Amplitude (Harmonix) PS3/PS4 - KS (Funded, final day)
- Thread starter Timeless
- Start date
cj_iwakura
Member
That's how I feel. Frequency can also be MUCH harder since it doesn't have the broken power-up variety, and tracks don't stay gone for set durations.
Freq Out's synth line gives me nightmares.
RyanPierre
Member
I'm hoping with how much campaigns typically lull between the beginning and the end that it won't make a huge difference. But if this did end up being a factor that contributed to them just barely missing the cutoff or something, I would be pretty devastated.
Oh man, End of Your World's synth was my undoing back then.
cj_iwakura
Member
That and Robot Rockerz are probably the scariest. I think I cleared RR's once.
Vinterbird
Member
Very important point. Just because it's a kickstarter doesn't mean these people don't have bills, rent and the likes to take care of. The amount of money they're asking for makes total sense when you take an average paycheck and times that by 30.
If Sony don't particularly want to make it, then why should they fund it? They can't fund games based on every IP they own.
ItAintEasyBeinCheesy
it's 4th of July in my asshole
What would happen if it doesn't make the 775k.... but then Sony pay the difference?.
Would be pretty weird.
Would be pretty weird.
I think you are overestimating Harmonix' worth, I highly doubt they still have 'oodles' of money from Rock Band. RB3 kinda flopped sales-wise, the final weeks/months of DLC had pretty mediocre sales as well and they're slowly losing the rights to most DLC songs. If anything I'd say their funds are running dry.
The weird part of this Kickstarter is IMO Sony's apparent lack of funding.
Laws00
Member
I should go through the page to see if they answered this but someone in the twitch tv chat asked, "wouldn't it be easier to just rework the rock band blitz code?" They're starting from scratch from what i hear
I know licensing and all that and paying people comes into consideration.
I know licensing and all that and paying people comes into consideration.
Triggerhappytel
Member
I never played the original, but find this Kickstarter to be a bit weird. Three quarters of a million dollars for an HD upgrade seems a bit on the steep side considering there's been some full games made for less, such as Broken Sword 5, Strike Suit Zero or Shantae: Half Genie Hero.
Considering the original Amplitude apparently sold, like, 50k copies, that's the least weird thing about the project...
It's not just a HD remaster. It will have all-new songs made just for this game and they are probably not recycling any assets like the trippy background scenery or shit. Broken Sword 5 also wasn't made for less. The Kickstarter asked for less, but they but a lot of their own money they got from older Broken Swords' iOS etc. sales into the development.
Sony isn't putting any money into the project, not now and certainly not if the Kickstarter fails. They are helping in other ways (letting them use the IP and making all the other legal shit that goes into releasing a game on Sony's platforms go as smoothly as possible). If the Kickstarter fails, then that's it for Amplitude. There will never be a sequel and I doubt they'd try to immediately do Wavelength: The Spiritual Successor for PC & consoles either.
Yeah, Amplitude is kind of a niche, but Sony has been very friendly and financially supportive towards indie companies as of late, so why not offer the same deal for Harmonix? Especially considering the fact they already own the IP.
Canis lupus
Member
Hopefully that happens in the event it fails to meet the funding goal.
Sony doesn't want to spend money on the franchise. It was Harmonix that approached Sony to assess the conditions to revive it and Sony let them use the IP/brand for free. (I think Sony didn't ask for any IP usage fee/percentage didn't they?)
Because they do that through the pub fund which has a max amount below what they are asking for.
You can make the 'behind the scenes' argument for any title ever. Amplitude is using an existing engine:
It's not like you're paying for engine R&D.
I'm not sure how a game that graphically is basically a screen of notes progressing down a path with some flair required such hefty sum unless really most of the money is going elsewhere. And then you're telling me there's another $1M Harmonix put themselves?
By being a HD remake there's little second-guessing in the development process. They aren't going to encounter challenges that catch them unguarded, no design dilemmas and so on.
For the amount they asking you can fully fund bunch of games, that to me seem to have a larger scope graphically and mechanically and on multiple platforms. One combination example:
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...ging-tabletop-adventures-to-life?ref=category
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/midgarstudio/hover-revolt-of-gamers?ref=category
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/postmodsoftworks/the-old-city?ref=sidebar
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alonsomartin/heart-forth-alicia?ref=sidebar
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2129301589/grave-open-world-survival-horror
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1012709089/death-in-candlewood?ref=discovery
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crytivogames/the-universim?ref=discovery
i think sony might be willing to invest if the costs where lower. 3 quarter of a million is a big ask for such a niche game. BUT...if harmonix manage to get majority of the funding via kickstarter but doesn't seem set to achieve their goal, i imagine sony will top it up so it happens. afterall, by that point we might only be talking a $100,000 investment...
maquiladora
Member
140k in less than 24 hours. A good start.
