“It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”

I'm not an expert on the economics of the video game industry, but I can't believe that would pay a team of 6-10 people for very long.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/45588301/woolfe-the-red...

It's so easy to underestimate the work to be done, graphics easily break when you change the underlying hardware and renderers, gameplay had to be adapted to touch controls, etc. It didn't help that our estimate multiplier was only 3.

All of this gave me a much greater appreciation of the work you guys did at Naughty Dog.

Given a particular problem of a similar sort to something he's worked on, an experienced engineer will be able to list 10 different issues that might crop up.

An inexperienced engineer won't know of those potential problems and will just see the most optimistic path possible.

When you're moving massively outside your familiar zone, many unexpected problems will crop up. Best solution is a phased approach. Pick the bits you judge as most risky (you should hopefully have some idea) and implement prototypes in those areas, in the hope that most of the scaries will crop up. You've then got a better idea as you move on.

I've written this in the context of doing engineering, but it's equally true in all fields - like trying to sell a product into a new an unfamiliar market.

> In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion. A title considered to be AAA is therefore expected to be a high quality game and to be among the year's bestsellers.

By definition, a budget of $75k + 6-10 people wont make an AAA game.

> When we made Crash Bandicoot (with a team of 7), it was already virtually impossible to make a AAA game with 6-10 people, and that was 20 years ago.

I'm biased/invested in this area, but I think nowadays tools are really helping strip away the technical challenges of making a game. Increasingly game development is less about technical challenges but more about the creative challenge. Individuals are willing to pour thousands of hours of work into artistic and creative projects, and I am seeing far less resistance and challenges going forwards for these sorts of people to produce AAA quality games, when previously game creation was extremely inaccessible to them.

Also, thank you for Crash Bandicoot. Amazing game :) One I loved playing growing up!

(Fun anecdote: I'm from Russia and I didn't know English when I was a child. I had no idea what "save game" means so I started Crash Bandicoot 3 from scratch every time. Imagine my surprise when I realized how saving works.)

Reading this made my day, it's the exact same rule I try to apply to my own effort estimate, to the letter. I was 100% convinced I came up with it myself, but now I'm starting to think I may have (unconsciously) picked it up from someone else at some point ;-)

congrats!

Reminds me of these rules:

- Multiply by π for small, known teams, doing a new job,

- by π^2 for unknown teams,

- and √π for known teams who have already started, know their work and have a good track record.

From http://alistair.cockburn.us/The+magic+of+pi+for+project+mana...

The biggest problem with making games is the fact that there's no end goal of "Done." It's just a vague point in time, really. Is it done when you've made 10 levels or 11? Is it done when you've added 10 power-ups or 11, or 15? In a movie, you can't make the thing 50 hours long, no one would watch it all. But for a game, 50 hours is now considered medium sized, compared to MMO's and MOBAs that offer hundreds of hours of time to play.

Scope creep is the biggest danger in the games industry. Reading this update, where they talk about going from 2D to 3D, my heart broke. That's such a major change, and as he writes, such a major uptick in difficulty, it was the beginning of the end.

Terry Cavanaugh [http://distractionware.com/blog/ ] gets scope right. Valve gets scope right. You can tell when it's done right because the pacing of the game feels damn near perfect, like Half-Life 2: there's little down time, and you're always moving forward, even if yer not always shooting.

I feel bad for the Woolfe team, but they clearly had rose colored glasses on. There's a very good reason modern console games cost at least 8 figures. Hell, even with 8 figures of budget, many big name titles aren't even that good. The games industry is a harsh mistress. Like judging what's funny for a comedian, judging what's fun for a game developer is the toughest task they have.

What is your definition of AAA game? I believe Minecraft was created by 1 person (or at least started). I consider Terraria to be a AAA game and that was made by 3-4 people.

http://www.quora.com/Engineering-Management/Why-are-software...

http://www.quora.com/How-did-game-developers-pack-entire-gam...

There are a lot of $10 games that will entertain for 4-5 or more hours (even excluding the outliers like Terraria). I'm surprised that the developer was surprised at the perceived value of their product.

That said, he's right that the market for indie games is ridiculously saturated right now.

Why can't you do something like "Game on Rails", where you set up a basic framework that has all the stuff a game normally needs, and then you only have to layer your assets and logic on top of it?

Do game devs already use something like that and still have these delays?

I think if you are making a 3d game you haven't thought things through.

