KickStarter Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption - adventure-RPG from the creators of Quest for Glory

[Name]

From update comment section

Our current plan is to release the game 2nd quarter 2014 (between April and June), but we will not let it go out until Lori and I agree that it is outstanding. We are currently financing it with our personal savings and loans in addition to the Kickstarter money. We *will* release Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, and it will meet our high standards.

 

[Kz3r0]

So, after trying to do it on the cheap they now need more money?
:facepalm:

 

[Infinitron]

So, after trying to do it on the cheap they now need more money?
:facepalm:

This is like that thing Shadowrun Returns was talking about.

Only with even less money.

 

[Blaine]

I still don't see why five people can't use $410,000 to crank out an adventure game in nine months. That's over $100,000 per annum per person, before taxes, as well as before taking Kickstarter's cut into account, but also before taking post-release sales into account. Hire an artist, a music/sound person, and a programmer (in addition to Corey). Release the game within nine or ten months, then sell around 15,000 copies post-release at $20 apiece within the next two or three months—that should be enough to afford each team member a white-collar salary, cover the fairly minimal overhead for such a small team, and pay off the middlemen. Repeat process ad infinitum.

If you can't muster the 21,000 fans needed in the above (admittedly simplified) model, or if the five team members can't handle all aspects of designing a relatively simple game, then it's probably time to hang up your hat.

 

[J1M]

I still don't see why five people can't use $410,000 to crank out an adventure game in nine months. That's over $100,000 per annum per person, before taxes, as well as before taking Kickstarter's cut into account, but also before taking post-release sales into account. Hire an artist, a music/sound person, and a programmer (in addition to Corey). Release the game within nine or ten months, then sell around 15,000 copies post-release at $20 apiece within the next two or three months—that should be enough to afford each team member a white-collar salary, cover the fairly minimal overhead for such a small team, and pay off the middlemen. Repeat process ad infinitum.

If you can't muster the 21,000 fans needed in the above (admittedly simplified) model, or if the five team members can't handle all aspects of designing a relatively simple game, then it's probably time to hang up your hat.

Because every game needs 3D voice acting.

 

[ghostdog]

Another case of bad planning, but at least it seems they will finally go for nice 2D art like a classic QFG.

 

[xilo3z]

I still don't see why five people can't use $410,000 to crank out an adventure game in nine months. That's over $100,000 per annum per person, before taxes, as well as before taking Kickstarter's cut into account, but also before taking post-release sales into account. Hire an artist, a music/sound person, and a programmer (in addition to Corey). Release the game within nine or ten months, then sell around 15,000 copies post-release at $20 apiece within the next two or three months—that should be enough to afford each team member a white-collar salary, cover the fairly minimal overhead for such a small team, and pay off the middlemen. Repeat process ad infinitum.

If you can't muster the 21,000 fans needed in the above (admittedly simplified) model, or if the five team members can't handle all aspects of designing a relatively simple game, then it's probably time to hang up your hat.

One of my favorite quotes from the hilarious "Indy Game" movie sums this up perfectly. The fat one from Team Meat says right after they release the game - "Holy fuck... I now have more money in 5 hours than I had in the past 5 years of my life...combined. What the fuck do I do now". All with a look of total fear on his face.

We expect people whom most have never sniffed a pay checks totaling over 50k a year, and even then - whom have no professional financial literacy, or management theory, or ability to do accounting, to all the sudden become master of financial and project risk mitigation.... They design video games. They don't understand money, finance, accounting, management, law, or anything. A group of pros at Troika couldn't even understand it. Master of devaluing a company, Mr. "I-Gave -Stock-To-Everyone,-Some-Even-For-Just-Filling-Up-My-Water-Bottle.-I-Walked Around-Just-Handing-Out-Stock-One-Day-.-It Was Fun" Chris Taylor at Gas Powered Games couldn't ( I forget the exact quote but in the Matt Chat interview, he mentions how fun it was to just give random workers shares of stock in his company whenever he felt like it. ). We expect every little pimple faced nerd on kickstarter to? Every out of work writer from the 90s to?

While it would be cool to hear a kickstarter backed company be like "Oh we invested X amount into fixed income to hedge out our monthly overhead, while we used some for collateral to restructure our office lease to more friendly 'seasonal' rates during our development time"...don't expect it anytime soon. Expect- "OMG CASH MONEY HOLY FUCK YES, LOBSTER FOR DINNER EVERY NIGHT!...." A lot of people on there view it as just free money. IE - the whole Amanda Palmer fiasco, with her claiming the kickstarter money went towards maintaining her lifestlye while she worked on the CD... That is what most people view kickstarter for.

