I'm just curious if there would be interest in something like this.
Thought process:This would be
expensive, to the point that we can't fund it on our own unless we were selling it as AI War 2 or something. And the only way to do an AI War 2 that wouldn't be largely problematic would be to wrap all the existing expansions and content into it. Which would be fine in the main, but it would then basically cease all support for all AI War 1 customers who didn't buy the new version. Which isn't too cool, because not everyone even cares about a graphical upgrade. Or has the money to want to upgrade a game they've been playing for years, that is getting a facelift but nothing much more.
So a kickstarter would be our main way of funding something like this, because it would let interested parties spend as much or as little money on it as interests them. And it would also clearly demonstrate if there was enough interest in this for it to be worth the money that it would take to do the project.
Pros of the idea1. Obviously this would make the game look better, so everybody gets more eye candy. This wouldn't increase system requirements at all, since we're talking about the same premise of how the art looks now, but just redrawn
way better.
2. I'm sure this would draw in some more customers for Arcen, who otherwise were put off by the graphics perhaps.
I think that's about it.
Cons of the idea1. It's expensive to do, so that's going to take a lot of funding from a lot of people, or a LOT of funding from a smaller group of people. I don't have a really close estimate of what this costs, but as a first guess I would say it is between $31k and $66k. So it's
very nontrivial. You can see why we can't fund this ourselves; it makes the Valley 2 art revamp look like child's play. Oh, and since Kickstarter takes a cut and all that, the actual target of the campaign would need to be correspondingly higher.
2. It's not really likely to bring in THAT many more customers for Arcen, since the premise and learning curve of the game is the main thing that is scary to those who don't play the game. So in terms of doing this, the main benefit would be for players who want to see it, not particularly for Arcen. Although the market might surprise me, who knows.
3. From an Arcen standpoint, looking at this from a selfish financial standpoint, this actually has as much a chance of being a negative as a positive (not a huge chance in either case; it's probably neutral). Specifically, if a bunch of our core fans dump a bunch of money into something like this, which doesn't really profit us AND which will eat up at least some of our staff time... well, that's frankly less money you could spend on things that actually profit us. See, I told you this one was selfish.
4. In order to actually run a kickstarter, we'd have to fund an exploratory process of making a mockup of what things would look like under the revamped look. Aka, we'd revamp some of the ships and backgrounds and a single planet, and then show what the new style would look like. These would need to be actual graphics usable in the game, so that there is nothing misleading about it. Man I would hate people to imagine one thing and then get pissed at us when it doesn't measure up or whatever. So there's a cost here of at least several hundred dollars just to try it. Not a huge deal, but still.
5. Regarding #4, it's inevitable that some people are going to feel misled and be pissed about it. "I was imagining it would look like X from that first screenshot, and the final product isn't what I had in my head!" That is going to suck, but I don't see any way around it when we're talking about something that doesn't exist yet. Though hopefully with the right artists it's not going to be that the game looks bad or something. But then again there are people that think that Gratuitous Space Battles looks bad, so I don't know what to say to that.
6. This would set the bar a lot higher for future expansions. We couldn't coast by on less-expensive art for future expansions; instead we'd have to do more expensive styles of graphics from then on, forever. This is not a minor point, because it makes it harder for us to break even on a given expansion. And if we can't break even on expansions, we can't really do them. One way around that would be to kickstart future expansions (which aren't really all that expensive) if the larger market isn't willing to fund them by sales of them alone at the break-even levels. Aka, if we ever hit a point like that, we could keep the game going for the smaller core community based on increased financial support from them. But that's not really fair to the core community either, and I'd rather not get into situations where people are paying a premium for what we currently give them at an awesome price. So, like I said, this is not a minor point. THAT said, I think that probably our breakeven points would not be so affected anytime soon that this would really actually be a true barrier to anything. But you never know.
Specifics of the ideaSo... what exactly would be entailed here? Things I can think of at present:
1. We'd need to do all-new planet graphics, with a super talented planet artist who can do really stunning and realistic planets. How much would these cost? Possibly $100 to $200 per planet. So doing 50+ of these would be an incredible amount of our budget right there. I don't think that's a good idea, so either we'd have to find a way to do those at less expense (meaning either a less-senior artist who charges less, which might mean lower quality; or meaning an artist in a country with a favorable exchange rate to the US), or we'd have to simply do fewer of them. Even 10 planets would be pretty pricey.
