Adventure Gamers - Forums

inthemoat - 25 October 2023 04:49 AM

luckyloser - 24 October 2023 12:01 AM

6,000-10,000 lines for 40 characters through the game is a job that can easily take a year, and costs a lot ...

Which reminds me of another pitfall that can sink indie developers: overambitious thinking and uncontrolled scope creep on the back of a successful crowdfunding campaign….

GateKeeper - 24 October 2023 03:37 AM

Right, but many games are actually better without voice acting.
Just because you can have spoken dialogue in the game, doesn’t mean that you have to.

Totally. For games in the ‘classic’ style, I personally prefer text over voice acting, even decent voice acting.

Jdawg445 - 24 October 2023 10:29 AM

The best is when devs come on here and ask for opinion on a demo or a trailer and we give honest feedback and they’re like you’re wrong, my best friend, brother, and wife thinks this game is the greatest ever. Okay then why ask for anybody’s opinion.  most devs don’t want honest feedback they want confirmation bias.

This is a common problem in a number of creative but still commercial pursuits. I’ve seen indie cartoonists go into absolute meltdown over mildly critical reviews.

It’s not always easy, sure, but come on guys, lets at least pretend to be adults.

I was actually talking to my father about this recently. He said going to art school in the early seventies set him up for life when it came to handling criticism. The lecturers’ feedback sessions back then were apparently no holds barred and brutal.

Bottom line is game design is hard. very hard!!!!

Yah. It’s probably some kind of mid-life crisis, but I’ve been kicking around a few game ideas for the last year or so. As soon as I even slightly move past the day-dreaming stage and start sketching things out in a vaguely systematic way, the scale of the undertaking sinks in. And that’s getting a functional game, never mind an engaging and rewarding one!

Yeah what is strange is this phenomenon is mostly only done in the creative arts fields. The whole you have to wear soft mittens when dealing with creatives and their fans. Move this to something else like car manufacturing and nobody cares. If you buy a car and it’s a lemon and gives you nothing but problems you can trash it all day online and you won’t have car fans and manufacturers going boohoo don’t you know what these people had to do to make this car, how many engineers and Builders and testers it took to make.  you might have some pushback from people who like the car but that’s not the same thing that happens in the entertainment industry as a whole.

The one gray area is Mom and Pop places especially restaurants. You can Trash a chain restaurant all day from the food to the service to the wait time. But by God if you say something bad about a local place, you’ll get told off by family members and the owners because they can’t take criticism, it’s kind of cringe-worthy to be honest.  I guess cuz one is a corporation and one is not but still they’re both providing a product and it sucks it sucks. Same with game design or any other creative Endeavor, where you’re charging somebody for your creativity. It’s still a service at the end of the day and if it stinks it stinks. If it’s wonderful it’s wonderful.

Blaming fans never works, see The Last Jedi a Star Wars movie that I actually enjoyed, but the majority did not. And when Disney attacked the fans, that did not like it, it was not a good look. especially calling them a small vocal minority, even I’m like no as someone who likes the movie it’s a 70/30 split with 70% of the people who absolutely despise this movie. Let’s be honest about the situation. Same goes with game design where they act like you’re the only one who brings up a problem and then you go to steam and you see countless threads of people complaining about the same issue that you brought up. it’s like you’re not being very honest and it makes me never want to support any game you ever develop again.

The example being used right now is voice acting, if you spend a whole bunch of money and get voice acting that’s not up to par you have to be honest with yourself and say either I have to spend more and get it right or just not have it because I’m going to get roasted by reviewers and then that’s going to turn other people off from buying my game.

Same with puzzles, you should know whether you created a good puzzle or not, that’s actually easier to see even then Voice acting. Or just be honest in advertising… did you create an adventure game or a walking simulator, and don’t go the Cop Out route saying well puzzles don’t matter anymore because everybody just uses a walk through anyways.

It’s like the heavens were listening because after I posted my last statement, I randomly ran across this video which sums up my point pretty perfectly. of course this is dealing with more of a major studio, but something tells me rather big or small these are the same issues that come up to a certain extent.

luckyloser - 24 October 2023 06:21 PM

Funny you say that as it took me 20 years to realize that GK: Sins of the Fathers had a talkie version, as I had played once back then on them floppies, but it has never changed a damn thing playing it again (the talkie version).

At least it’s one of the best voice acted games, I don’t think there’s any other game that would have Luke Skywalker and Mr. Worf in the same game.

Too bad it’s so bad technically. Too much compression can be understood by storage space limitations, but why is one Worf’s line spoken by another actor who doesn’t even make an attempt to sound like him is something I can’t understand. It might simply be better to leave that line out entirely, if for some reason you can’t get that line from the real actor.

In Star Trek: 25th Anniversary some dialogue options randomly switching from Kirk speech to Spock speech was probably simply a mistake of identifying the right sound clip, but in Gabriel Knight they had a wrong guy recording that line which really stood out badly.

Of course these aren’t indie games, so their problems certainly weren’t caused by limited resources.

If we talk about indie voice acting problems, one bad issue is when the developers buy their lines from voice actors over the Internet. Many of those actors are actually good, but when they record the lines in their own homes or whatever, the sound quality varies between different characters in the game, and sometimes they keep pronouncing the same word differently, as there was no one to direct the recording session.

Finding funding and keeping overhead costs low can be a challenge, especially if you’re aiming to make a free game. I’ve been through several funding applications and it mostly comes down to luck and if whoever is gatekeeping the funds likes the vision. I put a lot of criticism at the sort of money folks who push for a game to be like another already existing game or want to stuff it with micro transactions. Quite often it can be a choice of getting funding and changing the game to suit the investor or get no funding at all.

Beyond that, keeping a lid on scope and keeping overheads super low can require a lot of focus. Some creative people sometimes make bad business decisions or maybe sometimes aren’t the best managers. For me personally, keeping the focus to work on not just a game but also a company has been challenging. It is very easy put off doing important business tasks in favour of doing the development.

One final challenge is actually standing out in a saturated market. It can be very easy for you to be lost amongst a load of other quality games and about 20 million asset flips.

crumpets - 26 October 2023 05:30 AM

I’ve been through several funding applications and it mostly comes down to luck and if whoever is gatekeeping the funds likes the vision.

The problem is that the system is biased.
There are many ways to get financial support from all kinds of funding systems, but most of them require that you have a record of producing games previously.

So newcomers won’t get accepted unless they have some game developing history to show, and they don’t have a track record, because they haven’t had any funding. It’s a vicious circle.

The problem of somebody with the money liking or disliking the concept is the same regardless of whether we are talking about game companies, angel investors, some culture funds, or crowdfunding.

inthemoat - 26 October 2023 12:29 PM

crumpets - 26 October 2023 05:30 AM

I put a lot of criticism at the sort of money folks who push for a game to be like another already existing game

I’m told that’s the standard advice for pitching TV shows or whatever. It’s like A crossed with B, with a twist of C. Apparently this appeals to the minds of commissioning executives, etc.

The question is, does this change the way you design and implement your game, or just the way you pitch it? Dunno.

 

I’d say the latter is better. Investors are sometimes quick to request things that may not fit the game such as lootcrates or a multiplayer. In those situations it is good to come prepared to somewhat circumvent their request by proposing a better idea that would suit the project more. Sounding like you know what you are on about goes a long way, it is best to prepare for all the possible questions and requests you may hate.

So a request for lootcrates becomes a plan for merchandise instead. With well reasoned persuasion and maybe some slightly bias data of your target audience, I found that presenting viable alternatives rather than flat out saying no works reasonably well.