🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:55:34 +0200, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic,
Iguana wrote: 

>On 20.6.2012. 22:33, Rin Stowleigh wrote:
>> On Wed, 20 Jun 2012 22:08:35 +0200, Iguana <Iguana^MGT@hi.htnet.hr>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 19.6.2012. 19:23, Rin Stowleigh wrote:
>>>>
>>>> The greatest game ever made, redone.... let's hope it does not suck
>>>> like prior attempts :)
>>>>
>>>> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1547218311/alpha-colony-a-tribute-to-mule?ref=card
>>>
>>> Caution, with this one. Some think something's fishy... And those some
>>> are too often right. ;)
>>>
>>> http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/06/19/alpha-colony-a-tribute-to-m-u-l-e-is-a-great-example-of-increasing-kickstarter-abuse-and-the-blurry-line-it-sits-upon/
>>
>> The guy that wrote the article is an idiot if he thinks $500,000 is a
>> lot of money to deliver a professional game title, and beyond idiocy
>> if he thinks Machinarium was really developed at a cost of $1000.  The
>
>He didn't wrote that in the article...
>
>> wikipedia article says $1000 was the advertising budget for the game.
>
>As a matter of fact he wrote the same you're stating right here. :)
>
>> When I saw their funding goal was only half a million, I actually
>> worried that the end result might be kind of rinky-dink.
>
>You might want to ask yourself how can *this* professional game title be 
>developed with "just" $400K, then. And you might want to compare the 
>types of the games or the "promissed" feature lists or the development 
>teams involved (or additionally hired) or the overall styles (or tones) 
>of the Kickstarter pledges between those two.
>
>http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1613260297/shadowrun-returns
>
>
>That said, I really hope Alpha Colony will be worth the money involved 
>(or asked for). It looks good in presentation video. But I won't hold my 
>breath for it. The platform most interesting to me - Android - seems to 
>be the least interesting one to "developers". :/
>
>Or were you talking about "M.U.L.E Returns" in your original post? That 
>one seems to me a bit safer bet.

To give some perspective, here's the flaw in the article you posted.

He's comparing it to Machinarium.

Machinarium is a Flash based adventure game, where everything is
scripted, entirely predictable and the number and timing of user inputs
is extremely limited. There is *zero* complexity in that program by
comparison. They already had a development platform (Flash), and they
only had to program for an extremely limited set of input possibilities.
Therefore everything they did could be "labor of love" content
generation, with a lesser need for "labor of necessity" code checking.

OTOH, M.U.L.E. with network support and an asynchronous turn structure?
They could spend $500,000 just doing QA on that project, and the author
of the article glosses that fact over by supposing "a willing pen of beta
testers."

Basically, he's claiming QA is going to be free, and that is a crock. He
sounds like an open source hippie with no real experience in professional
development, where quirky results are not overlooked, and "good enough"
generally isn't. The spec of the proposed project is several orders of
magnitude greater in complexity compared to Machinarium. It's ambitious.

We should certainly be wary of giving money up to Kickstarter with no
guarantees, or on the basis of our nostalgia, but $500,000 is pants for
this kind of project, and IMO a reasonable request that passes the sniff
test.

I had the same initial reaction as Rin, "Do they really think they can do
that for *only* $500k?"

-- 
Zag

No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had
spent more time alone with my computer.' ~Dan(i) Bunten