Developer Blog

[RudyOosterndijk]

Personally, I'm not yet sure what to think about all of that. So I won't comment on the matter itself.

Let me just throw in the fact that our "3 hard-working individuals" put some significant work in GR1 - for free. Make of that what you want.

[Haruna]

Here, GR 2.0 uses Unity, so the hardest work - the underlying engine - is already done for them.

f**k you. Sure, there is already some scripting language and a graphics engine there to use. But you really think that a game engine and its development kit provide the developers with a one-click-easy, no-effort solution? You still have to write the physics, AI, menu, and other internal scripts, you still need to develop the graphical assets, might need additional 3rd-party development tools that might have to be written from scratch, optimize the graphics engine to fit your art style and your minimal computer needs, and on top of that, a game developer who puts his in-progress project work out for the public to view has to put up with whiny, inane, and unreasonable folks like you.

James and co are NOT Turn 10 Studios or Polyphony Digital, hell, they PALE in comparison to even Kunos Simulazioni (and that dev team is TINY)! You really expect them to juggle day jobs AND game development work AND put out a great successor to the GeneRally we know and love in a reasonable frame of time?

There are entire goddamn colleges in North America (and probably Europe too) dedicated to game development, and you know what? NOT EVERYONE MAKES IT THROUGH!!!! WHY!? Because even WITH an engine, you still need to build the frame, and all the other components on and around it! And not everyone is good at that! We'd all be game devs if that were the case, no?

I don't care if you take away my Car Master honors over this post; that one sentence is like a big 'f**k you' to all of the developers who use game development kits and engines.

And while I'm a bit skeptical that the Kickstarter will meet its goals, I will, unlike you, contribute!

[Lukeno94]

Of course they're not Turn 10 Studios or Polyphony Digital, nor did anyone say they were. However, there are plenty of indie devs out there putting out very good games for absolutely nothing. OpenTTD is one example, racer being another - long term projects that have never needed Kickstarter, or people to do anything other than donate. I use games like Racer as evidence that you can do this without charging anyone a penny, and merely asking for donations - and Racer was done from scratch. I did not say that all the hard work had been done, or even most of it; simply that the hardest part has been done. I'm not one of the people demanding a "reasonable amount of time" clause, so you can drop that rubbish straight away; I'd be happy for it to take 5 years, if that's what it took to do it properly.

[resir014]

OpenTTD is one example, racer being another

Now, now, those two games are "open source" games. They're different - they have various contributors worldwide who volunteer themselves to contribute changes to the game, such as feature contributions and bug fixes.

GR, as a freeware game is different. While the GR devs distribute their game for free, they didn't distribute their source code. They're the only ones that work on adding changes and fixing the bugs.

And James, thanks for your explanation. Although I'm still skeptical that the goal would be reached, which is why I refrain from sparing some cash at the moment. Sorry.

[Lukeno94]

OpenTTD is, but it was initially done by a very small group of people. Racer is most definitely not open source, and I don't know where you got that from.

[Glen]

Lukeno, please, wait the end of the Kickstarter, then we'll what happens

[puttz]

I would point out that OpenTTD is an open source game, so that doesn't really apply since GR2 is closed source with a 3 man dev team. Racer is not open source, but people can access the code and submit modifications to the dev team for approval. So, I'm not entirely sure that argument is valid for either of those games. Just saying.

@resir, if I'm not mistaken, if the KS does not reach the goal for pledges, you don't pay anything. The payment only goes through if the goal is reached.

[Crono]

Generally was freeware game and WE (community) want to keep it as a freeware game...That's the spirit of generally.

Really? The spirit of GeneRally is that its free? Well it helped spreading the game for sure, but its not what GeneRally is about. And now we have the opportunity to get a Sequel of the Game - polished and with a lot of features WE (the whole community) would like to see - all that for just 10 € (minimum). I could not even visit the cinema with that money ...

And about the Unity argument: Everyone who ever worked with Unity (lets say making a game) knows that this is helping alot - but its far from being done just by using unity. Unity just provides the Framework to create a game - all the game logic, physics etc isnt there. There is no random finished game popping up when you open the IDE.

Here is the situation from my personal view: We are a great community and we now have the great chance to get a sequel of GeneRally - the Game we all love. We have waited for years, and now we have the chance to speed up the developement for a few bucks! Isnt that great? But there is more! The developers are really friendly guys who already did a lot of work for us for free. And they give us the chance to have an influence on the game. They listen to what we would like to see in the game!

