Pocket Rumble: 2D indie fighter - Discussion

[d3v]

Any Kickstarter for a video game that isn’t 7 figures either has a publisher waiting to see if there’s interest through the kickstarter, or is composed of people who have no idea how much it costs to make a video game and will end up failing down the line.

Sage advice from someone who has never made a video game before and whose only experience with it is the lies spouted forth by a hipster douchebag who fills his game with unnecessary frivolities to bloat the development costs.

Because said “hipster douchebag” actually worked in the industry for years before working on his own game (and now his second one).

Yes, he worked for a big company like EA that had millions to spend on a licensed game, and that convinced him that he needs to spend that much on his own games.

His games cost a massive amount because he stuffs them with unnecessary frivolities such as excessive and redundant frames of animation (that alone easily costs him a fortune), overzealous rewards (you don’t really need to offer physical goods like character statues as backer rewards) and other unnecessary bloat (music tracks are way longer than they need to be, he hires a lot of staff to do cleanup and coloring on animation, he wants every single one of his thousands of animation frames to be meticulously colored and detailed, etc.)

A lot of the things Mike does are extravagant and unnecessary and defy common sense for indie developers. If you can’t afford to make statues of your characters, don’t offer them as a kickstarter reward. If you can’t afford a gorillion detailed frames of animation, try to cut back on them. If you can’t afford, I don’t know, HIRING STUDIO FUCKING TRIGGER TO MAKE AN ENTIRE ANIME OF YOUR GAME, maybe don’t ask them to do it.

Pocket Rumble doesn’t have most of these things and perhaps that’s why they were able to publish their game without having to sell their bodies to science.

Most of these things were stretch goals which were beyond the initial cost.

A big part of his costs still come down to salaries, aka how much the team needs to get paid per month, plus things they need to pay contractors for necessary stuff like music, etc.

Yeah, well, “polishing” things costs money. And focusing on polishing things at such an early stage of development is misguided, because it comes at the expense of actual content that makes your game more valuable. Skullgirls could’ve had more characters if they had dialed down the “polish” to something reasonable. The game doesn’t need thousands of frames of animation per character. Games like Third Strike have nowhere near that much animation and they still look great.

GigaMaidens is coming along slowly, but it’s still on track.

Still haven’t given a breakdown of your costs, at the very least how much you’re paying yourself and your team (assuming you’re not just working in your basements in your free time).

Things like an anime OVA and statuettes of your characters should not ever be stretch goals. It’s wasteful and expensive, and the money you spend on producing them could go towards your game instead. Keiji Inafune promised a lot of this garbage as well. He couldn’t reign it in and it’s one of many reasons the quality of his game suffered as a result. These are things you should attempt to produce AFTER you make your game, only if there is interest and you have the capital to look into it. They shouldn’t be part of the planning before you start making it.

As for your other question… “Monthly salaries”? “Licensing for software”? “Marketing”? “QA testing”? Give me a break. None of this stuff exists to small teams in the pre-alpha stages of an independent game project. Mike Z has skewed your perspective on how indie development works. I’m just focused on developing the game, I don’t have a legal team writing contracts or a marketing department. It’s just me, my artist and whoever I commission to help us make the game.

As is the case with most indies, I am funding it out of my back pocket and indeed creating it in my “basement” in my spare time. A lot of us do not plan things out using such a pre-meditated scheme until we’re able to guarantee funding; most of us are just playing it by ear until we can get solid footing. I do what I can, put in the man hours (for which I obviously get no pay at all since it’s MY project), and reach out to freelancers I can afford to help me. No two devs operate the exact same way, using the exact same methods. Most of us are just doing what we can. It’s not fast or efficient but it gets us where we’re going. We don’t have the capital to be hiring tons of people and planning what we’re going to pay them every month. My expenses are all over the place, at least for the time being. Once we secure funding THEN we plan things out.

You seem to think that this is like a job where I’m a CEO who decides his own salary. It doesn’t work like that. I pay other people to help me, with money I get elsewhere, and my pay will be the game’s sales. Even if I did “pay myself” (which doesn’t make sense as I’m funding it with my own money) I would just be putting that money back into the project. When I get crowdfunded, all that money will go into the game.

