Regarding "it's done when it's done." There are exactly two kinds of developers who can do that: those who don't need the income from their games to survive because it is not their main job; and those that don't need the income from their next game because they are already incredibly rich.
Or those that have a much tighter grasp on budget and scheduling than you seem to? I thought AIwar was a smash hit? You seriously didn't earn enough money from that game to not have to rush your next title? Was Tidalis rushed?
Zing! Wow, that's pretty insulting. I've already stated that we're in the business of doing heavy R&D. If I knew exactly what the project was going to be like before we started it, then certainly we could budget more easily. If you want to make a clone of something existing, you can budget exactly what it would take (more or less). If you're making something that nobody has ever made before, you have to plan for the unknown to some extent.
Tidalis was not rushed, but it also did not earn back the money that was spent on it. AI War has been a smash hit over the course of four years, but bear in mind it's been the only thing that has broken even for us, and it's not like all that money arrived in one lump in 2009. AI War has been the primary funding source for another five games, so I'd think that was doing pretty well, really. There's a reason we were able to take 18 months making Valley 1, or 7.5 man years, and that was AI War. That didn't earn back what we spent on it, so that makes more things troublesome.
You have already said that you basically dropped the ball budget-wise with Valley 2. If you'd spent the Valley 2 money on a smaller project then there wouldn't have been such a mad rush to get it finished. Other developers may also be "push out" developers, but it just strikes me that you are pushing your deadlines too far, which is worrying. Whether that's due to financial pressures, poor budget control, or even just a certain attitude: whatever, I just think it's hurting the quality of your games a little too much.
I don't think it's hurting the quality of our games, personally. I'm proud of everything we've put out, and I feel like our quality bar is well above the average for indies as a group. We don't compete with Bastion or whatever, but we're a lot more niche than that anyhow. In terms of the Valley 2 budget, that did get a bit runaway but that again comes back to the nature of R&D. It also comes back to some serious problems with the art budget, which I won't go into because that's a wasp's nest between two companies. Suffice it to say, that project was our first experience working with another outside studio in collaboration, and the experience was the source of well over half of our budget problems.
Google "kill your darlings," seriously.
Do you realise how condescending these "google ... " sentences are?
Sigh. I was writing from my phone, but I apologize if it's condescending. I'm not sure why we're suddenly arguing fiercely here.
I think the reason you have this impression of Arcen being "push out" where you might not with other developers is two fold...
Hey, you might have a point there. Being so open is a double-edged sword, certainly. Maybe my impression is wrong -- but I've got to stick by it. Your final game quality seems to be compromised by having such tight schedules.
Compared to
what? What are the budgets and team sizes of the competitors you are comparing us to? Are they pushing into hugely innovative territory, or are they doing "something familiar with a slight twist?" Innovation has a large time (and thus money) cost, you know? I think you're trying to look at a multifaceted issue as something that is black and white. The reality of a situation is a lot more complex. You can't really sum up the successes or failures of a project or a company in just a sentence, usually. Not unless there is gross negligence that just sinks the whole thing, but that's not the case here. There are people who love each and every one of our games, so we've made at least some folks happy every time.
Secondly, we don't really toot constantly about our own financial pressures until they start coming to a head. Valley 1 went 6 months over schedule to make sure it was as good as possible at the end, and we had -$6k in money when it launched. Less when Valley 2 launched. I completely avoided taking a salary this year until this month to make sure that the projects could get out in a quality way while we also didn't shed staff.
Sounds to me like it's really a budget control issue then. It shouldn't really get to the desperation stages of you having to not take a salary in order for the company to stay afloat. Obviously, this is going to put undue pressure on when you need to release that next game.
What you are attributing to incompetence -- apparently -- is actually a natural flow of young companies. We're past the startup stage, but into what is often referred to as "too small to be big, too big to be small." The budgets and so forth always get smashed all to heck in that phase. Basically we need staff in order to grow (and in order for me to have a less crazy schedule), but it's tough to afford that staff based on existing income. So you run into a constant chicken-and-egg scenario. There's an income hump there that we have to get over in order in order to be under less pressure. We're close to that, and I think will hit that point this year. But this is a pretty common theme among companies in our life stage.
Is the above slightly contradictory with my remarks about the R&D budgeting stuff? Sure. A lot of what I say can seem contradictory until you think about it a bit more and look at the bigger picture of the company. Putting it in armchair physics terms, there are a ton of forces acting on one particle. How does the particle move? Well, it's complicated, right? Various of the forces are clearly having an effect, but no one force is solely responsible for the movement of the particle.
What about multiplayer? Is that still making it in? Sounds also like you would have also liked to have had a proper beta period, but you just don't have the time for one.
