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http://www.rainfall-game.com

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Contact: Karim@rainfall-game.com

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vacant sky's failure and the trends of selling rtp to stupid humans

vacant sky's failure and the trends of selling rtp to stupid humans

author=Lita_LeCotta
If you want you can learn to do the art yourself, but OH GOD THAT TAKES MONTHS OF WORK according to you that's basically a waste of time amirite?
This all depends on your aspirations!!! Okay!

Do you want to broaden your skills, impress others and yourself, and learn all parts of the design process? Do you want to enrich your mind and creative ability in the long-run? Go for self-help..

Do you just want to write a story, build an interactive world, and be more of a businessperson? Utilize maximum cash money.......

whichever path the children of the earth choose to take, have a ganbatte kudasai ^^

You could do everything yourself that's cooler. Art is amazing and artists if paid should be well compensated. Maybe by commission upfront then a portion of sales, not many people would do that last part though lol (I would).

author=Jude
They're jpegs so it's difficult to be certain, but the assets themselves look good. It just looks like the programmer is the one making the environments with them.

This could be true, but I don't know I pray that you're right.

vacant sky's failure and the trends of selling rtp to stupid humans

author=perihelion
You know how much this game cost to make? $32,000. That covers paying contractors, business expenses, and the developer paying himself a small salary over the six-month development period. (source) In case you think that's some freakish anomaly, according to this site, an average iPhone game costs $10,000 to $125,000 to make depending on complexity.

You're just throwing out numbers holy shit. Vacant Sky was not going to be a mobile game. It has no mobile costs. His game is for PC as that is the RM platform at the moment. He was using rtp graphics and had some custom graphical art. The graphical art costs are minuscule, I'll explain below. You're exaggerating beyond belief and I can just tell right away you don't know what you're talking about. As for the XNA and Monogame part, this is an admittedly expensive route to take. The issue I have is that I'm not really taking this game seriously at this point, if he wanted to do this he should have mentioned how he planned to make this jump. His description about the funding is lacking a lot of detail, important details. I feel that this should remain an RM game based off his own ad. As an RM game, I don't feel it needs 20k for the funding. Can he ask for this much? Of course he can but his plan was not solid enough to me personally to justify that amount. A XNA game with completely original assets and so on sure, but from the ad? There are conflicting elements.

author=perihelion
A big part of that price tag is art, because good art is expensive, and RPGs in particular are very asset-intensive. For a commercial game, you need commercial-quality graphics. For those of you decrying the use of the RTP, where exactly are you suggesting the replacement graphics come from? If an artist charges you $30/hour and takes three days to make a tileset, that's $18,000 for half as many tilesets as come with the XP RTP. There went your entire $20,000 Kickstarter, never mind sprites. And battle graphics. And character portraits. And animations. And GUI. These games would need to be asking for a lot more than $20k if they wanted to replace the RTP with graphics of similar quality. Oh, and don't forget you need audio too.

Just... Stop this dude it's really annoying. You're misinformed, you have no clue what the costs are and everything you're saying is hypothetical. If you actually took the time to figure out how much pixel art and vector art costs you would know that what you're saying is utter nonsense.

Art is actually an OVER-SATURATED market, to find good quality artists is no where near as hard as you described. Graphical artists are a dime a dozen, the good artists normally have rates because they have most likely done commissions at some point. These rates vary and if you've done research then you would actually know that artists are not demons, talk to them talk about your plan and your budget and present something interesting (artists like doing jobs that are actually interesting) and you would find out out that they will likely support / be willing to help projects that have a lot of planning behind it. They may even give you a small discount, especially if you were requesting something visual for an kickstarter ad initially. If this doesn't work? Keep looking, adjust your plan.

Deviant Art and Pixel community sites have a shit ton of artists, especially Deviant Art. Besides these communities there are even more places to check and either post job ads OR you can simply approach an artist if you like their gallery / work. I've dealt with artists that even had their commission windows closed and STILL were interested in working for a friend of mine or myself sometimes. I don't buy your arbitrary numbers you're pulling out god knows where. Stop misinforming people here. Of course there are artists that would want 30/hr, don't hire them find someone you can afford and does good work this part takes... effort?

author=perihelion
It's great if you can recruit a talented artist who will work for profit share, but if it happens, you got really lucky. It's completely unrealistic to expect someone to do tens of thousands of dollars of work essentially for free. And getting a bad artist to do it, or doing it yourself, is shooting yourself in the foot. Graphics are the first thing that potential customers judge you on, so if you actually want to sell copies, your game needs to be attractive. Unless you somehow manage to become a viral sensation, but don't count on that.

You acknowledge art to be #1 priority but then suggest it's impossible to find someone to do tens of thousands of art for free? Why would they do it for free? Pay them artists are starving as is. Second, pay your artists BEFORE you post an ad. Is that so hard? Pay for your assets initially something to show the general art of the game and then ask these crowd source companies to help you out, they clearly have a good indication of how the art looks (also more money, more detail).

Echoes made 43k and for what was essentially his first game. He showed off rtp looking art and called it temporary,

http://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/projects/111698/posts/253663/image-129857-full.jpg?1340585226

http://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/projects/111698/posts/253663/image-129856-full.jpg?1340584978

This is the current in game art... Do I even need to explain why it's more intelligible to HIRE artists firsts and pay your way to show how the game will REALLY look first? If you want you can learn to do the art yourself, but OH GOD THAT TAKES MONTHS OF WORK according to you that's basically a waste of time amirite?

