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However choosing to seek publisher funds because you want to make something bigger and better was completely under their control.

Stick to original Kickstarter goals, perfectly fine to check if publishers are interested, but only expand project when extra funds are a done deal. Am I missing something?

Noddy - 21 October 2015 07:54 AM

Stick to original Kickstarter goals, perfectly fine to check if publishers are interested, but only expand project when extra funds are a done deal. Am I missing something?

Exactly. With decades of experience in the industry, Rand Miller should know that promises don’t mean shit until there’s a signed contract to back them up.

(It’s been a recurring pattern in many of these Kickstarter projects. Game creators think it’s a chance to finally do away with all those busybodies and their talk of plans and schedules and budgets and contracts and whatnot. Well, it turns out those people actually do serve a purpose!)

I was sad to hear about Cyan’s setback, but not entirely surprised. The folks who work at Cyan are great people and I think very highly of them, but they simply do not have anywhere near the level of business savvy that they do game design skill. I’m glad they aren’t giving up, and I’m very excited about this game! At this point I wasn’t expecting it in 2015 anyway.

Robyn Miller the talented composer well know for writing and producing the award-winning music for Myst and Riven has agreed to do the Obduction soundtrack!

http://obduction.com/?p=404&utm_content=bufferbb7a6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Nice trailer. The music, is it Robyn Miller’s?

smulan - 04 March 2016 12:12 PM

Nice trailer. The music, is it Robyn Miller’s?

That music should be from the game so yes since he is doing the soundtrack

Apparently the music used in this teaser is an older Robyn Miller music track from an album he put out called ‘Ambo’.  It was not made for Obduction.

As for the publisher incident, I agree that it was poor judgment on Cyan’s part.   
I think Cyan generally does excellent work on visual design/art direction, worldbuilding and sound design.  Their puzzle design is decent but not as consistently good, and their business competence is arguably even weaker.

This is a company that has almost gone bankrupt twice - right before and after the run of MO:UL on Gametap.  On the other hand, it’s kind of astonishing they’re still around, and that Uru is still running at all after it failed repeatedly.  (Even in a stagnant condition)

I’m not surprised by the delays.  They never promised 2015 release, they just said they’d aim for it, and their track record on Myst, Riven, etc indicates their projects often tend to fall behind schedule.  If this one is six months late that’s less late than Riven turned out (for example) - Riven was initially supposed to be done in 2 years and it ended up taking twice that long.  In Riven’s case this was probably a good thing.  Riven was an incredibly detailed and immersive game (for the time) and I hope that Obduction will also become better as a result of the extra time they’re putting into it.

I can personally relate as an indie dev, seems like no matter how hard I work on things my stuff always tends to take longer than planned.  (For example, my freeware adventure-game project Panoramic Worlds) It’s common to underestimate how long things will take (it’s a well-known cognitive bias) and it is doubly difficult when you’re dealing with something as complex as developing a video game.  A lot of things can go wrong. In my case, debugging and feature creep and struggling to do assorted freelance tasks in order to *fund* the completion of my project, were all factors that have slowed everything down.  That and, I’m trying to make a game by myself with no team assisting me.  Not an easy thing to do, and even harder to do well. 

Lots of people dislike the personalities of Jonathan Blow (Braid) and Phil Fish (Fez) but I have to give them props for completing really good indie games and sticking with their projects for years on end until they were done.

Regarding this side of the production of Obduction -

To their credit, Cyan was at least clever enough to focus on getting the code and interactions of the game functioning correctly as early on in the process as possible.  They had a playable (if blocky-looking and unpolished) prototype of the entire game working half a year ago, apparently.  That’s good because the programming side of things is where things are most at risk of going wrong. 

So at least they did that much right.