So yeah, you have no right to talk shit about Lab Zero/MikeZ or anything people have to say about how much video games cost to make, because you haven’t actually gotten to the point where you need to figure out how much your shit is actually going to cost.

What I do know for a fact at this point is that it’s not going to cost millions of dollars. Unlike your hero Mike Z I’m not as wasteful with my money. I would be able to make that money stretch much farther if I had it.

How? By underpaying your staff? Working under minimum wage?

And thinking that you can stretch the money out is probably the biggest mistake of a lot of teams that go to crowdfunding. Why do you think that so many of these fail because the devs either mismanaged their funds or straight up ran out of money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03A5lQ2vM2U&t=745s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNedOKN7s_w

Of course the notion that I have no right to talk about it is absurd. If that were the case, then you’re in even less of a position to talk since you’ve never even made a game and are only going by Mike Z’s word.

Worked in software dev (not video game related) before, and I’ve done budgets for these things, so I’m familiar with having to defend large budgets simply by saying “this is how much you’re paying these people per day/month”.

[PSYCH0J0SH]

Any Kickstarter for a video game that isn’t 7 figures either has a publisher waiting to see if there’s interest through the kickstarter, or is composed of people who have no idea how much it costs to make a video game and will end up failing down the line.

Sage advice from someone who has never made a video game before and whose only experience with it is the lies spouted forth by a hipster douchebag who fills his game with unnecessary frivolities to bloat the development costs.

Because said “hipster douchebag” actually worked in the industry for years before working on his own game (and now his second one).

Yes, he worked for a big company like EA that had millions to spend on a licensed game, and that convinced him that he needs to spend that much on his own games.

His games cost a massive amount because he stuffs them with unnecessary frivolities such as excessive and redundant frames of animation (that alone easily costs him a fortune), overzealous rewards (you don’t really need to offer physical goods like character statues as backer rewards) and other unnecessary bloat (music tracks are way longer than they need to be, he hires a lot of staff to do cleanup and coloring on animation, he wants every single one of his thousands of animation frames to be meticulously colored and detailed, etc.)

A lot of the things Mike does are extravagant and unnecessary and defy common sense for indie developers. If you can’t afford to make statues of your characters, don’t offer them as a kickstarter reward. If you can’t afford a gorillion detailed frames of animation, try to cut back on them. If you can’t afford, I don’t know, HIRING STUDIO FUCKING TRIGGER TO MAKE AN ENTIRE ANIME OF YOUR GAME, maybe don’t ask them to do it.

Pocket Rumble doesn’t have most of these things and perhaps that’s why they were able to publish their game without having to sell their bodies to science.

Most of these things were stretch goals which were beyond the initial cost.

A big part of his costs still come down to salaries, aka how much the team needs to get paid per month, plus things they need to pay contractors for necessary stuff like music, etc.

Yeah, well, “polishing” things costs money. And focusing on polishing things at such an early stage of development is misguided, because it comes at the expense of actual content that makes your game more valuable. Skullgirls could’ve had more characters if they had dialed down the “polish” to something reasonable. The game doesn’t need thousands of frames of animation per character. Games like Third Strike have nowhere near that much animation and they still look great.

GigaMaidens is coming along slowly, but it’s still on track.

Still haven’t given a breakdown of your costs, at the very least how much you’re paying yourself and your team (assuming you’re not just working in your basements in your free time).

Things like an anime OVA and statuettes of your characters should not ever be stretch goals. It’s wasteful and expensive, and the money you spend on producing them could go towards your game instead. Keiji Inafune promised a lot of this garbage as well. He couldn’t reign it in and it’s one of many reasons the quality of his game suffered as a result. These are things you should attempt to produce AFTER you make your game, only if there is interest and you have the capital to look into it. They shouldn’t be part of the planning before you start making it.

As for your other question… “Monthly salaries”? “Licensing for software”? “Marketing”? “QA testing”? Give me a break. None of this stuff exists to small teams in the pre-alpha stages of an independent game project. Mike Z has skewed your perspective on how indie development works. I’m just focused on developing the game, I don’t have a legal team writing contracts or a marketing department. It’s just me, my artist and whoever I commission to help us make the game.

