120 mps is just for the sake of development. They said they’re aiming for closer to 1000 mps. That’s roughly Korean War jet speeds.
Of course in the real world having two people doesnt actually mean half the time not normally, should do in theory, but things rarely pan out that way, though diminishing returns can exist in reality humans are all different if they found two incredibly talented people then yes those two could take less than half the time then one talented person’s efforts, and one super-genuis could take a 1/2 the time again of those two very talented people or less, but still a company can throw 20 equally talented people at it, vs the work of one guy all the diminishing returns in the world wont make up for the fact it’ll take em a year and have a fair chance of being at least equal if not superior to 1 guy’s efforts.
Also, the figure quoted was suppose to be indicative of the average costs of hiring an individual as I stated the salary is only one component of that cost…additional costs beyond those actually stated were implied by the bit that says … etc,… secondly office costs are optional, SC has plenty of people who work from home and work via video conferencing.
Why because I’ve spent allot of time studying crowdfunding projects for my own purposes rather than anything else, and have got to point where I have a fair grasp of how much a given project can hope to get by this point, and because the Space market is saturated up to its eyeballs by this point, getting people to spend any more than the box price of the title on any new space project will be a real struggle, as many have invested higher than this in other projects all ready and are still awaiting them to come out, even getting the box price will be hard for many, as said many people now feel they have as many space games as they’ll have the time to play at least for a couple of years.
Crowdfunding is selling a dream before the dream is reality, sure a tech demo helps, but only in proving that the people involved have the knowhow to actually potentially produce what they promise, its still no garantee but its supporting evidence that will help people open their wallets and feel some confidence they will get something back from it.
Atm you have to sell that dream to people already filled with other dreams of a similar nature who have already coughed up for them, until those products they’ve already funded become reality they remain dreams, mentally they’re already commited to enjoying these other titles they’ve been dreaming about for a while now, so convincing them to part with even more cash for yet another title, whilst there still waiting for existing ones is going to be come increasingly difficult to convince people to part with their cash, after all part of the point of pre-purchasing is essentially paying for your games in advance, and people rarely go out and buy 5-10+ games in a single genre in one go, they may well end up having 5-10, maybe many more given enough time games in that genre but they’ll do it gradually one or two at a time, battlescape is trying to be number 3, possibly number 4+ at a time, which is a tough sell.
Whilst royality fees have been a stable of smaller companies efforts, larger companies tend to plump for a single one off payment allowing royalty free use, additionally CR, is highly unlikely to agree to pay royality fee’s to anyone, this again counts against the tech rather then for it, the only leverage that can sell infinity’s procedural tech is the fact its current superiority its worth the time it would save and costs of development, long-term he’d much more likely to plump for self-development of procedural tech rather than engage in a unlimited royality bearing agreement with another company.
Which if they ever had income issues would require them stripping half of the features built on it, in the game should they ever be unable to pay it, it would be signing a devil’s bargain, and given the kinda budget he enjoyes atm, he has no compelling reason to feel forced to do that kind of thing, you might convince him of the merits of a one off-purchase, but you have almost no chance of convincing him to pay royalities for it.
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And yet, not all space games are the same. If I think about the ones I have played (which is a lot), the only thing many of them have in common is… the fact they are set in space… The trick will be to run a smart marketing campaign showcasing what is unique about Battlescape.
I agree it would not have been sensible to run the Kickstarter immediately in the wake of games such as Star Citizen and Elite:Dangerous, but I feel enough time may have passed now that people will have more disposable income to throw at amazing stuff. If I-Novae can grab their attention, they will receive money. That is the way it works.
If I were to hazard a guess I’d say Infinities primary competitor is Elite: Dangerous, atm, which works on similar principal’s and is jolly fun, its difficult to guage the staging though, their art, client stability and so on are far further along then infinity but their procedural tech is currently more limited and incorporates real-world data(not all obv), however sure there not all the same, but it doesn’t mean people wont count them that way especially if you dont convince them sufficiently in the first minute or two of the video, theres already several different space games out there under dev, sure true space enthusiast’s will get the lot, but joe average the gamer will choose only a small number of them, battlescape is not however the full infinity, so will have to do a good job of a KS to prove its worth.
Remember the golden rule is only around 5-10% of the people likely to buy your game will be willing to pre-fund it, however reaching that number can be difficult, even star citizen doesnt have marketing dollars, so relies on mostly new sites interest and conventions, so its taken all this time since its KS to reach its 520,404 backers(at time of writing) which represents 5-10% of its eventual playerbase, they reached a fraction of this during their KS.
They only had 34,000 backers on KS before the time ran out on, reaching enough people out of those who are likely to buy and then convincing them is the issue of the day, so yeah a good video and presentation and a good page which gives people all the info they want on the project is vital, but once you got all of that reaching enough people for all that to matter is equally vital, it could in theory reach 500k, even higher but only if they manage to become much higher profile then they are atm immediately before and during the ks, atm with their current profile I stick by my original assessment of 200k being a more sensible goal.
