The odds of a revival

[Bryan=0101]

What are the odds of this being revisited or having it's development taken over and finished. This game can become the next big thing if done right devs can't be that blind can they?

[Skenners]

Ive attempted in the past to see if DF were interested in handing it over to us (derelict games) or to even purchase the rights and code to it, but they turned us down.

Id dare say, unless they were offered a buttload of cash upfront that they wouldnt give it to anyone else.

-Skenners

[Toliman]

As for a remake, no.

Schafer/DoubleFine owns the IP, and there's nobody left in DF that worked on DF-9 to resurrect it. After the game was forced into early 1.0, the developers "left" DoubeFine.


Running a studio in San Francisco full time is expensive as Fk, and someone has to pay for Schafer to run Over budget and Over schedule on all of his projects.

It's something like 2 million/yr in salaries and expenses to pay $90k to $120k/yr for a developer, not just senior devs or management. SF is not a cheap town, and developing 2D games is intrinsically time consuming but doesn't need a lot of art assets once started. This means that smaller teams can build the engine and gameplay, while artists can be moved into animation or development of other projects.


The premise of the game is sound, hence why they funded and built the game. The only problem was that it's a niche game genre. You can find a lot of survival games on steam, and a lot of space survival and base-building games of varying quality, from cancerous to obtuse.

It's a niche.

The main obstacle to getting Spacebase, or a competitor to Spacebase, to revive this, is to get a big enough audience to buy the game, or to keep buying the game, i.e. subscription or patreon dollars to add new features.

It's a sketchy business really.


As for Devs, no. They're not that blind if they're capable professionals.

They're typically the optimistic ones as they put the effort into making the games work, or to exceed and achieve their outcomes/project goals. A sound engineer's going to do their best, because that's what they do.

The blame for this one lies squarely on Tim Schafer's shoulders.

A variety of reasons are available for why DF-9 tanked, but it's mostly to do with the money.

Tim went way overboard with Broken Age financially, and realised as that game was running over schedule (which it was bound to do), and over budget (which is Tim's speciality), i.e. see the roving film crew hired to document the game development, etc.

Sometime in 2013/2014, they had a operating budget of $10k per dev, per month. in a team of 40 odd devs across 4 projects at least.

i.e. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-07-03-tim-schafer-needs-more-money-to-finish-broken-age

at the point that Tim started his "epic adventure" into marketing/financing Broken Age, he ended up with 3.3 million and spare cash to throw around.

This also tied into being generous and starting other projects in 2011-2014.

Essentially, this started of as an indie project in DoubleFine's Amnesia Fortnight in 2012 ? where they get game ideas from their in-house developer pool to create prototype games for the Game Jam. Some are tech demos, some are indie as all fk, and some are interesting games that are really unique, or just have a fun premise.

Hack n Slash, and Spacebase DF-9 were the 'winners' of Amnesia Fortnight voting that got funded and developed by a small offshoot team of 4-5 people. The team was an offshoot from the early Broken Age engine development teams, that were helping the "main project".

And that's where things went downhill.

Schafer, and perhaps some others around him, decided that he'd attempt to bridge the $400k in indiefund financing he got to make Spacebase (and Hack n Slash), with funding from the public. This was an inherent error of judgement on Schafer's part, because he did not fully understand or gauge the public's role.

Schafer, after the main development in 2013, opened the project to Early Access on Steam so he could use it as a marketing exercise for the game, much in the same way he leveraged kickstarter, twice, on the same game project.

Indie Dev is not the same when you need to publish demos or show your effort to keep people motivated. The effort to entertain or to promote, is time you don't spend purely on the game, but it is also an intrinsic motivator.

I don't blame the 4-person team that did the majority of the work, JP LeBreton and company were mostly fired after the project was wrapped up, and they no longer needed to work on Moai-based LUA games.

[FluffyGuy]

Originally posted by Skenners:

Ive attempted in the past to see if DF were interested in handing it over to us (derelict games) or to even purchase the rights and code to it, but they turned us down.

Id dare say, unless they were offered a buttload of cash upfront that they wouldnt give it to anyone else.

-Skenners

well i hate that this game was version like .58 or .62 then suddenly its 1.0 and just forgotten

[Mush]

Originally posted by Toliman:

-snip-

I don't blame the 4-person team that did the majority of the work, JP LeBreton and company were mostly fired after the project was wrapped up, and they no longer needed to work on Moai-based LUA games.

That is actualy a well written version of what happened to Spacebase, thanks for that.

I agree on everything but i would like to add that all blame does go to Double Fine.
That the project failed is one thing, that stuff happens, but the way DF handled it was atrocious.
They could have been upfront and open but made the conscious choice to Lie.
That is something that should not be forgotten by any consumer of video games, if you really insist on calling the purchase of an early access game an investment.

[Patriot]

Oh well. Another early access hopeful appears to be dead. Moving on.