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[Mephansteras]

PTW. Wish I'd know about this during the Kickstarter.

[alakoring]

There has not been a Six Ages Kickstarter …

[nenjin]

You guys should do a blog post about your feels on Kickstarter. I know a lot of people are curious why we can't throw money at you.

[Cruxador]

There has not been a Six Ages Kickstarter …

You mean a game can be made without first begging money from potential consumers?

I wonder if it's a generation thing actually; these days we're used to games being made by penniless millennials who need the money just to effectively survive without working (and can't effectively manage a major project and a full time job at once) so it seems pretty unusual when people who are more financially stable don't need handouts to make something of substance.

Or maybe it's a difference in mindsets between tabletop and vidya communities. A lot more tendency in the former to just buckle down and do as much as you can out of pocket, and between a design that's not super cost-intensive, having pre-existing connections which mean your pockets don't need to be quite as deep, and (I imagine) somewhat deeper pockets due to KoDP on digital distribution, doing it out of pocket is probably more viable than with a lot of games.
After all, going "here's something we did before, let's do another but even better" is totally different than going "here's something that people with a full team did before, let's do it again but fully modernized!".

tl;dr: PTW

[Mephansteras]

We seem to have two threads going at once, so cross-posting in both so we can hopefully decide on one.


http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=145291.0

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=159277.0

[hops]

New blog post, also, let's start posting blog posts when they come up from here on out.

There has not been a Six Ages Kickstarter …

You mean a game can be made without first begging money from potential consumers?

I wonder if it's a generation thing actually; these days we're used to games being made by penniless snake people who need the money just to effectively survive without working (and can't effectively manage a major project and a full time job at once) so it seems pretty unusual when people who are more financially stable don't need handouts to make something of substance.

Or maybe it's a difference in mindsets between tabletop and vidya communities. A lot more tendency in the former to just buckle down and do as much as you can out of pocket, and between a design that's not super cost-intensive, having pre-existing connections which mean your pockets don't need to be quite as deep, and (I imagine) somewhat deeper pockets due to KoDP on digital distribution, doing it out of pocket is probably more viable than with a lot of games.
After all, going "here's something we did before, let's do another but even better" is totally different than going "here's something that people with a full team did before, let's do it again but fully modernized!".

tl;dr: PTW

I think it's less about generations and more about the nature of the project and the team's resources, and whether or not they can efficiently convert money into productivity. I think the Six Ages development team already make enough revenue from King of Dragon Pass to work full-time, so they don't need to risk feature creep.

[Cruxador]

I think it's less about generations and more about the nature of the project and the team's resources, and whether or not they can efficiently convert money into productivity. I think the Six Ages development team already make enough revenue from King of Dragon Pass to work full-time, so they don't need to risk feature creep.

Well, this is true, but the resources are going to be both qualitatively and quantitatively different for someone who had a steady "real" job before the collapse of 2008. And the ability to efficiently convert money into productivity is something that comes with work experience, which generally comes with age. Obviously it's not entirely a generation thing, since there's plenty of cases of older folks throwing a kickstarter and then cocking up the results, and there are some cases of younger people making a good product too. Although the cases where you can say that development was efficient are vanishingly rare, it's not like inefficient development is unique to young people, it's pretty common among video games in general.

Still though, I'm pretty sure if you could somehow come up with an objective qualitative examination of project output, you'd find that it correlates pretty clearly with age.

[hops]

I think the bottom line is just that the Six Ages development team are already developing everything they want to develop, and doesn't need Kickstarter to tie their hands into implementing unnecessary features in exchange for money that they don't really need.

[EnigmaticHat]

PTW

[nenjin]

I think the bottom line is just that the Six Ages development team are already developing everything they want to develop, and doesn't need Kickstarter to tie their hands into implementing unnecessary features in exchange for money that they don't really need.

doesn't need Kickstarter to tie their hands into implementing unnecessary features in exchange for money that they don't really need.

in exchange for money that they don't really need.

money...don't really need.

The post is about logos. Pretty mundane but I think it's a fairly important part of the game. Kind of like I said on the blog, I think a lot of indie games have functionally uninteresting or clashing logos. There's a formula to logo making these days that doesn't feel very original when you've seen it time and again on the last 1/2 dozen indie games. I also have to laugh when I see this big, colorful, bombastic logo attached to an RPG maker Final Fantasy clone.

