, 2016 12:48
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I skimmed the forums a few weeks ago to see if there was any news. Apparently it was something like video corruption or something in the documentary that was holding it up. They aren't just taking the version they put online and burning it to some Blurays, they were re-editing the episodes to remove the blur they put over design documents and stuff during development.
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Aug 31, 2016 13:43
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Shantae slips again:quote:Update on Release Date Also: quote:Farewell to Xbox 360 and PS3 If you slip a game long enough, their consoles will stop working and so less platforms to support.
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Sep 1, 2016 01:53
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Difficult as in "oh thank God, we hadn't even started".
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Sep 1, 2016 11:38
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Also if you're not a big company Sony and Microsoft literally won't let you start on ports for last-gen consoles as of well over a year ago. Platforms don't want people launching things on old systems as well.
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Sep 1, 2016 16:39
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Hey everyone, we just launched our second campaign on Kickstarter for Eisenwald: Blood of November. It's a new sandbox adventure in the world of Eisenwald where the story will revolve around the fight of two factions for the throne. We were working on creating a simple DLC but got carried away and now want to make a new game. Kickstarter has the video too but youtube version has captions, just in case. Kickstarter campaign is also a good deal - for $12 (Early Bird deal) you can get both the new game and Legends of Eisenwald (which is $20 on Steam and GOG but of course there are sales on and off). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIW4vOAJUQ4 Legends of Eisenwald is an adventure game with tactical battles, RPG and strategy elements set in a low fantasy medieval world where supersticions of that time became alive. It was funded in May 2012 on Kickstarter and was released in 2015 on Steam and GOG where it was pretty well received. SA forums helped us a lot during the first campaign, we remember it and we are grateful.
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Sep 1, 2016 17:30
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Kickstarter apathy is real. Sorry, Eisenwald dude. But hey, at least you got to ride the first wave, eh?
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Sep 3, 2016 18:34
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So maybe it's just me misunderstanding how all this works, but if you released a game and were successful, shouldn't the funding for sequels or w/e come from the profits made by the first game?
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Sep 3, 2016 18:51
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If you made enough to cover cost overruns and pay for a second full production schedule. I'd imagine most Kickstarter-scale games fall short of that mark.
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Sep 3, 2016 19:07
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Pureauthor posted:So maybe it's just me misunderstanding how all this works, but if you released a game and were successful, shouldn't the funding for sequels or w/e come from the profits made by the first game? Hairbrained Schemes is doing exactly that for their Shadowrun games, though. They've had kickstarters for all the major ones. One of the problems of Kickstarter projects is that you sell to most of your customers up front, so unless you get somewhat lucky and sell a bunch more copies after release, you're still likely going to be a bit low on funds. And really, if you can pull off a second successful kickstarter, then it's to your advantage.
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Sep 3, 2016 19:20
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Basic Chunnel posted:If you made enough to cover cost overruns and pay for a second full production schedule. I'd imagine most Kickstarter-scale games fall short of that mark. Yeah you'd need something like the success of Shovel Knight to cover that - it's how the Shovel Knight devs are able to afford to keep making all the free extra content they've been making after all.
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Sep 3, 2016 19:23
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Pureauthor posted:So maybe it's just me misunderstanding how all this works, but if you released a game and were successful, shouldn't the funding for sequels or w/e come from the profits made by the first game? Not if you're dropping every excess money into stretchgoals. Stretchgoals which almost certainly going to cost more than you thought, on top of a game that is going to cost more than you thought.
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Sep 3, 2016 19:57
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I know about Kickstarter fatigue and all this stuff, but we count more on our community rather than press. We believe there should be a few hundred people who are grateful that we did Legends of Eisenwald. Now, we already reached 30% and Kickstarter 30 rule says that we have now 90% chance of success And we did a lot of work for this new game already, that's why the modest sum of $12000. And for players who never played Legends of Eisenwald we tried to make a good deal - $12 tier includes LoE and Blood of November. LoE is now $20 on Steam but the lowest price on sale was already $5, so I think it's a fair deal and hopefully a good incentive. For a small project like this I don't anticipate much profit, breaking even would be good.
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Sep 3, 2016 20:28
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Earthlock, Festival of Magic has launched on XBox One, and will supposedly launch on Steam in 7 or 8 days. The beta on Steam has been going for two months, but mouse + keyboard support was only added a couple days ago. Unsurprisingly, this proved to be problematic since using the mouse for movement quickly proved to be buggy in the first dungeon, once the camera rotated away from the starting position. It also added a game-breaking bug in a tutorial right after the first dungeon. A quick patch disabled the mouse for movement and fixed the game-breaking bug... if you're using a controller. Keyboard users are still stuck (just one screen farther in the tutorial than before). I don't have much confidence that they will be ready to release the Steam version in a week (especially if they're not working on the weekends). Who knows how many other bugs and glitches are waiting past the bugged tutorial? It's not that the game is bad, it looks great, it seems interesting, it does control well with the keyboard... it's just a shame that technical problems are sabotaging it. Taking out the buggy mouse movement is fine for a quick fix, but if they weren't trying to hastily cram in mouse support at the last minute and gave it a proper beta test, they could certainly have fixed the mouse movement issue instead of just taking it out. I actually hope that they'll delay the Steam launch, if only for reasons of self-interest. Pureauthor posted:So maybe it's just me misunderstanding how all this works, but if you released a game and were successful, shouldn't the funding for sequels or w/e come from the profits made by the first game? It really depends on a lot of things. For instance, Larian made enough money to pay back their loans and fund production of Divinity: Original Sin 2, but they returned to Kickstarter in part because all the user feedback they got from D:OS 1 really improved the game and made it better.
