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There has been a bit of good news on the Episode 2 front. Nothing in stone yet, but we have received some paper work from MS. It looks like we may (as in possibly) get approved for an Xbox One dev kit. If this happens, we can shop our game out to a few publishers, explain the enhancements we want, the expansions, the cost etc. to make it Xbox marketable product. Then when its finished, we can take those improvements and update the PC version :) If we do a full re-build, we could even have cross platform multiplayer, which would be amazing. I sincerely hope this does happen and Episode 2 gets merged into episode 1 as a result... Or better yet, we get to make all 3 in one big epic, with all the original features we had desired in the first place.
Though I maybe getting ahead of myself here, there are a lot of variables. 1st get the dev license, 2nd shop it around and see if we can sell a chunk of our baby in exchange for the necessary dev budget. It's just the first bit of good news I've had in a while, so I felt like sharing it. Hope I'm not being too annoying, lol.
that didnt go well I guess...
Nope, but we came close. The review bomb that followed Star Bundle and Jim Sterling's coverage (both happened at the same time) was the death blow. 86% to 42%, 4 years later it's climbed up to 50%. Yeah we had a contact that was interested when we sat above 70, but thanks to "squirty plays" and Jim's complete lack of ability to play arcade games or understand how double tap to run works, that didn't happen.
SFG crew are now scattered to the winds at this point, most are at least 2 hours drive away. We still talk online, get together every other month and occasionally work on stuff, but getting the next installment ready is going to take money that isn't there. To be completely transparent, this game did not break even.
Danielle and myself have continued making games, From Beyond: Prologue, a point and click MacVenture inspired horror game is currently out and just won a spot at Seattle Indies Expo (SIX) 2019, so if you happen to be at PAX West, Sept 1st, come next door to SIX (it's free) and say hi to Danielle and myself.
We want to do a new Dungeons, hell we have 2 more design documents filled with stuff we had planned and and a list of improved features we'd love to add in a re-make + Follow-up. But, until we have a better source of income, we are deving much smaller scale projects at the moment. Funded from my day job and what little royalty I see ever so often.
why not work on 2nd one slowly? During those 4 years if you worked slowly from time to time, maybe right now it would be near completion. I knew a game where developer worked slowly in spare time on a game but managed to get it finished after couple of years
For reference, Dungeons took 5 years and that was with the entire team working after our day jobs and nearly every weekend. We did it slowly, (hell we started it when some of us were still in college and even made a vlog covering the production for the first 3 years.) until the last 6 months where we had a bit of money, went fulltime and managed to finalize it and prepare for the follow-up. If we were to make the follow-up, we'd have to start from scratch code wise, as this was last game made with the Torque X engine, which now long sense dead. It would be a complete rebuild.
Art is expensive. About 80% of our budget went to art. We had entire features built for Dungeons (Tournament mode being one of them) and had to pull it out of the game as we ran out of production money to pay for the needed art assets. We had hoped to earn enough during the initial launch to get the last bit of art and re-enable the features as a sort of free DLC/Update and a happy surprise for the gamers, but… Well the math didn’t pan out.
So why can’t we just “do it ourselves”. At the moment John and Nate are working fulltime elsewhere and don’t really have time for serious game development. Plus John’s been wanting to work on his own project, a 4X RTS of his own for like two years now. That leaves Danielle and myself. We were the co-writers / designers of Dungeons, but Danielle is a concept artist, not a spriter.
Reason 1:
So we’d be dependent on our usual freelancers, which would be fine, but well to put this into prospective. An average Dungeon character cost us around $300usd a piece. That covers concept finalization, the animation, etc. Which is very cheap compared to AAA studio rates (A AAA US studio would pay a freelancer about $80 in 2012 money for a finalized concept sprite. That’s just 1 finalized frame. Just to give you an idea of what art assets cost in the industry). The backgrounds cost us around $1200 a piece (again to give you a ball park cost idea, a AAA studio’s background illustration of that resolution would run around $10,000 for the first fully colored and shaded copy, which might not be final.) You don’t pay for these things in installments like a credit card, but upon completion of parts on a weekly schedule (character concept, animated run, attack combo 1, etc. Each frame costs $$$). Some artists require their payment be placed in Escrow, which means you put your money with a 3rd party (usually an escrow service or bank) and it’s disburse once the finalized work has been submited an d approved. Basically, it’s a way for them to know that you have the money. Sure, I could code the game, but without an art budget, it’s not exactly presentable. There are very few sprite artists that will work for a royalty share (they would have been screwed if they did on this project as it hasn’t made money) and even fewer willing to commit to something for years without an immediate paycheck.
Reason 2:
John was our lead programmer, I can program, but I’m no John. I programmed all of From Beyond: Prologue, I did most of the level construction in Dungeons and our other game Kobold’s Quest, using the builder. But to ask me to try to remake the Dungeons game engine inside of UE4 or Unity? That might be outside my scope. I attempted to re-make the first level a year ago in Unity. just to see if I could, and while I got something working OK, and added the ability to throw enemies and objects, what I had built just wasn’t robust enough to handle everything needed, plus after going over the art asset needs with my freelancer to get budget estimates I had to conclude it was well outside my means.
