Kickstarter for a new Tim Schafer adventure game project

[Eric]

Ship dates for the reward tiers have been changed to March 2013.

[Victor6]

I'm fairly sure it's going to be top down like the original.

Awesome news then. Although I'm still interested too see how the lawyers at Zenimax react to developments (i.e. shadowclaws).

On a more general point, I'm still wondering how long will it be before people get burned?

- Say there's a well known game designer who talks big, but delivers small (and often late), someone like the recently unemployed Peter Molyneux. Fans could be driven away from funding projects in this manner if the designers let them down.

and of course there's the marketing goons. I wonder how long it will be before some bright spark in PR realizes that they can abuse this for their own ends. - Get fans to pay for games, or even just 'additional features' (DLC) for games, before the publisher has even released them.

[Snarky]

I do have to argue that 3.4 million is actually a gigantic budget for a game like this. Assuming they work on the game for 2 years with full time employees. Even at an above average salary per year of $100k per employee (subtracting $200k for the documentary and $200k for voice actors), that could easily employ 15 people for two years.

You're forgetting that Kickstarter takes 5% and Amazon another 5%. Then subtract something like $150-200k (?) for the rewards, as well as the things you mention, and you're down to about $2.4M to actually make the game.

And then you have to remember that company cost per employee are significantly higher than just the salary. There are taxes, of course, and also things like facilities (office space, electricity, internet access...), equipment (computers, office furniture, software licenses), service staff (HR, janitorial, payroll, cafeteria if the company is big enough) and additional management (either more managers or more attention required from existing managers). Usually there are additional perks like free or subsidized health insurance that need to be budgeted for, plus bonuses. A manager I know used to say that you should double the salary to get an estimate of the employee's true cost.

So assuming they're budgeting in the appropriate fraction of DoubleFine overhead and fixed costs into the game budget, that would be about 12 people for a year. Certainly not bad, but not huge, either.

[Ryan Timothy B]

You're forgetting that Kickstarter takes 5% and Amazon another 5%.

Right. I forgot about everyone's cut.

You brought up some fair points. Although it already looks like they have an office and appropriate furnishings and equipment. As for property costs and taxes, that's likely already covered by the earnings of games they've already completed and released. But even assuming it's not, they're still looking quite good at the moment. You couldn't make Gears of War with that budget, but you could easily make a Monkey Island type adventure game with updated graphics.

[Construed]

I have to agree on all points here really, There is an obvious overage, but how much the overage actually is cannot be completely determined.
My view of it is that I can accomplish a complete game design on an old dell/hp/emachine hybrid i made out of a bunch of junk computers in my home without requiring a team or studio. Not saying having a team doesn't speed things up, but when using an engine such as ags you can only have 3 team members. An artist a coder and a writer, none of which can actually work on the game at the same time. Being how the engine saves games only 1 person can work on it at a time, leaving svn and gits rendered useless which is another point I want to bring up when we finally get through this future of ags ordeal.
But in the end I say that I'm glad that tim has gotten an overage but my main concern is his fidelitity to the PNC industry as most of his games are 3d microsoft driven games, Not saying that those games aren't nice, they just don't feed my personal nostalgia.

[Denzil Quixode]

Two years? Didn't they say they want to release for October?

Was that right at the beginning? The Update #2 on the Kickstarter project back in February:

"This project has really grown into something much larger than we were expecting, which is-scientifically speaking-awesome.  Many of you have been asking if this means we’ll be taking a bit more time with the production, and the answer is yes. This is not a cute, quick little game anymore. This is the real deal. This is a capital-G Game."

[Scavenger]

But in the end I say that I'm glad that tim has gotten an overage but my main concern is his fidelitity to the PNC industry as most of his games are 3d microsoft driven games, Not saying that those games aren't nice, they just don't feed my personal nostalgia.

Psst, hey, secret information! Tim Schafer has worked on:

# 1990 Maniac Mansion (NES port), tools programmer, SCUMM (LucasArts)
# 1990 The Secret of Monkey Island, co-writer, programmer, additional designer (LucasArts)
# 1991 Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, co-writer, programmer, additional designer (LucasArts)
# 1993 Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle, co-designer, co-producer, co-director, co-writer (LucasArts)
# 1995 Full Throttle, project leader, writer, designer (LucasArts)

So I don't think you have anything to worry about. The only reason he has a lot of 3D action games under his belt is because that's what publishing companies will publish. Monkey Island is a pretty neat, little-known game, you should play it sometime, get to know this obscure guy's real flavour.

