121–130 of 392 posts
"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?
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> Since the regular salary is $24k Where did you take this number from? Try at least, the bare minimum, double that in Western Europe for anyone calling themselves a game developer
Lol. I work as a programmer in one of the largest studios in the UK and make $30k/year. Games industry is brutal with wages.
It's interesting that failure articles seem to always go up to #1 on HackerNews. Why is that?
Think about when you first started learning to program: write code, attempt to compile, FAIL, make some adjustments, FAIL again, make more adjustments, successful compile. Execute, FAIL, make more adjustments, etc. This rapid failure/remediation cycle is somewhat unique, as it opens us to try new and innovative things without fear of failure: failing is just part of the learning process. Since failure is "cheap", we tend to gravitate to sucking up all information about failures, in the hopes of learning from it.
Now think about most other trades: cooking/carpentry/plumbing/etc. When you fail, there are material losses. So that learning curve is expensive, and you often apprentice and learn from someone doing it correct, rather than trial and error (though you get a bit of both for sure).
I suspect this is the same reason when really interesting Post-Mortems are posted, they shoot up, and lots of positive commentary around them. We all consume it, in hopes they prevent us from writing the same one in the future.
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…
What does "AAA Game" mean anyway? I'm a bit lost on the definition. Wikipedia says: > In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion. A title considered to be AAA is therefore expected to be a high quality game and to be among the year's bestsellers. By definition, a budget of $75k + 6-10 people wont make an…
[1] https://www.quora.com/Who-makes-more-money-Hollywood-or-the-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Since the regular salary is $24k Where did you take this number from? Try at least, the bare minimum, double that in Western Europe for anyone calling themselves a game developer
Lol. I work as a programmer in one of the largest studios in the UK and make $30k/year. Games industry is brutal with wages.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Issues with estimating, particularly something like this, mostly comes down to meta-ignorance: you don't know what you don't know. Given a particular problem of a similar sort to something he's worked on, an experienced engineer will be able to list 10 different issues that might crop up. An inexperienced engineer won't know of those potential problems and will just see the most optimistic path possible. When you're…
I like that term 'meta ignorance'. It is important to realize that ignorance isn't "bad" it can be fixed by learning, but its good to know that you have it so you can start fixing it. The other aspect of this that I see, even in seasoned engineers, is the 'presumption of simplicity'. Some things look really simple, but inside they are actually quite complicated. A smart phone is just a screen, a computer, a battery a…
Yeah, it's descriptive. I think I re-purposed a term from an academic paper that referred to meta-stupidity: stupid people are too stupid to know that they're stupid.
They did an experiment where they got people taking an exam to guess what mark they were going to get. In general, the lower scoring people in the exam over-estimated their mark more than the smart people.
I'm actually finding it reassuring to see some of these 'our project failed, sorry' messages coming up. It reassures me that kickstarter is actually being used to fund new things, rather than just as a marketplace for existing products, where you don't even have to have found any capital up front.
I hope that backers take it the same way. New stuff is risky by definition - and KS has funded some pretty major successes on risky projects too (Oculus).
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…
Issues with estimating, particularly something like this, mostly comes down to meta-ignorance: you don't know what you don't know. Given a particular problem of a similar sort to something he's worked on, an experienced engineer will be able to list 10 different issues that might crop up. An inexperienced engineer won't know of those potential problems and will just see the most optimistic path possible. When you're…
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Agreed. I don't understand how they can not give anything at all to all the people who poured money into their kickstarted. What does it say about crowdfunding?
It says that people don't understand what Kickstarter is: you are investing in a project, not buying a product. Investments carry risk.
And as the previous poster mentioned, how do you not put this money aside to reward people who gave you money?
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…
Reminds me of these rules:
- Multiply by π for small, known teams, doing a new job,
- by π^2 for unknown teams,
- and √π for known teams who have already started, know their work and have a good track record.
From http://alistair.cockburn.us/The+magic+of+pi+for+project+mana...