Notes from Underground
on
Funding New Games
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
With typical game budgets being in the $500,000 range, I'm wondering if there still is a place for the "garage" game developer.
Take my little project, for example. I'm currently trying to scrape together $3,000 to: 1) buy a decent soundtrack, 2) buy some decent sound effects, and 3) advertise on a few websites. The rest of the time and effort required to bring the game up to a "marketable" level (adding lots of eyecandy and gameplay extras) comes directly from me, so I don't include that in the final price.
I'd like to be able to simply take out a personal loan, but for that I'd have to be pretty sure that the game could sell at least 300 copies online at $10 a pop.
If this little game works, it's not that much of a stretch to pull together $30,000 (about the size of a car loan) for a game, if you could expect to sell 3000 copies at $10 each. It then becomes like real estate, I suppose.
If it were only that easy. I suspect that the distance between a finished game and a sold game is just as long as the distance between an idea and a finished game... Clearly, big budgets don't necessarily equate to big sales, but does that mean that small budget titles don't even stand a chance at profit?
I'm sorry that I didn't get a chance to look at this topic sooner!
Here at the University of Illinois, I'm a project leader for our game programming club Gamebuilders, so I'm pretty well versed in the rudiments of game design.
Yes, the best thing that I can recommend for anyone starting with game programming is to go the OpenGL route. For better or worse, graphics programming is a major component of game design, and OpenGL is general enough so your skills might apply to any number of systems if you choose to pursue a career in game developlent.
That said, the best way to get started with OpenGL is to use GLUT, the OpenGL Utility Toolkit. It's a great way to learn OpenGL without having to get bogged down in the specifics of the OS you're dealing with.
Also, there are numerous tutorials available on the subject of OpenGL and game programming in general on NeHe's site. If I had to point beginning to intermediate game programmers to one site and one site only, it would be there.
If you have any specific questions about OpenGL or GLUT, feel free to send me an email, as well!
Like the article states, any kind of patent can be invalidated by the demonstration of prior art. This particular patent seems a bit too general to be nontrivial when it was filed in 1996.
The actual fees (starting at $570 annually for a company with a revenue of $100,000) aren't really all that large, though. My website would probably only have to pay $14 a year! But I do understand how this whole patent nonsense is spiraling out of control.
We can either work hard to prove prior art, or we can work hard to get the IP system restructured. Or we can just shell out the money and be done with it...
Honestly, I didn't even know that it was football season.
After I stopped watching TV about 2 years ago, I've been increasingly out of sync with popular culture. I just don't have time for all that extra information that is extraneous to my work.
More and more of my "news" comes from/., and I'm not sure if that's good or bad...
Like it or not, force is the ultimate form of power. Sometimes the only thing that keeps an opponent from hurting or killing you is the knowledge that they will be killed. And even then, it's sometimes not enough.
In any society where physical force is equated with some kind of status and power, then yes, most social interactions would degenerate into people fighting and murdering one another.
As long as people have something to gain (or think they do) by physically dominating or murdering someone else, then lethal weapons become necessary.
Ultimately, it's a self-destructive cycle of violence and death, with each person feeling entitled to murder either because of the law, personal revenge, or, more commonly, god told them to. If you play into the belief that you need to have the ability to kill on demand in order to be safe and secure, you're just adding to the problem, in my opinion.
I'm suprised I haven't seen more penis jokes in response to this story, because in the same article they have a link to this story: Tissue engineers grow penis in the lab.
My psychology prof. just gave a lecture about how basic research is fundamentally important, but you've got to wonder why all these research dollars are being spent in the field of penis enlargeonomy...
I'm generally opposed to murder in all it's forms (death penalty, war; holy, political or both) so it's good to see people spending time on weapons that essentially don't hurt anyone.
I'd much rather live in a future where police are armed with neutralizing weapons a la Minority Report, rather than walking around with god damned AK-47s like the police in many countries do today.
