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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”

#331

Post by IkmoIkmo »

jules wrote: post #176
song wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)...

Basically he said that they got a €60k subsidy from the Belgian government, and that this was a huge waste of taxpayer money for a couple of hand drawn sketches and 3d models.

afaik it was a loan. It'll probably turn out to be a de facto subsidy because it was a subordinated loan (i.e. they're last in the line of creditors to get their money back), although looking at the financial reports I wouldn't be surprised if something was left at the end, but either way created tens of thousands in tax revenues alone, a bunch of jobs and a finished game that's still selling (and whose IP is for sale to pay off creditors, including the government), not a bunco of sketches and models. No wonder he deleted his comment.

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

#332

Post by timv »

Joeri wrote: post #160
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…

The issue that I'm struggling with as I picked up experience and learned how to estimate better (read: higher) is of becoming a wet blanket. People will rave about this awesome thing we could do, and I'm the one saying "no, we can't, and this is why". That's why Steve Jobs said to stay foolish, it lets you chase after ideas that a rational person would consider too risky or just plain impossible.

My solution, where possible is to run with one (or more) of the following responses:

- I think there will be some challenges in that, can we take some time to think through the implications of ______ (or how we would deal with _____, etc)

- I think it's a great idea, but we're going to need to come up with a creative solution to solve _______

- I think we're probably under-estimating how much work that is. Maybe there's a smaller version we could start with and progress from there.

- We've looked into this before and got stuck at ________, do we think we've got a solution for that?

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

#333

Post by rdancer »

bko wrote: post #38

> 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.

The purpose of a company, any company, is to achieve some goals, and that means risking the company's capital, that is, investors' money. If your primary concern is to return the invested money undiminished, you'll be completely paralysed.

The purpose of the campaign was to develop and ship a game.

They have succeeded, and in the process went bankrupt. Which means they won't be able to even pay creditors, lest investors.

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

#334

Post by rdancer »

bko wrote: post #38

> 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.

The purpose of a company, any company, is to achieve some goals, and that means risking the company's capital, that is, investors' money. If your primary concern is to return the invested money undiminished, you'll be completely paralysed.

The purpose of the campaign was to develop and ship a game.

They have succeeded, and in the process went bankrupt. Which means they won't be able to even pay creditors, lest investors.

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

#335

Post by timv »

ethbro wrote: post #224
WmyEE0UsWAwC2i wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it is easier to come out with a list of: a. "things that would mean the project failed." in contrast to: b. "things that could lead the project to fail." For "a" one could list. There is no money left. The team desintegrates. Etc... And finally ask yourself, what could I do now so that, if we arrive to any of the listed sutations the damage is reduced. Take this comment with a grain of salt. As every other comm…

This is actually exactly what I heard on an NPR report about a consultant (yes, cries from the peanut gallery) who helps companies learn to manage projects better. After doing all the normal project management estimates, etc, the very first thing he does is sit down everyone who will actually be implementing the project (or a representative sample). He then asks them a simple question: "Come up with one scenario wher…

One of the most successful risk workshops I ever ran was for the implementation of very large application in a bank.

I pulled in a sample of people from the development team and proposed the following scenario:

It's the Monday morning immediately after our implementation, and you come in to the office to find a bunch of senior managers discussing a big issue with the system.

What went wrong?

That brought up a huge number of potential issues that were sitting in the back of the engineers minds that have never been written on any risk register, etc.

We talked them through, got comfortable that some of them weren't really likely/possible, and then worked on mitigations for the others (mostly via test plans)

In the end, the implementation was a success.

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

#336

Post by robryan »

blakeyrat wrote: post #206
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…

From reading the reviews of the game on Steam, the main complaints are that it's buggy (especially with regards to enemy AI), and it's incredibly short (not even 2 hours' worth of content.) There are a lot of $10 games that will entertain for 4-5 or more hours (even excluding the outliers like Terraria). I'm surprised that the developer was surprised at the perceived value of their product. That said, he's right that…

Yes, unless you are have a really novel concept that will make people see past early bugs (such as ARK: Survival Evolved) you are competing with some games that set the bar very high.

For example something like Ori and the Blind Forest, not exactly indie but a $20 title with amazing graphics and sound and around 6-8 hours of bug free gameplay.

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

#337

Post by TwoBit »

DonHopkins wrote: post #316
blakeyrat wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all from the top of my head. Credentials: I play a lot of video games. AAA game (typical example: Skyrim): * Sells for $50-$60 * Has cutting-edge graphics and (generally) runs on the newest generation of hardware * Is available on most/all gaming platforms * (Nowadays) Usually has some celebrity involvement (Skyrim had Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Michael Hogan. Oblivion had Patrick Stewart.) * 20+ hou…

I'd argue that The Sims 1 was an AAA game (in that it became the best selling PC game of all time) BECAUSE it ran on last year's hardware, used software rendering, and didn't require a 3D graphics accelerator, so a lot more people were able to play it (like little brothers and sisters who inherited their older sibling's computer when they got upgraded).

Sims 1 wasn't a great achievement in graphics, it was a great achievement in design and gameplay.

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

#338

Post by DigitalJack »

DigitalJack wrote: post #191
lexicalscope wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta-stupidity actually has another term for it as well - the Dunning-Kruger effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect - people that are inexperienced in a topic don't know what they don't know (as you put it, meta-stupidity) and so think they're smarter than they actually are - people that are more knowledgable know how vast the topic is, so realize their knowledge is less compared to overall know…

The dunning kreuger effect is useless. Dumb people think they are smart, smart people think they are smart. Nothing to be gleaned from that. Only at the very fringe of the intelligent side do the lines of actual intelligence and perceived intelligence cross.

Maybe before down voting you should go look at the data from the dunning-kruger study.

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

#339

Post by themodelplumber »

rurban wrote: post #284
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 lived with this Mark Cerny rule for a few decades, and it was mostly true. But finally after I'm over 50 I came to proper and good estimates now. Mostly because I'm a much more experienced now. 2d == 1.5d, 1w == 5d and so on. But game programming is like architecture. There's so much more to do.

Can you explain a bit more? I'm intrigued. What does 2d == 1.5d mean? Was that how close you were nailing your estimates? If so, how did you get to that point?

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

#340

Post by rebekah-aimee »

shawn-furyan wrote: post #138
RogerL wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you have to do is look at the budget, schedule, and people count of any game ever. This is not secret information (big picture numbers, anyway). Okay, so maybe EA is non-optimal due to corporate hoo haa, and a lean team can do more. That doesn't begin to account for a budget of 50K replacing a 100+ person, 1+ year death march effort.

I get the sense that the author considered AAA games to be largely overwrought and needlessly complicated, which for his purposes was probably true. I suspect that the team mistook "can be simpler" for "can be simple". In that light, I think the error in judgement is understandable. Humans have multitudinous ways of tricking themselves into believing the things they would like to believe.

One has to be very careful about conclusions based on the assumption of someone else's ignorance.

There are a lot of people who spend lots of money doing something in a stupid way (look at big software companies), but even they have an underlying reason: it's difficult to pick good programmers and value them accordingly unless all your managers are also programmers (and who picked them?).

When you say, "The normal approach to X is stupid; we're going to do things differently," you have to understand how the normal approach came about so that you can avoid ending up there yourself regardless, and also so that you can avoid whatever problems it adapted to avoid.

There are situations when assuming by default that other people are reasonably intelligent is a bad or dangerous idea--while driving, for instance, or during basically anything involving casinos or Black Friday. But when a market governs a motivation as powerful as money and is sufficiently discerning, you'd better start really questioning whether those people are actually stupid or you just don't understand what they're doing.

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