New blog post - musings of an independent game developer

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My buddy must pay attention to your twitter(or something!)because he linked it to me, I read it, and then come here to find it was only posted a minute ago.

It’s been a long 8 eight years and a lot in my life has changed. I can interestingly say waiting for infinity has been a steady constant. I’ve never lost hope, and through all the setbacks I kept telling my friends “just wait until next year” right along with you. I eagerly anticipate the release of the kickstarter and thank you Inovae(that’s everyone on team) for making the sacrifices for that dream game we all want to play. I was young when I first find the project and it was my child’s dream of a game. Now older, yet still quite young, it remains my dream game and I will do my best to help it succeed through the kickstarter.

Cheers to the next 10 years waiting and (hopefully)playing together!

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Thanks for sharing your experience and thoughts and the general mood within Inovae, with us Keith.
I can understand your reaction to said type of comments about Inovae’s work, instead of waiting like we do, you (all of Inovae) actually moved up and try to make yours and our dream reality, and all the time you invested in it went towards that goal. Even if it sounds cheesy, we stand behind your work, criticizing every aspect as we move along :slight_smile: .

Sadly our culture isn’t advanced enough yet, so that this kind of appreciation would be all you needed. We all wait for the day the Kickstarter goes live and those people who desperately want to throw money at you, because that’s how they expressed their appreciation :smiley: , will finally be able to.

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I’ll definitely have my part with Infinity’s Kickstarter goal. Quick math says 12500*40=GOAL (subject to change) I sincerely hope we can pull it off.

I’ve never used Kickstarter so I’m not familiar with rules. I wonder; say there’s 1 day left and the minimum funding goal is a few grand away. Better yet, say it’s a good twenty thousand away from the minimum funding goal. I wonder if backers can then add additional monies onto their already sent payment.

Yes.

Payment is only sent after the Kickstarter finished successfully. Only then the Credit Cards are charged.

I guess the system isn’t dumb and can figure out if you have the funds to cover your payment before it gets added to the Kickstarter total. Otherwise, the whole deal could be botched in the end.

Nice blog post, past blogs were of a different variety, in this one @INovaeKeith gives a kind mention to the community and considers failure. Wonderful, a much better mind-set IMO :slight_smile:

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They can’t see if you have sufficient funds. In most cases your card would just be overdrawn but if there was a failure to take the payment they wouldn’t know until the end of the campaign and the system attempted to take payment.

some app that lets people pretend to drink beer

Breaking news!
New strategy of I-Novae Studios: develop some app that lets people pretend to drink beer, sell it for billions of dollars and use the funds for Infinity.

Good luck with the final run before the campaign! I have a pile of money sitting on a catapult, ready to be thrown.

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@INovaeKeith
Dare I be critical… though I’ll likely be ousted.

I personally think the problem is “It’s done when it’s done”. I think this statement has been tossed back to the eager fans a fair bit in the last 10 years since I’ve followed this project. I’m in the software industry and I know that “It’s done when it’s done” means it unlikely will be done within a reasonable time period. It’s more of a way to say that there are no plans and the team will just ad-hoc everything. Now it might be the fact that you do have an internal plan that you choose not to reveal so that it gives you a flexible release date. But it still seems to come short even for a kickstarter campaign.

I’ve done some custom music work for small indie projects from time to time. I’ve learned to ask for a timeline before accepting any work. So far, it’s very conclusive that individuals who are able to give me a tentative timeline are usually the ones who complete the project, this includes people who don’t even have a prototype/sketch when they contact me.

This blog post IMO, does not do justice towards the fans and I believe you will turn supporters of this project away. The post is definitely shocking for me since that is not something I would ever write. As a professional, you ignore these tweets, it was clearly a rhetorical tweet. Fans will be fans, haters will be haters. Simple as that. That said, quite frankly, I’m surprised that many fans are still around after all these years. People definitely appreciate the amount of work the team have put into this project without receiving a dime, but this appreciation can only last so long. I may be wrong here but I assume most of the team members have day jobs outside of this project. A project of this magnitude requires the same magnitude of attention. Sure, funding hasn’t fallen through yet, but is that the team’s first priority?

My two cents.

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Your criticism is fair and you most certainly won’t be ousted lest you choose to oust yourself =). I debated whether or not to release that blog post for the very reasons you outline. For the sake of “professionalism”. You’re absolutely correct we’ll always have fans and we’ll always have haters however we have spent the majority of our history giving little insight into our personal struggle. It’s for that reason I decided to strike a different tone - to do something a little different.

