Quote:
Originally Posted by zane
Of course more content is more work, but a 100k price tag is completely absurd. Especially since this is a location and character theyv already given some design, and their staff isnt paid by the number of locations added. Most importantly, lsl1 is a short game that needs extra content to be of decent length for modern standards. So what were they going to do with it if they didnt reach the goal? Turn it into dlc that people have to buy? If they knew this was going to cost that much they shouldv set that price tag from day 1, the initial kickstarter message was murky about this, and now that its opportune theyr basically saying "650k or the new character we wrote goes into the trash!"
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Zane,
As the author of the update you found insulting, I can assure you that we have *no* new character designed as of this date, let alone the supporting puzzles, supporting story, or supporting location. As I suggested I might have done, I made the whole "the character cut from the original" up. There was no such character (and I made it perfectly clear that I might have done so); if you spend even a minute googling Leisure Suit Larry 1, you will find precisely *NO* references to a character that had to be cut. This was an amusing fiction (as I *said* it might be), on the same level as the whole "Leisure Suit Larry 4" myth.
Our original budget was created by giving the original design to Adventure Mob (and a number of other potential subcontractors) and asking them to tell us how much it would cost to reproduce that design, with new art, new interface, and with a specified list of features and platforms. Based on what Adventure Mob told us *and* what they demonstrated in terms of sample artwork, we went with them.
Everything else that we've discussed possibly doing with them, from requiring a dialogue tree system (which was not in the original game) to a messaging input tool that will allow us to generate thousands more messages than the original game utilized (and do it in a timely manner) will cost us a good deal more money, for some of the reasons others have mentioned above. For the new character, we have to design new puzzles, a new location (and if you know how Al Lowe designs, you know he packs a lot of puzzles into each location), a new story, new artwork, and new cutscenes that support the story and surrounding events. We have to make them fit seamlessly into a design that's existed for 25 years and write all the supporting text and dialogue; the additional text and dialogue not only needs to be programmed, but it also significantly increases the amount of testing we need to do, as we have to make sure nothing is broken or unaccounted for along the way, and the text throughout the whole game needs to be adjusted in order to take into account the new character, the new location, the new items, and the new experiences the main character will go through in order to navigate those new sequences. Once the new character's puzzle path is complete, we can't pretend it never happened, we have to adjust everything else accordingly.
Will that *alone* cost $100,000? Highly doubtful; however, that is by far the MAIN goal we want to achieve with that new goal. What else could we do with whatever money is left over? All sorts of things, but we simply haven't decided what those are yet -- you have to allow that some specifics should wait until we're well into development and we end up seeing the greatest need for additional work here or there, or end up with enough feedback from pledgers and testers to say, "Well, we really need to do this localization, or add that platform."
Yes, in the best of all possible worlds, we would give people a list of precisely where every penny is going to go BEFORE the project starts, but that's simply impossible. And I don't think any other Kickstarter game projects are doing that either. Even if they were, I doubt that's what would end up happening.
We are NOT holding features hostage. I don't think other Kickstarter gameware projects are offering significantly more granularity than we are. This project may not be to your tastes, and I would not blame you a bit for feeling that way and expressing it as vocally as you want, but attacks on our integrity are wholly undeserved.
