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No new postsKickstarter reflection of succesful games in production
Big Finish always had money tucked aside for the Tex Murphy game, the Kickstarter was done to top up the coffers so that they could finally do it. So in that sense they were financially on more secure ground that some other Kickstarters. I don’t know how much they make money with their other catalogue, but I guess that might help as well.
About Moebius artwork. The issues I’ve had with the art relate to the scenes branded finished on the preview docs. While they are okay looking as such, it’s pretty evident that they haven’t been pushed as far as they could have been and I suspect that the lack of budget is to blame there. It’s just not possible to fine tune everything to the perfection, if money is tight and you have an actual game to program as well.
As for Mystery Game X, I never cared for it, as it can be pretty much anything. There’s no reason to get hyped over a game there’s not even a synopsis floating around.
On a side note, I do think that Jane did shoot herself on a foot at the beginning of her Kickstarter. Personally I had hard time understanding what she was trying to sell, whit her talk about three games, season ticket and all that. Perhaps she was bit over ambitious. When I initially pledged I gave her 50$, but I soon after dropped it to minumun to get Moebius, as the whole thing didn’t open up that well for me. On an afterthought I’m pretty happy with that decision as the “Lola and Lycy” game doesn’t interest me a bit either.
I never backed Hero-U as I was very disappointed on how the Cole’s presented their idea.
Big Finish always had money tucked aside for the Tex Murphy game, the Kickstarter was done to top up the coffers so that they could finally do it. So in that sense they were financially on more secure ground that some other Kickstarters.
Even taking that into account, they still said they only had about $750,000 left after rewards fulfillment. Since that was said, they’ve probably gotten around $20,000 in Paypal and probably some more from GOG, too, but it’s still a tiny budget for what basically amounts to shooting a low-budget movie and making a video game.
It’s true, they probably save on overhead by developing and shooting in TruGolf’s offices but I still think Chris and Aaron are probably not getting getting paid and Adrian’s working for scale, because it’s the only way to make sense of that budget.
Also, where are all these Moebius screenshots people are talking about? I haven’t seen any shots of the game since they put out that first cut scene footage.
About Moebius artwork. The issues I’ve had with the art relate to the scenes branded finished on the preview docs. While they are okay looking as such, it’s pretty evident that they haven’t been pushed as far as they could have been and I suspect that the lack of budget is to blame there. It’s just not possible to fine tune everything to the perfection, if money is tight and you have an actual game to program as well.
As for Mystery Game X, I never cared for it, as it can be pretty much anything. There’s no reason to get hyped over a game there’s not even a synopsis floating around.
On a side note, I do think that Jane did shoot herself on a foot at the beginning of her Kickstarter. Personally I had hard time understanding what she was trying to sell, whit her talk about three games, season ticket and all that. Perhaps she was bit over ambitious. When I initially pledged I gave her 50$, but I soon after dropped it to minumun to get Moebius, as the whole thing didn’t open up that well for me. On an afterthought I’m pretty happy with that decision as the “Lola and Lycy” game doesn’t interest me a bit either.
I am not a buyer of the idea that budget brings quality artwork, Indie games single handedly beat out competition by doing multiple work and mostly in Art department impress, point is its all about right talent hunt and strong team, more wont do good nor budget, one guy in graphics department could do the business well, if he has right skill and aptitude for it.
Pretty much agree on Not pushing far enough as adventure genre base has some fondness
of less is more, but i find this cutting corners approach as injustice to story and overall
feel.
I am not a buyer of the idea that budget brings quality artwork, Indie games single handedly beat out competition by doing multiple work and mostly in Art department impress, point is its all about right talent hunt and strong team, more wont do good nor budget, one guy in graphics department could do the business well, if he has right skill and aptitude for it.
It really depends on scope. A small game with a low budget like Machinarium can have stunning artwork, because it’s represented pretty much as the artist drew it. As long as you don’t have too many scenes, this is fine.
