Mane6 just launched their Indiegogo campaign for Them’s Fightin’ Herds, a 2D fighting game with character designs by Lauren Faust (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic). These guys formerly made Fighting is Magic, a My Little Pony fighting game that got C&D’d by Hasbro, which is part of what prompted Lauren Faust to join the team. Those who backed the Skullgirls Indiegogo campaign may recall that one of their stretch goals was licensing Mike Z’s proprietary engine to Mane6 for this game, and they’ve already got some really good stuff going on with it!
They’re asking for $436K and have already raised a bit over $17K in an hour.
Telefrog
3748
Telefrog
3750
The yanked demo for Kojima’s Silent Hills game on PS4. A lot of people really loved that experience.
lordkosc
3751
A $25 spot was open, so I took it. :) Game concept looks great.
And now my Kingdom Death box has been delivered to my friend’s house- I switched the taking there a couple months ago when I found out my landlord is being foreclosed on so I might not be here when it got delivered. I never received an email or any tracking info that it was even on its way. Grumblegrumble.
But hey, 22 lbs of gaming goodness is here!
Well, looks like my Kingdom Death box was delivered today, and I never got any tracking info or anything. I had it delivered to a friend’s house, though- my landlord is being foreclosed on, so didn’t want to take the chance I wouldn’t be living here. Going over to pick it up in a bit. So excited.
rowe33
3754
It is truly massive - prepare to be impressed!
Telefrog
3755
Project Phoenix is boned.
So what happened? What’s going on? Why the delay? Why such a long delay?
The short answer is: Programming. Programming was listed on the KS page as one of our major risks to the project and we got hit by it. We were holding off for a specific person and ultimately they could not join us. Now we have to get a replacement(s).
The long answer is: the Project Phoenix development was hinging on one major programmer to bring the project to a point where others could begin their in-game work. Obviously, that did not work out. The programmer’s involvement got delayed and therefore the game was delayed respectively. Now he has been removed from the project altogether and we are working to get a replacement(s) in as soon as possible. The replacement programmer(s) will be paid to do the work until the game is done, unlike the original staff’s arrangement which is based on royalties (i.e. they don’t get paid until the game is done and starts selling - and no, this is not the same as volunteering) but this will be paid out of CIA’s company account and not the KS funds.
Unfortunately, we are not able to solidify the replacement programmer(s) contract until the end of October 2015 which means that there will be not much to show in terms of in-game assets until closer to the end of the year.
After all of that, why switch game engines? Doesn’t that set you back even further?
The decision to switch game engines was made for two reasons. 1) The programmer we had been hoping to work with was very well versed with Unity but once we lost him we had no particular reason to stick with it and 2) Unreal 4 natively offers much more robust tools for development than Unity and it would have actually been more time consuming to stick with Unity sans our original programmer than to switch and have a plethora of tools immediately at our disposal.
Worth noting that they managed to get by for just over 2 years plopping out art and story updates before remembering to mention that, oh yeah, they had completed exactly 0 programming work.
Oops!
Telefrog
3757
I loved their status chart:
State of the Game
100% Scenarios (Main battles and story elements for Acts 1-5)
90% Game Design (combat mechanics are designed and programmed with the exception of the threat system)
80% Overall models (all base models are done which includes characters and environment - variant models are left to do)
70% Overall animations (90% humanoid animations are done)
0% Textures
0% Script (text for the game)
0% Unreal 4 executable (sandbox used to create the game) - this is the main thing we need a programmer for
0% Level Design (“physically” building the world, placement of objects and characters, lighting, and scripting) - obviously this cannot happen until we have the executable
0% Particle Effects
5% Sound Effects
0% VO (dependent on script and casting)
0% Localization (mostly dependent on script)
?% Music - 80 minutes of unlooped music is composed (JRPGs usually have 90 minutes) - still needs to go through post production/arrangement and recording
Uh, you have nothing.
And just in case you hadn’t had your fill of failed JRPG Kickstaters:
Unsung Story Is A $660,000 Kickstarter Disaster
Sorry for the Kotaku link, but sometimes you just gotta suck it up
I and 15,823 other suckers gave money to Playdek last year for Unsung Story, a game they said would be “a spiritual successor in a storied line of epic tactical RPGs designed by Yasumi Matsuno,” director of FFT and Vagrant Story, among other games. The impressive Kickstarter pitch promised a story-heavy strategy-RPG that sounded like the Tactics sequel fans have been craving for years now. I backed it, and I wrote about it several times on Kotaku. Now I regret that. Unsung Story has become yet another one of Kickstarter’s many disasters—a frustratingly opaque project that’s apparently switched focus and has left tons of backers asking for refunds.
When the Unsung Story Kickstarter first launched, Playdek promised that the game would be out in July of 2015, but in an update sent to backers yesterday, CEO Joel Goodman wrote that it’s been delayed to late 2016 thanks to layoffs and other unfortunate financial circumstances at the company. Fine. Delays happen. What’s more alarming is that Playdek seems to have switched focus on Unsung Story to make it more of a multiplayer game, and that their new development timeline is all about player vs. player combat rather than the narrative-heavy single-player game that the Kickstarter initially promised.
The company’s apparently refusing refunds and plowing ahead with the new plans. . . so hooray?
These people are making it harder for the rest of us. How can we have more done than the above two stories in 5 months with a handful of people?
Technical competence? Never heard of Playdek before, I think Matsuno was the only thing giving them recognition. This is an evergreen story with KS: “Fly-By-Night Studios announces their spiritual remake kickstarter is having a rough time.”
I backed you guys even knowing about these stories, if it makes you feel better.
It’s amazing the amount of KS projects that get funded without a line of code been written or even a programmer on board (which means the scope is bound to be extremely off). Of course backers are never told this, but it is extremely common.
JoshL
3762
Playdek has actually released several successful iOS games – including Ascension and Agricola. So people could maybe be forgiven for thinking they could release something.
LMN8R
3763
Jesus that is the most naive chart I’ve ever seen in gaming. Anyone who thinks you can have any “game design” or “scenarios” finalized before it’s actually implemented and running in code is a goddamned fool.
geewhiz
3764
I believe Playdek is also working on the digital Twilight Struggle too.
malkav11
3765
Probably safer considering it’s a digital boardgame implementation and that’s their core competency. JRPGs, by contrast, would be a bold new frontier for them. Not that companies don’t genre jump like that successfully, but it’s trickier.
Playdeck is a legit developer (if they did abuse that KS, which was clear from the very beginning it was not what people were buying into). In this case I think it’s the backer’s fault for not seeing the writing in the wall (that they were making a mobile, online game first and a story driven game second).
The Project Phoenix case is way more typical of KS projects though. Create nice art, maybe some concept renders. Get the funding for a design you have not really scoped or budgeted. Realize you will not make it. Figure out how to get out cleanly enough.
In the last 6 months, including Project Phoenix, I have seen five KS projects lose their programmer. You don’t lose a programmer if you are either paying them enough or if they are a key team member. If neither of those are the case, maybe you have a more fundamental problem.
