Development Info A new Banner Saga progress update is out

[Trash]

Tags: Kickstarter; Stoic; The Banner Saga

Work on the Banner Saga seems to continue apace with lots of mentions of systems reaching Gold (aka nearly finished) states in the latest update. With hints of a Beta being quite near as well. Nice. The part of the update that's bound to get people talking however is Alex Thomas's included take on the recent Kickstarter developments regarding missed deadlines, running out of funds, looking for publishers, etc. Here, have a snippet.

If nothing else, I think the gaming community is finally getting a good picture about real game development. What would really shock people is that there is nothing unusual about any of this, except that you are finally seeing it. This is every game development story that has ever existed, except instead of the publisher dealing with it, YOU are.

Budgets of 1 to 4 million are small-to-medium sized. Our budget of $650k (in actual funding) is relatively small, half a year of production for a small team. Budgets of kickstarter projects asking for $20k... that's not enough to make a game, that's just some content. Surprise! Games you've come to expect as "standard" like Call of Duty: maybe 150 million to make, rough guess. You know how much Old Republic cost? I'm not legally allowed to tell you, actually. It's that much. Now you know.

Games take 1 year to make... if it's a casual iOS game, or an annual sequel. Medium sized games take 2-3 years. Large games take 4-5 years. Believe it or not, lots of games fall in a nebulous space between AAA and "indie", whatever that means. The Old Republic took over 6 years. Yeah, you started hearing about it 1 year before it released. It started production five years before that. For five years hundreds of people toiled on it 12 hours a day and you had no idea! Now you know! Isn't knowing about production right from the start wonderful? No, it's not. It's annoying. It takes FOREVER. That's why you usually don't hear anything until it's almost ready to ship.

Delays, content cuts, pushed back dates, plans to make revenue sooner- this is how games are developed. Bioshock Infinite, the biggest game of 2013, got delayed for half a year, AFTER pre-orders were sold. Journey took 3 years to make a 3 hour game and had to go back for more funding from Sony TWICE. That's how game development goes. They didn't know they'd need to do it. Humans are not good at estimating creative endeavors, no matter how "professional" they are.​

I bet EA loved this.

 

[Dickie]

That sounds like a bunch of whining to me. They're the ones who said the game was going to be out in November 2012. If you say that it's going to be done in seven months, and it takes more than double that, you're the asshole, not the people who believed you knew what the fuck you're talking about. If I tell my boss something will be done in a week, and I'm working on it a month later, can I just say "Fuck you. Programming is hard"?

With 30 years experience between us in the games industry, and after working as leads on The Old Republic; one of the biggest projects in gaming history, we know what it takes to make a top-tier game.

Apparently, this is seven months and $100k.

Edit: I'm not mad the game is late. I just hate this attitude that I'm a bad person for thinking they'd stick to some kind of schedule or knew what the fuck they were talking about.

 

[Spectacle]

It seems like an experienced project manager who can deliver a game on time and on budget is even more necessary with kickstarted games than with standard publisher deals.
Fargo and Fergus will rescue us from the amateurs!

 

[Stoic John]

Dickie I think a more accurate take-away would be that the game originally planned at $100k does not have the same scale and scope as the game re-planned at $700k.

Spectacle indeed, a skilled project manager can really be a great help to any team. Especially if their efforts help free the 3 artist/developers making the game to focus on the activities at which they excel.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Dickie I think a more accurate take-away would be that the game originally planned at $100k does not have the same scale and scope as the game re-planned at $700k.

Spectacle indeed, a skilled project manager can really be a great help to any team. Especially if their efforts help free the 3 artist/developers making the game to focus on the activities at which they excel.

Which is why I think it's important to communicate schedule changes to backers as early as possible. If you get seven times the amount of money you asked for, it's more or less a given that you'll try to make a bigger game, which will take you more time. This is perfectly reasonable, and indeed, at the end of the Torment campaign, when InXile announced they'd need more time, given how much the original funding goal was exceeded, there was nary a complaint. Fargo even commented during the countdown party how he was surprised that the announcement went over as well as it did.

On the other hand, obviously, if you say nothing till your original ship date, and then suddenly go "Well, we got more money, so we're going to take more time, isn't that obvious to you people?", then you will be met with a lot less good will.

 

[Johannes]

They're doing a trilogy, so they could've easily kept the first part of it relatively modest and close to what they had in mind on their original budget, plus some outsourcing with their Kike gold, did they reach the orchestra goal for example that I remember they had? Then make the sequels more complex and detailed.

Or at least communicate what your plan is, when you know your funding and can make an educated roadmap, instead of over a year later.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Ninety-ninety rule of software development: "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time."

 

[Rahdulan]

Fargo and Fergus will rescue us from the amateurs!

Urquhart is a goddamn wizard for managing to keep Obsidian above the water over these years when they've essentially been in "will work for food" mode. But for the sake of comparison, isn't Stoic Studio pretty much made of only three guys? I'm not sure if they actually WANT to cut in someone else to handle the business side of things.