As is the case with most indies, I am funding it out of my back pocket and indeed creating it in my “basement” in my spare time. A lot of us do not plan things out using such a pre-meditated scheme until we’re able to guarantee funding; most of us are just playing it by ear until we can get solid footing. I do what I can, put in the man hours (for which I obviously get no pay at all since it’s MY project), and reach out to freelancers I can afford to help me. No two devs operate the exact same way, using the exact same methods. Most of us are just doing what we can. It’s not fast or efficient but it gets us where we’re going. We don’t have the capital to be hiring tons of people and planning what we’re going to pay them every month. My expenses are all over the place, at least for the time being. Once we secure funding THEN we plan things out.

You seem to think that this is like a job where I’m a CEO who decides his own salary. It doesn’t work like that. I pay other people to help me, with money I get elsewhere, and my pay will be the game’s sales. Even if I did “pay myself” (which doesn’t make sense as I’m funding it with my own money) I would just be putting that money back into the project. When I get crowdfunded, all that money will go into the game.

So yeah, you have no right to talk shit about Lab Zero/MikeZ or anything people have to say about how much video games cost to make, because you haven’t actually gotten to the point where you need to figure out how much your shit is actually going to cost.

What I do know for a fact at this point is that it’s not going to cost millions of dollars. IUnlike your hero Mike Z I’m not as wasteful with my money. I would be able to make that money stretch much farther if I had it.

How? By underpaying your staff? Working under minimum wage?

Of course the notion that I have no right to talk about it is absurd. If that were the case, then you’re in even less of a position to talk since you’ve never even made a game and are only going by Mike Z’s word.

Worked in software dev (not video game related) before, and I’ve done budgets for these things, so I’m familiar with having to defend large budgets simply by saying “this is how much you’re paying these people per day/month”.

Considering I get paid nothing for working on my own project, yes, I’d say that’s “under minimum wage”. And freelancers are usually quite affordable for indie devs. I pay them by the hour, and they do quality work. I don’t underpay them, if anything the person you idolize overpays his staff, and hires too many at once.

Those videos you linked aren’t really about budgeting trouble, they’re more about people who ran away with the money they got. I think Mike could tell you more about that since his money was stolen by Konami.

Kaiju Combat is an example on one of those videos. Are you kidding me? Those people thought it would be a good idea to use the money to create a card game to advertise the video game. What a joke. Most of these aren’t conducive to proving your point.

[Evolution169]

Considering I get paid nothing for working on my own project, yes, I’d say that’s “under minimum wage”.

If you want to work a regular job and developer in your spare time or support yourself with handouts, that’s your choice. I’m sure many indie devs would rather not go that route, and you can’t blame. And no one should be working for minimum wage if they have a marketable skill.

[d3v]

Any Kickstarter for a video game that isn’t 7 figures either has a publisher waiting to see if there’s interest through the kickstarter, or is composed of people who have no idea how much it costs to make a video game and will end up failing down the line.

Sage advice from someone who has never made a video game before and whose only experience with it is the lies spouted forth by a hipster douchebag who fills his game with unnecessary frivolities to bloat the development costs.

Because said “hipster douchebag” actually worked in the industry for years before working on his own game (and now his second one).

Yes, he worked for a big company like EA that had millions to spend on a licensed game, and that convinced him that he needs to spend that much on his own games.

His games cost a massive amount because he stuffs them with unnecessary frivolities such as excessive and redundant frames of animation (that alone easily costs him a fortune), overzealous rewards (you don’t really need to offer physical goods like character statues as backer rewards) and other unnecessary bloat (music tracks are way longer than they need to be, he hires a lot of staff to do cleanup and coloring on animation, he wants every single one of his thousands of animation frames to be meticulously colored and detailed, etc.)

A lot of the things Mike does are extravagant and unnecessary and defy common sense for indie developers. If you can’t afford to make statues of your characters, don’t offer them as a kickstarter reward. If you can’t afford a gorillion detailed frames of animation, try to cut back on them. If you can’t afford, I don’t know, HIRING STUDIO FUCKING TRIGGER TO MAKE AN ENTIRE ANIME OF YOUR GAME, maybe don’t ask them to do it.

Pocket Rumble doesn’t have most of these things and perhaps that’s why they were able to publish their game without having to sell their bodies to science.