[monkey0506]

Even more obscure than Monkey Island is the strange console once known as NES, published by a now even lesser known company called "Nintendo" of all things. I'm also sure that SCUMM couldn't have been all that important...I mean, none of the Call of Duty games ever used it. You know, real games like Call of Duty and Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 3 and Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and Call of Duty World at War and Call of Duty Black Ops. Not stupid pointless ones like "Full Throttle". 8)

[m0ds]

Slightly OT but Ron-lated to this discussion - is Monkey Island a work of art? The Smithsonian art museum says yes:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17373879

[Eric]

I'm curious as to whether any of you are taking part in the secret DFA backer forums. There have been a few interesting threads there on aspects of game creation, but the forums strike me as being filled mostly with users who seem to be showing off their zany senses of humor, or trying out to be best buds with the Double Fine creators. I'm hoping that as the process rolls on, some of the zanies will fall by the wayside and there will be more nuts n' bolts discussions.

Is it just me?

[Babar]

There are already some "nuts and bolts" discussions, although considering the timeframe and the stage they're currently at, it is obviously mostly about budgeting and equipment and stuff right now.

I'm not so sure that at any point there is going to be a "Hey backers, what do you think should be the theme of the game?" or "Hey backers, what sort of colour palette should we choose?", i.e. there probably won't really be much DISCUSSION with the developers about the direction of the game (aside from maybe the a vote once in a while on something), just them giving information of what is going on, and then the community discussing it. There is all that extra backer community discussion going on, but personally, I get all my forum community needs fulfilled here , so I just stick to the Game/Documentary Development Announcement forum.

[Eric]

Yeah, sorry I wasn't being clear: to clarify, I didn't mean discussions with the developers. My nuts n' bolts needs from them will likely be met by the documentary.

I'm thinking more that there's a great opportunity with however many of the 80,000 something backers have actually signed up for the forum to get into what makes the adventure genre work. There has to be some sort of wisdom to be gained from concentrating a niche group into one area like that. But the discussions so far are running very shallow. There's a nascent thread about verb coins there that's four pages in and hasn't really gotten deeper than "Interaction is good, maybe?"

And in other promising threads, a few quality posts are quickly followed either by the "I"ve written Tim Schafer's name on my Trapper Keeper" crowd or the, "What this thread needs is another shoe-on-head joke," mob.

I think I'll follow your lead and stick to the development sub-forum, but access to these discussion groups was one of the things I was excited to plop my money down for.

I should've made a donation to AGS instead. There were some quality posts once upon a time that I think were intended to be a multi-author discussion series on game design -- I'm having trouble finding them now, but I think Vince Twelve's 'Why Your Game is Broken' posts were among them. And this recent post on detective games is a fantastic roundtable of knowledgeable creators and players weighing in on some specific difficult aspects of design.

Those are the kinds of things I'd hoped the masses of backers would be discussing over at DF, and I'm still hoping they get around to it.

[Ali]

I don't know if you've been around long enough to remember the Game Theory Discussion threads? I seem to remember they were archived somewhere, but you can always search 'GTD'. I remember there being a few quite interesting subjects.

(Sorry to go off topic!)

[Snarky]

Most of them are currently in the Rumpus Room (page 2). I'm planning to make a post that links to all of them and then move them to ART&C.

[Snarky]

I'm thinking more that there's a great opportunity with however many of the 80,000 something backers have actually signed up for the forum to get into what makes the adventure genre work. There has to be some sort of wisdom to be gained from concentrating a niche group into one area like that.

I wouldn't assume that the DFA backers are necessarily the greatest experts on adventure games or the finest minds in fandom. Skimming the forums, I noticed one thread that offered an idea for a novel game mechanic... which turned out to be Maniac Mansion.  : I think they're more likely to be people who played and liked a few LucasArts games when they were kids but haven't kept up with the genre lately than dedicated adventure gamers, much less theorists.

BTW, I noticed that someone from DF has answered a discussion we had earlier in the thread.