[Ibid Straydrink]

Besides, everyone knows that the best ancestral enemy is the hated Sea.

Your day will come, salty menace!

Complete with salty balls.

There has not been a Six Ages Kickstarter …

I wonder...

tl;dr: PTW

In my opinion, it's more a matter of the natural progression of events stemming "way back" (less than 20 years..!) to the advent of online shopping and mobile device networks, later supplemented by and contributing to social media.

Alas, this is irrelevant to the thread.

[Kagus]

Much as I can understand the reasoning behind "this thing's too big for cattlefolk like you; you die", I don't really like the immovable finality of it. Like, you can whup them in every other encounter, but suddenly they just say "okay, NOW we actually mean business" and take off the hoof-gloves to press the I WIN button.

Especially considering the proximity of the ducks, you either suck up to them or you ally with them... You can't avoid them, and you can't antagonize them.


It's not even a matter of how "threatening" your clan is. You don't need to be poised to threaten protected, important ancestral lands or get closer to the main bulk of their forces; you just need to irritate the faction enough that they'll stomp you out of spite, passing harmlessly by anything else in the way with a force so massively overwhelming that literally no resistance or alliance you muster will be able to make any difference.

That's the issue I see with it. It's a lack of options, unless you consider "get deaded" a legitimate gameplay decision.


Like, yeah... You actually have a better shot of killing The Accursed Sea than of defeating the beastfolk.

[alakoring]

You guys should do a blog post about your feels on Kickstarter. I know a lot of people are curious why we can't throw money at you.

It’s complicated… One reason is the amount of effort it takes to do a good Kickstarter campaign. All of which would take away from actually getting the game out the door.

[alakoring]

Or maybe it's a difference in mindsets between tabletop and vidya communities. A lot more tendency in the former to just buckle down and do as much as you can out of pocket, and between a design that's not super cost-intensive, having pre-existing connections which mean your pockets don't need to be quite as deep, and (I imagine) somewhat deeper pockets due to KoDP on digital distribution, doing it out of pocket is probably more viable than with a lot of games.
After all, going "here's something we did before, let's do another but even better" is totally different than going "here's something that people with a full team did before, let's do it again but fully modernized!".

Isn’t Six Ages both of those? (Only, there is a full team, even if it’s a little smaller in terms of developers.)

The big difference between tabletop and digital game Kickstarters is that the former succeed more often. http://icopartners.com/2017/07/kickstarter-and-games-2017-mid-year-status-update/

[Cruxador]

Or maybe it's a difference in mindsets between tabletop and vidya communities. A lot more tendency in the former to just buckle down and do as much as you can out of pocket, and between a design that's not super cost-intensive, having pre-existing connections which mean your pockets don't need to be quite as deep, and (I imagine) somewhat deeper pockets due to KoDP on digital distribution, doing it out of pocket is probably more viable than with a lot of games.
After all, going "here's something we did before, let's do another but even better" is totally different than going "here's something that people with a full team did before, let's do it again but fully modernized!".

Isn’t Six Ages both of those? (Only, there is a full team, even if it’s a little smaller in terms of developers.)

The big difference between tabletop and digital game Kickstarters is that the former succeed more often. http://icopartners.com/2017/07/kickstarter-and-games-2017-mid-year-status-update/

It's both, but I meant the difference between updating something you already have the experience of working on compared to making a "spiritual successor" or otherwise trying to do something bigger and fancier with less manpower and experience.

As for the difference, I was also looking at the reason behind the successes. Consider the recent success story of Song of Swords. They were not only successful, but considering it was a first time company with no previous publications, they were astronomically successful. So how did they get there? Well, they spent four years working on the game out of pocket, and incidentally community building along the way. The kickstarter was just for physical copies and a bit of additional art/layout stuff.
There are also video games that come to the table that prepared, but the number for video games that keeps rising is the failures, and I think that has to do with people's expectations of what can be done without external funding.  Concider too that this applies to success rate in delivering as well as funding; someone used to stretching pocket money is going to be better situated to effectively use the kickstarter money, and is also far more likely to be able to finish the project on other funds rather than declaring failure if that particular pool of money runs out. There's a bit of feedback on that, as the community of video game backers has been impacted by several highly funded projects that failed or, more commonly, delivered a result that fell short of initial promises.