Most of these things were stretch goals which were beyond the initial cost.

A big part of his costs still come down to salaries, aka how much the team needs to get paid per month, plus things they need to pay contractors for necessary stuff like music, etc.

Yeah, well, “polishing” things costs money. And focusing on polishing things at such an early stage of development is misguided, because it comes at the expense of actual content that makes your game more valuable. Skullgirls could’ve had more characters if they had dialed down the “polish” to something reasonable. The game doesn’t need thousands of frames of animation per character. Games like Third Strike have nowhere near that much animation and they still look great.

GigaMaidens is coming along slowly, but it’s still on track.

Still haven’t given a breakdown of your costs, at the very least how much you’re paying yourself and your team (assuming you’re not just working in your basements in your free time).

Things like an anime OVA and statuettes of your characters should not ever be stretch goals. It’s wasteful and expensive, and the money you spend on producing them could go towards your game instead. Keiji Inafune promised a lot of this garbage as well. He couldn’t reign it in and it’s one of many reasons the quality of his game suffered as a result. These are things you should attempt to produce AFTER you make your game, only if there is interest and you have the capital to look into it. They shouldn’t be part of the planning before you start making it.

As for your other question… “Monthly salaries”? “Licensing for software”? “Marketing”? “QA testing”? Give me a break. None of this stuff exists to small teams in the pre-alpha stages of an independent game project. Mike Z has skewed your perspective on how indie development works. I’m just focused on developing the game, I don’t have a legal team writing contracts or a marketing department. It’s just me, my artist and whoever I commission to help us make the game.

As is the case with most indies, I am funding it out of my back pocket and indeed creating it in my “basement” in my spare time. A lot of us do not plan things out using such a pre-meditated scheme until we’re able to guarantee funding; most of us are just playing it by ear until we can get solid footing. I do what I can, put in the man hours (for which I obviously get no pay at all since it’s MY project), and reach out to freelancers I can afford to help me. No two devs operate the exact same way, using the exact same methods. Most of us are just doing what we can. It’s not fast or efficient but it gets us where we’re going. We don’t have the capital to be hiring tons of people and planning what we’re going to pay them every month. My expenses are all over the place, at least for the time being. Once we secure funding THEN we plan things out.

You seem to think that this is like a job where I’m a CEO who decides his own salary. It doesn’t work like that. I pay other people to help me, with money I get elsewhere, and my pay will be the game’s sales. Even if I did “pay myself” (which doesn’t make sense as I’m funding it with my own money) I would just be putting that money back into the project. When I get crowdfunded, all that money will go into the game.

So yeah, you have no right to talk shit about Lab Zero/MikeZ or anything people have to say about how much video games cost to make, because you haven’t actually gotten to the point where you need to figure out how much your shit is actually going to cost.

What I do know for a fact at this point is that it’s not going to cost millions of dollars. IUnlike your hero Mike Z I’m not as wasteful with my money. I would be able to make that money stretch much farther if I had it.

How? By underpaying your staff? Working under minimum wage?

Of course the notion that I have no right to talk about it is absurd. If that were the case, then you’re in even less of a position to talk since you’ve never even made a game and are only going by Mike Z’s word.

Worked in software dev (not video game related) before, and I’ve done budgets for these things, so I’m familiar with having to defend large budgets simply by saying “this is how much you’re paying these people per day/month”.

Considering I get paid nothing for working on my own project, yes, I’d say that’s “under minimum wage”. And freelancers are usually quite affordable for indie devs. I pay them by the hour, and they do quality work. I don’t underpay them, if anything the person you idolize overpays his staff, and hires too many at once.

And what happens then when you actually go into full production, when you actually have to get the game out within a certain amount of time instead of just working on it on your free time? When you actually have to pay yourself since you’re working full time on it? Or have you even thought that far ahead.

Which leads us back to the point since we are talking about budgets for crowdfunded games, since budgets actually mean that a game does have to get completed in a certain amount of time before the funding runs out (and again, is the reason why so many of these crowd funded games fail - because the people behind them don’t realize how much it actually costs to make these games).

[PSYCH0J0SH]

Considering I get paid nothing for working on my own project, yes, I’d say that’s “under minimum wage”.

