Adventure Gamers - Forums

Honestly I don´t think Zifnab (correct me if I’m wrong), was referring literally to develop games without any kind of budget, but making it clear that you can make decent games without astronomical numbers in terms of budget.  And the examples he gave was headed in that direction.

Because it is quite obvious that a budget is always necessary for any venture.

subbi - 08 September 2014 08:07 AM

I’d still like to hear the name of an indie developer that apparantly produced an adventure game with little or no funds and put Broken Age to shame.

Amanita with Machinarium!
When they ran out of money with only a few months to go before release, they mailed people who’d bought Samorost 2 for a few dollars and asked for preorders. Just prepaid preorders, nothing else.

You can argue all you want on what constitutes a good or bad game, but Metacritic clearly demonstrates that Broken Age is a good game with a meta-score of 80+.

If you set so much store by Metacritic, here are some scores.
Broken Age - 82
Machinarium - 86!
Other excellent indie games are Gemini Rue (82), the Cat Lady (81), Botanicula (82).

Zifnab - 08 September 2014 06:39 AM

Karlok - 08 September 2014 06:12 AM

Names?

Haha, well that’s why I brought up ol’ Vincent.

I was just curious who Tim Schafer was up against.

but okay.
Jonathan Boakes worked as a chef for a Japanese Restaurant while making the Dark Fall series. Also see The Mind’s Eye (3rd person), Slouching Towards Bedlam, Curses! (and probably most text adventures), Mikael Nyquist, the father-son team of the Capri games (who I believe both work as physicists). Also Miasmata one of the best AGs of last year, made by 2 brothers using the profits from smaller games they had made previously.

Not to mention Zork - the founder of adventure gaming. I mean come on.. bloody Zork! What more do you need? 

I’ll add Vince Twelve with his wonderful Resonance. And the Kentucky Route Zero team.

I totally agree. Awesome games can be made on tiny budgets. We see it happen all the time.  That’s often where the high-risk innovative stuff happens too!

If I could have my way, all those millions that went to big names would instead have gone to smaller independent studios with original IP’s. It would have spawned tons and tons of new interesting games. I may be a little biased here though.

Blackthorne - 08 September 2014 09:13 AM

Sure, developers can make awesome games on skint budgets.  But they often do so with the hope that they can become successful enough NOT to HAVE to do that.

Thank You. Here is where me and Zifnab seem to have a different perspective on things.

Blackthorne - 08 September 2014 09:13 AM

Sure, developers can make awesome games on skint budgets.  But they often do so with the hope that they can become successful enough NOT to HAVE to do that.

Can I mention Amanita and Machinarium again…

I do kind get the feeling that some people would prefer people to do games just for the hell of it as some sort of mad scientist kind of labours, where everything they make in life goes into creating one piece of entertainment.

I think there’s some amount of naiviety aroun this thread, as just like everything else, games are done because the makers want to make money, at least in most cases. Most of the time those games are done by people where propably only few feel like it is their labour of love, other people in the teams are there most likely because they want to make money with the skills they have, be it coding or creating art assets.

As I’ve said, not everyone is lucky enough to have mad skills like Stasis creator Christopher Bischoff does. While he’s basically one man band, who can do most of the things himself, most other people really do need help of the others. And in most cases those others are hired help, as not everyone can be lucky enough to get the needed skills from the people in their lives.

Yes, small teams can do great things, but more often than not, those teams are pretty lucky to have found just the right people to do just the right things. Some other small teams, while passionate, lack those skills. For a real company like Double Fine budgets are necessary, as those budgets are used to keep the needed skills in the company.

tomimt - 08 September 2014 10:31 AM

For a real company like Double Fine budgets are necessary, as those budgets are used to keep the needed skills in the company.

This. The point I have been trying to make but have had a hard time communicating, apparently. Thanks Tomimt!

theo - 08 September 2014 02:36 AM

Diego, I hate to break it to you but you’re looking at this trough insanely rose-tinted nostalgia glasses.

You would have had a case if I said: “All old games are better than new ones”. When I did my top 10 here on forums, I had old and new games in it.

Also, it would take a complete lack of anything that is sane to say: “All old games have better graphics than new ones”. When I spoke of the best graphics I ever witnessed in a game, I mentioned The Whispered World/Book of Unwritten Tales (even before they were released).

One main point could be - the Number of Games/Quality Graphics among them produced much higher number than the current situation. To put it more practically - if I was to praise a new cartoon 2D adventure, I’d say - “this looks exactly like hand-painted adventure of 90s!”, and not, I don’t know, 2010s. Rise of indie philosophy might be one of the reasons, but as Tim said, we’re experiencing rise in popularity (and I believe it’s in great part thanx to indie companies) so no biggie. However, I intentionally dropped out indies of my examples in the first post.

theo - 08 September 2014 02:36 AM

None of those pictures look a whole lot better or a whole lot worse than the other, new or old.

Now, that’s interesting (and exactly the thing I wanted to discuss in this thread). I looked again at those, and I really, really find the old games in the series to have better graphics, but I can also understand if someone doesn’t see it. To compare GK1 “pixels” with high-res images of the remake wouldn’t be fair, just as it wouldn’t be fair to say that Pele is lousier footballer than Ronaldo, simply because Ronaldo today runs more km during the match, because of the football development in the last 50 years. But I can say that I prefer the “artistic” quality of the original - for example, if there existed high-res images of the original GK backgrounds, I’d rather hang them on the wall than the new ones (the same applies to MI remakes). Or the other way around - if we’re to transform the new art into low-res pixelated images, I’d prefer the original.