The difference between designing for 2D and 3D is astoudning.

I took a 400 level game development course at my univeristy, and we had 3 teams. 2 teams decided to do 2D games, the remaining team wanted to do a 3D game.

At the halfway though the semester part, my team had a 2D platformer, with 2 fairly long stages built and enemies moving around and all that good stuff.

The other 2D team was also ahead of schedule with their design.

The 3D team? Stuck in some sort of debugging hell just getting the main character model animated correctly, and they hadn't even started on the enemy models or AI implementation and had barely done anything with level design.

I imagine even at the professional level it would go something like that. Designing in 2D is just faster. Designing a sprite palette is far faster than getting a 3D model textured, animated, etc, and building words in 2D is AMAZINGLY fast one you have you templates down.

Extending the time is always an option.  There are pros and cons to it, and its not as cut and dry as it may appear in my initial post.  It isn't like "we are a week behind, we need to cut feature X".  A week behind typically means that we need to crunch.  It's the features that are speced to take 4 weeks that take 12 that kill us.

Delaying the game is always an option to remain feature complete.  That isn't always a good option.  Some companies are publically traded and have commited on a release in that quarter to their stockholders (who are the owners of the company).  Development time is expensive (as is releasing a bad game) and extending the time typically means missing the budget.  Sometimes the team involved is scheduled to start other projects that now have to be delayed because of it (the domino effect).

That doesn't mean that sometimes delaying the game to stay feature complete isn't the right answer.  But it does mean that from a project manager standpoint if those decisions have to be made something has gone wrong.  A mistake was made that will cost the company one way or the other because the design was to ambitious.  It would have been so much better if the designer would have done a speced a design that did fit into the scheduled time frames.

Warning: I chugged Monster again so this is very long. <3 

Also, delaying a game doesn't just affect stockholders. For smaller companies, every time you delay a release I'm sure you lose a handful of possible buyers. If you check these forums there's a lot of people that are impatient - Some rightfully so, and some saying that Stardock isn't moving quickly enough.

With Stardock having a 75-100% return policy depending on the situation, even though Brad has already stated this will be a loss, if they can churn out a game that will score an 8-9 out of ten in six months vs. a game that will score a 10 in twelve-eighteen, they'll take the more viable option. Sometimes the choice is a good game in an acceptable amount of time that will get a lot of people interested and make most people happy and a great game in an insane amount of time that may alienate a large amount of the fan base.

Half Life 2, which according to Gamerankings has an average score of 95.31%, had a five-year, $40 million development cycle.

Now five years for a company like Valve, which has a strong background in game development and a large publisher backing them like Sierra, and a distributer like Electronic Arts. That's a pretty large budget and development time.

Mass Effect was originally announced in October, 2005, and was first released November 20th 2007. Now I couldn't find data as to their initial development date or budget, but coming from Bioware, EA, and based on Unreal Engine 3 (Meaning they didn't have to develop their own engine for the game), that's another large development time, especially considering it didn't release for PC until May 28, 2008. Mass Effect scored an average of 89.43%.

So these massive companies, with massive publishers, spend years and tons of money developing these games.

Stardock, comparitively, has an amazing track record for the size of company it is. Their revenue in 2009 was a mere $15 million (I say mere, but I mean I'd take that any day of the week) according to the data I could find. That means Half Life 2 cost more than the entire company makes in more than two years to produce.

So for Stardock to turn out the games and development capabilities it has in the past is astronomical. Galactic Civilizations II Dark Avatar scores a 92.27% average. I'm not sure what the development cycle and time was for the game, but the fact is they did it without millions of millions of dollars and a huge publisher to back them.

Elemental (From what I can find) was announced on November 4, 2008. So being released in October 2010 puts it on track to score in the 80-90% range, _if it were backed by a massive budget_. It isn't. It's a Stardock game, so it's not backed by EA, or Microsoft, or run by a massive company.

Even if it takes five years, putting it near the Half Life 2 mark, it'd still be under budget and still a massive success if it could score as high as GalCiv II.

But Stardock can't afford that because if it takes that long to churn out a game, what will the fans do in the meantime? Elemental's big hype is being spiritual successor to Master of Magic. But that doesn't hold a candle to the fanaticism of fans that were waiting between Half Life and Half Life 2. They already knew what to expect. They knew it was worth the wait, and even if it flopped the die hard fans would likely have still bought it just to have it.