I think you can see why I’m working on smaller scale projects? I wrote, designed, coded and art directed From Beyond, it’s holding a perfect 100% score on Steam, because of the type of game it is and it’s art style, it’s needed budget is FAR SMALLER than what Dungeons cost. From Beyond was built at Nintendo specs, the total art/music budget equaled about 1/58th of what Dungeons cost to make and I programmed it and built it in 8 months by myself as the only “dev”. The follow-up is a bit more ambitious but is coming along fine and is still a fairly cheap production. I’ve already broken even with the first game, while the profit isn’t much, I at least feel it’s going rather well and is generating a bit of a fanbase (I have actually gotten a few fan letters with that one, rather than angry death threats I got from this one). Maybe it’s the genre demographics of the players? Danielle has been working on her own 100% her art and story adventure game for 3 years now. She is also learning to program at the moment, as she’s attending WGU for a Computer Science degree, so her help on From Beyond is mainly punching up my writing and testing.
So, where does that leave Dungeons? Well after I finish up the follow-up, which at the moment, looks to be December, since a hard drive crash (and a failed cloud synch) kind of decimated my original October launch date. I am going to help Danielle in anyway I can to finish her game. When we have those two projects off our plates, we will be looking at what can be done with Dungeons. We have a lot of stuff already designed, though we’ll probably want to go over it and punch it up a bit. We will have to decide if we want to continue with the current art style, or punch up what we already have to HD, which will cost us some coin. If we are both programming, it might be possible to recreate the Dungeons engine, especially in Unity, maybe even re-add some of the hilarious features we had in earlier builds, that had to be trimmed due to Torque X garbage collection issues causing in game hitches. The only way I could see us being able to afford to do it would be to switch from standard sprite animation to Spine/Spriter style animation. That would reduce the cost per character by 4/6ths with our usual artists, then it would be a matter of finding affordable background work that would match this new art direction.
I’m really not a huge fan of the spine animation look, but it’s what everyone else is doing and that’s because it’s far far cheaper to produce and if I’m being 100% honest here, the younger gamers seem to prefer it. I still can’t believe one of the reviews complained about the smoothness of our animations, seriously? Our hero walk cycles alone were 5 times as many frames as Golden Axe Revenge of Death Adder. He seemed to think that (IMO gross) floaty look Spine has was “smoother” … Ugh. Well not my cup of tea, but I’m a gamer who grew up with Arcades and had an Atari as my first computer/console, so what do I know? Times change and I must adapt to it eventually. Such a compromise would be worth it, if the game could be finished, as funny as we had planned and as fun as we had originally intended. Better to come out with something, than nothing and we have quite a story we’d like to tell. This first episode was meant as just an introduction to characters after all. Plus Multiplayer would work with a hand shake server in Unity and eliminate the UPNP issues the Torque X version had (well really it was a user issue, because they had cheap routers, not because the code is bad. Any game using P2P would have the same exact issue). But yeah Unity would erase that problem and make online multiplayer a much smoother experience.
In conclusion, yes I want to make Dungeons, but I want to do it in a way where I’m not the only one working on it. I want to have it planned out in a way where I can afford to actually see it through and not get mired down waiting for the next paycheck so I can get the next art asset in order to finalize a feature (programmer graphics can only get your so far when it comes to finalizing blocking etc). I also want to finish the current series I’m doing, before I jump onto another project. Keep in mind I work all day and am doing this on my weekends and when I get off of work and I’m in my late 30s so my energy levels are no like they were where I could live off of energy drinks and pound the keyboard all night and still go to work the next day. So. How do you think I should go about it? Should I use the current art assets as a starting point and just add? That might be hard because resolutions are going up along with expectations and as I said, some young gamers think this frame by frame animation isn’t “smooth”. So should I redo it all in a Spine animation system? If so should that be vector? Yes it would be cheaper, but to me it wouldn’t look as good. Should I replace the music? Voices? I mean if I include a follow-up in this I’d have to get new voices, because most of those voice actors have moved on, some even did work for Red Dead Redemption and I couldn’t afford them today. Lol You see, there are a lot of things to consider when approaching resurrecting this game. I want to do it. But I have to do in a way where there is a clear path of development and one that can be traveled primarily by 2 people. Danielle has mentioned several times that she would like to do another Dungeons. Our sprite artist freelancer we use for pretty much every project we’ve ever done, has been wanting to do more Dungeons as well. So… Yeah. Love to do this. Just need to clear our plates and figure out how we can afford to do it and work out cost savings measures that would result in an acceptable visual quality.
Sorry this was such a long ramble. I just wanted to be thorough and let you know I’ve thought about it, toyed with it and the very things that must be considered prior to jumping into deving it. I do eventually want to do this, it’s on my game dev bucket list and it will eventually be done. But it’s not what I’m doing at the moment. I’m open to feedback on this matter though and suggestions. I have an open mind, etc. lol
but understandable