Though tbh a failed kickstarter is not the end of the world, you can always make another one, and indeed the extra people you reached during the extra month of the original kickstarter who are likely to try again will be added to the people you can reach during your 2nd ks, co-funding on indiegogo would be a sensible idea, seen a few projects do well out of that, and running a funding app on your own site is also a good idea, especially long-term, indeed a number of projects will launch with a higher goal fail to get enough people, then re-launch a 2nd ks with a lower goal but via stetch end up with more than they originally asked for due to the extra number of people reached.
If they could somehow get an article into PC gamer (and PC gamer UK) about your game the month prior to release it would also be of notable benefit, also articles in all the major online publishers would help but, getting into the newsletter would be better, as the problem with online news, its gone from the main page in a few hours, so getting multiple times in to get as many as possible helps, though a clever funding and reward strategy will be important, if they could flog some limited ships to people that would help, as long as its nothing to “op”, maybe take a page out of the CR book of marketing and flog exactly the same ships as will be available in the final game, only allowing pre-purchasing of better ones might do well, still i wouldnt try SC prices for em and expect to get many takers, they’re pretty high for most.
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Like most gamers practice abstinence with Call of Duty, Battlefield, Counter Strike, Left 4 Dead, Evolve, Borderlands, Unreal, etc?
erm, all fps games are a little bit to wide a net to count as a niche market, ones a zombie game, others post apocalyptic, ones an sci-fi fps mmo, ones an arena fps, ones a competitive fps, two are action fps…, even star citizen has an fps segment, many of them are practically different market, sure people might buy a handful of games in each category but not half a dozen.
Oh wow! Why hadn’t anyone thought of that!
Surely if you just spend a lot of time studying the trends of consumers there’s no way the stock market would ever crash! Oh wait…
Office costs are not optional for close cooperation. It’s possible to have 2 programmers working on 2 different things remotely, but if you want “procedural planet generation, quickly” you’ll need to have the people working on it do so in the same room at the same time or the benefit is largely non-existent.
You clearly are an expert on human psychology. Yes I’m being sarcastic.
And an expert on the English language.
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Where else but somewhere between, or in all of Infinity / SC / Elite, are hardcore space geeks going to get their fix? Do you really think that we turned our nose up at all but one of the old space sims, e.g. Freespace? That playing only one game would somehow be better than playing all of them?
The real criteria for playing a game in a niche as far from being saturated as Infinity’s niche is whether it’s good, not whether it has competition. You have to get as redundant as the zombie or horror/survival (Amnesia) niches to lose sales.
I’m not disputing that Battlescape will have to do an extremely good job of the KS. They will certainly have to grab the attention of players, make them go “wow” and then proceed to prove it is a good investment.
However, I disagree that average gamers will only choose one or two games in a particular genre. You are right in saying that “fps” games is a big catergory, but so it “space” as I mentioned earlier. Space strategy, fps (incidentally what I:B will be), adventure, sim, and combinations thereof.
If the idea seems solid and the game looks attractive, people will buy it. The market is saturated with every sort of game under the sun, but does this stop developers? Nope. I see the Steam store (for example) filling up with many new indie games all the time. The attitude towards gaming seems to have shifted from big blockbuster titles, to more of a pick-and-mix approach.
I think Battlescape will fit neatly into the category of “looks kinda cool, let’s give it a try, oh look at the possibilities of this engine”. The demo (if still going to be released with KS) should go a long way to dispelling the vapourware attitude also.
I-Novae’s time is coming. I hope they get it out soon.
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How long will the kickstarter be? 30 days, 60 or 90?
You have theories and reasoning on how long it should be?
I don’t think we have been told how long the KS will be, I’m assuming 30 days for some reason.
The problem is, humans aren’t built to handle anything close to space based speeds. A house sized object goes from pea sized to you hitting it in under a second at the “low” speed of 2500 miles per hour (to compare, the earth orbits the sun at a leisurely 67,108 mph, that’s going from pinprick to smashing into a house in about 2 tenths of a second)
True, once speeds get above a certain value, they become hard to handle. But the funny thing about speed is of course that it’s relative. While you may orbit the Earth at tens of thousands of mph - relative to the surface - astronauts can still drift happily around on spacewalks. It all depends on your point of view.
However, I am extremely against setting an arbitrary limit to ship speeds. In space, acceleration should matter more as there is no practical limit to your speed like there is here on the surface. If pilots can control their relative speed effectively, they will either be able to set up hit-and-run attacks at high speed, or dogfight at slower speeds.
I remember playing a pretty good game called Starshatter: The Oncoming Storm (I think). In that you could set the controls to allow you to build up high speeds in capital ships, but you’d have a hard time slowing down or turning because of the momentum. The fighters could turn much more easily because their acceleration was greater compared to their mass.