Yes, the situation may not be perfect, but its not that GR costs 50€ - it will be cheap (even cheaper than minecraft) - and if you like to use online features (on servers that need to be payed btw) you have to spend some money - i dont see a big problem here. And if you dont like to spend money and just play the game - you can do so.

Cu Crono

[Lukeno94]

OpenTTD is open source, but as I said, the very early versions were done by a small team. The only source code available for Racer is absolutely ancient, and is barely relevant to the current version. The argument is relevant, because the basic game was done by very small teams (or, in the case of racer, almost all was done by one man), and the other stuff is fluff on top.

[Crono]

Let me quote the OpenTTD page:

If you enjoy playing OpenTTD and would like to help support its development, please consider donating. OpenTTD is developed and released free of charge, and the developers give up their own free time to work on the game. In addition the server used to build the releases and host the web services costs a lot of money to run, so any support would be appreciated.

The need money too. They just collecting it in a different way.

Cu Crono

[Lukeno94]

Yes, donations, which if you actually read what I've wrote, I've said all along that they've been receiving those... jeez.

[Haruna]

Yes, Luke, long-term projects are beautiful when they finally come to fruition, and yes, Racer and OpenTTD are great examples of free long-term projects that are really awesome. But those, at least in the gaming world, are few and far between.

I was a developer for Speed Dreams. 2D artist, nothing special. It had an international development team with backgrounds ranging from engineers at major German car companies to physics majors to aspiring web artists to obsessive gamers who wanted to contribute something more useful than a bitchy forum post. It fell apart. It could have been something great. But it's not.

And there are plenty of projects out there that have similarly fallen into the shadows of obscurity. We tried, we honestly did. Sure, there were times I had it easy - plenty of time to create new cars for GeneRally while juggling new liveries or logotypes for Speed Dreams. But nothing stays constant except for the factor of change.

Sure. Let's wait. Let's wait while this community is slowly declining. Let's wait five years where James and co's passion for developing the game may be uncertain two years from now. Let's wait while an economic crisis looms about in the background. Unlike Speed Dreams (and by extension TORCS), if GR2's dev team is no longer able to develop the game for whatever reason, you or I cannot simply fork the project on SourceForge. Bad things happen to those who wait too.

[Crono]

Yes, donations, which if you actually read what I've wrote, I've said all along that they've been receiving those... jeez.

Sorry, that was not against you

Cu Crono

[Lukeno94]

We waited far more than 5 years for GeneRally 1.05 to be updated to 1.10. The comments that basically say "well things may get a bit rocky without money" don't wash.

[Haruna]

We waited far more than 5 years for GeneRally 1.05 to be updated to 1.10.

And that was because it had no active developers for a long time. Five years is a long time for things to happen. Given how crazy I drive in real-life, and given I live in a state where nearly every driver has little consideration for the safety of others - I probably won't have those five years you'd love to wait. And there's at least one good example of a game that took TEN years to develop, and it got ripped apart by both the gaming press and gamers who were waiting for it. There may not even be a community five years from now.

[Trigger Happy]

We waited far more than 5 years for GeneRally 1.05 to be updated to 1.10. The comments that basically say "well things may get a bit rocky without money" don't wash.

5 years by playing finished GR ... can you imagine how much time it will need only to keep GR working in next 5 years (new OSes etc)? Do you think guys have so much free time to continuously and simultaneously work 5 years on 2 games? It's not a demand, that GR2 needs to be developed in reasonable time, it's necessity, which James and co. themselves are aware of, they do point out the need! And still it'll be quite a task to maintain both games playable and one of them to develop.

[Lukeno94]

I didn't say that they have to continuously work on GeneRally, did I? Or that they had to continue working on the old version? That's the whole bloody point about the 5 year wait... And in no way is this a necessity.

And that ten-year-development case, I'm assuming you're referring to Duke Nukem Forever; that was a game that cost money to buy, and was very much in the wrong era (particularly with regards to its humour). GeneRally's basic game style is not era-dependant, because it is so simplistic.

[Haruna]

You're one of the few who can trivialize game development in this community, Luke. Aww. How cute~!

[Bouncebackability]

I discovered GeneRally as I was bored and browsing free racing games, the features that were available to me then have kept me here for the subsequent years. From what I'm reading, those features that were free then, are going to be free in GR2. So for free, you're getting a VASTLY improved version of GeneRally, which you could happily continue to play for years.

As someone who almost never takes part in competitions, I've never been too preoccupied about the addition of online, so really, apart from the day-night cycle (potentially something I could live without) I would probably stick with the free one anyway. But I plan on donating more than £8 towards kickstarter, so the point is kind of mute. But I think the solution is fairly well considered.

