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Clang game project has run out of money
- hacknat 13y agoFor a second I literally thought Apple had decided not to fund clang (llvm compiler) anymore.
- PeterisP 13y agoSame here. WTF even is that other CLANG (the article doesn't say), and why should we care?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- plorkyeran 13y agoClick on the Home link just above the green bar.
- MAGZine 13y agoIt's a sword-fighting game being spearheaded by nerdcore author Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, Anathem, et c) http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang
- jere 13y agoCLANG is a sword fighting videogame/hardware project led by Neal Stephenson, a rather famous sci-fi author. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang [derp.... I forgot HN decapitalized titles. I was counting on that to differentiate it]
- mark-r 13y agoI don't think the capitalization would have helped, it's too subtle. I too was wondering what a game had to do with a C++ compiler.
- pfraze 13y agoYou should watch their kickstarter video. It's actually really entertaining.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jared314 13y agoThis is almost just bad timing, because the 3D motion/position capture hardware is just starting to get up to speed. At least the company itself is also a publishing company, so the project will only be put on hold.
- luchs 13y agoUnfortunately, the formatting of the possibly most interesting paragraph "LESSONS LEARNED" is broken. Here's a reformatted version: https://gist.github.com/lluchs/bd12ab2e17491c8c4b50 https://gist.github.com/lluchs/bd12ab2e17491c8c4b50
- mratzloff 13y agoWell, glad I wasn't one of the 9 people who donated $10,000. I tend to judge these projects by funding level. When I first saw CLANG with the goal of $500,000 but no publisher lined up, I decided to pass. $500,000 is not enough to develop something like this on a full-time basis.
- codezero 13y ago"We ran out of money and can't deliver, so give more of your money to another Kickstarter project." What?
- kevingadd 13y agoThey did release a downloadable game to backers, IIRC. I've seen videos of it being played.
- codezero 13y agoHey, it's better than nothing, right? :)
- necubi 13y agoThe demo is basically unplayable in its current state. The controls are unusable, and there's no real AI (your opponent mostly just stands there) nor multiplayer. I think backers are especially annoyed because the kickstarter originally promised a full game, but then at some point that shifted to a demo with no acknowledgment from Subutai that this was a change. Furthermore, a lot of us bought razer hydras (the motion controller used by the games) only to find out there would be no real game for it and that we should instead back some new motion control hardware on kickstarter.
- wahnfrieden 13y agoWelcome to Kickstarter and early adoption.
- Paul_S 13y agoI'm a backer but I have to say it looks like he just got bored with his toy and wants to do something else now.
- aeturnum 13y ago"Loyal donors may be curious as to why an apparently promising game is difficult to finance." Is this game really "apparently promising?" It's a highly technical fighting game that they admit, "is underwhelming in its current state." They're using a new control scheme that requires a special controller. It's also entirely possible that potential sources of funding are waiting for other games that focus on swordplay to release[0]. In addition, their team is a bit light on game veterans. The co-founders are both authors who don't appear to have business experience, much less game development experience. Their VP of game development is an industry veteran, but one who has mostly done art development. It seems like their most prominent backer is Valve's Gabe Newell.[1] I also can't find much on the actual development team, which makes me wonder where they're getting the assertion, "Our team punches above its weight." It also seems odd that they're pitching this as, "people just won't give us money for some reason," rather than, "we're doing something really risky and so it's hard to get funding." I like the idea, but I think the team has gotten too deep into their own project. [0] http://www.blade-symphony.com/ http://www.blade-symphony.com/ [1] http://www.subutai.mn/company.php http://www.subutai.mn/company.php
- Fuzzwah 13y agoSome of the core guys behind Blade Symphony are people I worked with on Dystopia (the multiplayer cyberpunk HL2 total conversion). They've done it all on the back of a kickstarter campaign which raised $19,058 back in 2011 and more recently pre-orders (which includes beta access). $15k of the kickstarter money was used to cover the source engine license cost. I'm obviously biased since much of the team are good friends of mine, but the quality work these guys are doing blows my mind.
- sillysaurus2 13y agoHolywhatthefuck. $19,058? In 2011? Are these guys independently wealthy or what? That's amazing, either way.