By posting an ad with just rtp as temporary resources to me is ludicrous. Vacant Sky has how many people working on that game? Art is not that expensive, it will be a good chunk of any budget but again I'm telling you from experience that you don't know what you're talking about, look and you'll find affordable good artists willing to work with you if you have a solid plan. I've not only done commissions for art / music I know the ball park figure of how much the majority of artists would ask / fair prices to charge. The more you are informed about these things, the easier it is to find people willing to work with you. Strong leader, strong project.

Edit:

Oh and base tiles, base tiles, base tiles... BASE TILES. Once you have initial base tiles you can use that for a lot of the game dude at least for tile based games *woosh. That would cost like.... *pulls out abacus (couldn't afford calculator that would cost $412,003 dollars)... Hmm like 18k?

Show's over folks! (This was kind of obvious)

Wow, really cool you went through all that :). I didn't even know you could edit submissions until just now, edited that article I linked in the blog post. Will be making a new devlog there very soon too :).

Cool.gif ~

vacant sky's failure and the trends of selling rtp to stupid humans

This blog article is directed at a lot of rm game designers who might make ads. It points out that Sailerus was either ridiculously misinformed of the value of his game or he was attempting to gouge, ne?

Might want to do some research next time.
author=Luthan
Everybody is free to do they want. If some people want 20k even if they don't need 20k then it is okay. If other people want to pay it then it is their problem. Or not if they are happy with it because they think it is a good thing to pay the money.


Yeah, EA is free to rape game studios and put game dev studios out of business. You know what happens when you put money first? Go look at today's game industry it's abysmal. If you aren't in it to make a quality game FIRST then you're doing it wrong. That is the purpose of Indie. That mentality is the reason why a lot of shit sucks now a days, no integrity.

Success of the Kickstarter + Moving forward

Don't be narrow minded... That's like a teenage argument.

http://rpgmaker.net/games/1358/blog/7692/?post=382070#post382070

vacant sky's failure and the trends of selling rtp to stupid humans

@Hima

I'll tell you where TFT is right and wrong. He's right in saying that Kickstarter group of pledgers are just unaware, Ciel mentioned they just don't know of what's out there. Some are informed about RM and the niche communites it has and how things work. Others kind of understand but still pledge because they like an concept, or just the person / presentation of a game and advertisement. Some even like the idea of getting a chance to contribute to a game, their ideas at a price they are willing to pay.

As the people who create games and submit them to crowd source funding sites, it is imperative that your intentions isn't to gouge what is essentially an honor system, people pledge and hope for the best!

Some argue if people are willing to pay then there's a target audience. This is fundamentally wrong, yes it's true in some sense but you have understand that it is EASY to mislead people. This is what marketing does, it alters human perception, we see things in different hues of light and in a lot of cases? It clouds our judgement. Yes, it's just a fact people buy shit all the time they weren't even interested in or they couldn't tell it wasn't for them from the start.

To show the bigger picture which is the intention of some guys here or whatever is not wrong, I think it's the right thing to do.

However, I'll tell you where TFT is wrong. Passing his opinion off as fact. The other side of the fence is that Kickstarter exists to fund ideas or projects. What people do with their project or submit is there own thing.

That is the intention, if you have an idea or concept then it is NOT wrong to submit your advertisement, no matter how bad it is. Why? Because that is what the site is for to fund ideas and to fund projects. Do you notice that backers are the only one able to drop comments (on kickstarter at least)? Because your opinion doesn't matter. The only people opinion that matter are those who pledge. That is how the site works.

I personally think that games like Echoes receiving that much cash for what is essentially his FIRST game, is really bad. There is no real screening unfortunately at KS. That is just the fact of the matter.

The only thing we can do is encourage people to put some effort behind there game and do not purposely try to gouge the pockets of the average joes out there. Commercial game companies ALREADY do this. It's a disgusting act and I'm tired of the pursuit of money ruining everything I love.

With that said, if you truly wish to submit something to crowd funding sites, then ask for the amount you really need. An rtp game does NOT need 20k. If you're creating a game using free resources and need a soundtrack or some custom art, get the quotes first and establish contact with your artist and then work out a plan. Pay for your assets yourself, at least initially to show the crowd funding backers. You'll also have an idea of the value of your game is.

No one cares if you use rtp or free resources, people CARE when you use it and then ask for tons and tons of money. If you get over funded, then you should probably use the rest of the money to replace your free resources, make sense right? Point being crowd funding should not be thought of as a golden ticket, if you want money then you should willing to invest in your own ideas with either time or money to pay for initial art to show off your vision.

vacant sky's failure and the trends of selling rtp to stupid humans

author=Jude
Vacant Sky's failed Kickstarter bid came up briefly in #rpgmaker this morning. I think it failed because it still looks like an RPG Maker game, and by that I mean it kind of lacks its own identity. I didn't realize there were actual RM shovelware games that reached their Kickstarter funding goals (I do not consider Vacant Sky in the RM shovelware tier, mind). So, with that in mind, I am surprised Vacant Sky failed, but I guess $20k is a gamble.


Well there are a few that just went under the radar, successes.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1875882614/tentativly-titled-whispers-of-eternity?ref=live

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gentlemenstudios/rain-0?ref=live

Raciela

Did a small LP, didn't get too far this was actually a second recording as I had the mic off the first time heh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcBJsHoFKSI&feature=player_embedded

I plan to play more / make longer parts then get to that review. It actually wasn't loading a map near the end, which was odd as that didn't happen to me before. Anyways good luck with Chapter 2.

"enJooooYYyy"