I do have to argue that 3.4 million is actually a gigantic budget for a game like this. Assuming they work on the game for 2 years with full time employees. Even at an above average salary per year of $100k per employee (subtracting $200k for the documentary and $200k for voice actors), that could easily employ 15 people for two years.

You're forgetting that Kickstarter takes 5% and Amazon another 5%. Then subtract something like $150-200k (?) for the rewards, as well as the things you mention, and you're down to about $2.4M to actually make the game.

And then you have to remember that company cost per employee are significantly higher than just the salary. There are taxes, of course, and also things like facilities (office space, electricity, internet access...), equipment (computers, office furniture, software licenses), service staff (HR, janitorial, payroll, cafeteria if the company is big enough) and additional management (either more managers or more attention required from existing managers). Usually there are additional perks like free or subsidized health insurance that need to be budgeted for, plus bonuses. A manager I know used to say that you should double the salary to get an estimate of the employee's true cost.

So assuming they're budgeting in the appropriate fraction of DoubleFine overhead and fixed costs into the game budget, that would be about 12 people for a year. Certainly not bad, but not huge, either.

DF has asked not to leak info from the exclusive forums, but I guess I can say that I was almost on target. They have a little less money and therefore a slightly lower number of people working on the game, but the cost per employee per year is pretty much exactly what I estimated.

[Eric]

Ali, those threads are exactly what I was talking about when I wrote...

There were some quality posts once upon a time that I think were intended to be a multi-author discussion series on game design -- I'm having trouble finding them now

...Except now I can find them thanks to you (and Snarky)!

I think they're more likely to be people who played and liked a few LucasArts games when they were kids but haven't kept up with the genre lately than dedicated adventure gamers, much less theorists.

Yeah, I don't know why I expected otherwise.

[Stupot]

I went on the foum for a few days after I was registered (it took about a week to get me registered, for various reasons), tried to take part in a few discussions, but soon realised  I was reading a lot of the same stuff over and over again, none of it very insightful.  And at one point there were WAY too many polls, 50% of which were "Do you think there are too many polls?" polls...  I think there was even a "Do you think there are too many 'do you think there are to many polls?' polls?" poll, or something like it.

And I was getting annoyed with everybody saying things like "This is OUR game!",  "WE get to decide how it turns out!" etc... No we don't, fuck off. You're not that important, you just bought a pre-order. You MAY get to vote in the occasional poll which MAY have a tiny bearing on the finished product, but shut up and let the experts get on with making their game.

[Jared]

That IS something I've noticed about Kickstarter - there will still be people that have the mindset of a producer even though they've given $15 and have a sense of entitlement over the project. Handling the fans seems to be one of the trickier aspects of the process so far, and something that has intrigued me with Shadowrun Returns.

Lots of people backing that project are saying stuff like "If there aren't any Adepts I won't back this" others insisting everything from a specific sourcebook. There have been good things to come out of it - a lack of interest in some of the pitched ideas like PvP ability and an expanded multiplayer game have seen the developers react quick. But then there are things like the project lead expressing doubt about the viability of the Linux port which resulted in, from memory, about 30k of funding disappearing in protest.

All in all I'd still say Kickstarter's good, but giving fans any more reason to a sense of entitlement than they carry with them gives them a lot more reason to backlash. And has been seen recently, fans can backlash HARD when they feel a lack of return for their investment (*Cough* ME3 *cough*)

[Victor6]

Society needs a slap.

In this case the sense of entitlement is a little stupid when you consider that it's a donation, not an investment\loan to the studio.

Some people just want to go back to design by committee (providing of course, they're part of it).

[blueskirt]

Seeing as the people on the Double Fine forums are mostly players and not designers or players with serious interest in design, I wasn't expecting anything more than requests from idea guys sprinkled with a couple of knee-jerk reactions against Telltale latest design choices and "deaths are bad" debates, not serious questioning about the typical Sierra or LucasArts GUIs there, in fact I think lot of people will request for it to make a come back.

And since I:
1. Much rather discuss these serious questioning here with you,
2. Don't see a need to voice my opinion in hope to steer the game design in one direction,
3. Fully trust Ron and Tim on the design,
4. Want to see a Ron and Tim's game, not a game designed by a 80 000 persons committee,
5. Have a huge problem in discussing adventure games with people who knows squat about indies,
I'm not interested in posting there.