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Sep 3, 2016 20:29
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Pureauthor posted:So maybe it's just me misunderstanding how all this works, but if you released a game and were successful, shouldn't the funding for sequels or w/e come from the profits made by the first game? Legends of Eisenwald did pretty well compared to many other games but it's not a bestseller by any means. We broke even in April. So, yes, if we had enough profits made by the first game we would definitely fund this game with it. But we don't.
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Sep 3, 2016 20:39
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Pureauthor posted:So maybe it's just me misunderstanding how all this works, but if you released a game and were successful, shouldn't the funding for sequels or w/e come from the profits made by the first game? Video games are really unpredictable financially. Some games blow their load early in the first few months while others have a long tail of slow but steady sales. But most flop or break even and there's no room to start the next big thing. It's why I reject the conspiracy theories that people are running away with Kickstarter money. Some are like the Confederate Express guys who vanished four updates in but most lose everything to poor management. There are easier and more profitable ways to con people than Kickstarter.
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Sep 3, 2016 21:59
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At this point, I've sworn off video game Kickstarters. I've got three I'm still waiting on from 2012/2013 and a few others that were otherwise underwhelming or are still technically in development.
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Sep 4, 2016 00:32
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Aterdux posted:Hey everyone, we just launched our second campaign on Kickstarter for Eisenwald: Blood of November. Sounds good, I backed it albeit mostly for the original LoE. Kickstarter has been great for turn-based tactical RPGs although I'm curious to see how Blood of November turns out as a sandbox adventure game.
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Sep 4, 2016 01:11
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Xelkelvos posted:At this point, I've sworn off video game Kickstarters. I've got three I'm still waiting on from 2012/2013 and a few others that were otherwise underwhelming or are still technically in development. Speaking of which, what's a good way to sell a code for a game you backed but no longer have interest in?
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Sep 4, 2016 01:13
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Pureauthor posted:So maybe it's just me misunderstanding how all this works, but if you released a game and were successful, shouldn't the funding for sequels or w/e come from the profits made by the first game? Crowdfunding isn't solely about getting something funded - it can also be a very effective long-term marketing tool, so there's value in doing it even if you (or your investors) don't necessarily need the money.
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Sep 4, 2016 01:29
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Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain came out a few days ago on Steam. I've plasyed it to the end in about 6 hours. I wouldn't say it's worth 20 bucks, but it works. Much like the original book, you can fail your quest on a random skill or luck roll. The combat system is ok, though spotting the AI patten makes the battles a lot easier, and one of the last battles with a Skill 9 Goblin(!) is infuriating but does force you to use lots of tricks. It's not a straight copy of the book, but most of the rooms and traps you might remember from 30 years ago are still there. You'll end up replaying the start a lot of times - this is old school limited lives RPG that requires you to take notes and remember which lever to pull every time you get to that trap. The different characters play a bit different, but not enough I think as they could have. If you played the original gamebook, I'd give it a 7/10, for anyone else maybe a 6. It would be worth it if/when it goes on sale. For a mobile game I'd give it a 8/10. Comstar fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Sep 4, 2016 |
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Sep 4, 2016 03:41
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Pureauthor posted:So maybe it's just me misunderstanding how all this works, but if you released a game and were successful, shouldn't the funding for sequels or w/e come from the profits made by the first game? This is rather adorable in its naivety. 1) If there is free money you don't leave it on the table 2) making 100%+ ROI on a game is a fantasy-land scenario. A success is closer to 25% ROI. Even Call of Duty making a billion dollars off a title is paying $500m for the opportunity to do so.
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Sep 4, 2016 04:55
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How do you feel about this as a more explanatory trailer for Lonely Star? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_E3oPgZ3Co It's still a work in progress; i think the Movie Maker titles maybe look kind of cheap, and if I were gonna take another run at Kickstarter I'd consider adding a "hey guys this is me talking in a jargony way about what you're looking at here" voiceover section. But for now, to anyone who found the first trailer sloppy or bewildering, you think this is on the right track?
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Sep 4, 2016 05:47
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swamp waste posted:How do you feel about this as a more explanatory trailer for Lonely Star? I didn't realize you were a survival game, I thought you were more legend of zelda ish.
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Sep 4, 2016 05:56
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Sigma-X posted:I didn't realize you were a survival game, I thought you were more legend of zelda ish. You restore health by eating food/corn and drinking water, so it was a huge part of the demo to gather food. Not obnoxiously so, mind you, you would automatically store the food so you could eat it later. I thought it worked well and was fairly intuitive.
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Sep 4, 2016 06:03
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