All aboard the HypePlane for the rings video/kickstarter!

Battlescape
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The engine is under development concurrently with the art tools and art workflow/pipeline. It’s difficult to provide tangible/substantial community involvement at this stage of development, other than highly skilled coders and artists wanting to put in long hours on the project for free, luckily we have found some (mostly from the community). The game design will be presented during the KS, the game development will come after the project is funded. Post KS is where we will seek much more community involvement via alpha/beta testing and feedback, ideas and other input. Once I:B is released/shipped the modding tools will follow and the community asset contributions/I-Novae marketplace can begin. There will not be any community contributions for the initial development of I:B as the art budget is scoped and set.

In terms of monthly, weekly or some of you wanting daily updates/blurbs, the art team has shown you all we are willing to show, we’ve made a decision to not show anything new until the crowd funding campaign. We are working in our spare time outside of our fulltime jobs and lives, we don’t have enough to show you without dipping into what we’ve been working on for the KS video.

In terms of coding updates, we are developing a game engine that will one day be commercially licensed to assist in the funding of current/future INS projects. I have never followed a game engine’s development before so I am not aware of just how much of the IP is shared freely on the internet, be it implementations, code, things that are busted, fixes and whatnot. Keith/Flavien can address that if they so choose. Chances are, if they are going to give blurbs, it will be on twitter, anything more substantial will show up in a blog.

We share with you in the frustration of the slow pace of development (maybe our girlfriends more than many of you :)). Remember, projects like Star Citizen and even Elite Dangerous had pre-funded funding and manpower resources that dwarf ours (and I do not believe they shared anything with their communities until they actually presented their game idea via KickStarter, which is the stage at which we currently reside), we only have our spare time + bank accounts. I know many are sick and tired of hearing that “excuse”, but it is the truth.

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I saw that Tweet then it was gone. It wasn’t jest me then. :slight_smile:

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NovaeGene Ok then will there be more then one faction stile of ships? I don’t recall if this was answered or not. I do remember that there will be more then one class of ship though.

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I believe I have answered this before, so I hope my answer is consistent. If we only achieve the min. funding goal, there will be one faction at time of release, the Starfold. We plan to have a stretch goal that will add the Centarus faction. We do not plan to have a stretch goal to add the Deltan faction, that will be reserved for future DLC or other game update.

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[quote=“Sab1e, post:155, topic:524”]
Recently there has been a massive surge in people getting impatient and frustrated but this is a good thing.[/quote]

It’s good that their potential customers are impatient. It’s a disaster that they’re frustrated. That sense of frustration is Keith’s doing, however unintentional it might be. He enjoys dealing with the potential customer base, in using social media to share his enthusiasm about the work they’re doing, and so forth. Unfortunately, that’s all premature because the team cannot predict the timing of their deliverables. He cannot make any statements about deliverables until he knows when they will be delivered. For a staffed, full-time company, delivery is almost a foregone conclusion. For a group of people scattered around the world working part time, not so much.

Keith should have continued with the most productive outlet for the community - namely, to distract us with gameplay debates, modeling competitions and the like. A community that does nothing more than kibitz over a few tweets is no community at all. It becomes more of an unruly mob.

Gameplay debates? Modeling competitions? But INS isn’t going to use any of that stuff, right? Well, make that clear right from the outset, but if somebody presents a model of a ship that everyone goes bonkers over, the modeling team can sure learn something from that. The modelers themselves might find inspiration from artwork or models that people submit. It is contribution by influence. If INS said that the nose of the ship you posted was the inspiration for the Jabber 6 Miner, that would be pretty cool. You get nothing more than a public nod from a team member, but that’s better than creating your art and pinning it to a wall in your room.

Similarly, the gameplay debates might give a few ideas to the developers about hot buttons that players have about this or that, or point out deficiencies in certain gameplay interactions. Do players want realism or just big explosions? Do they want to control whole fleets or just work as a cook on a ship?

