DevTracker

[Grummz]

If any of you are interested in the dynamics of crowdfunding, look at the top ones on kicktraq.com and compare them to the failed ones. Also not the inverse bell curve typical of most funding. Most successful projects are funded in the firstk 2-5 days. If not, they tend to fail.

This means baked-in community is important. If we want 10,000-20,000 backers, I'd like to grow our community from our current 10,000 to 100,000 prior to KS.

 

[Grummz]

That's why it won't be how you describe it . We are on path to build playable mockup/demo/prototype however you want to call it. Em-8ER needs to show it can deliver, it needs to build trust and backer base. By quickly delivering milestones on set path is a way to do it. There are now more than 400% more people than there were last milestone and it increases at steady pace. Mind there is no budget for marketing, all this is due to volunteer efforts, word of mouth, and articles on gaming sites here and there about vision and development progress.

When there is a mockup backers can actually play with high level of polish, you can expect kickstarter for a full time company (Mark is already working on it full time). If you ask me it's way better than starting doomed to fail kickstarter campaign (not to mention I don't think Kickstarter permits projects without a working game demo). All other games in this stage of development are super secret ... Em-8ER is out there in the open from the very first steps. As more hands are brought onboard, pace will speed up.

You can read about the approach in Grummz's own words here https://em8er.com/the-path-to-playable-mockup/

There are two things you need for a great Kickstarter:

1) A working game demo with nice art (art sells, folks, esp to the Kickstarter crowd)
2) A ready to go community.

The second is by far the most important. The most successful kickstarters already had a community based around their game, or a built-in audience from their website with high traffic. Community has to work to spread the messaage for it to work. Everyone here will have to work extra hard to get the word out. Exploding Kittens did this by being the first to offer achievements based on how much you shared/tweeted/facebooked. Ashes of Creation went further to offer a referral bonus (highly contentious, but got a ton of youtubers talking about it)

 

[Xeevis]

I have real doubts that Em8er will ever be finished.
Crowdfunding a bunch of micro segments of a game seems like it will take decades to finish if at all. The last crowdfunding funded one character? Seems like funding each and every character/tree/shrub/tile/vehicle/mob/blade of grass will take billions of crowdfunding initiatives.

Then all these micro projects don't automatically form themselves into a complete game. Expect another few thousand crowdfunding initiatives for the actual engine/game.

Thanks for the credits. Hopefully I will get to actually use them within my lifetime.

That's why it won't be how you describe it . We are on path to build playable mockup/demo/prototype however you want to call it. Em-8ER needs to show it can deliver, it needs to build trust and backer base. By quickly delivering milestones on set path is a way to do it. There are now more than 400% more people than there were last milestone and it increases at steady pace. Mind there is no budget for marketing, all this is due to volunteer efforts, word of mouth, and articles on gaming sites here and there about vision and development progress.

When there is a mockup backers can actually play with high level of polish, you can expect kickstarter for a full time company (Mark is already working on it full time). If you ask me it's way better than starting doomed to fail kickstarter campaign (not to mention I don't think Kickstarter permits projects without a working game demo). All other games in this stage of development are super secret ... Em-8ER is out there in the open from the very first steps. As more hands are brought onboard, pace will speed up.

You can read about the approach in Grummz's own words here https://em8er.com/the-path-to-playable-mockup/

 

[Grummz]

Sure, we've had over 5 years of pre-production, testing and knowledge called my work on Firefall. That part is done. I know what needs to be done. And a sad but true fact of modern crowdsourcing is that nobody funds a game on grey boxes moving around anymore. That ship has sailed.

But again, all the research is done. We know what was fun and worked, and what didn't. I spend 5 years figuring that out and see no need to go through it again. I am bee-lining towards the culmination of all this prototyping and see no need to start from scratch again and lurge from system change to sytem change.

I learned my lesson last time, so I am not getting into the whole community thing as hardcore anymore, but I'm still keeping tabs on what's going on.

I noticed lots of focus of these milestones are on art assets/animations/visual systems. Is that really a good idea? Art takes a lot of time, even if you have a good pipeline, and even if you take advantage of the newest UE4 features like in-engine animation editing and realtime geometry updates - still takes time.

Playing games for over 16 years now I noticed that if you have a fun core gameplay loop, you can put even rather coarse or minimalistic art assets in and people will still like it (Portal, Superhot, hell, even Nier: Automata - it's a super-ugly game). Alternatively if you put out fantastic graphics (and visual systems) and start thinking about the gameplay loop too late you end up with, well I don't want to mention it, but people will think of it anyway so - No Man's Sky). Graphics assets can be later patched without too many issues, as they don't break much, but gameplay mechanics are dependent on the initial codebase limitations, so they aren't as easy to improve.

Just an observation.

 

[Ronyn]

The Mighty JoeSolo is online now, Streaming his work on the Omniframe.
Want to check it out? I bet you do!

CLICK HERE​