Allegiance 2

[MrChaos]

Cashto and OMB are both correct

ranks to trend to equalized match play and shiney things are the popsicles and shock collars to keep you coming back

[Terran]

QUOTE (phoenix1 @ Feb 5 2013, 10:21 PM) 18 months at 150k a year comes out to 4.5 mil?

Jesus man, invest in a calculator or something.

this is why i wouldnt invest if p1 is leading this effort
on the other hand, 150k a year is a bit much no? recent grads right out of school should be way cheaper than that and more or less just as good as the old farts

[cashto]

QUOTE (Terran @ Feb 6 2013, 09:04 PM)
this is why i wouldnt invest if p1 is leading this effort
on the other hand, 150k a year is a bit much no? recent grads right out of school should be way cheaper than that and more or less just as good as the old farts

Eh, it's US salary. Could be done cheaper if offshored. Might be able to con some people into doing it for ramen noodles and equity. I think hiring people straight out of college would turn out to be a false economy (i.e., put the project at risk failure or at least significant delays).

Also, I said "fully loaded". That $150k isn't just salary, but includes benefits, taxes, HR compliance costs, office space, recruitment, all manner of other overhead. The rule of thumb is to take the salary and double it.

As far as 20 people and 18 months go, I pulled those numbers out of my ass ... but I went back, though, and they weren't too far off:

QUOTE Six months later, we had a design created and a team built. That was a little over two years ago. It's been a long row, but wow, we're almost there![/quote]

QUOTE Creating a working prototype was kind of hard for Allegiance. We could fly around in space and shoot people 2 years ago. But we could only imagine what it would be like to play with 32 other players, let alone several hundred. It's tough to get that many people playing early in the cycle when you have a team of like 10.[/quote]

QUOTE So how much code does it take to create a game like Allegiance? Since people frequently ask me, and I was kind of curious myself, I just checked how much code we have, and it's approximately 450 thousand lines.[/quote]

[Spunkmeyer]

QUOTE (cashto @ Feb 7 2013, 12:45 AM) As far as 20 people and 18 months go, I pulled those numbers out of my ass ... but I went back, though, and they weren't too far off:

Yeah but the original Allegiance ran into serious difficulty with Dplay, and it was in the midst of transition to DirectX 7. They had no engine to work off-of. And they weren't game programmers. I also doubt if everyone on the team was full time on this. The costs will also be much less when you aren't part of something like MS. And I have seen *very* impressive stuff pulled off with only 3 people.

You really think it'd cost more than twice as much as what Braben figures it'll take to get Elite: Dangerous done? If you added all the bells & whistles you could think of (which would be highly unnecessary for the game to succeed) it still would not match ED in scope.

[cashto]

Well, remember, I said I'm only making an order of magnitude calculation. So anything between $450,000 and $45m is really my guess.

If you could base Alleg 2 off an existing engine or something, sure, that could cut the cost. I'm guessing though there are going to be bells and whistles, and novel gameplay elements in Alleg 2 that aren't in Alleg 1 (Or else what's the point?)

While I have no doubt that small, highly experienced, established teams can pull off some impressive stuff, I'm gonna go with the assumption P1 doesn't have one of those up his sleeve.

[Bacon_00]

P1 I definitely applaud your apparent zeal for this project. You seem to really think it's possible, and who knows, maybe it is. But I think the best thing you could do is stop talking and start doing. If you are really passionate about this project, then do it. Don't let me or anybody else make you doubt it. There are lots of people who were told "no" and ended up making a @#(!load of money by not listening to "no." But there's many, many more who heard "no," went ahead with their project anyway, and lost a lot of time and money and ego. You just don't hear about them because they ended up not doing anything anybody would ever hear about.

Talk is cheap. You show us (and the rest of the internet) something tangible and impressive and you'll generate some interest. If you want Kickstarter funds, you need to show people something. Something that impresses them. Something that catches their attention in a sea of extremely talented people and their products begging for attention. Kickstarter isn't a money-factory. It's just a way to show people your ideas. I don't think a single Kickstarter from an unknown game developer with no working prototype has gotten anywhere near its funding. You need a resume, a product, and a good sales pitch, just like in the real world, if you want stranger's money. Right now, you have nothing. You need to stop defending yourself with words and start showing us why we're wrong. Otherwise, I guarantee, this project will be dead before it begins.

If you think we're being harsh, wait until you start asking complete strangers who have never heard of Allegiance (aka Kickstarter) for money.

[Spunkmeyer]

Well, just a straight rewrite of Alleg would just look better simply because technology has improved. It'd be much easier to add to with a more maintainable code base. You would want to add to the feature set of course, but a lot of it can be done iteratively IF you plan for it ahead of time. For example, adding a strategic meta-game layer later on would be easy if you built-in the hooks for it. Or you could always add 'real' carriers later if you designed the game around that. Meanwhile you 'd still have a full playable better-than-Alleg experience you could shop around.

[notjarvis]

QUOTE (Bacon @ Feb 7 2013, 09:23 AM) P1 I definitely applaud your apparent zeal for this project. You seem to really think it's possible, and who knows, maybe it is. But I think the best thing you could do is stop talking and start doing. If you are really passionate about this project, then do it. Don't let me or anybody else make you doubt it. There are lots of people who were told "no" and ended up making a @#(!load of money by not listening to "no." But there's many, many more who heard "no," went ahead with their project anyway, and lost a lot of time and money and ego. You just don't hear about them because they ended up not doing anything anybody would ever hear about.

Talk is cheap. You show us (and the rest of the internet) something tangible and impressive and you'll generate some interest. If you want Kickstarter funds, you need to show people something. Something that impresses them. Something that catches their attention in a sea of extremely talented people and their products begging for attention. Kickstarter isn't a money-factory. It's just a way to show people your ideas. I don't think a single Kickstarter from an unknown game developer with no working prototype has gotten anywhere near its funding. You need a resume, a product, and a good sales pitch, just like in the real world, if you want stranger's money. Right now, you have nothing. You need to stop defending yourself with words and start showing us why we're wrong. Otherwise, I guarantee, this project will be dead before it begins.

If you think we're being harsh, wait until you start asking complete strangers who have never heard of Allegiance (aka Kickstarter) for money.

Bacon gives wise advice IMO

[jbansk]

If you want your idea to have any chance of success....


DON'T ASK THIS COMMUNITY HOW TO DO IT!!...


Look at what they did to Allegiance 1.

[vogue]

yep bacon nailed it, if you can give the public a prototype with at least the front end up and people willing to pay for your good then it'll be extremely easy to find investors. till then it's just an idea in your mind that hasn't yielded any results and investors usually avoid these people like the plague