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AusGAF 10 - Node Country for Old Men

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Kritz

Banned
Our group's uselessness wasn't really distributed too well, was the problem. One guy did jack fucking shit. And it's not like he was ESL or anything. He actively knew he was doing jack fucking shit, and that nobody would call him on it.

And Bryn, as cool as that duder is, had a minor mental breakdown mid semester and was delegated to full time documentation bitch, so all of his software implementation was either scrapped or I hastily threw it together with sticky tape and cynicism.

The two guys we put as artists did their job insofar as they provided art. I think our project was so far in the shitter that we honestly didn't care what they gave us, as long as they gave us things on time. We kind of ignored them giving us half a million poly spaceship models with 40-80mb worth of texture memory each, for a program designed to run on a fucking ipad.
 
Yeah obviously ours wasn't a game project so we didn't face a lot of the same problems. Like I said, we were real lucky. We had several fantastic team members, and a few solid ones. The people who couldn't cut the mustard were identified really early and the rest of the team was consistent and punctual over the year. We also had one of the best clients you could ask for, because he was a computing student himself only about 4 years out of the university. He gave us a really well scoped project and had a lot of ideas himself on how we could start to tackle things.

Bryn is in a much better place recently than he was last year. He's had a lot of problems but he's working through them well now. Probably gonna catch up with him next week.
 

Kritz

Banned
Good to hear about Bryn. That dude was alright, it just sucked that our interactions were via the black hole of emotional turmoil known as project.
 

Stackboy

Member
oh boy, shouldn't have had that much coffee so late in the day. And you'd think maybe I could be studying if I can't sleep, but here I am browsing the list of recent successful and unsuccessful kickstarters and trying to work out if the ones that succeeded are worse than my game, or if the ones that failed are better.

My conclusion is that I have no idea how people can make a game, over the course of a year, for only $10,000. Especially if your team is larger than one person, which a few of these seem to be.

On top of that I still need to do some thinking of what kind of model CBD is going to have later down the line. My default choice was just charging $5 or $10 for the game and have it be that, but I might just succeed in killing my playerbase. Alternatively I could go a free to pay model and charge people for custom skins + hats + other silly aesthetic stuff. If I decide I want to charge money for the "full game" (whatever that may be), at what point do I cut off my existing free players from being able to access new updates?

Or do I just have the KS pay for the game's creation, and not really bother actually making a profit from the game and have it as resume fodder. Saying "hey, I can make this kind of ambitious kind of functional kind of popular video game, but I have no idea how to make it financially viable! Please give me job making MetaCricket Review Spinulator 2016: Australia's 5/5 Star Talent"

Or do I go to sleep because this thought experiment is about six months premature and I'm really just looking for distractions from this exam I didn't really study for but will probably still pass?

I think I'll keep reading gamasutra posts until the MONA flood lights stop flashing across my bedroom window.

Do a Kickstarter, you know we will all back it and that will make you MILLIONS.

My dad is going to buy the new Surface Pro when it comes out in a few months, that makes him cooler than me, right? I think so.

Diving back into Batman Arkham Asylum. Game still holds up. Also Goat Simulator is a riot.

I think I might buy that Halo 1-4 collection too, if the MP community is there. Maybe for cheap. Who knows. I'm already going to be juggling Destiny and COD AW.
 

Gazunta

Member
Oh yes, group projects. FUN TIMES.

Back in 2003 I was a QANTM student and we had our end of year group project to make a small game.

There were five of us on the team, and I and one of the artists were the only two to do any actual work on it. The other three were either hopelessly out of their depth and didn't know how computers or games worked, or were just fucking jackasses that we had to ignore to get anything done. Funny how those three didn't end up working in game dev the following year ;)

It's a monumentally terrible game, but you can download it here. You throw monkeys at robots and the monkey acts like a boomerang and that's pretty much it and I'm amazed it still runs on modern computers.
 

Kritz

Banned
I think ausgaf backing eachother's kickstarters might be like the snake eating its own tail metaphor

that monkey game is off the chain gaz
 

Kritz

Banned
How much work until you can get your game on steam tho

To be honest I could probably just fix up the account registration and general site security, and throw the thing up on greenlight.

But I figure I want to run a greenlight and KS at the same time. Since greenlight gets thousands of views in the first couple of hours and then nothing for the rest of time, and Kickstarter gets a bunch of views at the start and end of a campaign. So the cross pollination of users is probably pretty important.
 

Quasar

Member
Our group's uselessness wasn't really distributed too well, was the problem. One guy did jack fucking shit. And it's not like he was ESL or anything. He actively knew he was doing jack fucking shit, and that nobody would call him on it.

I'm eternally cursed with being in groups where some members do bugger all and I'm forced to do their work as well. God I loath group work.
 

Gazunta

Member
During lunch it did strike me as ironic that I was complaining about useless members of teams when I was easily the most useless member of them all in my 'pro' game dev days. :)
 

Deeku

Member
I survived the uni group works by befriending smart people cos they smart, or quiet people cos they won't protest/clash with you. By doing this, you become like a mediator between the smart dude who has the ideas/knows shit, and the quiet people who are hard working and get shit done! Then of course, you become the dick that just organises meetings and proof reads, ie jack all LOL!
 

