It's interesting how...

[tim.]

Ironmace were able to go from 0 to demo-quality game in 10 months, including all of the player controllers, 6 classes all with distinct abilities, weapons, and equipment, while being relatively well balanced for group-interplay, 2 different dungeon floors with 2 variations, a realtively wide variety of enemy types per floor that all had unique combat interactions, 2 bosses with a relatively high difficulty, a basic mining and crafting system, and were able to do it all while still making an actually engaging gameplay loop.

And now, in 6+ months, they've added a total of, what, 4 new generic enemies and a single boss, 2 horribly unpolished maps, 1 class that has barely any use, and VOIP? Oh, right, and i guess that green potion that nobody actually uses, all while making balance changes that makes some of the classes totally useless or absurdly broken.

If i were a conspiracy theorist, i might suggest that it seems like they were following a template to use as reference to get a lot of the groundwork done.

[Mr B.]

Having worked in development, and given the situation, I can't really see what other answer there is. Frankly, anyone saying otherwise hasn't any expirence in development, but meh.

I also think it's amusing how the IQ seems more towards one side. The amount of backtracking and twisting evidence is insane.

Oh, lets not forget the armchair lawyers who have fought off two companies bigger than Nexon :D :D

[Snooze]

Even looking at other games, a ue4 engine game is looking at another year+ of alpha development because they're changing to ue5.

[Fleshly Delight]

Dev teams work at different paces based on far too many variables to just say "10 months is sus."
Kenshi took something like 12 years in development.
Valheim is still in early access and already like 5 or 6 years into development.
GTFO was sitting around 5 years by release.
Project Zomboid is hitting around 12 years and still in EA for at least another 4, minimum.

It's not unbelievable to get to where they were before the end of that year when you look at what they have to show for it.
It's not much, but it's a fun game.

Chosen engine, purchased or created in-house assets, number of spent man-hours, size of the team, how many illnesses/important life events came up, passion in your work, and skill in your field all affect the speed at which a game is developed.

Once you let the public start touching your game, ESPECIALLY if it gets absurdly popular, things change.

[Snooze]

Originally posted by Fleshly Delight:

Chosen engine, purchased or created in-house assets, number of spent man-hours, size of the team, how many illnesses/important life events came up, passion in your work, and skill in your field all affect the speed at which a game is developed.

Leaving engine behind, creating in-house assets takes a LONG time, added in with torch placements and lighting, enemy placements/amounts, ensuring doors fit frames, enemies are scaled properly to player size, animations, hit-box detections. Not a lot is simply 'drag and drop'.

It takes a long time to place all these in, and while no one knows exactly how big Nexon's P3 team is, if we place it at a solid 20 developers, it's reported that half left for Ironmace.

Half that is 10 people to put out a stable playable demo in 10 months.

Kenshi was a single person. Of course it took 12 years.
Valheim's team is 10 people. (It released 2 years ago, and it wasn't NEARLY as polished as PT4 was. PT4 could have easily been a beta EA release.)
GTFO is 10 people.
Project Zomboid has at least 10 people, with more not even listed, and started with 4, then 6 people.

Edit: To toss up another game- Carnal Instinct was put into EA 2 years ago, and was nothing more than a collection of s*x scenes. It's grown now to a proper open world, and they're looking at taking another 2 years more.

From their recent roadmap released on steam;

We think that we're realistically looking at around 4-6 months of development time until we leave Pre-Alpha, with a further 6-8 months until we leave Alpha. This then leaves us Beta and final release content, so in total we think that the Pre-Alpha/Alpha/Beta to final release will run for approximately 18-24 months from today

[Fleshly Delight]

Originally posted by Snooze:

Originally posted by Fleshly Delight:

Chosen engine, purchased or created in-house assets, number of spent man-hours, size of the team, how many illnesses/important life events came up, passion in your work, and skill in your field all affect the speed at which a game is developed.

Leaving engine behind, creating in-house assets takes a LONG time, added in with torch placements and lighting, enemy placements/amounts, ensuring doors fit frames, enemies are scaled properly to player size, animations, hit-box detections. Not a lot is simply 'drag and drop'.