 

[J1M]

That's bullshit. Someone who has lived in poverty or on a budget is perfectly capable of continuing that behavior and knowing how to stretch a dollar.

The idea that one must hand all of one's money to a rich person to "keep it safe" is how rich people get richer.

 

[DalekFlay]

None of these people are willing to live on 40k a year. They're worth more than that on the market and don't get the idea of taking less now to make your art and making more later if it's good. If you had a family and health insurance to pay for with California housing prices maybe you would agree, who knows.

Almost every Kickstarter should have asked for more than it did.

 

[DeepOcean]

The lack of transparency on kickstarter is a bitch, I don't know if it is the case of developers too fearful of exposing themselves or what, but if they don't disscuss their problems with the backers, people would just take the worst possible theory of them being incompetent or dishonest. There are people that would take any opportunity to whine about the most inane shit but most backers are invested on the Project and really want them to succeed. The frequency of updates, for example, is something unexcusable, if they had 40.000 or 4 million. They can't complain that people are becoming suspicious if the last update was in may.

Compare their kickstarter page with Mage initiation or Quest for Infamy, I know that both projects, actually started way before the kickstarter and Hero U is something that is starting from zero, but the lack of care with communication is something really infuriating. I just hope the best for them, they designed really great games but they made alot of mistakes that would be easy to avoid, like for example by pitching something that looked like a modern indie "rogue like" for people that are Quest for Glory fanatics, tankfully they realized that and decided to make the game closer to a QfG style game. Jesus, just look the amount of kickstarters that wasted alot of time with shitty engines instead of doing something very obvious, like searching the engine with good cost/benefit like Unity.

 

[iamlindoro]

If you think it's infuriating now, wait until the demo or trailer comes out and it's used to launch a second crowdfunding campaign.

http://www.hero-u.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=265

When you ask your most sycophantic fans to give you their opinions on whether or not you should start a second round of crowdfunding (at no risk to you) versus taking out a home equity loan (putting some skin in the game), what result is one supposed to expect? Of COURSE they're going to tell you to go with a second round of crowdfunding.

Corey said:

The interesting thing about the entire Renegades campaign is that they ran a successful Kickstarter, reached slightly above their original goal, and are now doing a supplementary Indiegogo campaign. That's exactly one of the paths Lori and I have considered for our project.

My original budget projection for Hero-U was $550,000, which would have required raising $800K on Kickstarter because of fees and reward costs. I knew it would be unrealistic to ask that much, so we opted for a lower goal and hoped we would get more. Otherwise we would plan on raising supplementary funding after a playable prototype was ready.

Indiegogo is tempting for this because of their Flexible Funding policy - You can get supplementary funds without risking the entire campaign failing. It also reaches a different audience than Kickstarter.

So what do you all think of the Star Trek: Renegades approach? Is it honest and reasonable? Or do you feel slightly betrayed that they are not entirely funding their project from the original Kickstarter campaign? How would you feel if we ran a supplemental campaign? Would it matter if we did it on Kickstarter vs. Indiegogo?

We don't actually have to do this. We can self-fund by "betting the farm" with a home-equity loan. We can get outside investors (but they will want a huge share of game profits). And we can make deals with vendors and contractors to give them equity instead of up-front cash. What we *don't* want to do is compromise on the game size or quality to fit within an arbitrary budget that we knew up front was too small for this type of game.

 

[Name]

If they give an awesome demo and launch an indigogo campaign to gather more gold using the demo as a pivot for media outlet, I don't think it's that infuriating... the original kickstarter backers still retain their reward right? They still need to push for a finish product right? So nothing actually changes, except more money can be thrown at them for whatever reasons from people have money to spare...
But if the above conditions do not hold, well...

 

[iamlindoro]

Yes, best case scenario with your given circumstances, the game is pushed through to completion with maybe just a few hurt feelings here and there. Obviously existing KS backers retain their rewards. The possibilities for failure/problems are much greater than the singular possibility of success. They intentionally under-projected their KS goal by 50% knowing it wasn't enough to make the game, in spite of having claimed during and after the KS that what they received was enough. They've mismanaged the project by their own admission:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects...n/posts/616072?cursor=4551456#comment-4551455

Yes, I will say more about the schedule in an upcoming update. We are far from out of money - We have enough to run through the end of the year before I kick in any of my own. And that's the problem - We had trouble getting the right team together, so the game got off to a slow start. We did not have the right combination of talent at the beginning, and that is just starting to come together now. We have some very exciting partnerships that we will announce soon.