Dryk

Member
Enhanced Steam tells me I've more or less broken even on market sales, and I got a foil card yesterday. Victory.

I survived the uni group works by befriending smart people cos they smart, or quiet people cos they won't protest/clash with you. By doing this, you become like a mediator between the smart dude who has the ideas/knows shit, and the quiet people who are hard working and get shit done! Then of course, you become the dick that just organises meetings and proof reads, ie jack all LOL!
What's your strategy of dealing with smart, not hard-working quiet people that rarely have good ideas? :p
 
Been looking for Ausgaf in all the wrong places but finally found it - stickied. My face is red... Subbed and looking forward to getting to know AUSGAF better.
 

Stackboy

Member
I have a pretty long list of stuff that is a year or so old that has never had a deal good enough for me to bite on, ready for the steam sale.
 

r1chard

Member
TLOU just arrived in the mail, PS3. I guess I'll be playing that before I get a PS4 ;)

[given that I'm also going to be playing Watch Dogs on my PC now...]

Oh, and I sorted out the new monitor issues with my PC - turns out the DVI dual-link cable that the store in Mitcham (not MSY, the one on cnr Mitcham/Whitehorse which was the only store before MSY moved in) sold me was not a dual-link cable, even though it looks a like one. Plug in an actual dual-link cable and 2560x1440 works a treat.

Microsoft still can't render text for shit though, even with all these pixels.
 
Got good poisoning from ... somewhere in Sydney.

Fuck you, Sydney.

Vomit streak almost at four years. The last place to give me such bad food poisoning was a street meat vendor in Beijing. :(
 

Kritz

Banned
man I thought I'd gotten a computer virus

come back from exams to find some random .exe on my computer with some weird ass name so I scan the bitch with MSE and it doesn't know what the fuck, so I google the .exe name

Hey guys -

I haven't had a chance to post on the Sumea boards for a while...but now you know why :)

Introducing 'Ryan Starr Is Abducted', the first game from Brisbane games and animation group Insert Coin! We officially unvieled it at QANTM's Industry Night on Friday but now it's being released to the web.

http://gazunta.gadgetlife.com/ryan/RyanStarrAbducted.exe is where you'll find the game and http://www.insertcoin.iscool.net is where you'll find the team's web site!

The game as it stands now is a fully complete one level demo. I hope you like it! We'd be interested in hearing your feedback (just hit reply on the board). For the record I did the game design document and character animation for the main character (except his walk cycle) and the monkey. We had 4 animators and 1 very stressed programmer put this together in 4 months.

So...any publishers out there interested? Any game development companies interested in hiring? :)

- Gazunta :)

... fuckin', ohhh right. I'm an idiot.
 

Gazunta

Member
I was so young and full of enthusiasm to make video games!
I was a moron who really should have started doing webcomics in 2003
 

Dryk

Member
Problem with steam sales is that there is nothing that i am tempted to buy because it was already on sale before and has been bought last sale.
I love sales where I can't buy anything because I've already bought everything. Keeps me relatively in check.
 
My AIE end of course game was that shitty run and gun supposed-to-be-a-vertical-shooter Contra-like that ended up being me coding the entire gameplay, one guy who did a shitty AI implementation (so shit that if we had more than one enemy on screen, the game would lag. not only that, but enemies literally ran left/right and shot towards player if he was within a cone in front of the enemy) and another who did the most convoluted UI system ever.

Artists were scrubs, but did good work when they actually wanted to (0.1% of the time), AI guy was a fuckwit who literally bailed on the project halfway through and the other had a lot of personal problems, which was fine because he still worked but then refused to scale back the UI and just get it done. it was apparently, for the final three weeks, "almost done".

I did get credit from one of the head programmers from what is now Firemonkeys though. and I got kudos from the dickhead who created that mmo engine bigworld.

I want to redo that game and do it right. in 2d. with fun involved.
 
My AIE end of course game was that shitty run and gun supposed-to-be-a-vertical-shooter Contra-like that ended up being me coding the entire gameplay, one guy who did a shitty AI implementation (so shit that if we had more than one enemy on screen, the game would lag. not only that, but enemies literally ran left/right and shot towards player if he was within a cone in front of the enemy) and another who did the most convoluted UI system ever.

Artists were scrubs, but did good work when they actually wanted to (0.1% of the time), AI guy was a fuckwit who literally bailed on the project halfway through and the other had a lot of personal problems, which was fine because he still worked but then refused to scale back the UI and just get it done. it was apparently, for the final three weeks, "almost done".

I did get credit from one of the head programmers from what is now Firemonkeys though. and I got kudos from the dickhead who created that mmo engine bigworld.

I want to redo that game and do it right. in 2d. with fun involved.
I can do the AI for you! Seems easy. Actually I don't know anything about AI, but I do know it sands for Artificial Intelligence maybe!
 
I can do the AI for you! Seems easy. Actually I don't know anything about AI, but I do know it sands for Artificial Intelligence maybe!

Honestly for the game, it should've been so easy but he decided to make it as fucking convoluted as possible. He's part of the dev who does that Collateral game, last I checked. Dancing Dinosaur Games.
 
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