Yes, multiplayer is still making it in. And actually, we've decided not to do a beta period because we did not want to, not because there was not time. We could easily do a beta instead of a second round of alpha if we wanted, but there are some very compelling reasons not to do a beta. With many of our future games, we probably will not do public betas anymore. I wrote about it in more depth in another thread, but it comes down to basically not wanting to shoot the anticipation in the press and the public in the foot. It's a complex issue, and I wrote about it much better in the beta thread I think.
Hey, I don't think you're pushing stuff out willy nilly, but you have had extremely harsh deadlines which can't be good for the game or yourself. I don't like to see you guys work 24 hour + shifts like you had to during AVWW2 as I recall.
Valley 2 was comparably tame; Valley 1 was the nightmare there near the end. Though Valley 2 was no picnic either. Shattered Haven and Skyward Collapse have both been much better in terms of overall workload (just ask my wife). It's still not what I would hope, but we're making huge strides in the right direction. The thing is that I can't wave a magic wand and just make everything easier. It's true that I could fire all the staff and have a yearly income larger than most senators if I wanted to. I could faff around and make smaller games and so forth if I wanted to do that. I would also have to do EVERYTHING, and the pressure of doing that is not fun. It's also a lot more productive working with a team, as many heads are better than one. And I also want the people I work with to be able to keep their dream jobs.
So it comes back to that "too small to be big, too big to be small" thing. Incidentally, I haven't cut staff income or required any other staff to work long hours. It's all been on me and me alone in those regards. I'm pursuing a growth strategy in order to ultimately ease things on myself by having some short-term pain in order to get things to be easier long-term. So far it seems to be working, but it's a risky thing in some respects (not for the company as a whole, though).
That's the idea here: Skyward is tight and interesting, and we'll see how it does. If well, then expansions.
I hope it does extremely well as I don't think I've seen the true Arcen, yet. I want to see the day when you have a lot less pressure on your shoulders and can take your time somewhat. Maybe that is an unrealistic scenario in the average life of an indie dev, though.
I take some mild umbrage with that, too. In terms of the "true Arcen," here we are. Good grief have we taken our time with AI War. There's been no rush and it's been developed and incredibly refined over a super long period of time. Same with Valley 1, including post-release. We hit the end of what I felt like we could do that I was happy with with Valley 1, so we did Valley 2. I'm super happy with how that turned out, and there's not anything I would really change. I play it with my son and have great fun with it. I'm not sure what I would add in an expansion. Tidalis turned out extremely well, too. We could have added more stuff as free DLC, as we had ideas for other game modes and such; but the reality was the game was already so huge it wasn't needed anyhow.
Shattered Haven is also something I'm really proud of. We didn't get to add all the last endings into the game because of time pressure, but the game has had so little traction with the larger market that there's not much we can do about that. I feel like the art in that game is a big thing holding it back, and that again comes back to some... external factors that we have since corrected and which I cannot go into. I feel like that game looks as good as we could make it given our situation, but that's my main complaint with the game.
With Skyward, aside from wanting to do more in expansions, there's nothing that I'm dissatisfied with at this point. I even love the way it looks, with a few nits here and there.
In terms of the "true Arcen," all that means to me is "Arcen with a facelift thanks to the money to hire outside contractors of the appropriate skill." Beyond that, it's all incremental improvements and things we learn. Skyward is very streamlined in the UI and so forth because that's something we're getting better at. And we haven't thrown in every feature and the kitchen sink because we're learning that's a stupid thing to do on a number of levels. So in terms of the "true Arcen," I suppose you could say we'll never fully see that, because (as with all things) we're changing and growing all the time.
But the key thing with those on a design level is that it's because we're still learning (as is everyone), not because we're rushed or whatever.
Hopefully that makes sense....The Trenches.
I'll check out The Trenches. I really don't have the breadth of knowledge of how other indie developers work in order to say whether the way you operate is typical or not, although it might interesting to research the issue.
The Trenches is more about AAA, but yeah. You'd be surprised how many AAA games are more rushed than ours.
No hard feelings. I hope SC does amazingly well, maybe then you can afford to give your next game the time it deserves.
No hard feelings, but I think you really have a very different view of things than I do. Which is fine, but I think I'm closer to the data. In terms of the "time it deserves," any project could take infinite time. Seriously, there is always more that could be done or changed. In terms of AI War or Valley 1, I think nobody in their right mind could claim those didn't get an incredible amount of time from us (and AI War continues to get that). Skyward is getting all the time it needs; part of its design was such that it doesn't need as huge a testing cycle, because of the nature of how the game flow is. It wasn't an accident that we chose that for our next project here.
TLDR: You seem to think we don't know what we're doing or are stumbling around in a panic, but I think that's pretty far from the truth. There have been a lot of tough decisions to make, but that's the nature of business. But none of our games have been universally reviled, all have been heartily loved by some faction or other, and some of them have been widely popular. Revenues have grown every year, we've gotten to make a wide variety of games in different genres and not died from that, and we're continuously learning and improving rather than staying stagnant. Holy heck that's a pretty solid business right there. Not perfect, but nothing ever is.