So basically they have a quarter worth of runway left on a project that won't be done for 2-3 quarters, and they've changed approaches several times, necessitating throwing out the gameplay mechanic they hoped to use... twice. They didn't have the right team at first, but say that they now do. A good project manager's job is to keep the thing in scope. The scope here has changed multiple times, and it's cost them. Yes, scope, budget, and schedule are understood to be fluid in the games business, but you can't just change the scope a couple of times and not expect that to have consequences when you have a fixed income/budget. If you're at a big studio, you can argue for more of a budget allowance. When you have the max budget set in front of you from day one, you know that it's execute to budget or find yourself in a very uncomfortable situation (by failing or having to go ask for more money).

I guess what I'm suggesting is, it would have been better to fail on the first pass trying to get what you knew you needed than succeed the first time trying to get half what you need. They could have taken community input (which they ultimately have, allegedly, in that it sounds much more QfG-like) and launched a more successful KS with a pitch that WOULD have earned them what they needed. Now the whole thing seems from the outside to be horribly mismanaged.

So yeah, is success technically possible? Absolutely. But the track record thus far is iffy at best and doesn't inspire confidence.

 

[Name]

Indeed. I have already lost faith in this project.

 

[J1M]

Why is the choice between begging for more money and taking out a second mortgage? Why don't they have any savings that they could use for this project?

If they don't have enough faith in this project to even put a single cent of their own money into it, I don't see why anyone else should either.

 

[Boleskine]

The bad planning is strong with this one. Too many changes and too much time wasted. Did they ever put out a demo in July like they said would happen?

I believe in the Coles as designers but it's clear that without some stronger direction they got lost in the shuffle of wanting this game to do way too many things.

 

[Blaine]

If you had a family and health insurance to pay for with California housing prices maybe you would agree, who knows.

I understand that, but if so, they ought to have had those costs in mind from the get-go. I also understand project creators setting their asked-for funding goals lower than what's actually needed in order to hedge against failure—e.g. if they ask for $200k, actually need $400k, and end up getting $392k (which is still workable), then they've avoided the project failing due to not quite making it. Also, potential donors are more likely to pledge if they feel certain a project is going to be funded, regardless of the fact that credit cards aren't charged until the campaign ends. If people feel that a project creator is asking for too much, they may assume it's doomed (perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly) and not even bother to pledge.

I very much agree with you that, if creators believe in their niche-within-a-niche project, then they should be willing to tighten their belts, shoulder some financial hardships, and invest personally in their own project for the short term. It's not really fair that some projects get more than enough money to succeed without their developers needing to spend a single dime of their own money (see Numenera [the RPG campaign setting]), or even pocket a handsome profit, but that's life. It ain't fair. I'd like to be an heir to billions, but I'm not.

Expecting to be paid a handsome salary and live well in California (or whatever/wherever) before you've even produced a demo, simply because a number of other celebrity developers have that luxury, is just silly. Pledgers don't risk much at all individually, so it's not unreasonable to hope to be fully bankrolled by pledges. It's unreasonable to expect to be fully bankrolled by pledges, to plan around that assumption. And as far as that goes, while pledgers assume very little monetary risk individually, neither will they rake in any of the profits should the project succeed admirably.

 

[Name]

Why is the choice between begging for more money and taking out a second mortgage? Why don't they have any savings that they could use for this project?

If they don't have enough faith in this project to even put a single cent of their own money into it, I don't see why anyone else should either.

They are already using their savings according to the comment I quoted one page ago.

 

[Blaine]

They are already using their savings according to the comment I quoted one page ago.

Are they? That's a good sign.

Unless the project/game tanks, in which case I'll feel genuinely bad for them.

 

[Irxy]

Truth is, they had no straight design and no real team during ks, basically nothing but their names. It took them 6 months of trial and error to realise a game they are making and start any production at all, of course they are running out of money. So the problem is not the amount of money they asked for, but the fact that they launched ks without doing the necessary math, preparations and preproduction, just not to miss the initial surge of the ks success phenomenon, which nobody knew how long could have lasted. Remove the names from project page, and it wouldn't be able to even get 4k$ I bet. Well, the devs are people too, maybe they didn't realise their skills got rusty over the decade+ since their last game.