2. We'd need to do new backgrounds for sure. These are one of the things I'm least happy with in the game visually at this point. I was really proud of them in the... what was it, 6.0 era? Or was it 5.0? Anyway, when I last redid them. But they've gotten so they really bug me now, a lot of the time. Trying to procedurally set the colors winds up with a lot of things that are pretty ugly. And on high-contrast monitors like I now have (I didn't have quite so high contrast a monitor at the time, which I think is the difference), the edges of the background nebulae can look really off and ugly. Also, there's only so good of arrangements you can get when you are randomly creating these backdrops as opposed to having someone paint the whole thing by hand.
a. So either we get an artist to do new backdrop pieces, and just go with those under the premise that with better painting of the swirls and so forth that the whole appearance will look better (which I'm sure we could manage, although it wouldn't be as goods as option 2.b.).
b. Or we get an artist to paint backdrops that are a static scene (minus any planet, which would be added in on top as now). These would be like the main menu graphic that we did, which I understand a lot of you were not happy with. That main menu piece turned out to have some low-quality parts to it because it was upscaled in ways that were not good, since the artist messed up the size requirements we were looking for and then tried to correct, and we didn't catch it. But also there was too much contrast between the dark and light parts for it to work well in game. So we'd work with a different artist on this and get it done better.
If we did 2.b, those would cost perhaps $200 per piece, possibly more (very possibly we could get it for less, but the lower you push the price the lower the quality goes). So again a limitation on how many we can reasonably do. You'd be looking at the same backgrounds a lot more often, but they would be much prettier. As another negative, if you're using a resolution larger than 1920x1080, we'd have to scale the image up, which would look bad if done too much. Forget about EyeFinity sort of scaling; you'd need to turn this off and just go with flat starfield backgrounds.
If we did 2.a, that would undoubtedly be cheaper and more varied, and it would still look as good on larger resolutions as it does on smaller ones. However, the degree to which it looks better would be a lot lower.
3. We'd be redoing all the ship graphics, and that would be expensive simply because of the huge freaking number of them, heh. But we could make these look really impressive for $50 per ship on the high end, and potentially as low as $20 per ship. Here it's mostly a question of how detailed we want the style to look; less detailed is less expensive. The other challenge here is that because there are so many ships, there's no way one artist working on the ships could get them all done in any reasonable amount of time. So we'd have to find multiple artists who can all work in a compatible style with each other, and that's more than a little tricky. It can be done, but we'd wind up burning some money at the start just trying to get them all on a consistent style. If we didn't burn that money then of course we're kind of skimping on the artists and making life harder on them since they'd be doing lots of rework for free. I'm not cool with that unless they personally screw up something that they should have really known better about.
I don't know exactly how many ships there actually are in the game, but just counting up folders in the Ships subfolders should be pretty close. I come up with: 396 base game, 129 exp 1, 49 exp 2, 60 exp 3, 155 exp 4, 69 exp 5. So that's 858 ships in all to get new graphics. Leading to a cost of $17,160 on the super low end if they are all done for $20, or $42,900 on the high end if they are $50 each. Holy smokes I was not expecting this to be so high until I actually counted it up. Good grief!
4. Then there's the far zoom icons for all those ships. I'm going to guess there are closer to 600 far zoom icons needed, but I didn't count it up. Probably each of those would cost around $10 to $15 each. So $6000 on the low end, to $9000 on the high end. And yes, we really would have to redo all of these since we'd be presumably redesigning all the ship shapes at least to some extent if we were doing a professional art revamp. And so we'd want them to match. And some of the existing far zoom icons are admittedly moderately ugly, so that's another reason.
5. Then there's the HUD graphics. Finally something that isn't super expensive! We could probably redo this for under $500 and do it really well. The main problem here is that, because of the amount of info we're trying to pack into small spaces, there's a pretty darn limited amount of space for an artist to do anything interesting. And if it's TOO interesting, then it's distracting you and making it hard to read things, etc. So that $500 is figuring in some rework. We'd likely also want to include a new font in there, which would be challenging to find and to fit into the existing amount of space that we have, without becoming illegible or just looking the same. So that would take some hunting for sure, but it could be done.
Whew! Okay, I've certainly convinced
myself that this is not a good idea.
In terms of the cost of the expansions going up, let's look quickly at the added cost to the Ancient Shadows expansion from these numbers. In terms of what it would cost us to do a new expansion with a similar number of ships in the future if we went with this new art style. For 155 ships, that would be between $3100 on the low end and $7750 on the high end. For the far zoom icons, if we figure only 116 icons, then that would be $1160 on the low end and $1740 on the high end. So that would be an increase in costs for an expansion of between $4260 and $9490. That's adding between 33% to 50% to our entire budget for an expansion, as a frame of reference. Ouch.
Okay, yeah -- I'm super convinced against doing this now. But I thought I'd post this anyway, because the thought process is interesting, and if anyone ever wonders why we don't just do this, they can dig up this thread and see in all the gory detail.
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