Elemental doesn't have that luxury. Even though they aren't publically traded, Stardock still has to justify its spending. $15 million revenue may seem like a lot, but consider this:

Programmers and engineers first entering the business or under three years experience average 50,000 a year. 3-6 years averages 66,000 a year, and 6+ averages over 88,000 a year.

Lead programmers make a little more starting out at 56,000, but over three years they average 83,000, and over six they make more than 90,000 a year.

Video game technical directors  make 60,700 under three years experience, three to six years makes around 73,000, and over six averages 110,000, but has been reported as high as 195,500. That's just the programming side of things.

Artists and animaters average between 41,500 and 75,000, and lead artist and animators average 64-80, and as high as 215,000.

Then you have producers, quality assurance, audio, musicians, and composers.

Reference https://forums.elementalgame.com/404298 for the general Stardock game project chart.

Product Manager
Business Manager
Project Manager 2
Marketing and PR
Publishing
Asset Support
Mock Reviews
Documentation
Music
Libraries
Misc. Assets
QA Team
Art Lead
Compatibility
Bug Tracking
Debugging Lead
Programming Lead
Engine
AI
Gameplay
Modeling
Animation
Concept
UI
Design Lead
Gameplay
Campaign
Story

Each of those positions is typically handled by a single person that has to be paid, have taxes and social security covered, insurance, benefits. And each position requires their own costs. Stardock isn't like my personal computer. They're using high end programs that they *cough cough* paid for. I have programs that are of dubious origin, but if I wanted to publish something I'd buy the actual product to make sure everything was legal.

And that's a single project on their game design side. They're constantly publishing other applications and working on Impulse implimentation at the same time.

As much as Brad says they can take the loss, if we want Stardock to stick around, and I'm sure they do, they need to make sure they can come as close to breaking even as they can, so release time is an extremely important factor.

I like Stardock and I'm willing to wait. These people that complain about the game still being in beta and such, they'd still be complaining if the game weren't released. Honestly I pre ordered because I thought the beta was still open (Till I found an obscure forum post telling me otherwise) and so now I just feel like I'm getting what I expected - A chance to participate in the development of what will become an amazing game.

The more we, the players, pressure and demand from Stardock, the more likely we're going to end up with that 8-9 scoring game instead of the 10. Stardock is capable, but we need to realize that game development takes time, especially on an independant company's smaller budget.

I think this is an excellent suggestion. Knowledge is power and the more knowledge about people's gaming tastes you gain, the better Elemental will be. Please do this.

derek, as a long term utilities/applications programmer, I have found that the core is more like 10-20% with debug/polish 80-90% of time & labour, but very careful design of the project can reduce the debug/polish by 20-30%, but then the design could add 10-20% of the total time/resources, so in my opinion an ideally specced project would be design 10-20%,  core 10-20%, debug/polish 50-80%, and yes the total range IS 70% to 120% of the total project time and a sensible project manager would already have budgeted the extra 20% time and drive the project team hard enough to try for the 70% and offer a dual incentive of half the savings in time to the team & the other half to the 'customer' in the cas of custom programming projects.

harpo

I love the fact that it seems like about half the people on this forum have programming experience. <3

I am only a medium/long term programmer, as I started learning programming back in 1978 on a WANG computer that had  f o u r  K I L O B Y T E S of core memory and loaded cassette tapes at 500baud, and ironically the wang used the SAME tape codes/format as the TRS-80 that I bought later.

and some of the programmes/utilities that I have written over the years include several simple games(that I found fairly boring so stopped writing games) a wordporcessor , a mailing list manager (both using cassette for storage and later updated to floppy storage), for disc operating systems I have written a moderate range of utilities including a disc map printing program that printer out a HARDCOPY map showing where on the disc each file was allocated, and even a disc menu creation system that created machine language menus for the particular discs, and even heavily modified a database program creating program(all of these were created on the trs-80), and more recently there is my sins utilities and menus for my windows defense utilities discs that I prepare each morning.

perhaps it is the fact the programmers tend to like to hang out with likeminded people, and also that programmers and techs are far more technologically aware and therefore tend to have more to say relating to tech

harpo

This is a good outline of why software developers should avoid the bane of "scope creep" and often say no to features that some people want - it has a huge impact on releasing software products on-time with working features and without tons of bugs.