Project budgeting is more directly related to team size/salaries than complexity/scope of gameplay systems. Those tend to be more "time expensive" in terms of balancing/debugging that in KS projects have an huge advantage of using backers as an at-hand QA department.
Dead Man Typing
Member
First thing I've ever backed - $20. I've never played Amplitude, but I'm a huge fan of Harmonix and played a ton of Rock Band Blitz.
The kickstarter has to help keep the studio going for the next 10 months. I'm guessing that's the reason or the high price.
The kickstarter has to help keep the studio going for the next 10 months. I'm guessing that's the reason or the high price.
FantasticMrFoxdie
Mumber
Nice almost nearing the 150k goal in a day.
Harmonix said in their Twitchcast Sony supported it on the side, but would not officially fund anything unless there is enough community interest (that minimum 775k).
Hmm I wonder what a minimum Shemue Kickstarters goal would be. lol 10 mil maybe?
Harmonix said in their Twitchcast Sony supported it on the side, but would not officially fund anything unless there is enough community interest (that minimum 775k).
Hmm I wonder what a minimum Shemue Kickstarters goal would be. lol 10 mil maybe?
Neuromancer
Member
Saty's got it all figured out, I bet the Harmonix team is deliberately overcharging so they can use all that extra money on hookers and blow.
Neuromancer
Member
I don't see why they couldn't at least mention it as news, in fact I'd prefer they didn't give 'the hard sell' anyway. I hate when podcasts do that (see: the Republique incident on Weekend Confirmed.)
There's little that Harmonix can do about that. It's Sony's IP, which means Sony has the final say over the platforms.
LurkerPrime
Member
I think only Alex has a chance of doing that sort of thing.
The only reason I think Alex may do this is because (around the time of the GAFpocalypse yesterday) Alex posted a news article on Giant Bomb about the Amplitude Kickstarter and then later took it down over concerns re: his past employment at Harmonix. GB doesn't generally post news articles about Kickstarters unless they're from a big studio (and thus are newsworthy). The problem is that, as far as I'm aware, the only other newsworthy Kickstarter was Shroud of the Avatar, so the whole situation seemed more than a little peculiar.
Is there a link and timestamp to the Weekend Confirmed/Republique incident? I've got this morbid curiosity...
It's to gauge interest and likely gain extra support. This is going to help fund the game but also prove the game has an audience.
That's a terrible way of doing it
QUICK! Hurry up and tell them before it's too late.
why?
They wouldn't have started the Kickstarter had they not gotten Sony's permissions prior, all the legalities and such.
Why?
The original games are over a decade old, so it's tough to gauge if there's still an cult audience waiting for the series to return. This lets them see if people are willing to bite, takes the risk out of the equation, and basically allows of an internet show-of-hands. Harmonix isn't the biggest studio out there, so turning around so many projects at once (Fantasia, Chroma, possibly another secret project, and Amplitude) could be a disaster.
Amplitude isn't exactly Mario or GTA, so it makes a great deal of sense in terms of investment. This can help get other funders interested through traditional means if they see this campaign get funded.
chaostrophy
Member
In for $20.
I like rhythm games, but I'm more into electronic music than rock and I'm not into keeping a bunch of cheesy fake instruments around to play a videogame. So this sounds perfect.
I like rhythm games, but I'm more into electronic music than rock and I'm not into keeping a bunch of cheesy fake instruments around to play a videogame. So this sounds perfect.
They've created an engine, but that doesn't mean they now need zero work on the engine for Amplitude HD. They need to optimize it for this particular game and to make the game work on both PS3 & PS4, both with wildly different hardware. There's not some magic button that will make it all happen free and in a day.
The backgrounds in Amplitude PS2 aren't all that simple (designing and then making them a reality probably isn't all that fast a process), not to even mention they would have to make them in HD quality for Amplitude HD, which certainly doesn't make it an easier process. The music itself requires a lot of work as well. They need to compose all the new music, then they need to arrange & record it, perhaps remix them to make them a better fit for and then master them. That's just step 1 for any given song, then they need to actually take those finished songs and create the playable note-patterns for each instrument and finehone them to the kind of perfection they are known of.
