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

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

#251

Post by pimlottc » Wed, Aug 12, 2015, 7:34 PM UTC

antjanus wrote: post #158

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 think that the longer I've worked as a developer, the more inclined I am to be a pessimist. Sometimes projects look so freaking easy but then you realize you've just spent 3 weeks working on one feature out of a dozen and you're about to hit your first deadline. I definitely do the "manager doubling" when it comes to estimates. If I think it'll take a month, I estimate 2 months to my boss. If I have to report sever…

What's frightening is the variability of daily productivity. Some days everything comes out the first time, you're using the right framework and you finish 20% of the project with 10 lines of code. Other days, you lose hours chasing down a bug from a single typo, or debugging an obscure corner case incompatibility between two libraries. And there's no sure way of telling what kind of day you'll get next.

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

#252

Post by iolothebard » Wed, Aug 12, 2015, 7:35 PM UTC

magic_beans wrote: post #227

selestify wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

72k USD per year seems quite low for even a fresh junior developer...

What state do you live in?! I make 20k less than that as a junior dev.

What state do you live in? Mississippi or Puerto Rico?

20k is far too low, you can make more than that waiting tables. Jesus 9.615/hr. I made about double that as a waiter in Oklahoma in the mid 1990s.

Update your resume sir/ma'am!

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

#253

Post by cmdrfred » Wed, Aug 12, 2015, 7:38 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #84

raverbashing wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USD or GBP?

$30k USD, converted from GBP for the convenience of US readers ;-)

I make 31,200 supporting a few dental offices, I'm about to give my two weeks notice (when my boss shows up) and i'm going up to 41 to do the same thing. That's abysmal man.

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

#254

Post by avalaunch » Wed, Aug 12, 2015, 7:44 PM UTC

s73v3r wrote: post #202

micampe wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says that people don't understand what Kickstarter is: you are investing in a project, not buying a product. Investments carry risk.

You're not even investing, though. Investment implies a share of the company.

You're thinking of a very specific type of investment. Investment in the more generic form simply means putting in time, money, and/or effort in the hopes of some future reward. In this case, you're investing money in the hopes of a future reward that you preselected.

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

#255

Post by justin66 » Wed, Aug 12, 2015, 7:44 PM UTC

thenomad wrote: post #127

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.

That's a very good point. 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 would feel a lot better having been a KS contributor to this than I would having been a KS contributor to Oculus. "Thank you for your contribution and now some other, better-connected investors and employees are going to make money off of their investment in us" is about the worst possible outcome of a Kickstart.

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

#256

Post by Bartweiss » Wed, Aug 12, 2015, 7:46 PM UTC

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…

This, I think, is fundamentally the equation driving modern game design and the "indie revolution".

For AAA games, modern, high-end systems increase the difficulty of providing a product. Modern development tools help, but graphics demands and expectations are inexorably growing. In a world where animating reflections might be a full-time task, 6-10 people can't even count on developing a trailer for a AAA product.

In response, then, indie games. Why the rebirth of pixel art and simple, geometric visuals? Not because it's 'retro' or 'clean', but because it's easy. Procedural generation, low-poly graphics, and user generated content aren't popular because they produce the best products, they're popular because they're all decisions that slash the number of employees you need.

Woolfe's mistake was setting out to make their game as good as it could possibly be. For an indie team today that's simply not possible.

To paraphrase your producer, "3 years = Duke Nukem Forever".

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

#257

Post by sombremesa » Wed, Aug 12, 2015, 7:54 PM UTC

methodover wrote: post #250

This is such a hard thing for me to read. Game development is so incredibly hard. It feels like a winner-takes-all game where the very top 1% have everything, and the rest have almost nothing. It's a shame that this studio has to fold. The game looks pretty good. You don't get to that point without having incredibly talented artists, programmers and managers, without having a team that's working pretty well together.…

It's not just game development, it's almost any creative endeavor. "90% of everything is crap" - Sturgeon's "law".

Now even if you end up making the 10% that isn't crap, you have to fight hard to get any attention. There is a huge amount of hustling involved.

Even when you are an unprecedented genius, you will suffer immensely for lack of business and marketing skill. Where would Einstein be without Adler? Where would Newton be without Halley?

That's just the way the world is (and has been, since time immemorial).

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

#258

Post by vvanders » Wed, Aug 12, 2015, 7:54 PM UTC

rebootthesystem wrote: post #137

I don't have data to back this up other than years of entrepreneurship. I'm sure someone could invest the time to dig-up the data and corroborate or refute my statement. I think game development must rank way up there with restaurants in terms of business failure rates. It might even be worst than restaurants but the data could be impossible to collect. Why? Because restaurant failures are a matter of public record w…

I don't have much to add than this is solid info and advice. Glad I got out of the industry a long time ago.

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

#259

Post by freditup » Wed, Aug 12, 2015, 7:57 PM UTC

zarkone wrote: post #230

dmbaggett wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never get tired of hearing that -- thank you! :)

I've tried and beat Crash Bandicoot and Crash Cart for the first time this year. (I'm 25, and neither me nor my friends had PS1 in my childhood). While playing this game I was like always been on the bleeding edge between difficulty, wishing to give up and encouragement... I mean, I just couldn't resist, -- I couldn't turn off the console, in spite of the fact that I had to re-run some levels about ~50-80 times to be…

I think that's part of what made the adventure Crash games such a success. They were challenging, but not impossible; death was penalized fairly; there were always more things to discover and collect. In addition, the games were easy enough to learn but not overly simplistic. The games weren't ground-breaking, but the balance and polish were fantastic and made the games great.

I feel like CTR was slightly easier, but still a great arcade racing game.

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

#260

Post by Impossible » Wed, Aug 12, 2015, 8:08 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #229

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…

Stupid, deceptively-simple question: Why can't you do something like "Game on Rails", where you set up a basic framework that has all the stuff a game normally needs, and then you only have to layer your assets and logic on top of it? Do game devs already use something like that and still have these delays?

Yes http://www.unity3d.com/ is essentially "Game on Rails". But, just as you can quickly and easily build a failed startup with Rails, Unity doesn't really save you from building a game that no one really wants.