I have no idea how close the team is to the Kickstarter for Battlescape, so starting up such a thing now might be pointless. However, if there are still several months or more to the Kickstarter, throwing a few bones to gnaw on would likely impart some health to the enthusiast community.

Go back to the old forums and find the most popular topics. Discussions of weapon systems was a favorite. Ask a few leading questions and you’ll likely get a lot of folks playing their favorite space game via debate in the forums.

In short, everyone is focused on the Kickstarter, but the team isn’t ready to do the Kickstarter. The team should distract the community so it stops focusing on the Kickstarter.

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First of all, thanks for the well mannered response. I know you must get tired of having to come out and respond when the flame wars rise up…

So I wasn’t personally going aiming for development/content updates (others clearly are) . You’ve made it clear plenty of times before that you’re saving content for the final push. I was going for just some good old fashioned activity.

This is where I have to try and reinforce what I was trying to say. Kickstarter is the first hurdle. You can have all the post KS plans you want, but if it’s not successful, they’re going to change. My comments on trying to get more community involvement sooner, rather than later, was specifically aimed at doing what you can to have a successful Kickstarter. I want you to succeed. If memory serves me correctly though, you guys were aiming at something like $500,000. If true, you are definitely going to need as much community backing as you can possibly muster.

I was not suggesting contributions as I already knew you weren’t taking them. I was suggesting fan art as a means of stoking community involvement. Currently the most active thread is “Describe the user above you in three words.” Depressing really.

I know you guys don’t have a lot of time. The real intent is to create something within the community that is self-sustaining to create that sense of community. Something, anything, that’s not the community crying foul over the lack of updates. I’ll even take a top 10 ways to drag @Kichae into a science discussion.

They didn’t need to share anything with their communities precisely because they had name recognition as some of the original developers of games we remember, and they already had established studios with communities for their previously released games as well as friends and contacts in industry.

The point of any comparison to Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous is purely perception. When you pitch Infinity, like it or not, you’re going to be compared to them. At its broadest, you are pitching a space-sim shooter. We’re not comparing apples and oranges, we’re comparing different flavors of apples.

Again, I like what you guys are doing, and I want you to succeed, but you’re going to have a tough time if you don’t go into the kickstarter with a sufficient support base…and I must say, now that I look down the line, I think @JB47394 has the right idea:

Seriously, I’m not looking for any more kickstarter discussions or content at this point, no matter what other people’s sentiments are. I’m just looking for some signs of life here. SQUIRREL!!!

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This is more a reaction to ‘fits and starts’ rather than the overall lack of stuff. A whole bunch of people crawled out the woodwork due to said ‘stuff’ starting to show up, only for things to go back to the way things were when they stopped bothering to pay attention.

[quote]Wake me up when it gets interesting.[/quote] Is a legitimate mentality to have.

That being said…
Flavien, Keith, Gene, whoever: Is there a ‘Kickstarter starts today’ mailing list or something I could join? :smile:

(No. Really. That would be fantastic if there was)

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We have the old forums email database, we plan to use that along with these forums and a social media marketing campaign to get the word out when the time comes.

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I think infinity is really strange. I am following it for quite some time of my life now and even checking the forum on a daily basis atm. Still there is next to no progress leaking to the community.

I think you should maybe employ somebody with public relations. Somebody who is able to maintain any hype around infinity. This person should be active at twitter, facebook, google+, forums, … and also know about things going on at inovae.

I wish there were information available on the status of the whole project. What is already possible with the toolkit you developed? Which tools are still in heavy development? Which physical effects are simulated in infinity? What techniques are used, to make a close-up shots of huge ships look good? How many modeled objects are more or less finished now? How many are in progress?
…

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lol

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From the art side of things, “the whole project” we are currently working on is for the purposes of the crowd funding only, it is all WIP, it is not final, and certainly not game ready. This is due, as I have stated many times, to the concurrent development of the engine, toolset and the art pipeline.

