Why I lost $42,500 making a VR game • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I lost $42,500 making a VR game

#51

Post by dleslie » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 4:37 AM UTC

rwallace wrote: post #39

dleslie wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a narrative game at that. They're incredibly niche even when they're not VR games.

I was about to express surprise at this, but then it occurs to me: are you using 'narrative game' in a different sense, to mean specifically a game where there is a voiced narration, like The Stanley Parable or Oxenfree?

That would be a narrated game. ;)

Narrative games are an old genre with its roots in text adventures that focuses on telling a story almost to the exclusion of other gameplay elements. If they do include other elements it will most likely come in the form of an environment puzzle, I find.

Re: Why I lost $42,500 making a VR game

#52

Post by dleslie » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 4:40 AM UTC

freeflight wrote: post #42

dleslie wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Books are entertaining. Books in visual form are entertaining. Interactive books can be entertaining too, and that's what narrative games purport to be. The tricky part is that they must make up for the absence of other game mechanics. Myst, in a sense, is a narrative game with puzzles. Strip the puzzles away and it wouldn't be so hot. It's a risk to reduce a game to its story, as that story must hold on its own.

But books are not dragged down by bad gameplay mechanics, the closest equivalent to that would be printing a book on stinging nettle. Sure, there could be a really amazing story inside that book, but who wants to go through the pain of constantly being stung to read it? The point here not being that "narrative games are bad by nature" but rather that a lot of them sabotage themselves by using the "narrative game" exc…

What you described is just symptoms of bad design.

Re: Why I lost $42,500 making a VR game

#53

Post by plussed_reader » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 4:44 AM UTC

freeflight wrote: post #42

dleslie wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Books are entertaining. Books in visual form are entertaining. Interactive books can be entertaining too, and that's what narrative games purport to be. The tricky part is that they must make up for the absence of other game mechanics. Myst, in a sense, is a narrative game with puzzles. Strip the puzzles away and it wouldn't be so hot. It's a risk to reduce a game to its story, as that story must hold on its own.

But books are not dragged down by bad gameplay mechanics, the closest equivalent to that would be printing a book on stinging nettle. Sure, there could be a really amazing story inside that book, but who wants to go through the pain of constantly being stung to read it? The point here not being that "narrative games are bad by nature" but rather that a lot of them sabotage themselves by using the "narrative game" exc…

I disagree about the book mechanics dragging down ‘gameplay’. I can reread Tolkien ad nauseaum, but I still can’t get more than a quarter through any George Martin book.

Re: Why I lost $42,500 making a VR game

#54

Post by floatingatoll » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 5:57 AM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #3

The story is informative -- VR games don't sell well, except if you can time to new hardware -- but the math behind the $42.5k number is dubious. Can I value all my hobby projects at $60/hour too? Over a million USD accumulated losses during my adult life so far...

What hourly rate would you have charged someone else to build those hobby projects for them as a contractor?

Re: Why I lost $42,500 making a VR game

#55

Post by sigi45 » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 7:21 AM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #3

The story is informative -- VR games don't sell well, except if you can time to new hardware -- but the math behind the $42.5k number is dubious. Can I value all my hobby projects at $60/hour too? Over a million USD accumulated losses during my adult life so far...

If you actually try to sell it as he did, yes.

Re: Why I lost $42,500 making a VR game

#56

Post by sigi45 » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 7:24 AM UTC

filamentWow wrote: post #49

Kind of pretty much clickbait, since no real money was expended across bank accounts between two or more separate parties. The author expounds on an appraisal of hypothetical money, if one imagine's that he paid himself all labor costs to perform the work. He spent several months working on a video game that didn't do well, and made zero dollars. Did I lose $6,000 dollars on a hypothetical bitcoin I never paid for in…

He invested, on purpose and with the goal to make money, his time as a software engineer.

The amount of time is not nothing and his hourly rate is reasonable.

It is not wrong to say he lost it

Re: Why I lost $42,500 making a VR game

#57

Post by throwaway7658 » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 9:23 AM UTC

phrasing it as losing money this way is dishonest attention seeking.

If a friend told me a group lost $10k making a game over the weekend, i'd freak out

Re: Why I lost $42,500 making a VR game

#58

Post by setr » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 10:30 AM UTC

The biggest concern I have is that he justifies it based on the idea that “he was pushing boundaries”... but really, he wasn’t: just because something doesn’t exist doesn’t mean it should (or would be interesting if it did), and at least from his description, it doesn’t seem like he made any real use of the vr medium. He just... wrote a pc game(?) and slapped a vr interface on top.

Vr chat pushes boundaries. It plays with the medium in a fashion that is only available to that medium. A VR computing environment would be pushing boundaries. A VR mirrors edge might be pushing boundaries (kinda; its more like mirrors edge was a game that imagined what vr would be like, and executed that vision under pc constraints. Now that vr is actually available, transferring over would be the obvious thing to do). A vr god game might push boundaries, if they do it right.

But cookie cutters and VN’s? I don’t see how you'd get anything out of vr in a straightforward port. By the time you actually got the medium doing something useful, it’d probably look nothing like an “incremental narrative game”

Re: Why I lost $42,500 making a VR game

#59

Post by rwallace » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 10:36 AM UTC

dleslie wrote: post #51

rwallace wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to express surprise at this, but then it occurs to me: are you using 'narrative game' in a different sense, to mean specifically a game where there is a voiced narration, like The Stanley Parable or Oxenfree?

That would be a narrated game. ;) Narrative games are an old genre with its roots in text adventures that focuses on telling a story almost to the exclusion of other gameplay elements. If they do include other elements it will most likely come in the form of an environment puzzle, I find.

Ah, so you are using 'narrative game' as I would use 'adventure game': one where the gameplay content is puzzles rather than combat or strategy? Okay, then I agree, that is quite niche these days.

Re: Why I lost $42,500 making a VR game

#60

Post by jowdones » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 10:49 AM UTC

filamentWow wrote: post #49

Kind of pretty much clickbait, since no real money was expended across bank accounts between two or more separate parties. The author expounds on an appraisal of hypothetical money, if one imagine's that he paid himself all labor costs to perform the work. He spent several months working on a video game that didn't do well, and made zero dollars. Did I lose $6,000 dollars on a hypothetical bitcoin I never paid for in…

Makes me vomit in my mouth when I read this sort of self-sufficient "I payed myself $60 / hour". You know what? An amount can only be quoted if you're PAYING someone else, it's only then when it stings.

These sort of entitled-clueless individuals wouldn't pay $6 / hour for an UpWork contractor to make a game 10x better than their crap.