Financing McCarthy.

[Baron]

Option #5 - Nothing finances worthy causes better than a nude calendar.  You can pose every month yourself, or see if you can recruit 11 other prominent AGSers to take one for the team.  If you distribute it digitally your costs will be minimal and, pending good taste and creative posing, you may be able to satisfy both your artists and your voice actors (er, financially that is).

Option #6 - Have you considered defraying the financial risk with some sort of informal partnership or corporate structure?  Everyone invests time and effort, and then reaps a proportionate fraction of the rewards on a contingency basis should the venture prove successful.  So, say the game corporation is broken down into a million shares, and every acceptable line of voice acting is worth 10 shares, or every usable sprite is worth 100, etc. (you'll have to break it down exactly according to the amount of work required so that it seems fair).  Every quarter for a year after the release date you divide the spoils proportionately, and then you fold the corporation (to cut down on long term hassle), with any remaining profits going to you as the ultimate owner of the franchise (obviously that would have to be made clear in the original agreement with your partners).  It depends on your jurisdiction, but setting up this kind of share structure for a private company can be dirt cheap, and anyway you could probably get away with doing it informally (but written contracts are a good idea so there are no misunderstandings).  If many people have a vested interest in seeing a commercial McCarthy widely distributed, they might just help with the marketing.  Indeed, you could set aside 50K shares for a designated pimp position....

Just throwing ideas out there.

[Gabriel_Down]

Are you sure you cannot find actors/voice actors just starting out who could do this for their portfolio? I'm pretty sure you could lure some of them, even more so if you tried to promote the game even more than the last one. You could also offer them in game credit and maybe links to their sites or something. My personal un-informed opinion is that you're better off with a freeware game at this point of your career.

Best of luck with your game!

[Calin Leafshade]

Just so you all know, I am well aquainted with the VAA and VAC and VA.co.uk :p In fact that's where all the other VAs came from.

However, as i said before, amateur VAs are much less likely to invest hundreds of lines for free than they are 30 lines.
Certainly if I want decent voice actors (there are some *terrible* VAs on those sites).

[Gabriel_Down]

umm ok sorry then!

[Stupot]

To be fair, voice acting is very often pretty bad in even the biggest commercial games, so I don't think paying actors is necessarily going to justify the price to you or to us.  Not at this point anyway.

Personally I would happily save a few quid to play the game non-voiced.  But if you absolutely must have voicing I'd rather give a small donation for the privilage than pay a set price.

[Wonkyth]

Well how about the "pay what you like" system that has been adopted by alot of indies?

That seems like a reasonable compromise. It's like donation except it gives people a little extra nudge in that direction.

This already!

[mkennedy]

Maybe someday they'll have software that will be able to mimic any voice and say whatever you tell it to. Though I imagine such software may be more expensive than hiring actors...

[Igor Hardy]

Maybe someday they'll have software that will be able to mimic any voice and say whatever you tell it to. Though I imagine such software may be more expensive than hiring actors...

Or even better, maybe some future AGS version will include a "make a McCarthy sequel" button, which will do all the work automatically in a couple of seconds.

[Grim]

I'd say commercial can be justified if you go easy (or remove them) on the werewolves this time around But maybe that's just me- anything that has werewolves in it puts me off  for some reason....

  What I found interesting here, though, is that you consider going commercial without really thinking whether you can find a publisher that will be interested in selling a sequel to a game that isn't that popular outside this community, or any no-budget indie game really. Have you already got publishers willing to do that? I found this was the hardest bit- getting people interested enough to try it.

  Another option to consider: maybe McCarthy 1 can be added to the sequel, so all newcomers can play it first before they try chapter 2. That would save some confusion, surely, and "buy 2 for the price of 1" always looks good, too!

[Layabout]

You have a few options, as you mentioned.

I for one would buy it. But I'd expect the first game to be a 'prologue' type of thing integrated, or have some kind of special edition with updated graphics, dialogue, etc. to reason the special name.

I don't think there is any reason not to go down this route,  as long as you get some support from someone already doing this with ags games, or you can throw it on steam. (perhaps speak to zombie cow or Dave Gilbert)

I'd also strongly encourage going for a higher resolution, but that is personal opinion.

[Snarky]

My immediate reaction is that it's not a good idea.

I would have thought that if you decide to make it commercial, you'll have to pay everyone involved in its production a fair wage, whilst if it's freeware you can get many/all to work for free or for a nominal fee. Also, a commercial game might demand a higher level of polish (e.g. higher resolution, more animations, better backgrounds, more music and sound effects, and so on), leading you to invest more into it; and you have to make really sure that it plays without bugs on all systems. All this takes more time and, for a commercial game, more money. And I am not convinced that the revenues would cover the cost increase, so you might come out worse off than if you'd given away the game for free.

There's quite an impressive lineup of commercial AGS games coming up (Gemini Rue and the next Blackwell title in the short run, Resonance and the Journey Down sequel/deluxe version in the longer run), and I think that does mean your game has to raise its game be competitive. Will it measure up to these others in production quality, length/substance, and player appeal, or will it still feel most like a well-made free game? Will you be able to make a good case for why people should pay for it while they can get e.g. Ben Jordan 8 for free?

