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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”

#141

Post by spike021 »

eecks wrote: post #134
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…

I was just playing Crash Team Racing a few days ago and it gave me a lot of good memories of my childhood. Thanks!

I love that game! For my brother and I it was the alternative to Mario Kart since we didn't have a Nintendo console at the time. So much fun though.

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

#142

Post by pmr_ »

numbsafari wrote: post #60
michaelt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Depends on what the backend motivations are. Clearly, the amount of work involved here was way too much. But if 72k can keep you alive on ramen and a futon so that you can make millions on the back-end ... Regardless, it's a gamble. But the up-front money isn't the only consideration. Especially if everyone has a real stake (which is not the case for startups in general).

72k can keep you alive on sub-standard living conditions, but it will not keep a team of 6-7 talented programmers and artists alive for very long. Not even for way below market pay and working in a garage.

And a single person just cannot turn out something close to a AAA title.

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

#144

Post by eecks »

spike021 wrote: post #141
eecks wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just playing Crash Team Racing a few days ago and it gave me a lot of good memories of my childhood. Thanks!

I love that game! For my brother and I it was the alternative to Mario Kart since we didn't have a Nintendo console at the time. So much fun though.

I'd buy an updated version (online) in a heartbeat

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

#145

Post by malkia »

bluedino wrote: post #77
malkia wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For NHL2k2/NHL2k3 we had dozen of people just doing the UI - Granted good UI is crucial in a sports game. That also was back in 2001

For something like that, do those people work full time on just that one game? Or are they also working on NFL/NBA 2k2 at the same time, creating UI code that works across all the games in the series?

We were not a typical sports game studio (Treyarch), and the other sport project that was done at the same time was for EA (some baseball game), while the one I was and talking about was for SEGA. It was a bit of a problem really, so people were not allowed to get mixed into teams. After that game Treyarch moved to do mainly Spiderman, and then Call of Duty. The latest COD also has quite a spectacular UI system, but much less coders are involved into bringing it up. But today's standards are even much higher - cool animations, links, socially enabled (twitch, facebook, etc.).

Some studio have made success with flash-compatible renderers, and we even thought for NHL2K2 to use one, but first it was only compatible with the Windows version of the Dreamcast (okay, I barely remember now, as we didn't used it, but there was a choice whether you can ship your game with some barebones NT system on the Dreamcast - but you had to lose 2mb to the oS). So that middleware (I think) required it, and it wanted somewhere from 2-4mb more on top.

One big problem, back in the days, with the UI is that you can have tons of memory in your main menu, but you barely have anything while the game is playing. So your "PAUSE" menu might use completely different code path, and look quite differently. The alternative is to reload things after PAUSE, but this decreases the quality of the product, also much harder to test, and you would hear the DISC "screaming" soo much :)

Nonetheless Dreamcast was fun to work on, spare the compiler, and the debugger :)

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

#146

Post by song »

jules wrote: post #85
[deleted] wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Do you realize that while it wasn't successful, they did actually make a game? http://store.steampowered.com/app/281940/ For comparison, €60000 buys about 40cm = 0.0004km of highway.

Off topic but I kind of hate it when someone replies and then deletes his comment. I wonder what he said in reply to my comment now (and what you replied to Jules)...

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

#147

Post by jeremiep »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #64
rkangel wrote: post #44

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…

I think you mix the meanings of simple and easy here. Simplicity is an absolute metric and describes the number of dependencies a thing has, while ease is a relative metric describing your understanding of said thing.

For example, a singleton is easy to learn and easy to use, but since every function using it adds a hidden dependency it quickly grows in complexity to the point its impossible to reason about it without forgetting something.

On the other hand, a Promise is simple as it depends on nothing but a producer and a consumer, no matter how much you compose them. Yet I've seen many experienced developers struggle to learn how to use them as they're not easy to understand at first.

This is somewhat related to meta ignorance. From my own experience I've seen a tendency in novice programmers to stick with things which are both easy to learn and use. Their projects go well initially but they grow less and less productive over time as complexity creeps in from the composition of all these easy to use things.

I've always said experience in our industry is knowing what not to use in order to stay productive in the long run.

Here's a link to Rich Hickey explaining it in depth: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

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

#148

Post by ergothus »

bhartzer wrote: post #63
Mahn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Properly estimating is not just difficult in your field, it's difficult anywhere in 'software' or tech. You always run into issues along the way, and you have to deal with them.

I usually attribute this to the idea of reuse: by definition, every software problem we are solving is "new", because if it wasn't new we'd just use existing solutions and there'd be no team. (Now there are people that insist on resolving problems, but they put themselves into the "new" category by choice).

New problems mean unknown ways to fail === hard to estimate

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

#149

Post by toomuchtodo »

rkangel wrote: post #46

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.

Agree! It would be nice if Kickstarter required all failed projects to provide a detailed, open post-mortem so everyone could learn from mistakes made.

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

#150

Post by dopamean »

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…

I wasn't really into video games as a kid but my father bought me a Playstation (the first one) used from some place and it came with a copy of Crash Bandicoot. It is the only video game I can say I've played. It was my favorite thing growing up. Such good times. Thank you!
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