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“It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”

kickstarter.com

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Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”

#31

Post by kin »

dmbaggett wrote: post #10

I wanted to believe that a team of 6 to 10 people could make a game that looked and felt AAA. Boy was I wrong! When we made Crash Bandicoot (with a team of 7), it was already virtually impossible to make a AAA game with 6-10 people, and that was 20 years ago. I tell inexperienced entrepreneurs to take their honest best estimate and multiply by 10. Or, as Mark Cerny (our producer on Crash) used to tell us, "add one an…

Believe it or not I'm star struck. I remember reading an interview about how you guys dealt with fitting such a large game into such a small space with a paging system. Amazing and inspiring! Thanks for the childhood memories :)

Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”

#32

Post by Mahn »

dmbaggett wrote: post #10

I wanted to believe that a team of 6 to 10 people could make a game that looked and felt AAA. Boy was I wrong! When we made Crash Bandicoot (with a team of 7), it was already virtually impossible to make a AAA game with 6-10 people, and that was 20 years ago. I tell inexperienced entrepreneurs to take their honest best estimate and multiply by 10. Or, as Mark Cerny (our producer on Crash) used to tell us, "add one an…

Properly estimating is probably one of the hardest things to do in our field, specially so if you are starting a product or company where you have to go with your gut for a lot of the decisions. I think the key to survive this is not so much learning to get estimates right, but being prepared for them to be wrong, that's probably why the "multiplicative factor" gets thrown around so often. The good thing is that the more experience you have at estimating things wrong, the better you'll become at guessing what the "multiplicative factor" should be. I started with 10 a few years ago, nowadays it's down to 4 :)

Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”

#33

Post by michaelt »

dmbaggett wrote: post #10

I wanted to believe that a team of 6 to 10 people could make a game that looked and felt AAA. Boy was I wrong! When we made Crash Bandicoot (with a team of 7), it was already virtually impossible to make a AAA game with 6-10 people, and that was 20 years ago. I tell inexperienced entrepreneurs to take their honest best estimate and multiply by 10. Or, as Mark Cerny (our producer on Crash) used to tell us, "add one an…

Also, the original kickstarter [1] was for $50,000 with $72,000 raised.

I'm not an expert on the economics of the video game industry, but I can't believe that would pay a team of 6-10 people for very long.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/45588301/woolfe-the-red...

Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”

#34

Post by song »

[deleted] wrote: post #18

[deleted]

I'm glad public money is spent on this. 60k is nothing on the scale of public money and is certainly peanuts when it comes to game budgets. And honestly, while it didn't sell well (and the market certainly is tough right now), the game in itself is not bad. It lacks polish and would have benefitted from a bigger budget but it's not a bad showing.

Tale of Tales is another example of a studio who produced some very interesting games in term of Art. The path was a very interesting game and as influenced quite a few other games.

Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”

#35

Post by jeremiep »

dmbaggett wrote: post #10

I wanted to believe that a team of 6 to 10 people could make a game that looked and felt AAA. Boy was I wrong! When we made Crash Bandicoot (with a team of 7), it was already virtually impossible to make a AAA game with 6-10 people, and that was 20 years ago. I tell inexperienced entrepreneurs to take their honest best estimate and multiply by 10. Or, as Mark Cerny (our producer on Crash) used to tell us, "add one an…

We just ported an AAA game with a team of 6 programmers and barely made it through with massive delays. The game was already feature complete and bug free when we got the source, all we needed to do was port it to mobile devices.

It's so easy to underestimate the work to be done, graphics easily break when you change the underlying hardware and renderers, gameplay had to be adapted to touch controls, etc. It didn't help that our estimate multiplier was only 3.

All of this gave me a much greater appreciation of the work you guys did at Naughty Dog.

Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”

#36

Post by normloman »

BasDirks wrote: post #19
Sumaso wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a real shame, since I was really looking forward to this game! I suppose I should count myself fortunate that I didn't Kickstart Woolfe. Seeing these failed projects is grim reminder that just because you back something doesn't mean it will be delivered.

"Oh I didn't get the toy I paid for". Really? That's what you're posting when a group of talented artists see their dream shattered?

The artists have no right to complain. They were the ones asking for money in the first place. They promised the public they would deliver on the "toy." They underestimated what it would take to make the game. The backers are not free of responsibility, but the artists also have to accept blame.

Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”

#37

Post by lost_name »

themoonbus wrote: post #3

"But changing gameplay from 2D to 3D had a major impact on overall development cost (we found out a little too late)" Not to pile on, but this was very surprising to me... how could you not know that this would have a major impact?

For what it's worth, I'm not sure that line communicates the change correctly. Judging from the kickstarter video and the Steam store page, it looks like it was always a 2D game in a 3D world (glorious 2.5D).

Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”

#38

Post by bko »

> But we have literally no money whatsoever to pay for stamps, let alone print the artbooks and dvd-cases.

How did this happen? Shouldn't that money have been allocated earlier? Did they spend every dollar thinking that this is the dollar that turns everything around.

Maybe I just don't get the mentality of those looking to fund projects on Kickstarter.

Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”

#40

Post by [deleted] »

tinco wrote: post #27
[deleted] wrote: post #18

[deleted]

How is that squandered money? It's great that Flanders supports their game dev community. Why is 60k a lot of money for preproduction? It's absolutely peanuts. And yes, they actually managed to employ game developers and gave them valuable experience that most definitely is good for the Flanders games industry.

[deleted]
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