But once you start getting into 3D (or a lot of 2D), resources really play a big part. Budget affects how many props you can build, how much detail you can have, and how much time you can devote to unique animations and such. There are a lot of ways to make a game look better that really do cost money.
I hadn’t looked at the last couple Moebius PDFs (didn’t realize they contained screens), so I just did now. The game looks fine. Not amazing, but fine. When you factor in fulfillment costs, they’re probably working with like $350,000 or less and they had to switch developers mid-stream, so all-told they’re making the most of it.
It’s funny to see how much more things cost when a studio like Double Fine does them. DFA isn’t like wildly more ambitious in scope than a lot of these other games, but their per-employee cost is comparable to a AAA studio where at a lot of these other places it’s not.
Of course a talented graphics artist(s) have a lot to do how the scenes turn out, but the budget/time also determines how long each scene can be polished before they are forced to move to the next. More moeny can give the art team a bit more time to polish the art as you can have more people working on it. There’s also a question of who you manage to get with the budget range you work in and sometimes you just might get more lucky.
Finding the right talent on the rigt price can be difficult. On DFA documents Tim says it a couple of times, that when you find the talent, you want to keep a hang of them, as it can be difficult to find a replacement.
Hero-U: Ouch. Since the Kickstarter ended, they’ve changed the art style, the engine and pretty much the entire team, and the release date has been pushed to “When it’s done”. Budget seems to be a problem. (Ironically, if they had made all these decisions before launching the Kickstarter, they would probably have raised more money than they did and wouldn’t have had these problems…)
I am confused as to where things stand on this one. Was the original art team replaced? What is the story behind that? Why did Andrew Goulding (Brawsome) leave the project? Do the latest previews look anything like what we saw during the Kickstarter campaign?
I am confused as to where things stand on this one. Was the original art team replaced? What is the story behind that? Why did Andrew Goulding (Brawsome) leave the project? Do the latest previews look anything like what we saw during the Kickstarter campaign?
The Kickstarter updates are generally public, so you can check the info there. See especially updates #30 and #34. Basically, soon after the Kickstarter was finished, they got a new art designer, who convinced them to ditch the top-down tiled environments and switch to isometric-3D. That obviously led to big changes to the engine. And since they didn’t have enough budget to pay anyone full-time, people started looking for other projects and ended up dropping out. At least, that’s how I understand it.
Reading the hero-u updates make me wonder how long it will actually take for them to ship the game. Because they can’t hire fulltime programmers they’ve apparently lost the ones they originally had to the job, because working part time wasn’t enough for them.
It seems like they’ve got a bit behind schedule (a few months), but that’s not really unusual for games - Kickstarter or not.
They’re currently searching for a full-time programmer and some extra part-time ones too, so the situation doesn’t seem that dire. If I remember correctly they also earlier wrote about trying to find some additional funding, so if that’s successful the small delay shouldn’t be that big of a problem. The latest update also mentions they’re burning through the funds at a slow pace, so the money are being handled carefully at least.
Yeah, that’s pretty rough. I’m feeling glad I didn’t back that one…
It’ll be interesting to see how Hero-U shapes up for sure.
My biggest concern with Hero-U is that they might have been too ambitious compared to what they have to work with.
Perpahs they underestimated their actual budget need and overestimated how much people are willing to pledge. But then again, had they anounced a “spiritual successor to GFG” in all point and click glory they might have had a bit bigger budget.
The way Kickstarter works is kind of flawed, because you can’t really set a hard minimum budget, because different tiers have different profit margins, and it’s hard to know how many people will give to which tier. Usually projects that narrowly hit their minimum end up with a high average pledge, and fulfillment costs go up compared to if a lot of people were giving to the lower, digital tiers.
So your choices are either to set a minimum that’s a bit higher than what you need, or just take your chances with what you end up with.
That is true. The project starter has to keep a very tight track on what is promised as rewards and what the tier actually brings in. I’ve seen a couple of Kickstarters in which the rewards themselves were so costly, that there wasn’t enough money left for actual production. But those usually are first time “entrepenurs”, who have more enthustiasim than business wit.
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