 

[Boleskine]

At this point I think the game is not nearly as important as Lori and Corey's personal situation. Hearing about them taking loans could spiral them down into debt should the game not be a financial success.

http://www.hero-u.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=265

Re: Crowdfunding: The Next Generation
by Corey » Sun Oct 06, 2013 6:13 pm

oasis789: I actually have a range of budgets depending on what goes into the game, and what other obstacles we run into over the next few months. I'm currently working on getting a home equity loan that will enable Lori and me to stop taking a salary. We also have three team members who are deferring some or all of their income until the end of the project. Given all that, we will need somewhere between zero and $150K to finish the game and create and ship the physical deliverables such as boxed games.

I have other personal loan sources we can still draw upon. I'm hoping the government shutdown will end in a reasonable time, as we should easily qualify for an SBA loan if/when the SBA resumes operation. I'm not counting on that, but it would be the simplest solution to funding the remainder of development.

Really just want what's best for the Coles at this point. It's probably in their best interest to put out the demo and use that to help sell pre-orders in addition to a possible supplemental IndieGoGo flex funding campaign.

 

[Stabwound]

As much as I love the Quest For Glory games, I can't help but feel a little pleasure in watching this debacle unfold. Corey said on this very forum that he and his wife could have managed QfG out of their living room, but that's easy to say. At this point it's obvious their whole plan was to collect money and then pay contractors to make the actual game. Oh, but at least everyone got their munchkin dolls!

 

[DeepOcean]

At this point I think the game is not nearly as important as Lori and Corey's personal situation. Hearing about them taking loans could spiral them down into debt should the game not be a financial success.

http://www.hero-u.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=265

Re: Crowdfunding: The Next Generation
by Corey » Sun Oct 06, 2013 6:13 pm

oasis789: I actually have a range of budgets depending on what goes into the game, and what other obstacles we run into over the next few months. I'm currently working on getting a home equity loan that will enable Lori and me to stop taking a salary. We also have three team members who are deferring some or all of their income until the end of the project. Given all that, we will need somewhere between zero and $150K to finish the game and create and ship the physical deliverables such as boxed games.

I have other personal loan sources we can still draw upon. I'm hoping the government shutdown will end in a reasonable time, as we should easily qualify for an SBA loan if/when the SBA resumes operation. I'm not counting on that, but it would be the simplest solution to funding the remainder of development.

Really just want what's best for the Coles at this point. It's probably in their best interest to put out the demo and use that to help sell pre-orders in addition to a possible supplemental IndieGoGo flex funding campaign.

Man. I love their work but it is hard to have sympathy when the problem was mainly their fault. Their lack of planning. There are other adventure games kiskcstarters that are going much better with less Money. I feel more symphaty towards the backers that gave money to them in good faith. I will only start feeling sympathy towards them when (if?) the game is released.

 

[Name]

As much as I love the Quest For Glory games, I can't help but feel a little pleasure in watching this debacle unfold. Corey said on this very forum that he and his wife could have managed QfG out of their living room, but that's easy to say. At this point it's obvious their whole plan was to collect money and then pay contractors to make the actual game. Oh, but at least everyone got their munchkin dolls!

Coles make a lot of mistakes in the process of kickstarter, like not being able to hold the team together, insisting new design then reverting back to QFG style, but why do you hold on to that living room line like this? What he meant to say is that the engine does not necessarily define the style and contents of a game, conceptually they could have run a QFG tabletop game session featuring the same content and style in the living room. The correct critique (or edgy argument) should be that since they think their new engine is equally suitable for the game, why changing back to SCI engine style now? The answer seems to be their programmer bails, even though he left the code and engine behind for them to use, new programmers have problems using them (You know sometimes how hard it is to read other people's code, let alone a whole game engine and stuff to reuse).

 

[J1M]

I understand what they are going for here, but with the quality bar set at "free-flash-game-art" I can't see why this project is asking for $400,000.

If I was an artist I would be embarrassed to show those 3 mock-ups.

Obviously art isn't everything, but that plus the tone of the video makes it sound like this project isn't even started yet. It is off-putting because it says that the creators require kickstarter followers to believe more in the project than they do.

I like being right.