- Osmium 13y agoYou can go a long way when you don't consider your own time an expense!
- fleitz 13y agoI'm also developing a new sword fighting game: I've solved the hardware problem by using sticks of wood, by using sticks I get realistic physics for free, it even has realistic feedback which prevents you from swinging beyond your opponents sword. Also, anyone can make their own sword for approximately the cost of a broomstick. I've solved the game problem by re-using the rules from fencing. In the last 5 minutes I've successfully done what took CLANG $500,000 dollars to do. So in short if you want to play my sword fighting game download the rules of fencing, and buy a broomstick. If you're looking for other players I've developed a massively multiplayer offline game network called the SCA.
- Osmium 13y agoDevil's advocate: there's nothing wrong with some ambition, and all the backers knew what they were buying into. That said, your broomstick idea is actually really interesting: imagine an Oculus Rift + Kinect combo. You don't need any additional hardware other than a stick or rod of some kind, since the rod will constrain the motion of your hands and the Kinect could detect the rod anyway. Only potential issue is a lack of haptic feedback, but we've had vibration motors in games console controllers for decades now so it should be feasible to make a pair of gloves that vibrate on impact fairly cheaply. Surely someone must've tried this..?
- Millennium 13y agoI'm imagining a lot of shattered screens and broken Kinect cameras.
- jacquesc 13y agoI think he was being snarky in the "don't play video games, go do stuff" kind of way. fleitz: If interesting new ways to interact with games/computers isn't your thing, that's fine. But telling us all to f'off and go learn to fence really doesn't accomplish much.
- fleitz 13y agoNah, it's more of a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium. Nerds have this idea that everything you can do in the real world can be done in computers, when the actual strengths of the medium are all the things you can't do in the real world. Lets take desktops, file and folders fucking suck but everyone wants to reimplement it, when the real advantage of computers is search. Imagine someone came to you and said "I'm going to make an audiobook of the Mona Lisa", you'd look at them like they were a fucking idiot and rightly so.
- georgemcbay 13y ago"The overall climate in the industry has become risk-averse to a degree that is difficult to appreciate until you've seen it." This is kind of a bizarre claim. Not because it isn't true but because it was just as true in June of 2012 as it is now. It has been many, many years since the big money in the gaming industry has been funneled into things that aren't Grand Theft of Duty Creed: Halo Edition.
- _delirium 13y agoI guess I could be massively overestimating how much money successful authors earn, but doesn't Neal Stephenson have quite a bit of money lying around, which could be used to bootstrap such a project if necessary?
- venomsnake 13y agoYou are massively overestimating for everyone but the top top tier. Neal Stephenson has mostly cult following. Also 38 studios showed what happens when you let your ego fund a studio - not nice. So while I don't doubt that he will be able to provide some funding, probably the sums needed are way too big for him to bridge. I am a backer of the project - lets hope that if the project is doomed they will at least release the assets to the community that funded them.
- wildster 13y agoYou don't make very much money writing Science Fiction novels.
- leokun 13y agoWhat kickstarter teaches us is that there is a reason why gatekeepers to bags of money exist. Credibility, accountability and responsibility matter, kickstarter can only provide a description, bios and empty promises. Donors have very little to rely on when making a decision about funding, and no recourse when things go south, which seems to be the norm. Donors are ill equipped to make sound decisions in the first place, lacking experience, expertise and access. Kickstarter is a recipe ripe for failure and loss with little accountability.
- camus 13y agoYou mean no accountability whatsoever.That's what will kill Kickstarter.
- mercurial 13y ago> when things go south, which seems to be the norm. Source? > What kickstarter teaches us is that there is a reason why gatekeepers to bags of money exist. You absolutely never see games from big publishers be repeatedly delayed, killed off mid-development, or released mid-development. Fact is, game development is hard and fraught with risks. As far as I can tell, this part of Kickstarter is, in this regard, doing pretty well, and I'm certain that a game like the Torment remake would never have gotten funding without it. Now and then, some of them are going to tank, just like games from AAA publishers tend to do. Others will come out and be crap (though since so many of them include "pay more to get access to the alpha", I'd say it's much less likely that the released product will be out of line with backers' expectation). And though people do tend to treat as such, Kickstarter is not a pre-order system. There is a chance the product you fund will not make it (that's why there is a mandatory "Risks and challenges" at the bottom of each Kickstarter project page). I'd just rather risk some money for a potential product which appeals to me and would have no shot at seeing the light of the day otherwise, than preorder an outsourced-to-5-different-studios sequel to Aliens: Colonial Marines.
