when someone makes a kickstarter campaign for a project they should ask for the summ which they need to finish the project…no?
and beside of that the game is on steam as a ea game for quite a while which give them some extra income too and
the last thing…you dont even know if chuckle gave them any more money to finish the product.
you assume that…but do you know it for sure?..dont be stupid…(little backlash here ;))…and use assumed stuff as a fact.
i mean the dev is her so i guess he can give the best answer for his reasons…when he want to answer.
Well no, that’s not always the case. Shenmue 3 just needed to reach their goal to convince some investors to back the game. I think some other game did that too(Bloodstained or MN9. I can’t remember).
didnt they had sony and YsNet already on board?
they mention them in the campaign.
i agree that that can be a plan too but i dont recal it to be mentioned for the kickstarter campaign.
at the end we can just assume what theire reason was and what kind of benefits they got out of it beside of the 10% income cut.
i thought they mentioned that sometimes in the past which was the reason why i asked to get linked to the source.
at the end its how it is, i just wanted to see what exactly the reason was for the step they have gone.
i would say we cut that topic her since its not really relevant for the game itself or you guys…does anyone know when steam workshop support will be implemented?
from what i heard it will not be the case on release.
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.
It largely depends on who’s running these things. It is true that kickstarters mostly mitigate costs and don’t eliminate them but 7 figures is a blatant exaggeration. There have been lots of completed games on KS whose totals don’t come anywhere even close to that.
Because said “hipster douchebag” actually worked in the industry for years before working on his own game (and now his second one).
That said, if you’re so knowledgeable and wise, how about you do what Mike did and actually provide a concrete breakdown of development costs including.
-Monthly salaries for the team for the projected duration of the project.
-Licensing costs for software, etc.
-Outsourcing costs for any outsourced/contractual work (music, voicework, etc.)
-QA testing costs.
-Certification costs if any.
-Marketing and promotion (including any backer rewards if you’re crowdfunding).
And whatever else you may have to spend on.
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.
Some people want to make their game as polished as possible. I wish more devs were that anal about it. I know I would be if I were a dev, and I think it’s a virtue.
Mike Z seriously outclasses most indie devs when it comes to the polish of the final product. He doesn’t settle for pixel art or generic 3D “looks like another Unity game” styles.
Pixel art is good to settle when you can do it right. Usually not the case with Western indies sadly.
As for the costs, most people ignore what is needed to make a game. Sadly people believe that ridiculously low prices for indie stuff is the way to go. So a lot of kickstarters purposely aim for a low goal to avoid failure. To make a good game you need a lot of money. A few thousands won’t do when you need to cover the costs of your team’s salaries for a couple of years, publishing, fees, doing decent audio, etc. Otherwise your product will not be as good as it can be, or will take many years as a hobby thing.
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.
I think pixel graphics are a great fit if the studio is trying to cut costs or make something feel retro, but it is a bit overdone at this point because so many indies see it as a way to cut costs and development time. I know this wasn’t the case when SG was in development, but it’s still hard to compare the gorgeous hand-drawn style of SG to anything with pixel graphics and say the latter looks better, unless you’re specifically going for a retro look to fit a theme.
Graphically speaking, no one is going to put Pocket Rumble or Brawlhalla in the same league with Xrd, but I think SG can definitely wow people with visuals just like Xrd can.
No, it doesn’t need thousands for frames per character. It was definitely a choice he made to go all out. I personally think it looks and flows better because of that choice. There aren’t a lot of really smooth hand drawn games out there, so SG does tend to stand out for that reason. 3rd strike looks good for what it is, and it’s smoother than most 2D fighters from the 90s, but it’s still not as smooth as SG. You can say it’s “good enough” or whatever, but that is still settling if you would rather it look better.
There graphics and those thousands of animation frames in SG do have their place in the market. I don’t think it was unnecessarily.
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.
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).
Well yes it’s pretty hard to compare Skullgirls to something like Street Fighter III, Vampire Savior, The Last Blade or Garou. Those are pixel art and look significantly better.
No offense to Skullgirls though, they did very well for an indie game. But it irks me when I see people instantly dismiss pixel art and automatically consider high res stuff as superior just because it’s high res.
I love Pixel art. It’s art, take it for what it is, not what you want it to be. It’s a graphical presentation and when done well looks hreat and is just as time consuming and effort inducing as just about any other style.
Stop worrying if it’s retro or cost cutting or whatever and look to see if it fits the product or not.
To each his own. I’ve never been a fan of impressionist art, and that’s what pixel graphics seem like to me. Same thing for voxel graphics.
Although I will say that I doubt anyone saw the first gameplay footage of Xrd and thought “damn, they need to go back to the low rez pixelated look of XXAC.” I mean, I’m sure someone out there will say they did, but I don’t remember seeing one complaint about the new high resolution style. That could be because the game is supposed to look more like anime, but I suspect that we’d see the same response if Capcom used that exact same style Xrd uses for something like a new Darkstalkers game, or even if SNK did that for a Garou or Last Blade reboot.
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.
GG is not really pixel art. They just happened to use pixels, but would have used straight up anime from the start if able. They never made full use of the pixel art medium. SNK and Capcom, on the other hand, achieved things only pixel art can achieve in their games. The rich texturing of SNK clothing, or something like Metal Slug, compared to the flat cartoon look of SG or GG is a good example.
SNK did go for pixel art until recently, even stating that they did so out of love for the medium. The problem is that to the average person, pixel art is just pixelated stuff of the past, ignoring the unique strenghts of the medium. It’s easier to wow people with higher resoultion regardless of quality than skillful pixel art.
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.
Total expenses can’t possibly be calculated at such an early stage of development. What I do know for a fact at this point is that it’s not going to cost millions of dollars. If most indie devs had that kind of money we would be making MAGIC happen. Not everyone is as wasteful as your hero Mike Z.
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’s word.
Like I said, many devs have released games that don’t come close to 7 figures. Their mere existence is enough to prove you wrong.