Also there is a parallel between your "add one and increase the unit" and the estimation of what kind of manpower you need to take an defended objective. The wisdom here is basically the same: If you are facing an objective defended by a squad, you will need a platoon to take it. If you are looking at a platoon dug in to the objective, you will need a company to take it. An entrenched company needs to be uprooted by a battalion, et cetera.

It's from this (The Mythical Man Month as you mention, and the estimations the infantry taught me) that I have built a kind of mental model for estimating things, that ends up being sort of universal like the 80-20 rule.

For AAA games, modern, high-end systems increase the difficulty of providing a product. Modern development tools help, but graphics demands and expectations are inexorably growing. In a world where animating reflections might be a full-time task, 6-10 people can't even count on developing a trailer for a AAA product.

In response, then, indie games. Why the rebirth of pixel art and simple, geometric visuals? Not because it's 'retro' or 'clean', but because it's easy. Procedural generation, low-poly graphics, and user generated content aren't popular because they produce the best products, they're popular because they're all decisions that slash the number of employees you need.

Woolfe's mistake was setting out to make their game as good as it could possibly be. For an indie team today that's simply not possible.

To paraphrase your producer, "3 years = Duke Nukem Forever".

But game programming is like architecture. There's so much more to do.

I didn't know CB had such a small team! Props!

1. I know this, I have done it before in this codebase. Estimate is accurate, multiply by 2 to account for watercooler talk, documentation, and other non coding work. 2. I know this codebase, I have a pretty good idea of what to do, how, and where. I have walked trough the code and can't identify any major roadblocks. Multiply by 5 3. I don't have an honest idea. Multiply by 20, and make it clear that it's a guesstimate at best. Usually a better estimate can be given after working on it some time.

It's still off more than I like.

People often don't believe me, some reason being that some developers really deliver on time and sell it as finished but then having the rest of the team fixing bugs and working around strange APIs for months. Often it's just that they also haven't experienced the pain of developing something of reasonable scale and stability.

No man, these are not tears, I just got something in the eye.

I hope that backers take it the same way. New stuff is risky by definition - and KS has funded some pretty major successes on risky projects too (Oculus).

The author explained more or less. Inexperience.

It's kind of like when some of the first 3D games came out, modelers would model a brick then build a wall out of them, instead of just modeling a brick wall other ways, like putting a brick texture on a regular wall. They probably just couldn't come up with a good way to 'cheat' 3D collision detection that worked for them. Approximating is a huge part of game algorithms even with the power of today's hardware.

This is harder that our case because it involves gameplay, so there were some naiveté from their part but I can see how from an abstract perspective it can be understimated.

Anybody starting a major project will be ignorant about some important things. It's impossible to do anything interesting and know everything up front; if you could know everything, then that would mean it had been done a zillion times before and therefore not be interesting.

There's also a strong selection bias. The kinds of people who don't take chances? They don't become entrepreneurs. They don't bet years of their lives on projects in hit-driven industries. Those who do take chances already know that so many of the things that previously seemed impossible or dangerous to them worked out to be fine.

So nobody should ever, ever, ever not start something because they don't know everything. The trick to successful entrepreneurship is to test your big risks early, so that your failures are small and recoverable, rather than late and fatal. Here their mistake wasn't underestimating the impact of 3D. It was in not testing their assumption before the public launch of the Kickstarter.

There might have been a problem with expectations. 2D Games sell level design and platforming. 2.5D games however are often done with excellent combat.

No one complains that Super Mario 3 has horrible combat. Of course not, its a 2D Platformer. By changing from 2D to 2.5D, everything about the game changed. From customer expectations, to platforming, to collision detection.

2D to 2.5D looks like a simple switch. It's not full 3D and it is a natural extension to 2D games. But really, so much changes that it was definitely a mistake for them to attempt to make that switch mid-development.

You and every other developer making the transition from SNES to PS1 in the mid 90's.

The purpose of the campaign was to develop and ship a game.

They have succeeded, and in the process went bankrupt. Which means they won't be able to even pay creditors, lest investors.

In that regard they succeeded. The game is finished, it's for sale, and the backers got their game.

But the sales were also disappointing, and so they declared bankruptcy.