If you want to work a regular job and developer in your spare time or support yourself with handouts, that’s your choice. I’m sure many indie devs would rather not go that route, and you can’t blame. And no one should be working for minimum wage if they have a marketable skill.

Sure, that’s fair. For me though it’s just a passion project and I don’t really complain about not getting paid anything to work on it. I’m just happy to see it getting done. I know there’s a lot more people in a similar position.

[PSYCH0J0SH]

Any Kickstarter for a video game that isn’t 7 figures either has a publisher waiting to see if there’s interest through the kickstarter, or is composed of people who have no idea how much it costs to make a video game and will end up failing down the line.

Sage advice from someone who has never made a video game before and whose only experience with it is the lies spouted forth by a hipster douchebag who fills his game with unnecessary frivolities to bloat the development costs.

Because said “hipster douchebag” actually worked in the industry for years before working on his own game (and now his second one).

Yes, he worked for a big company like EA that had millions to spend on a licensed game, and that convinced him that he needs to spend that much on his own games.

His games cost a massive amount because he stuffs them with unnecessary frivolities such as excessive and redundant frames of animation (that alone easily costs him a fortune), overzealous rewards (you don’t really need to offer physical goods like character statues as backer rewards) and other unnecessary bloat (music tracks are way longer than they need to be, he hires a lot of staff to do cleanup and coloring on animation, he wants every single one of his thousands of animation frames to be meticulously colored and detailed, etc.)

A lot of the things Mike does are extravagant and unnecessary and defy common sense for indie developers. If you can’t afford to make statues of your characters, don’t offer them as a kickstarter reward. If you can’t afford a gorillion detailed frames of animation, try to cut back on them. If you can’t afford, I don’t know, HIRING STUDIO FUCKING TRIGGER TO MAKE AN ENTIRE ANIME OF YOUR GAME, maybe don’t ask them to do it.

Pocket Rumble doesn’t have most of these things and perhaps that’s why they were able to publish their game without having to sell their bodies to science.

Most of these things were stretch goals which were beyond the initial cost.

A big part of his costs still come down to salaries, aka how much the team needs to get paid per month, plus things they need to pay contractors for necessary stuff like music, etc.

Yeah, well, “polishing” things costs money. And focusing on polishing things at such an early stage of development is misguided, because it comes at the expense of actual content that makes your game more valuable. Skullgirls could’ve had more characters if they had dialed down the “polish” to something reasonable. The game doesn’t need thousands of frames of animation per character. Games like Third Strike have nowhere near that much animation and they still look great.

GigaMaidens is coming along slowly, but it’s still on track.

Still haven’t given a breakdown of your costs, at the very least how much you’re paying yourself and your team (assuming you’re not just working in your basements in your free time).

Things like an anime OVA and statuettes of your characters should not ever be stretch goals. It’s wasteful and expensive, and the money you spend on producing them could go towards your game instead. Keiji Inafune promised a lot of this garbage as well. He couldn’t reign it in and it’s one of many reasons the quality of his game suffered as a result. These are things you should attempt to produce AFTER you make your game, only if there is interest and you have the capital to look into it. They shouldn’t be part of the planning before you start making it.

As for your other question… “Monthly salaries”? “Licensing for software”? “Marketing”? “QA testing”? Give me a break. None of this stuff exists to small teams in the pre-alpha stages of an independent game project. Mike Z has skewed your perspective on how indie development works. I’m just focused on developing the game, I don’t have a legal team writing contracts or a marketing department. It’s just me, my artist and whoever I commission to help us make the game.

As is the case with most indies, I am funding it out of my back pocket and indeed creating it in my “basement” in my spare time. A lot of us do not plan things out using such a pre-meditated scheme until we’re able to guarantee funding; most of us are just playing it by ear until we can get solid footing. I do what I can, put in the man hours (for which I obviously get no pay at all since it’s MY project), and reach out to freelancers I can afford to help me. No two devs operate the exact same way, using the exact same methods. Most of us are just doing what we can. It’s not fast or efficient but it gets us where we’re going. We don’t have the capital to be hiring tons of people and planning what we’re going to pay them every month. My expenses are all over the place, at least for the time being. Once we secure funding THEN we plan things out.

