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Kickstarter game project raises $10k, made using a DIY Platformer tutorial.

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Re: Kickstarter game project raises $10k, made using a DIY Platformer tutorial.

#51

Post by aidenn0 »

kamaal wrote: post #49
reitzensteinm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was tasked with porting Platypus to the Mac, which was probably the most nightmarish code base I've ever seen. The entire code base consisted of hundreds of arrays, and three or four, twenty thousand line long functions. But the game was brilliant. Anthony Flack, the creator, made a fantastic game. Absolutely brilliant. I'm not saying you need technical chops to know how to make a game. I'm saying you need to make…

I got your point. Lets say you develop a hobby for making furniture. You start developing Tables. You read a DIY book and start making stuff. In the meanwhile, you make mistakes, you don't put as many nails where there are necessary. You put more gum than what is necessary. Your finished product is definitely a table, but you've made is so badly it could hardly last for a couple of years. A carpenter down the street…

Except he hasn't shipped anything yet.

Re: Kickstarter game project raises $10k, made using a DIY Platformer tutorial.

#52

Post by reitzensteinm »

kamaal wrote: post #49
reitzensteinm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was tasked with porting Platypus to the Mac, which was probably the most nightmarish code base I've ever seen. The entire code base consisted of hundreds of arrays, and three or four, twenty thousand line long functions. But the game was brilliant. Anthony Flack, the creator, made a fantastic game. Absolutely brilliant. I'm not saying you need technical chops to know how to make a game. I'm saying you need to make…

I got your point. Lets say you develop a hobby for making furniture. You start developing Tables. You read a DIY book and start making stuff. In the meanwhile, you make mistakes, you don't put as many nails where there are necessary. You put more gum than what is necessary. Your finished product is definitely a table, but you've made is so badly it could hardly last for a couple of years. A carpenter down the street…

Look, if the guy wasn't taking money for it, I'd be completely supportive. Trying stuff, MVP, and all that. Great angle for a game, great way to get started. Clearly a smart go getter.

But to use your analogy, the man has ordered 50 tables, not knowing they're likely to fall apart. The seller never revealed his lack of experience. At the end of it, we're just going to say caveat emptor?

That just doesn't sit well with me.

And I definitely agree with you that shipping stuff is #1, but I'm not sitting around idly by criticizing the work of makers. Every dollar I've made in the last 8 years has been from games, and only 2% of it or so from contract work. My own attempt at building a community around preorders has been more successful:

http://www.underthegarden.com/

And I'd made 12 commercial games, some that set me up financially for years, before I felt comfortable being in a position to take peoples money before they've played the product.

Re: Kickstarter game project raises $10k, made using a DIY Platformer tutorial.

#53

Post by kamaal »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #52
kamaal wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got your point. Lets say you develop a hobby for making furniture. You start developing Tables. You read a DIY book and start making stuff. In the meanwhile, you make mistakes, you don't put as many nails where there are necessary. You put more gum than what is necessary. Your finished product is definitely a table, but you've made is so badly it could hardly last for a couple of years. A carpenter down the street…

Look, if the guy wasn't taking money for it, I'd be completely supportive. Trying stuff, MVP, and all that. Great angle for a game, great way to get started. Clearly a smart go getter. But to use your analogy, the man has ordered 50 tables, not knowing they're likely to fall apart. The seller never revealed his lack of experience. At the end of it, we're just going to say caveat emptor? That just doesn't sit well wit…

Well actually I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just trying to show you how the world is. We have to learn to live with this thing. The way programming has evolved in the years is scary to say at the least. And we may see more and more of this kind of stuff.

This is almost the same fury we saw when YC announced they would fund Ideas. Although they are not the same, but YC really was ready to fund stuff which wasn't really into material existence. While many who had working stuff might not have got funded, many of them might have had good enough experience and skill building stuff. At the same time there might have been ideas from non tech founders.

Sounds strange ain't it? These days you can do a lot of things by just knowing how to discover things and be a little productive.

No wonder yesterday there was thread on software engineers hitting dead ends at 40. There is simply too much competition and tools are reducing the barrier to entry opening a flood gate of people looking to make money here.

