If it were that easy to just find a bunch of cheap code in a dumpster somewhere, slap it together and get something functional im pretty sure there we would be all be swimming in it by now.
What has since allowed development projects to be easily estimated? Im wondering if your talking about high level stuff with plenty of performance headroom, or some new set of standards or a methodology im unaware of. Not that inovae’s date setting hasn’t been overly optimistic so far but this seems to be an exaggeration.
We are swimming in it, but the granularity is pretty coarse. Note that I-Novae Studios is building something that they intend others to reuse. We have Windows, OpenGL, DirectX, CUDA, and countless game engines that are either free or darned close. There are piles of free packages on the web to tackle all manner of software problem. Certainly people are publishing papers on how to accomplish a variety of interesting and difficult things in software. We’re getting to what I’m talking about, but slowly. It’s just not organized down to the component level yet. It’s very coarse granularity.
The natural headwind here is that programmers don’t want to reuse other people’s code.
Nothing has changed. This is bonehead simple stuff. If you don’t know what you’re doing or how you’re going to do it, then you can’t say how long it will take. This stuff is as old as the hills, but people just don’t do it.
Functional specification. Define what you’re going to build.
Design specification. Define how you’re going to build the functionality.
Task breakdown. Define the steps that you’ll take to implement the design.
That gets you to a completed implementation. Code, art, documentation, web site, you name it. If it’s a deliverable, then you need the what and how, and then the detailed steps you’re going to take to make it happen. If you can’t identify the detailed steps then you either don’t know what you’re doing or nobody knows how to do it. That’s going to play havoc with schedules.
None of this requires documents the size of the government budget formatted like a copy of Wired magazine. It means communicating this information to the people that need to receive it, and it means making sure that everyone ends up on the same page.
I have yet to find a piece of copy-paste code larger than a few lines of code that works as intended without me having to re-implement it. Seems that anything taken from somebody else, just does not integrate how it’s supposed to, or is inefficient enough to warrant a re-implementation.
Good thing about this is that I know what all of my code does and how…
You also can’t dumb down the scope to such extent that a 2 man indie team can build for $50k and ask $500k for it. @TheRiddick is giving his advice based on some research that he did and taking a hard stance without even a hint of consideration is not really the best approach.
Not sure where you are coming from with this, but we intend to ask for what we need to build the game based on our scope and budget, that has always been the plan. As far as adding in a bunch of PvE gameplay, a story, a campaign, that’s simply out of scope.
Even if you fail, so what? (no fee for failing - just read FAQ on kickstater)
I think most of us will still be here asking you to take our money and make the game.
We have a design document yes, will we share the document? No. However, we will present the gameplay vision on the KS page as well as the Battlescape website.
And this, are all tied together (once a project reaches a certain scale programmers also are not able to understand code, merely parse it). 200 hours to get a good idea of exactly what it takes to perform a never-before-done multi-million-dollar task resulting in no physical object? Sounds about right.
Im writhing this because since I am a long community member and I have being following INFINITY almost from the beginning Im having doubts about this whole issue:
Even if BS is another project and its in fact being used as a launching platform not mentioning INFINITY MMO is a HUGE MISTAKE. Why? Well you should always mentions your biggest goal and people will follow to that if what you deliver is good enough, in this case I would say is exceptionally good. You want to be a studio? You want to develop something greater/better? SAY IT !
The first and real project since the beginning from our understanding was the MMO, BS was an intermediary to show the technology and get starting funds.
Then goes question, after the KS campaign what happens?. Say you meet your goal. No more nor less. What the next step? Create another kick starter campaign just for the MMO?. Are the goals being set on the developing only BS and nothing more? By the time you get there…someone with more funds might get you.
How long could it take between BS and INFINITY to be developed saying that you actually met your primary goal?
Are you planing to just create the technology and then sell it to a higher bitter? that will develop the game much faster because of the funding they have?
That’s all fine, but IMO if your going to mimic what Starfighter KS are doing then you may have some issues getting funding. Their video is basically (Dogfight Dogfight Dogfight, explosions, PVP PVP PVP)… Nobody was impressed. But they may still just squeeze in their funding.
I hope Battlescape gets backed, maybe go to Steam also right after KS to acquire further funding to help expand features once the basic ones are in place. Also remember ED/SC were majorly successfully because they offered MORE then just a PvP shoot friends in space game, they had shit all to start with also and a small team (where Inovae are atm).
Perhaps adding functionality for users to create content for the game will be a good middle ground?
Frontier was an established studio, yes, but didn’t Roberts first pitch for Star Citizen compose of a single freelancer (excuse the pun) made ship and a scene that was made in Unity?
I’m sorry, but you really can’t compare where we are starting from, to where both ED and SC started from. Both of those projects had big money behind them even before they started work on their respective Kickstarter campaigns. As well as, iirc, both with the promise of 10’s of millions of dollars post successful KS by investors outside of the crowd funding campaigns. We will actually ONLY have the money we get from KS (after all fees, taxes & rewards are taken out) to make our game. We don’t have the investor parachutes those projects had, we cannot overpromise game features knowing we will have significant investor backing post successful KS.
We have spoken about this on IRC, old forums and probably on these forums too. Think one of the devs even had a model printed. Bottom line, the quality is crap…
We’ve discussed 3D printed ships. We have a team member who is intimate with the process, and advised us it is not a good option due to cost of product and shipping.