I would love to see players have some form of this choice of speed vs. manoeuvrability, if not in Battlescape then certainly in the MMO.
/end derailment.
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Unlimited speeds will make for horrible dogfights tho.
I guess if you value pure realism over an engaging fight, then it won’t matter. But for many potential players it will.
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I think there could be a balance to be struck.
For example: imagine a ship with main thrusters at the rear and smaller, less powerful, manoeuvring thrusters around its extremities. The smaller thrusters would have a certain maximum acceleration they could induce in whichever direction (for argument’s sake, let’s say 100m/s2). So if the pilot is flying along at 100m/s, it would take 2 seconds to do a simple stop-and-reverse… possibly avoiding that bunch of nasty projectiles just fired at where he would have been had he continued.
Now imagine they are flying at 10,000m/s. The pilot could close the distance to their enemy much more quickly (perhaps before they have a chance to accelerate away?) but changing their vector of travel would take 100 times the time - more deadly if something goes wrong.
Giving this choice between speed and manoeuvrability is a real effect of Newtonian flying and could make the mechanics of the game a little more interesting than “point and shoot”.
I’m not saying it would have to be hard. There could easily be two modes of flying: travel and combat. Combat mode automatically limits your speed to sensible levels, travel lets you go faster where your manoeuvring thrusters take longer to make you change course.
Or, even more simply, let the player decide how fast they want to go by rolling the mouse wheel. They would very quickly get a feel for what speed works best for them.
Leaving the option open could make for some very interesting, varied, dynamic combat.
I seem to remember there was a fair amount of this drifting effect in the ICP back in the day and at high speeds it could be difficult to stay within steady firing range of your target.
And of course, I haven’t mentioned the ability to turn independently of your travel vector. That’s been discussed elsewhere.
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While full Newtonian combat may not be feasible the issue is acceleration, not speed. Ships travelling at 10km/s in the same direction are effectively at a standstill in relation to each other, and would be able to maneuver / fight between each other as “normal”.
While you may think that acceleration would have to be extraordinarily high in order to be able to traverse a solar system within a reasonable time frame there has been a fair amount of discussion in the past about warp mechanics, leaving actual acceleration within a warp bubble at a perfectly manageable rate.
In order to make you imagine what 100m/s2 are just think how far will you go through your car’s frontal crystal if you go at 100m/s and suddenly stop to 0m/s. Yes it’s the same in space but ther you die 1. before passing through the window because of the g force, or 2. passing thrugh the *** window.
You have to deal with the g force with any acceleration more than 10m/s2.
And speaking about speed vector: this is the hard problem. I have tested the Space Engine’s spaceship simulator, and after 2 or 3 days of self-learning i managed to put in orbit a spacecraft on Mars and Earth, but non-orbit maneuvers are another thing. As you know but someone reading this maybe not there is no friction in space so if you go “north,” direction at for example 100m/s and want to go “east” at the same velocity and point there with your ship, you wil notice you are still going north but steady moving to north-east direction.
If you want to change your ship’s direction you have to completely stop your speed by accelerating backwards and then turn and accelerate to that point.
While playing SE i thought of some gameplay solutions to that problem, but some of them overlap the Infinity’s idea of skill combat. First of all think this only happen in space, not in atmosphere scenearios, so we coukd see fantastic combats in our worlds twthout feeling it’s arcadey. Also, with the excuse of “tech” everything is possible, but it will rest immersion to the game, what’s the real objective of simulating space physics.
I have thought that the GUI of the game, (or the spaceship, whatever) have to give the pilot exact info like calculating the best approaching orbit to an object, the best way to change direction given the current direction and speed, and of course some auto-pilot help, specially when approaching orbiting objects at high speeds (like moving your ship from surface to the orbiting mothership or space station), what has proven almost impossible (by me), at least at SE.
Finally, I have to say I think any kind of combat resembling dogfights in space would be counter-immersive. In my insignificant opinion I think Infinity will only triumph again its competitors if it can sell something really original and new, like having discovered the way to make spacial combats fun and reallistic, which totally excludes spacial (again, not atmospheric) dogfights.
It can be selled like: You want exiting and 100% skill based aircraft combat? We have it (atmospheric). You want 100% immersive and reallistic space combat and travel? We have it.
Also I have to say this is my first post since i discovered this page in 2010, so…hello mom.
P.D sorry my english, im not native.
Regarding space dogfights, I just want to point out that Kerbal space Program is heavily moddable and has a working multiplayer mod, so you could easily make a ship with infinite fuel and whatever thrust you want to test things out.
Addmittedly, I was assuming that any spaceship capable of doing this would also be capable of stopping the pilot being mashed to a pulp through use of future-tech. 
Depends on the state-of-art of the “future-tech” 
If cancelling gravity is made possible, one can imagine “gravity-dampers” to accept higher acceleration / deceleration.
If not … well you better pray to have “warp” travels that does not go above 10m/s or else you may end as a bloody pulp in your fiction 