That makes me wonder if it's possible to budget for an ambitious game at all? Even if you knew how long it would take to add ambitious features, are you saying it wouldn't happen because games can only be budgeted for X development time? That's sort of depressing to think about, it makes me think that we'll never see really REALLY good games.

Its not a binary condition, ambitious or not, executable or not.  It's a scale.  If your question is, is there any game developer out there that is designing games without considering scope.  They just design dream games without considering the implication cost.  Then no.  I don't care if its Blizzard with Starcraft 2 or World of Warcraft, Zynga with Farmville.  No matter how many millions they have to develop with they still have to consider the implementation costs of every design decision.

But this isn't a curse on the gaming industry, or anything new.  In fact this applies to every industry.  If you are designing new years automobiles you are considering the implementation costs of every decision you make.  Ford, BMW and Lamborgini may have a different balance in where they draw those lines.  But pie in the sky designs aren't directly useful for creating great products (though they are an interesting exercise in trying to find good ideas that someone else may find a way to may executable).

Put another way it isn't a coincidence that James Cameron's 3d movie Avatar came when it did.  It wasn't because that was when Cameron had the concept and knew what he wanted (ie: the design).  It happened when it became executable.  Cameron didn't staff a team, get a producer, hire actors, press and marketing based on his idea and just wait for ideas to be executable because he had the design he wanted.  He shelved it and worked on other things until it could be done, then when it hit an acceptable level on both the ambition and execution scales, the movie got made.

But I would bet that if you talked to Cameron there are hundreds of things he would have liked in the movie that simply weren't executable.  So even in a 300 million dollar movie its all about matching ambition and execution.

I see it as a kind of indifference curve

Pumping more capital,more time or more labor will allow for either a more ambitious or better executed game, but there are limits, the more of one thing you put in, the less efficient that one thing will be.

Like a good story! *drumroll*

Well it was not a "Bad" story. It just wasn't exactly an "original" story.

To the OP. The largest issue, or it would seem in this day and age, is the diversity of tech any one game has to be able to operate on at an acceptable level.

The new "niche" game is one that spikes the hardware requirements out beyond much of the older gear and in the process eliminate many of the headaches that seem to plague EoW to this day.

So I would suggest, that the hardware requirements for the Enchantress expansion be cranked up...

The thing that worries me is a 'Rule' ive noticed in the past.

A game designer will knock out 1 or 2 really good games, They'll then start going on about various rules, tricks and whatnots of what makes 'good games design' Then every game they make starts to be a big pile of poo.

Hope you break that Rule!

Recommended hardware requirements, certainly - But Elemental was originally advertised to be able to run on even low end netbooks (Even if it's in cloth mode, it's still something). And how would they explain their decision to players that can run games like Oblivion on their systems but suddenly can't run a turn based game? To the every day consumer, turn based looks a lot simpler than a real time RPG, both in graphics and complexity.

Such a move would just alienate players and do even more harm to Stardock's reputation. I've seen plenty of games that will have low-end specs listed as minimum and then a much higher end spec for recommended. I'll still get the game and if it just barely runs, well, I'll be satisfied because I knew what I was getting on the box.

I swear you've read some of my rants about (game that will not be named) on another forum..and turned my single sentence thoughts into a long winded speech 

But i couldn't agree with this more(not that my opinion matters or anything), Great ideas mean jack if they are beyond implementation (to clarify not necessarily impossible.. but impossible with the resources at hand be it time, capital or talent restraints) or you have to cut so much that the end result seems empty or flawed.

Does the underground area in Age of Wonders count? It would likely be done the same way for what you discribe, only with far more levels (and the 'floating' ones would let you see the others below).

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Whether 3D is good or bad depends on the game; the only reason 3D might be considered a curse on gaming is it is seens as a must have these days.

harpo

Not to be a necromancer, but there are graphics sets for dwarf fortress. This is my favorite

Ironhand Graphics Set

I agree, derek, the ascii are a little too much to handle.

Be warned though, the last time I tried that graphic set it contained a worm