These are professional game developers who all want to have, what, $40-50k salary a year if Harmonix is to keep them as their employees, so their monthly salary is 3000-4000$ per month. Amplitude's dev team wasn't huge, IIRC it might've been somewhere around 30 people, give or take a few. Developing an HD game AND a multiplatform game probably needs more than that, so they probably want to have a bigger team. Now, they would develop this game for around 9-10 months and let's assume that the ~30 people who did Amplitude PS2 isn't quite enough to deliver this game in that time, so they'd probably need to have a team of maybe 40 people. Let's say they have to pay around ~3500 for 40 people for 9-10 months. Thats 9x 40 x 3500$ = 1,260,000$ just for salaries or 10 x 40 x 3500 = 1,400,000$. That's not a little amount of money.
All development has SOME problems and second-guessing and troubles. Maybe PS3 can't quite run some of the stuff smoothly at 60fps so they need to figure out what kind of sacrifices they are willing to make, maybe some songs don't end up being all that fun to play and they need to change it or something.
They seem to have already worked on it for quite some time before making a Kickstarter campaign by people lending their time to it, not getting paid. Not really comparable to this, as not all people can just decide to make a game for free on their free time. Some of us actually want to & need to get paid for our work.
The dev team is really small and the graphics & animation seem pretty mediocre.
I assume this is like Dear Esther? No NPCs or almost any kind of more complex environmental interaction, just environmental exploration. You can see how that kind of thing could be extremely easy to develop?
A 2d game that the person has worked on, what was it, 7 years alone? Yeah, let's have Harmonix devs work on an Amplitude game for 7 years without getting paid and then have them ask a little bit of money closer to the end of their development process. Oh, and let's make it a 2d game too.
That looks really bad.
That looks pretty bad and lol at you thinkin $60k is in any way enough to make any kind of worthwhile open-world game. I can assure you this game would have been shit had it been funded (if it would ever even have been finished).
This is pretty much the only somewhat more complex game in your list and lo and behold, it's the only one in your list of games that has a bigger budget. I wonder why that is?
Again, it seems that some shitty looking amateur projects like Grave and some quality indies being willing to work at near-poverty-line-salaries/budgets are warping your sense of game budgets. Maybe some people are happy working the weekends for 7 years to bring their game close to the finishline and maybe you are content at playing games that definitely look like they haven't had much more than 40k of funding behind the project, but if you want to create a new Amplitude game with new music in HD for two platforms in 9-10 months, you'll need a bigger budget than 40k and a bigger team than ~5 people. You're comparing making what would very likely be an almost retail level Amplitude game with games that can mostly be described as shoddy amateur productions and a few smaller & simpler indie games and maybe one that looks a bit better. From your games, only the card game, that 2d metroidvania and Universism look like the only somewhat professional projects and there are clear reasons for that. The Dear Esther like game looks good too, but creating an empty world isn't that hard when you don't have to create any kind of meaningful interaction with the environment or even the simplest of gameplay other than set points where you'll start hearing monologue.
Sony paying for something like Rime is different because they might be hoping it becomes their next Journey, a huge "indie" success. Amplitude is a more known quantity in an almost dead genre. It didn't sell all that well in the past and all the Rock Bands & Guitar Heroes of the past few years don't exactly make publishers that willing to shell out 1-2 million dollars (or more if Sony as a publisher would want some licensed music into it to make it easier to market) to develop a music game.
Neuromancer
Member
I think it was this episode but it was 2 years ago, I don't have a time stamp for you.
http://www.shacknews.com/article/73...orderlands-2-republique-ridge-racer-unbounded
Fixed.
Messofanego
Banned
Yes?Aw hell no, what does Hover look average to? How does this look mediocre?
An individual pledge on KS can't go beyond $10k, I believe.
A couple of odd things have nagged me about the Kickstarter. I'm okay with the notion that using a Sony IP means it can't come to other platforms; that's understandable. What confuses me, though, is the fact that they don't say that:
I not really willing to let that statement slide without futher elaboration. There might be an explanation for it, but I'm genuinely flummoxed as to what it is; I'd be interested in hearing one.
Technicallly, that's just simple shapes & colours and somewhat stiff animations. The game itself looks interesting, but it's not rocket science how they could make that for so little money.Aw hell no, what does Hover look average to? How does this look mediocre?
I imagine that Sony could theoretically let the use the IP on a PC version -- but they can't make promises on that, of course.
Nymphae
Banned
It's funny how this game seems to be getting traction based off the success of Rock Band. IIRC, Amp & Freq really reviewed poorly when they were released. Then the GH/RB craze hit, and all of a sudden Amp & Freq are hidden gems. I just laugh when I see we're 14 pages into hype for a remake of a game that no one cared about when it was released.
People backing this obviously like the game, so I not seeing your point.