We have basic mesh, material & texture editors, enough tools for us to get assets into our engine to inspect/tweak/rework. We are currently at a similar stage of tool development when compared to the old ASEtoBIN tools for those of you who remember that package.

We have a coder that supports our current tools to aid the artists in continuing their work towards completion of the crowd funding assets. There are no other tools currently in development, not until after funding is achieved. Future tools will include a scene editor, animation editor, particle editor, planetary editor, physics editor, and maybe some I forgot.

The particle system is currently in development.

We do employ detail textures in some of our materials, however this has not been a high priority at this stage of development, hence the reason why the assets for the KS video are WIP.

Giving you specific numbers doesn’t really make sense, but in terms of assets required for the crowd funding campaign, we are probably at 95% modeled, 70% textured. We have some prop work left, and a lot of lighting work still yet to complete.

This is the plan, as we get closer to the crowd funding launch, we will ramp up the PR. Until then, we are hard at work on both the coding and art side to complete the work required to launch the crowd funding campaign.

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Yeah, but that email address is from back when I was wondering how to convince my mother to buy me a copy of Infinity. I’ve paid off a good chunk of the mortgage on my own house now. My email’s changed since then.

*Thanks for the reply though.

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I was following a game (went vapor) and they had a pr person. made games, contest and told us what was going on. I think that person worked for free. Got school credit I think. That was great. (hint)

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You should have a current email address for these forums correct?

After we are funded and working on the game proper, we intend to have PR person/people.

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I think the best option is to hire a professional PR team before the Kickstarter, spend some time with them to acquaint them with the company and its philosophy and have them work at it with the intensity of an actual project release. With the increasing number of Kickstarter failings and known late traffic in the area of space mmo’s, I don’t think you should rely on community, yourselves or freebies. I’m a musician and while this field is totally different, I’ve seen the logic of “don’t worry, quality and word-of-mouth will make it sell” fail again and again unfortunately. And the field of game media seems to be even deeper and steeper.

I am in no way affiliated with this company, but these articles were at least interesting to read.

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I would have to agree with this. Allot of people especially Indies really underestimate the power of PR and Press releases.

Also just a quick tip for @INovaeKeith - Some times raw unedited footage could be better than anything. I am not saying be unprofessional. I am saying build hype and excitement around your game prior to a big launch like a Kickstarter or a Fund raising event.

Here is an example of unedited footage to an extent that really churned up some hype.

If you insist on doing this yourself my advice to you is Cross post everywhere and have everyone you know tweet,G+,etc. about you.

My advice would be to -

  1. Launch your kick starter some time soon this year or early next year around February.
  2. Ask for advice or help on reddit.com/r/gamedev - I have heard that there are people willing to angel invest or just invest into projects on r/gamedev. So be specific.
  3. If you cannot do any of the above make your development tools available for an early access price. Look at what Unity3D does in terms of licensing now cut that cost down to a more fair pricing scheme and charge a very small royalty as well.
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After reading this entire thread, my hypeplane booster meter is now at 3%, up from my previous 2% before today, but down from my all time high of 20% (when I first read about infinity quest for earth).

While waiting, pour yourself a “Celestia”, basically a mimosa but with a bit of grenadine…

1/2 champagne 1/2 orange juice and a touch of grenadine

It has a really neat looking red/orange fade effect

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And there it leaves us again. From my point of view, the last lifesign of inovae is 2 days old again…

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I’m not sure I understand your complaint, I thought I addressed all your questions/concerns.

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You address our concerns on case to case basis and very specifically when the community makes a big deal about it. Basically you are quiet until there is a problem about you being quiet.

What we are asking is that you make an effort to engage us without a need for us to be bitching for weeks about the lack of communication. Anything from making a single post once a week on a random topic to actually engaging us as a community about something INS related.

Please, just a post once a week that we can rely on, not this reactionary strategy you always use.

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