It takes a long time to place all these in, and while no one knows exactly how big Nexon's P3 team is, if we place it at a solid 20 developers, it's reported that half left for Ironmace.

Half that is 10 people to put out a stable playable demo in 10 months.

Kenshi was a single person. Of course it took 12 years.
Valheim's team is 10 people. (It released 2 years ago, and it wasn't NEARLY as polished as PT4 was. PT4 could have easily been a beta EA release.)
GTFO is 10 people.
Project Zomboid has at least 10 people, with more not even listed, and started with 4, then 6 people.

Edit: To toss up another game- Carnal Instinct was put into EA 2 years ago, and was nothing more than a collection of s*x scenes. It's grown now to a proper open world, and they're looking at taking another 2 years more.

From their recent roadmap released on steam;

We think that we're realistically looking at around 4-6 months of development time until we leave Pre-Alpha, with a further 6-8 months until we leave Alpha. This then leaves us Beta and final release content, so in total we think that the Pre-Alpha/Alpha/Beta to final release will run for approximately 18-24 months from today

As someone that's worked extensively with code (specifically C++), Blender, AutoCAD, and UE4, I can see how a team of 10 could reach the game they showed around a year's worth of effort assuming theyre treating it as a real, 40 hour week job and aren't slacking off.

I suggest looking into Game Jams to see the level of skill, work, and ingenuity people can put into making a working game in less than 72 hours.
It's actually insane.

I do believe however that Ironmace isn't giving out the actual timeline on when they started developing the game outside of Nexon.
They need to give out more concrete information on their past scheduled work for said months before public EA if they want people to believe them

[tim.]

Point being that in the last 6 months they've managed to practically stagnant in their development relative to the 10 month timeline.

They managed to do 90% of the work in the first 10 months, and 10% in the last 6. Why did their development speed totally drop off a cliff? Especially when they announced they wanted to do early access just a few months ago? Surely adding in a new class wouldn't take 2 entire months minimum, especially for one that was so unpolished, considering they managed to have 6 which all had some level of party-oriented cohesion and actually fairly decent balance.

Just saying, it sure seems like Nexon's claim that Ironmace were able to bypass a huge chunk of R&D time, including balancing character/mob health and damage values and design iterations make a lot of sense when you consider their development on the game.

[Jaggervice]

Dark and Darker was essentially their project at Nexon and these are experienced individuals. It's not unrealistic to think they were able to quickly recreate things they had already done for an extended period of time after starting over.

I think most people can find this relatable in some way. After having done the work before, it is quicker the next time around after you already know what to do.

After they recreated what they had already done before, it makes sense that things would slow down as they are now looking at creating new things and polishing what's already there.

Once they finally released the game to the public (playtests), not only was development stalled for the week or so the game was live during the playtests (5 playtests = over a month of that 6 months), but work went into fixing issues and bugs afterwards. Also, they spent the last few weeks to a month dealing with the issues brought forth by Nexon, yet still managed to get the game out without a platform.

Since the first playtest they've added quite a few things and made various changes. They've added 2 maps, a class, etc. All of which has been incorporated pretty well. Take a look at some other games, even major AAA games and how long it takes them to put out new things or fix things despite the size of their teams and resources. This is something people complain about often.

It seems to me that Dark and Darker has done really well the past 6 months for what they have to work with and what they are also now dealing with.

[Flavalicious]

I mean a decent hot take if you didn't play any of the earlier tests. Games come a long way since i first played it in Sept of last year.

Games had 2 or 3 light reworks for the maps. They changed how the map configurations could spawn as well as removing chunks of those maps to be worked on more later. Added a class. Added probably 30 or so special ability moves, 30-50 perks, and probably around 20 spells between the classes that can use them. They added goblins, cave beatles, hell bats, centaurs, the multiple extra variations of skeleton equipment, the various stages of "elite" enemy progression, 2 new bosses to shore up the solo boss they had before, 2 new maps, VOIP, and an ungodly amount of gear, sound effects, artwork for UI elements, the entire spell menu setup as we know it today, etc. Thats without touching spawn balance, scaling, general balance and bug fixing.

