Kickstarter is awesome. The people who invented it deserve all their success. Wow! People are making games and don't have to take that big risk - "Should I put all this effort in only to discover that nobody wants to buy it?" - people are testing the waters - "Does anyone actually want this?" - and doing it without dealing with publishers.
Hell, I want to Kickstart everything now.
But here's the first thing I want to Kickstart: I want to recapture my glory days. I want to make another game with an awesome swinging mechanic. The kind of swinging mechanic that makes jaded hate-almost-everything game reviewers like "Yahtzee" Croshaw actually say something nice, call it "Fun, Fast, Flowing, Finuitive", and even put it on his top five games of all-time list. The kind of swinging mechanic that gets you nominated for an AIAS award (only to lose out to Half-Life 2 ... well, who can beat Half-Life 2?). The kind of swinging mechanic that makes it hard to work, because when I'm supposed to be tracking down a bug or testing a feature I find myself getting lost in it, just swinging around a sandbox world without a care.
Obviously, there's no way a publisher would greenlight this. ("Let me get this straight. You basically want to make a game like Spider-Man 2 ... without Spider-Man?" "Um ... kinda?" "Next!") And maybe nobody but me actually wants it. But Kickstarter will let me find out, without taking too much of a risk.
I've already started prototyping a swinging mechanic in Unity, and am amazed at just how much faster it's going than when I programmed up Spidey's webswinging in 2002. I don't need to go down certain dead ends - last time we marked up the terrain with points for the lines to attach to, only to eventually decide that it was more fun to arbitrarily raycast into the geometry to find the points. So I don't have to waste time marking up terrain. I can block out obstacle courses in Unity extremely rapidly - back then I had to struggle with Max, import the terrain, and write a page long INI file to get a level into the game. Last time I had to work against the existing code-base, taking out all of the lines of code that killed the hero's momentum - this time I'm building up instead of tearing down. I'm at least an order of magnitude more productive!
And the whole game can be done over an order of magnitude faster. Making sixty second shooter taught me a thing or two about rapid development. About keeping scope down, taking the shortest path to 'ship it', about necessity being the mother of invention - before sixty second shooter I used to think that you couldn't make a game in less than eighteen months unless it was a sequel. If the game focuses entirely on the swinging, and it's single-player, and we have a smaller, more abstract, world to explore (sure, New York was big - but didn't it kind of feel mostly all the same?) - I believe that if I teamed up with one artist, we could do it all in under a year.
There's the rub, though: the 3D artist/animators I know have jobs or are otherwise occupied.
So I'm putting the call out. If you know a can-do-it-all artist - concept, modeling, texturing, and animation - who might be interested in spending a year or so making a game they can call their own (with equity, of course!) - put them in touch with me. ([email protected]) There's almost no risk - one piece of concept art, of the main character, might be enough to sell the project. We might not even need that. We can work remotely, so no need to relocate. If the Kickstarter doesn't get funded, not much skin off anyone's nose. If it does - well, then we actually have to finish the game - and we'll talk about that, to make sure we don't commit to anything impossible.
So excited!
Wow. Words fail me. I am so excited about this! Will put the words out to any artists I know, and DEFINITELY will be funding!
Posted by: Tathamjohnson | March 26, 2012 at 05:59 PM
Jamie, this is a GREAT idea. Good luck with it!!!
Posted by: Darius K. | March 28, 2012 at 04:56 AM