I'm just still taken aback by the amount of money required (both kickstarter and thereafter), and I'm still struggling to fully understand how the figures were reached. Nearly £9000 on rewards seems kinda counter intuitive to me - its more than Kickstarter fees, Software licences, server & business costs combined - surely these are more essential than providing boxed versions posted halfway around the world?

[James]

And James, thanks for your explanation. Although I'm still skeptical that the goal would be reached, which is why I refrain from sparing some cash at the moment. Sorry.

@resir, if I'm not mistaken, if the KS does not reach the goal for pledges, you don't pay anything. The payment only goes through if the goal is reached.

Yup, this is 100% correct. Unless we hit £25,000, we get exactly £0 - this is the main reason for us choosing Kickstarter. We want to ensure that we can come good on the promises we make and, as such, we either want the full amount or nothing at this stage. If the funding fails, we'll look into other options if there's still concrete demand for the game - but that would mean that we wouldn't be able to offer the same perks/rewards (economies of scale, etc.) and we wouldn't be able to offer the same concrete guarantee of completion. Kickstarter is our way of providing donors with security and some nice little extras

I'm just still taken aback by the amount of money required (both kickstarter and thereafter), and I'm still struggling to fully understand how the figures were reached. Nearly £9000 on rewards seems kinda counter intuitive to me - its more than Kickstarter fees, Software licences, server & business costs combined - surely these are more essential than providing boxed versions posted halfway around the world?

We're very happy to reconsider the amount of money spent on rewards if that's something the community wants us to do. From our research of other projects of a similar type (both funded and unfunded) we believed that offering some really nice physical rewards (T-shirts, boxed copies, etc.) was something that the community would want. We can cut a vast majority of that reward budget, simply by removing things like the posters from the rewards (the boxed copies are generally a part of the higher-funding tiers, so we don't really lose out on those as we're not producing that many).

For clarity, I'm perfectly happy for us to delay the Kickstarter a bit to get community feedback on desired rewards if that's what the majority of people think should happen. Obviously, we do need to keep some rewards to attempt to entice people who aren't currently part of the community to contribute.

Let me break this down for you - currently, we're looking at around £8,000 assigned to reward fulfilment and postage. This is based upon a flat rate postage cost (as Kickstarter won't allow us to charge variable postage rates), and raw cost for the bulk items we'd buy. As an example of costings, if we removed posters and postcards from all the tiers, we would save around £2,000 from the budget in raw production costs, and about another £1,500 from postage (dropping us to a little closer to £20k rather than £25k).

The only physical goods we are providing at this stage are T-Shirts, Posters, Novelty Postcards, Boxed Copies and a Limited Edition (of which there are only 7 available). The production and shipping costs on the boxed copies and limited editions total only to about £1,000, so aren't really as significant a part of the costing... the expensive bits are the T-Shirts, Posters and Novelty Postcards. Currently, we've budgeted to be able to ship around 400 packages internationally (with only about half of those being packages with T-Shirts in them)... but the cost is huge when you're not producing items in the tens of thousands of units. The raw costs we're proposing, without any physical rewards/perks at all, total to ~£15k. To produce and fulfil ~400 reward packages, we're looking at an extra ~£8k (which is £20/package, where around £10/package is going to the lowest speed, bog-standard international shipping).

The perks are largely there to give incentives to you. If someone funds at, let's say, £15, we get about the same amount of money from that as someone funding at £40, simply because of the cost of fulfilling the rewards offered. We, as developers, have no actual benefit from the physical rewards and, in fact, it just means we'll have to spend several days packaging and shipping your rewards. We're planning to offer them simply because we thought that was something that would be important and valuable to the community - if it's not, we'll change that (and we'll still offer our nice digital rewards)!

As I said above, if you think this is worthy of some kind of discussion before we launch Kickstarter, I'll happily start a thread to collate peoples' views on the matter

[Bouncebackability]

Well, as an older member of the community who is likely to be able to afford to contribute towards the higher tiers than some of our community aged 10-15, I'm not all that bothered about some of the physical rewards such as the posters & postcards, I doubt my girlfriend would appreciate me putting up a poster in our flat for instance (boxed copies do sound cool as do some other physical items that are, smaller, and seem cheaper to produce). I don't speak for everyone of course!

The posters/cards may be a lower tier reward, fine, but is the £5k needed to fund just these really justified? That's all I'm saying.

ps I still wish you all the best in the project, a fair bit of negative reaction to the pricing by some

[James]

The posters/cards may be a lower tier reward, fine, but is the £5k needed to fund just these really justified? That's all I'm saying.