If I had to choose, I'd rather be made to puke with a vomit stick by accident than be shot through the heart over a simple Halloween misunderstanding...
They are always getting one step closer to "the perfect soldier." Nanotech stealthsuits, nutrition patches and now drugs that take away guilt and remorse. Murder has never been so easy (uh... probably!).
The next step would be to have a drug that wipes the memory (it is possible to inhibit the brain's long-term memory "commits" chemically) of the grunts in the field after a certain amount of time has elapsed, making for the ultimate in top-secret, covert missions.
If nobody remembers the horrendous attrocities, it's like they never happened at all!
The whole window / tv screen thing has been a staple of futuristic anime for a while now, as well as a lot of standard sci-fi, if I'm not mistaken.
It is definitely more of a "Japanese" techology in the sense that it combines the functions of two things, saving both space and money. A boon for all of us who are cramped into tiny one-bedroom apartments.
As a (soon to be) CS grad, after reading through all of the promotional material for the "Phantom" I was amazed to find not one scrap of real technical information.
I'm not even sure that the PR guy they interviewed is even human. I don't think he'd pass a Turing test.
No kinds of hints as to what the underlying architecture might be. Nothing about the graphics / sound hardware. Nothing about the media format. I mean, these are the kinds of things that the hard-core really go for, and all they can say is that "it will please hard-core games." How?
Sorry to say, but my shifty cousin is one of these "entreprenuer" types. "Entrepreneur" usually means "scam artist" in my experience.
A bunch of veteran "entreprenuers" from Florida (that technological mecca)? This whole thing is obviously a scam for VC...
You say that it costs you less than $3 to copy a CD, but you are ignoring a bit of the "overhead", in both time and money, that enable you to copy the audio in the first place.
If we just ignore the cost of the broadband connection that allows you to download songs so fast (and hell, even the *computer* you're using), and simply count the time taken out of your day to track down your desired songs through all the porn and pop, I'd bet it would come to some figure higher than $3.
I guess what I'm trying to say is this; finding and burning music that you like has certain costs associated with it, so I don't think it's entirely true to say that you can pirate music for "next to nothing."
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With typical game budgets being in the $500,000 range, I'm wondering if there still is a place for the "garage" game developer.
Take my little project, for example. I'm currently trying to scrape together $3,000 to: 1) buy a decent soundtrack, 2) buy some decent sound effects, and 3) advertise on a few websites. The rest of the time and effort required to bring the game up to a "marketable" level (adding lots of eyecandy and gameplay extras) comes directly from me, so I don't include that in the final price.
I'd like to be able to simply take out a personal loan, but for that I'd have to be pretty sure that the game could sell at least 300 copies online at $10 a pop.
If this little game works, it's not that much of a stretch to pull together $30,000 (about the size of a car loan) for a game, if you could expect to sell 3000 copies at $10 each. It then becomes like real estate, I suppose.
If it were only that easy. I suspect that the distance between a finished game and a sold game is just as long as the distance between an idea and a finished game... Clearly, big budgets don't necessarily equate to big sales, but does that mean that small budget titles don't even stand a chance at profit?
I'm sorry that I didn't get a chance to look at this topic sooner!
Here at the University of Illinois, I'm a project leader for our game programming club Gamebuilders, so I'm pretty well versed in the rudiments of game design.
Yes, the best thing that I can recommend for anyone starting with game programming is to go the OpenGL route. For better or worse, graphics programming is a major component of game design, and OpenGL is general enough so your skills might apply to any number of systems if you choose to pursue a career in game developlent.
That said, the best way to get started with OpenGL is to use GLUT, the OpenGL Utility Toolkit. It's a great way to learn OpenGL without having to get bogged down in the specifics of the OS you're dealing with.
Also, there are numerous tutorials available on the subject of OpenGL and game programming in general on NeHe's site. If I had to point beginning to intermediate game programmers to one site and one site only, it would be there.
