How exactly does $300,000 dollars = Galactic War?

I mean, I know it takes money to do ****. I can see $900,000 being needed for all the initial development of all the units, planetary generation and such. $200,000 set the standard for what it takes to develop one new type of planet and the units for it. So how does Galactic War come out as $300,000? Is it $200,000 work but the extra $100,000 is to be used as payment for the ungodly amounts of overtime GW sounds like it's gonna need?

Pretty much this.

Mike

I think this is just one of those things that "can't" be done with the modding API they're giving us, and so they're asking us to pay for this additional feature.

I'm hoping and praying this ISN'T the case, because that's the exact kind of bullshit GPG gave us with the Supreme Commander API. Everything should be mod-able.

Probably a complex AI and more coding on the procedural generator. Also the more features we get, the more staff is needed.

I'm pretty sure the extra money just lets them pay for more programmers to work on stuff. I think I heard that the stretch goals won't affect how long it takes them to make it.

GW was moddable for Supreme Commander. They just failed with it because they made a few crucial mistakes -trying to do too much while having very basic gameplay-problems- that were unrelated to the API of Supreme Commander.

I think the cost is a higher because of all the back-end stuff they need to include. especially if this is both single and multiplayer campaign, if I read it correctly.

It doesn't take money to do ****, it takes LOTS of money to do ****.

900k was pretty much a huge undercut, barely minimum to work for a year for a high-grade game. Even at 1.3 million they're are saying they still have to fund the rest themselves.

Stretch goals work both for paying for the features and to keep people interested.

300k these days isn't a lot to pay for more than one experienced programmer.

Before you make comments like this I would love to see a list of videogame projects you have produced.

Yeah, the stretch goals are here to get more funds because the kickstarter was set to 900k instead of a higher one (1.5k if I got it right). So the more money the devs get, the more comfortable they will be to work on it (the more feature we will have) and the less dangerous it will be for their business

That's why I'm asking. I have no sense of scale with this, so I'm wondering where exactly the money would go for developing the new mode.

The amount of work you have to put into new planet types seems reasonable, water and gas planets require heavy modifications on the engine to handle them, plus dozens of new units and assets for each planet which sure means a few hundred hours for the entire team for every planet type.

But just moving from a single solar system to multiple solar systems?
You have announced massive battles with up to 40 players for the BASIC version of the game. Also having a single or multiple stars with planets revolving around them is not that different, it's 3-5 units suited for this task at most and the use of interplanetary weapons needs to be limited to planets within the same solar system, but it's the same mechanics except for that.

Either you have some exceptional features planned which nobody got right from your preview (like persistent battles spanning multiple servers) or the community is right, that stretch goal is not going to be worth it's money.

I'll take that as a "No, I haven't produced any videogames."

I just wanted to know how it works out like this. :|

Clearly we aren't aware of how it works, we're the consumers, but I'm just curious about it.

They are not making a flash game, do you know how it cost a full month with 10 engineers with experience working on a project of this scale ? I guess no

There are tons of stuff you need to pay for, first of you need whatever comes up with the developments and what the company has to pay anyways.

Power bills, water bills, whatever bills.
They have to pay their employees.
They have to pay third party companies eventually.
They have to pay for new working material, for example broken computer parts, hosting etc.
They'll eventually have to pay marketing, licensing and so on.

This probably is only a fraction.

Besides, this game is already super low budget, so I guess not all the money is neccassarily flowing into the development of this specific feature, you are paying for a better game in general.

Also, all their "free" money is not really free, a rather big fraction needs to be spend to pay for the donates, merchandise, games licenses etc.

So you have to see, almost everyone who already donated *bought* the game, and therefor will probably not buy it again.

I imagine the main reason it could take so long is AI; they are going to need a set of different AIs, from singular unit control to choosing which solar systems to invade next. The entire solar system itself, too, will need to be procedurally generated and I imagine anything like a proper resource system where you can transfer resources from one solar system to another being really difficult to implement. And, remember, this'll all need to work with the whole recording gameplay system... it's a lot of work.

Got it totally wrong.

Galactic War does NOT mean to just have some nearby stars in the same skirmish, that should be possible with the basic engine WITHOUT the stretch goal!

If i got things right, then what they plan is an actual campaign. Not singleplayer, but fully clan and online capable with dozens to hundreds of skirmishes to fight until the victor is set. This indeed requires much more work, since it adds a whole new system on top of the actual game. The amount of work required for this is tremendous, if that feature is supposed to have an variating gameplay, then they will need to prepare hundreds of scripted events and situations to keep the campaign interesting, you could easily spend a full year on that last goal until it could be called "sufficient".

OP is perhaps best summarized as an argument from personal incredulity about how much X costs to implement.

I am going to have to go with the experienced game developers on this one.

Sorry for being so snappy about it, but I get biz questions like this a lot. Games are so much more expensive that most people can even believe.