KickStarter Underworld Ascendant is a disaster

Isn't it really easy to code monsters not to attack each other?

 

That cannot be true. Community Manager must just be trying to put a funny spin on why stuff isn't in the game, I refuse to believe that monsters got cut because they couldn't code them not to kill each other.

 

This might be off-topic but I just recently heard about this game and they put your name in the features. How long would you say you worked with them? About a month, similarly?

 

Well one of the responses from someone claims they're still coming across corpses of dead monsters in levels, even with ones they removed.

 

That picture of the plastic figures is a great visual metaphor for how badly managed this project was.

The figures they originally planned to make were based on characters that didn't even make it into the game. Why would you dedicate money to plastic figures when the game's development desperately needs money?* And if you were originally inspired by D&D, why wouldn't you make them the right scale for a miniatures game? Nobody uses 4" tall figures for gaming.

*I know that they had to produce the plastic figures because people paid for them during the Kickstarter, but that seems like the kind of thing you might want to branch out into only after you've got plenty of money raised to actually make the game. It's not like Sir Cabirus was some beloved character that needed to be immortalized in plastic.

 

It's symptomatic of short-sightedness during KS campaigns. Unwise devs are willing to fuck success by getting into businesses they know nothing about, such as figurines and physical goods beyond a box, manual and map. At this point I would argue that KS project outcome success is inversely proportional to the number of achieved stretch and physical good goals during the campaign.

 

Anyone remember that video demo of the shadow beast? it looked like something you'd see on the box of a 3D graphics card back in the late 90's

 

it seems like a lot of these people love the thrill of the initial KS campaign when anything is possible. when they finally reach their $50,000 KS goal they realize the spin-off TV show & online multiplayer xbox port stretch goals were really bad ideas

 

Okay, so why did "a lot of the prototype work have to be scrapped?" They definitely did not communicate anything about that to their backers.

 

I guess because the only publisher who would sign them was 505, and so they had to drop features in favor of a more modest game. No excuse for not fronting up and informing backers though. Though a tacky design, the old Shadow Beast gameplay is still cooler than everything in the shipped game.

 

looks fine?

 

Yeah, no way they could produce the game with the depth and detail he describes in this video with the money they raised, it was all a pipe dream.

 

It's not the money.

 

Maybe if they hadn't fucked around during the first 3 years doing jack shit and expanding their team (with hacks, no less), they could have avoided blowing all that KS money down the drain. I'm not saying $860k is a lot (especially when you have physical rewards to take into consideration), but 3 years with a team of 5-6 getting a decent salary of $3k should have been doable under $1m, even when you factor in the cost of capital (rent, software).

Unless I'm missing something about the game development business?

 

10k per month per person is generally how much it costs to run a game studio in a first world country.

 

That's a pretty fucking high estimate.

 

Possibly, but $3K a month to live in the crapsack that is Southern California? Outside of living in some pretty extreme conditions, you would likely have to commute hours each day to sustain that with any reasonable quality of life.

 

We can agree that 3k is too low while also agreeing that 10k is probably too high. Other numbers do exist.

 

The full cost of having employees is generally about 2x their salary total. Its an average, but once you've got about 8 people it becomes true almost always, barring some particularly capex heavy enterprises.

 

it's cheaper if you don't hire women or minorities because then you don't need an hr department

 

Then one of them turns out to be named "Kevin" and then you are completely fucked.

 

They're located outside of Boston, MA not California. Mass. is a high taxed state (we call it Taxechusetts) but game studios do get big tax breaks.

 

You know one of the things that impressed me about Phoenix Point in this regard is that Gollop was willing to move to Bulgaria in order to lower costs and squeeze every dime out of that crowdfunding cash. That move alone indicates to me, that not only he's dedicated to the project, but that he's got enough management capabilities to deliver the game. Stylistic and design choices aside, at least they're making a game that is more or less what they promised.

 

Actually he moved to the country because his wife was Bulgarian, also partially to get way from game development. (But then he got involved in the forming of the local Ubisoft studio, and then came to found Snapshot.)

Of course I agree that he seems to have decent management capabilities, and he admits that the low living costs of Bulgaria making the production possible. Great choice of starting base location, accidentally.