If you have any specific questions about OpenGL or GLUT, feel free to send me an email, as well!
Like the article states, any kind of patent can be invalidated by the demonstration of prior art. This particular patent seems a bit too general to be nontrivial when it was filed in 1996.
The actual fees (starting at $570 annually for a company with a revenue of $100,000) aren't really all that large, though. My website would probably only have to pay $14 a year! But I do understand how this whole patent nonsense is spiraling out of control.
We can either work hard to prove prior art, or we can work hard to get the IP system restructured. Or we can just shell out the money and be done with it...
Honestly, I didn't even know that it was football season.
/., and I'm not sure if that's good or bad...
After I stopped watching TV about 2 years ago, I've been increasingly out of sync with popular culture. I just don't have time for all that extra information that is extraneous to my work.
More and more of my "news" comes from
As long as people have something to gain (or think they do) by physically dominating or murdering someone else, then lethal weapons become necessary.
Ultimately, it's a self-destructive cycle of violence and death, with each person feeling entitled to murder either because of the law, personal revenge, or, more commonly, god told them to. If you play into the belief that you need to have the ability to kill on demand in order to be safe and secure, you're just adding to the problem, in my opinion.
I'm suprised I haven't seen more penis jokes in response to this story, because in the same article they have a link to this story: Tissue engineers grow penis in the lab.
My psychology prof. just gave a lecture about how basic research is fundamentally important, but you've got to wonder why all these research dollars are being spent in the field of penis enlargeonomy...
I'm generally opposed to murder in all it's forms (death penalty, war; holy, political or both) so it's good to see people spending time on weapons that essentially don't hurt anyone.
I'd much rather live in a future where police are armed with neutralizing weapons a la Minority Report, rather than walking around with god damned AK-47s like the police in many countries do today.
If I had to choose, I'd rather be made to puke with a vomit stick by accident than be shot through the heart over a simple Halloween misunderstanding...
They are always getting one step closer to "the perfect soldier." Nanotech stealthsuits, nutrition patches and now drugs that take away guilt and remorse. Murder has never been so easy (uh... probably!).
The next step would be to have a drug that wipes the memory (it is possible to inhibit the brain's long-term memory "commits" chemically) of the grunts in the field after a certain amount of time has elapsed, making for the ultimate in top-secret, covert missions.
If nobody remembers the horrendous attrocities, it's like they never happened at all!
The whole window / tv screen thing has been a staple of futuristic anime for a while now, as well as a lot of standard sci-fi, if I'm not mistaken.
It is definitely more of a "Japanese" techology in the sense that it combines the functions of two things, saving both space and money. A boon for all of us who are cramped into tiny one-bedroom apartments.
As a (soon to be) CS grad, after reading through all of the promotional material for the "Phantom" I was amazed to find not one scrap of real technical information.
I'm not even sure that the PR guy they interviewed is even human. I don't think he'd pass a Turing test.
No kinds of hints as to what the underlying architecture might be. Nothing about the graphics / sound hardware. Nothing about the media format. I mean, these are the kinds of things that the hard-core really go for, and all they can say is that "it will please hard-core games." How?
Sorry to say, but my shifty cousin is one of these "entreprenuer" types. "Entrepreneur" usually means "scam artist" in my experience.
A bunch of veteran "entreprenuers" from Florida (that technological mecca)? This whole thing is obviously a scam for VC...
You say that it costs you less than $3 to copy a CD, but you are ignoring a bit of the "overhead", in both time and money, that enable you to copy the audio in the first place.
If we just ignore the cost of the broadband connection that allows you to download songs so fast (and hell, even the *computer* you're using), and simply count the time taken out of your day to track down your desired songs through all the porn and pop, I'd bet it would come to some figure higher than $3.
I guess what I'm trying to say is this; finding and burning music that you like has certain costs associated with it, so I don't think it's entirely true to say that you can pirate music for "next to nothing."