Re: Kickstarter game project raises $10k, made using a DIY Platformer tutorial.

#54

Post by waterlesscloud »

taude wrote: post #41
angryasian wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably because its not beneficial for them to publish these stats, but I would love to see these statistics.

Actually, found the blog article: it's 46% in 2011 (43% in 2010), but whatever: http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/2011-the-stats

That's actually just the percentage of projects that hit their funding goal. There is no indication of what percentage delivered.

I suspect someone could figure this out. To my knowledge, all funded projects still have accessible pages. You could go through them all and see which have updates that indicate shipping...

Re: Kickstarter game project raises $10k, made using a DIY Platformer tutorial.

#55

Post by waterlesscloud »

ajross wrote: post #44
starwed wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If it's fraud, then sure: Kickstarter would be on the hook for abetting it. I'm not even sure that's the case, is it? They provide a platform, and take a cut, but I'd be a little surprised if that's enough to make them legally liable.

Surely they'd have some level of liability. Safe harbor rules from laws like the DCMA certainly wouldn't cover deliberate fraud. There would be enough to file a case, anyway. And if it was filed and not tossed out, they'd probably settle rather than risk all the bad press.

I don't know if they'd be liable, but they could take action that would reduce the possibility of this kind of thing happening.

One very helpful tool would be setting a community expectation of weekly updates from funding time to shipping time. They can't really enforce a rule like that since they have no leverage over the project people once the money is released, but they can certainly set the expectation that frequent updates are the rule, not the exception.

There are some cases where frequent updates may not make sense, but for the vast majority of projects, there's got to be some sort of news to share on a weekly basis. It's surely not too much to ask of project people that they spend a few minutes every week updating those who made their project possible.

If there's literally not any news to share, then maybe that project is in trouble, and that too would be communicated if the standard was for weekly updates and the project wasn't following that guideline.

Setting a standard along those lines is certainly better than the current state of affairs.

Re: Kickstarter game project raises $10k, made using a DIY Platformer tutorial.

#58

Post by shimsham »

JVIDEL wrote: post #23

Don't know about this project, but the problem with kickstarter is that once you back a project is no longer your money, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's right there on their TOS: they are not responsible for the project, nor to provide ways to keep the project's creators from running away with the backers' money. This "give money and something MAY happen, eventually" model is going to collapse on itself…

Does this sound like groupon for the funded-but-sometimes-a-bit-crazy-yet-awesome-business? if I were in risk assessment I'd assess the risks before gambling.

Re: Kickstarter game project raises $10k, made using a DIY Platformer tutorial.

#59

Post by kanzure »

samfoo wrote: post #21
glimcat wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some snake oil for $270,000: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1047510073/remee-the-rem... Kickstarter isn't particularly thorough about vetting technical projects.

There does seem to be some evidence that this isn't just snake oil: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/dreaming/Lucidity%20Institut... I remain skeptical, but it's certainly plausible. More than most ACM flim flam.

hey wait isn't that my site?

huh

well, thanks for linking me

Re: Kickstarter game project raises $10k, made using a DIY Platformer tutorial.

#60

Post by anthemcg »

This is the second article I have seen in similar form criticizing a funded project for being simple/theoretically easy to make or relying on prefab tech.

Every person on KickStarter has a chance to vet projects and decide for themselves. Most of these people are not professionals promising a slick top of the line product. They are just people who want to make something. Sometimes its a team of well qualified professionals but a lot of the times it is people who just have the desire to do it. Why are people bashing them? Sure, the guy didn't throw it out there that he was not experienced but most people wouldn't. He will probably deliver what he promised.

In my early days, I did more than a few tutorials to complete clients objectives.I refined it and refined it before they ever saw it.But at the end of the day, I learned it and made it my own. I think tech-savvy people tend to judge here but a lot of these backers have no clue how to even begin thinking about how to make a game. To them, it may not matter.

Besides who knows, I bet the backers are just aching for a Ron Paul platformer and thats all they heard when they watched the video.

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