The issue here is that they created stickers, dvd crap, soundtracks etc... Kickstarter backer rewards. And they can't ship them as they're bankrupt. The problem obviously is that they didn't earmark funds ahead. I think that's disrespectful towards the backers and it's a genuine complaint, but I don't feel it's very significant in the scheme of things. Kickstarters know the risks. And the creators of the game put their heart and soul into it and ended up bankrupt, yet did deliver the game. I think that's a fair compromise for the backers of the game, even if they don't end up getting their rewards, like an artbook or wallpaper which can be pretty sweet but I doubt anyone will lose sleep over it, while the creators must've lost a lot of sleep going through a bankruptcy.

So this notion they raised $50k for 7 people to build a game in two months isn't really the case at all. Beyond that, your point on merchandise rings true but it depends on context. A soundtrack, artbook and wallpaper usually isn't a big deal. After all, the game has a soundtrack regardless, and they'd already produced tons of artwork in the process of modelling, you can see it on the kickstarter. The effort is printing and shipping it. But if someone is giving you a $20 premium to ship him a PDF you already have on your computer, would you say that's bad business? Not really, any smart indie will pay some highschooler $250 to take care of it, a small price to increase your budget by $10k or something to that effect. The issue is that some kickstarters go way overboard, and the reward/effort ratio plummets to below their IRR or even below 1. So it really depends, in this case I think it wasn't a bad decision as they promised rewards for things they already had laying around, they simply should've earmarked the funds.

While that is the ideal way to close up a failed start-up (in my opinion anyway) I don't believe they would entertain that considering they're trying to sell the IP.

I suppose I should count myself fortunate that I didn't Kickstart Woolfe.

Seeing these failed projects is grim reminder that just because you back something doesn't mean it will be delivered.

I mean, I know Alice didn't sell well, but surely someone pointed that out to them?

http://forums.ltheory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=4492

They could not push out Vol 2 nor the Kickstarter rewards as they pretty much ran out of money.

I actually wonder if in such cases Kickstarter shouldn't back the shipping or demand getting the a hold of the rewards and try to some how compensate the backers.

Heck with the amount of projects which fail they can pretty much have a monthly loot crate going on with the crap received from failed kickstartups...

Tho if they file for bankruptcy i wonder if giving the rewards away will not count against them as they devalued their fixed assets value just before or after filing for bankruptcy.

(As to why they upvote them, I'm guessing it's because often we learn more from failures than from successes, and usually you don't hear about the failures as much as the successes).

Think about when you first started learning to program: write code, attempt to compile, FAIL, make some adjustments, FAIL again, make more adjustments, successful compile. Execute, FAIL, make more adjustments, etc. This rapid failure/remediation cycle is somewhat unique, as it opens us to try new and innovative things without fear of failure: failing is just part of the learning process. Since failure is "cheap", we tend to gravitate to sucking up all information about failures, in the hopes of learning from it.

Now think about most other trades: cooking/carpentry/plumbing/etc. When you fail, there are material losses. So that learning curve is expensive, and you often apprentice and learn from someone doing it correct, rather than trial and error (though you get a bit of both for sure).

I suspect this is the same reason when really interesting Post-Mortems are posted, they shoot up, and lots of positive commentary around them. We all consume it, in hopes they prevent us from writing the same one in the future.

Success stories usually won't include any dirty details, any shabby deals or the full naked truth of the events that underwent. No A-list actor will talk about the producer dick he sucked. You have a reputation to maintain after a success.

In a failure on the other hand, you probably are at the rock bottom, have nothing to lose, no one to be afraid of.

Now even if you end up making the 10% that isn't crap, you have to fight hard to get any attention. There is a huge amount of hustling involved.

Even when you are an unprecedented genius, you will suffer immensely for lack of business and marketing skill. Where would Einstein be without Adler? Where would Newton be without Halley?

That's just the way the world is (and has been, since time immemorial).

Long answer: depends on their circumstances in bankruptcy court. The company could potentially reemerge from bankruptcy with the creditors owning it. Or the court might rip the company apart and sell off assets to pay back creditors. The money Steam owes the company is just another asset.

Your point regarding putting your efforts into building a piece of software for someone else rather than trying to do it yourself is sound advice, but people will still disregard it even if it defies common sense. A tiny part of those will end up becoming very successful, and those are usually the people we hear of later.

It would be interesting to see numbers on failed startups (within both the gaming industry and otherwise).

My take is that a large proportion of game developers are actually game addicts or view it as their artistic calling.

So reason doesn't really enter into the make game / don't make game and scope-creep decisions.

Hell, to say the truth although I'm a developer, when I paid something on Kickstarter I also feel that way...

You've misunderstood what actually happened, the game had a different budget and timeframe.