If script length is the big problem, maybe you could see if you could cut down some of the dialog? (Preferably by trimming down long exchanges rather than reducing the number of exchanges.) Both Dave Gilbert and Vince Twelve have found that this actually improves the script.

You could also write some excuse into the script to allow you to use different voice actors for the same character, so there's not as much work for each one. Either split the character into two separate ones (maybe a police officer is replaced half-way through the investigation, for example), or have something happen that would change the voice (a flu, being the victim of serious injuries, turning into a monster, suddenly aging decades...)

The proposal you had about a donation button (perhaps associated with some incentive, like a producer credit, an early look at a video of the game or background sketches, etc.) sounds much better, though I wouldn't expect it to
bring in huge sums.

[Igor Hardy]

There's quite an impressive lineup of commercial AGS games coming up (Gemini Rue and the next Blackwell title in the short run, Resonance and the Journey Down sequel/deluxe version in the longer run), and I think that does mean your game has to raise its game be competitive. Will it measure up to these others in production quality, length/substance, and player appeal, or will it still feel most like a well-made free game? Will you be able to make a good case for why people should pay for it while they can get e.g. Ben Jordan 8 for free?

I don't think there's any need to make such a case. Revolution was giving Broken Sword DC for free a month ago, and the current prices you can pay during promotions of popular games are ridiculously low. Almost none of lesser indie games can compare in price/quality ratio to those titles, and it's insane to demand from them to feel guilty about it.

Little, modest indies can be competitive only in the sense that some players want to play even shorter, audio-visually inferior indie titles, if they see something special in them. Such people might choose to invest in the creators to see them make more and better titles in the future.

[ThreeOhFour]

An interesting point you make there, Igor.

We can buy classic games for PC, big budget high profile releases, for something stupid like $1 each nowadays, and their technology is far more advanced still than anything we'd be able to do with AGS, and they might have 15-20 hours of gameplay.

However, I'll still pay $10-$20 for an indie game sometimes, even if I flinch at a $20 price tag on a Playstation 3 game and think "I'll wait until that's cheaper..."

It's kinda hard to judge the value of games, really.

[Snarky]

I think that's more a matter of the two things not being directly comparable. The fact that Broken Sword is ca. 15 years old, has an established place in the canon, was made by a pretty big, professional team, and that many people have already played it makes it quite different than a new indie title.

Newness and timeliness are pretty big factors in determining what people see as a fair price. Something that has been available non-stop for a decade and a half, can easily be got second-hand, and presumably made back its budget many years ago won't command the price of a new release. Similarly, the fact that the creator is around, responding to feedback, that public opinion isn't set and reviews haven't yet been written (so there's a point offering your take), and that the response could determine the fate of future games also makes a new game worth investing in.

But I think if you're comparing a free AGS game to a commercial AGS game released around the same time, the situation is much more similar, and you have to be able to show some arguments for why one "deserves" to charge money. Otherwise I doubt it will be particularly successful or popular.

[Igor Hardy]

But I think if you're comparing a free AGS game to a commercial AGS game released around the same time, the situation is much more similar, and you have to be able to show some arguments for why one "deserves" to charge money. Otherwise I doubt it will be particularly successful or popular.

If you mean imaginative marketing and positive reviews, then, yeah, they're strongly needed to make an indie game profitable.

However, I don't see indie developers as burdened with responsibility to convincingly explain why they deserve getting money for their game instead of giving it for free, under the threat that people around will start to hate them and view them as sell-outs. That would be crazy.

[Snarky]

Only with the caveat that charging for something creates expectations, and failing to live up to expectations always risks creating bad feeling/backlash.

[Calin Leafshade]

Only with the caveat that charging for something creates expectations, and failing to live up to expectations always risks creating bad feeling/backlash.

Thats what demos and reviews are for.

If a developer made a bad game they get the backlash regardless of whether or not someone paid for it. I'm sure every AGS dev has seen this in action.

However, I don't see indie developers as burdened with responsibility to convincingly explain why they deserve getting money for their game instead of giving it for free, under the threat that people around will start to hate them and view them as sell-outs. That would be crazy.

Agreed. To sell out you have to make compromises based on perceived revenue which is something indies should never do.. that's kind of part of what makes them indie, keeping creative control separate from revenue.

[Igor Hardy]

Only with the caveat that charging for something creates expectations, and failing to live up to expectations always risks creating bad feeling/backlash.

Ok. That I fully agree with. But is it such an unusual risk?

A freeware game can create expectations, bad feelings and backlash just as well. Popularity (however small) can create greater expectations (or envy) than a price tag.

Similarly, saying something distasteful and/or arrogant publicly can potentially ruin the reputation of your games whether you charge for them or not.

In general, everything you create, or say is prone to being taken seriously. It's not only money that can make that happen.