It always brings a chuckle to me when folks are like "P3 did all the R&D works". Bro, its an extraction looter game. There are multiple titles on the target that have already established this formula, all they needed to do was adapt a fantasy environment. You figure P3 had questing in it? Or you think maybe that came from Tarkov/Cycle/Marauders influence? Beyond that, lets throw you a mercy bone and say sure, if IM did lift the project from Nexon and remade the same game almost 1:1. Care to explain how we have League of legends, DoTA, heroes of the swarm, smite and like half a dozen other copy/pasta Mobas with near identical gameplay elements and heroes, and hell even art style. Or is there an argument in this bag that Riots version of DOTA from like 10 years ago wasnt exactly what DD is to what P3 was. lol....Its almost like copyright doesnt safe guard a genre or a general idea.

[Mr B.]

Originally posted by Fleshly Delight:

As someone that's worked extensively with code (specifically C++), Blender, AutoCAD, and UE4, I can see how a team of 10 could reach the game they showed around a year's worth of effort assuming theyre treating it as a real, 40 hour week job and aren't slacking off.

Can we just state right here and now, coding is NOT development. Anyone saying so quite simply hasn't been properly involved in development.

For those in professions, think of all the time people have said 'Oh well what your doing could be done xyz'. Because they focus on a single aspect, and have literally no idea about all the other things which you have to consider.

Yeah, its like that. Coding is simply a part of development.

This timeframe, imo is too small.

[Jaggervice]

Originally posted by Mr B.:

Originally posted by Fleshly Delight:

As someone that's worked extensively with code (specifically C++), Blender, AutoCAD, and UE4, I can see how a team of 10 could reach the game they showed around a year's worth of effort assuming theyre treating it as a real, 40 hour week job and aren't slacking off.

Can we just state right here and now, coding is NOT development. Anyone saying so quite simply hasn't been properly involved in development.

For those in professions, think of all the time people have said 'Oh well what your doing could be done xyz'. Because they focus on a single aspect, and have literally no idea about all the other things which you have to consider.

Yeah, its like that. Coding is simply a part of development.

This timeframe, imo is too small.

"Coding is not development". "Coding is simply a part of development". Interesting contradiction within one post. Programming and coding are both involved in development.

Good thing 75% of the forums are developers with plenty of knowledge to understand something they are not a part of.

[Snooze]

Originally posted by Flavalicious:

I mean a decent hot take if you didn't play any of the earlier tests. Games come a long way since i first played it in Sept of last year.

Games had 2 or 3 light reworks for the maps. They changed how the map configurations could spawn as well as removing chunks of those maps to be worked on more later. Added a class. Added probably 30 or so special ability moves, 30-50 perks, and probably around 20 spells between the classes that can use them. They added goblins, cave beatles, hell bats, centaurs, the multiple extra variations of skeleton equipment, the various stages of "elite" enemy progression, 2 new bosses to shore up the solo boss they had before, 2 new maps, VOIP, and an ungodly amount of gear, sound effects, artwork for UI elements, the entire spell menu setup as we know it today, etc. Thats without touching spawn balance, scaling, general balance and bug fixing.

It always brings a chuckle to me when folks are like "P3 did all the R&D works". Bro, its an extraction looter game. There are multiple titles on the target that have already established this formula, all they needed to do was adapt a fantasy environment. You figure P3 had questing in it? Or you think maybe that came from Tarkov/Cycle/Marauders influence? Beyond that, lets throw you a mercy bone and say sure, if IM did lift the project from Nexon and remade the same game almost 1:1. Care to explain how we have League of legends, DoTA, heroes of the swarm, smite and like half a dozen other copy/pasta Mobas with near identical gameplay elements and heroes, and hell even art style. Or is there an argument in this bag that Riots version of DOTA from like 10 years ago wasnt exactly what DD is to what P3 was. lol....Its almost like copyright doesnt safe guard a genre or a general idea.

Oh yeah I know, but if Ironmace made an over-the-shoulder shooter moba, or a tower defence game, then they wouldn't be in this mess. What Nexon is saying is that there's no feasible way that IM could have pumped out what they did in such a short time without infringing on Nexon's trade secrets that the team worked on prior, which is a violation of the contracts signed by Park and Choi.