- leokun 13y ago> There is a chance the product you fund will not make it A very high chance, and the nature of that chance is not discernible to donors who have nothing to go buy other than the marketing materials on the Kickstarter page. People should not donate to Kickstarter, they should spend that money on existing games.
- jey 13y agoI'm just relieved to find out that "CLANG" isn't a video game you play by writing C++ code with the Clang compiler. LLVM's C++ frontend is cool, but not that cool.
- aardvark179 13y agoI was hoping for a game where you write optimization passes to transform a set of programs into a different set that let you solve each level. Actually, on a simple Robo Rally style set of instructions there may actually be a puzzle game in that.
- joosters 13y agoWhy did they not say anything until they had run out of money? It must have been obvious from some time ago that they did not have enough left to complete the project, yet they didn't care to tell their backers. Also, it seems odd that they talk about the problems they've had seeking other investors, as their kickstarter page didn't mention anything about needing more money. Rather, it implied that the $500k raised was all they needed to release the game. So at some point, they realised it wasn't enough and sought more investment, yet couldn't be arsed to post an update to kickstarter about the funding shortfall. Very poor.
- brokenparser 13y agoIt's even worse than that, I cite: Kickstarter is amazing, but one of the hidden catches is that once you have taken a bunch of people's money to do a thing, you have to actually do that thing You don't say.
- thomaspaine 13y agoYou should finish the quote... >Kickstarter is amazing, but one of the hidden catches is that once you have taken a bunch of people's money to do a thing, you have to actually do that thing, and not some other thing that you thought up in the meantime. His point being that Kickstarter funding makes it hard to pivot, as opposed to other types of funding.
- Wingman4l7 13y agoThe rest of the quote actually gives a poorer impression.
- mcv 13y agoAll kinds of funding come with some sort of commitment. If you want to do something else instead, you talk to your funders. They could have discussed this with their backers, but didn't.
- ricardobeat 13y ago$500k and a year later, they have a very limited game prototype and no money left. Meanwhile, an amazing, polished and content-rich game like Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP cost $200k in total (and the initial estimate was $110k), including development of it's own graphics engine. Something's amiss?
- Draiken 13y agoBy looking at the numbers the only thing you can see is the truth about how little they asked for such a big project. $500k barely pays the salary of the team building the game. As hard as it is to do an indie game, people do it for way less than $200k... heck, many people do it for "free" on their own spare time. I don't see that happening on project aiming to build an SDK made for a specific game type that includes new hardware.
- jlarocco 13y agoHaha, that was confusing. Skimmed half the article trying to figure out how they expected to make a game out of clang/llvm in the first place, only to realize it has nothing to do with that project.
- TheMagicHorsey 13y agoAnyone that reads Neal Stephenson books knows that he has an amazing imagination, but he has no idea what makes a fun game. His games sound cool on paper, but if you are someone who makes games for a living and you hear about his love of "realism", and you see what his design decisions are, you realize that he doesn't know anything about making things fun. Making things realistic is not making things fun.
- Wingman4l7 13y agoRealistic can be very fun. It usually happens when the thing that you want to do would be too expensive for you to afford in real life (flying jets in flight simulators, for instance). In this case, it's a pretty small niche -- people who are interested enough in fencing to want a proper simulator, but who don't have the time / money / commitment / fitness to do it for real.
- camus 13y agoI'm sorry i'll never get how some people can give 500 000 $ for phantom projects. Especially when serious projects are backed by real investors under the hood(that will make a profit if the project is successfull). Kickstarter is basically free money. There is no such thing as free money or it is really just a scam. I hear people say "It's not about the money" ,well, it is ONLY about the money.