You seem to think that this is like a job where I’m a CEO who decides his own salary. It doesn’t work like that. I pay other people to help me, with money I get elsewhere, and my pay will be the game’s sales. Even if I did “pay myself” (which doesn’t make sense as I’m funding it with my own money) I would just be putting that money back into the project. When I get crowdfunded, all that money will go into the game.

So yeah, you have no right to talk shit about Lab Zero/MikeZ or anything people have to say about how much video games cost to make, because you haven’t actually gotten to the point where you need to figure out how much your shit is actually going to cost.

What I do know for a fact at this point is that it’s not going to cost millions of dollars. IUnlike your hero Mike Z I’m not as wasteful with my money. I would be able to make that money stretch much farther if I had it.

How? By underpaying your staff? Working under minimum wage?

Of course the notion that I have no right to talk about it is absurd. If that were the case, then you’re in even less of a position to talk since you’ve never even made a game and are only going by Mike Z’s word.

Worked in software dev (not video game related) before, and I’ve done budgets for these things, so I’m familiar with having to defend large budgets simply by saying “this is how much you’re paying these people per day/month”.

Considering I get paid nothing for working on my own project, yes, I’d say that’s “under minimum wage”. And freelancers are usually quite affordable for indie devs. I pay them by the hour, and they do quality work. I don’t underpay them, if anything the person you idolize overpays his staff, and hires too many at once.

And what happens then when you actually go into full production, when you actually have to get the game out within a certain amount of time instead of just working on it on your free time? When you actually have to pay yourself since you’re working full time on it? Or have you even thought that far ahead.

Which leads us back to the point since we are talking about budgets for crowdfunded games, since budgets actually mean that a game does have to get completed in a certain amount of time before the funding runs out (and again, is the reason why so many of these crowd funded games fail - because the people behind them don’t realize how much it actually costs to make these games).

Again, the examples in those videos you linked completely fail to illustrate your point. Most of them are about mismanagement or misappropriation of funds, and in several of them money wasn’t even the issue, it was more about legal troubles or the deaths of staff members.

You obviously didn’t read my post as I said quite clearly that putting together a payment scheme is for after one has secured funding. There is nothing complicated about it. I can take all the time I need with the game and I don’t have to pay myself as it’s not my only source of income. If you knew anything about Kickstarter you’d know that deadlines set by KS are hardly deadlines at all. I plan to take all the time I need to finish it without being rushed by an arbitrary deadline. It’s different when you’re working for a huge company and the deadline is the last word. I’m free to set my own deadlines and move them if I have to.

[Plaid_Unicorn]

So about that switch release

[crotchpuncha]

Take it to PMs guys, no one else cares.

[PSYCH0J0SH]

Yeah, we won’t. d3v’s just arguing in bad faith trying to do some jimmy rustling. Nothing will come of it like usual. Carry on.

[Veserius]

all these off topic posts, nice modding as usual d3v

[crotchpuncha]

Yeah, we won’t. d3v’s just arguing in bad faith trying to do some jimmy rustling. Nothing will come of it like usual. Carry on.

I don’t care. Shut the fuck up and stop derailing the thread.

[butteroj]

So about that switch release

[PSYCH0J0SH]

Yeah, we won’t. d3v’s just arguing in bad faith trying to do some jimmy rustling. Nothing will come of it like usual. Carry on.

I don’t care. Shut the fuck up and stop derailing the thread.

He says, derailing the thread even further.

[JetKinen]

So about that switch release

.

This is an absolutely minor thing but after seeing that combo video i’ve realized that i hate when only 1 character has a meter

I can deal with different meters but i hate seeing that empty space in one side of the screen

[freelander]

that char’s meter usage is work in progress

[JetKinen]

Oh okay, thats good to know.

I thought his gimmick was having no meter gimmick

[Bob199]

People are finally starting to upload matches online

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViB2tUtO5Ns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otoUGIXRIEw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01CUQLNmdhc

[Plaid_Unicorn]

So about that switch release

[butteroj]

So about that switch release

Seriously… What happened to a March release?

[appo]

So about that switch release

Seriously… What happened to a March release?

its not going to happen
https://twitter.com/CardboardRobotG/status/846448752550330368

most likely struggle with getting the switch port done too?