I’m not entirely sure why you don’t think it does the fans justice - who do you think I was writing it for? Certainly not the haters, they will continue the hate regardless. The intent of the post was to show that we continue the struggle precisely for those of you who continue to share our dream, who continue to stick by us. I wrote it to show we’re just people doing the best we can to realize a dream we hope we can develop, share, and enjoy with the rest of you. If I did a poor job in communicating that, well, then that’s my fault.

That post may push some people away due to our lack of professionalism. I like to think it’ll bring some people into the fold as we put more of a human face on our development.

As always we greatly appreciate all of you who stick with us. We constantly read your feedback and take it into consideration as we plan and strategize. I apologize if I did a poor job in communicating that.

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I think the kickstarter could have launched with this video fromn 2010 alone:

Look at it, it is 5 years old and still looks better and more awesome than anything star citizen has shown todate…

Its not like you have to show a product to have a successful kickstarter. You only have to convince people that you can make it happen.

I think they should use some clips from that. It’s still good, and many will not have seen it yet. I may be wrong, but I think it is so far the only video with a ship in engine actually flying around. Still impressive.

the kickstarter video is probably even cooler… can’t wait to see it. my wallet is ready.

I hope they have at least the beginnings of pewpew in the kickstarter. The inovae front page claims that the kickstarter will be in 2015, I’m glad about that!

I disagree. While this is a nice tech video, don’t forget that we’re trying to crowd-fund a game, Infinity Battlescape. Nothing in this video demonstrates Battlescape’s ideas/vision/gameplay. It’s just flying around a planet with a ship and that’s it.

Also, it’s easy to say retrospectively that we should have launched a KS earlier. Back in 2010/2011, KS was very new, and there wasn’t that many successfull video game projects. According to wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_crowdfunding_projects ) the first games that really made more than a couple hundred thousand $ was in early/mid 2012.

The vision for the game could have been communicated otherwise.
My point is that you don’t have to show it, you only have to convince people you can do it.
I think the video is very convincing, nobody else can do what it shows, but “everybody else” can build a space shooter. Why would anybody think you can do seamless awesome-looking planetary landing, but not gameplay mechanics?
And even if they doubted that, funding could have solved it. “We need support to make it happen bla bla”

Aha, my suspicions were correct! Kaiyoti fears I-Novae. Lynch Kaiyoti he is a wolf… (wrong thread)… I mean the composer.

Though I am probably wrong, otherwise I-Novae wouldn’t be this secretive about the composer.

@TARS

While the tech demo was awesome, it was also on a High-End PC. Even if a Kickstarter was launched using just that, I-Novae wouldn’t be able to deliver a game in a year.

Also that version of I-Novae was mostly written by Flavien. @INovaeKeith as a programmer how easy was it to work with Flavien’s code. Yeah, your both professional programmers, but still. As I understand it, most of the code has been rewritten since that demo, correct?

Edit: Still I agree with lolsparta4, you should show it after the trailer in “Meet the team” or even after it in full, if some have the patience. :smiley:

BTW @I-Novae is there a place left where we can download the original 2010 tech demo? I have searched, can’t find it on non-streaming websites.

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Yes. The very reason for creating something like this is to have people use it - and a successful product is never “done”.

Keith has stated publicly that they will go to an iterative form of development once they’ve gotten through a successful Kickstarter.

It sounded like a vent to me, inspired by someone giving you a hard time in social media.

Social media should not be able to troll a CEO.

[quote=“TARS, post:12, topic:660”]
Its not like you have to show a product to have a successful kickstarter. You only have to convince people that you can make it happen.[/quote]

Yes. The 2010 pre-alpha video would have been sufficient, and the timing would have been perfect.

Coulda woulda shoulda.

Thanks for the response.

The reason why I don’t think it does justice for the fans came strictly from this line:

As it turns out I was wondering the exact same thing but in the reverse - what has taken you so long to build your own planetary tech and release a game? Please hurry up because, frankly, I’m tired and would prefer it if you could just do it for me

I’m no English major, but as a fan reading the post, this tone (despite it being somewhat satirical) doesn’t fly well with me. It is like saying “leave me alone, just do it yourself if you really want it” or even “well you can’t do it either, so what?”. Ultimately, I know now the message you are trying to convey is “Have you tried it? It’s not that easy”, but I don’t know if many readers will get the same message. Maybe that was meant directly at the tweeter, but it can definitely pass through to the readers of the blog. The negativity from the tweet can be addressed by the other segments of the post, just not with the quote above.