If IM skipped the prototyping, and preproduction, to skip right into production and alpha testing to release to the public, then that's kind of sketchy.

[Kexxor]

Originally posted by Snooze:

Originally posted by Flavalicious:

I mean a decent hot take if you didn't play any of the earlier tests. Games come a long way since i first played it in Sept of last year.

Games had 2 or 3 light reworks for the maps. They changed how the map configurations could spawn as well as removing chunks of those maps to be worked on more later. Added a class. Added probably 30 or so special ability moves, 30-50 perks, and probably around 20 spells between the classes that can use them. They added goblins, cave beatles, hell bats, centaurs, the multiple extra variations of skeleton equipment, the various stages of "elite" enemy progression, 2 new bosses to shore up the solo boss they had before, 2 new maps, VOIP, and an ungodly amount of gear, sound effects, artwork for UI elements, the entire spell menu setup as we know it today, etc. Thats without touching spawn balance, scaling, general balance and bug fixing.

It always brings a chuckle to me when folks are like "P3 did all the R&D works". Bro, its an extraction looter game. There are multiple titles on the target that have already established this formula, all they needed to do was adapt a fantasy environment. You figure P3 had questing in it? Or you think maybe that came from Tarkov/Cycle/Marauders influence? Beyond that, lets throw you a mercy bone and say sure, if IM did lift the project from Nexon and remade the same game almost 1:1. Care to explain how we have League of legends, DoTA, heroes of the swarm, smite and like half a dozen other copy/pasta Mobas with near identical gameplay elements and heroes, and hell even art style. Or is there an argument in this bag that Riots version of DOTA from like 10 years ago wasnt exactly what DD is to what P3 was. lol....Its almost like copyright doesnt safe guard a genre or a general idea.

Oh yeah I know, but if Ironmace made an over-the-shoulder shooter moba, or a tower defence game, then they wouldn't be in this mess. What Nexon is saying is that there's no feasible way that IM could have pumped out what they did in such a short time without infringing on Nexon's trade secrets that the team worked on prior, which is a violation of the contracts signed by Park and Choi.

If IM skipped the prototyping, and preproduction, to skip right into production and alpha testing to release to the public, then that's kind of sketchy.

The way I see it, the developers of Dark and Darker could possibly get so far on their game in such a short period of time may lie in the fact that they aren't a giant company. All the developers could souly focus on developing of the game without any distractions / other projects. They also did not have to submit every step of the development to higher ups to be scrutinized and then approved before moving on to the next step or being told to change it. We also have no idea how many hours a day each developer put in while working on Dark and Darker, heck they might have been pulling 18 hour days, 7 days a week for those 10 months. There could be a lot of reasons development was as quick as it was that does not require stole assests.

[Snooze]

There is, but then that's more of a toxic work environment and contrary to IM's mission statement of, to quote:

We are a merry band of veteran game developers disillusioned by the exploitative and greedy practices we once helped create. We are experts who have worked on many of the biggest hits in Korea.

"Ah yes, let's not do the greedy exploitative practices of game developers by, in fact, having our developer team work ungodly, exhaustive, crunch time hours that have ruined many lives in the past."

[Kexxor]

I wasn't quoting anyone on the hours they worked. I was just offering possible reasons they could get the development of the game done faster than what Nexon is claiming possible. I have no idea what their hours were, or what the work environment at Ironmace is like.

[Snooze]

I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they were actually decent work hours, 40/week, maybe in a 10/hr day setup, 3 days to be with family/relax.

But, alas, game development is a toxic environment by nature of the production. Coding aside, you've got lighting, collision, hitboxes, etc, all that require fine tuning. Not a lot of people knew that you could shoot through the grating on doors.

But again, I speculated that it was 10 people. We don't know how many Nexon had employed for P3. It's possible that there was only 10 people, it's possible that it was 70.

If they employed 70, and half left for IM, then yes, 35 people could absolutely nail out the game.

If they had 10, and IM got 5, then no. There's no way, especially when IM reported themselves sleeping IN the office, and how poor they were.

We know there's at least 3 people- Park, Choi, and then the one bugger who made the Gofundme.