Well, that's not really a question we can answer - as we're not going to be the ones buying them! Unfortunately, we're almost certainly not going to get tens of thousands of backers, so we can't take advantage of economies of scale with the perk production (and so it drives the cost up)

[1nsane]

Here is the situation from my personal view: We are a great community and we now have the great chance to get a sequel of GeneRally - the Game we all love. We have waited for years, and now we have the chance to speed up the developement for a few bucks! Isnt that great? But there is more! The developers are really friendly guys who already did a lot of work for us for free. And they give us the chance to have an influence on the game. They listen to what we would like to see in the game!

Yes, the situation may not be perfect, but its not that GR costs 50€ - it will be cheap (even cheaper than minecraft) - and if you like to use online features (on servers that need to be payed btw) you have to spend some money - i dont see a big problem here. And if you dont like to spend money and just play the game - you can do so.

Cu Crono

This, so much of this.

If you want to keep on playing a free version once it's complete, sure wait until it's done and boom you have a free game. It looks better, it works better and still should support what you've done on the old one. And no need to worry about what happens with the kickstarter. If it fails and GR2 never materializes, you can just imagine it never existed and be happy with 1.1X. If you want to get the kewl new stuff, pay for them. Want to get your hands on it earlier, kickstart it. Simple.

As for the physical perks, I'd personally only go for the shirt (And propably the postcards, those are cool). Sure, if the other stuff comes there, it's cool addition, but otherwise nah. I mean, I haven't bought a physical PC game in years. I don't really have a place to store those either. Same goes with the poster, as it would end up being just rolled in a closet. Now, obviously a little amount should be printed for that complete pack so it becomes that very special essential edition.

It's a shame mugs are expensive to produce and risky to ship, as those would be the perfect nerd perk.

Rather a strong focus on digital perks is propably the wisest move, which you are already doing if I remember the blog post properly. A multikey/OST(If help is needed *wink wink* )/digibook seems to be the most popular perk levels. Well, and alpha/beta access obviously.

[XYY]

Well, time for me to really enter the discussion. It's going to get a bit longer post


Whilst I think the £25k are going to be really hard to get, after reading your chart I think it's a reasonable amount. You wouldn't certainly enrich yourselfs at the cost of the community . Especially like you mentioned the packaging/sending of the perks, it's going to be a costly thing.
Now that I'm just talking about the sending of the T-shirts and stuff, I'd like to suggest one thing. Maybe it could be possible to send "bundle" packages to trustworthy people (e.g. Crono, Trigger Happy, Paw, Buka ...) so that they could send the stuff in their home countries (if they want of course). I'm sure it's more expensive if you send twenty different packets to different german addresses from GB than sending one bigger packet to one person which sends the included packages. That would require collaboration with and dedication by these trustworthy guys, but I'm sure it's not an impossible task Btw I'm most interested in a boxed copy (maybe with a neat "handbook" sort of stuff / history of GeneRally as a booklet ).


What exactly is going to happen if we miss the funding goal? I now know that you don't get any money out of it and that we get our money back, but how is the development of GR 2 going to continue then? I hope you don't give it up entirely , because I'm sure many of us really want to see a refreshed version with some new features. It would be nice if you could write something about it (or have I missed anything you've written already? ).


However, I don't really like the idea of giving only a restricted version for the "free" user. I like the idea that those who contribute to the programmers get a better access to the game in (early) development, but I think after the development is terminated, the entire game including all features should be publish entirely as freeware. Of course it's difficult then to give an improved access to the game for the contributors. One possibility could be to give the contributors access to new features earlier (e.g. when GR2.1 would be posted, GR2.0 would become freeware), but what's most important for me is, that one can at any point enter the "contributor" status and get the better access (Just think about it - let's say next month a new motivated forum member signs up, but doesn't immediately contribute, and is pissed of later because he can't get the full version). But I'm pretty sure that won't happen...
Maybe (but I don't have enough insight on your working methods) it could also be possible to make "nightly" builds or important updates accessible for the contributors earlier than for everyone else.


I think it's sensible to delay the kickstarter a bit to get as much response as possible. Especially with a game like GeneRally it's important to have the support by many many community members, and so far you have managed well to respect, understand and incorporate the communities' wishes and dreams.


For me GeneRally was always a funny little game, and the development of a second version shouldn't change this! But after reading your blogs, I think it's going to get a great game. Hopefully there's also going to be a "classic" mode making the game look like GR1
I just love the ability to download GeneRally at any time from the Internet and being able to play it (almost) instantly on every Windows computer.
Ah yeah, please leave out the automatic track / car generation, however it could be nice to get a better insight on the data formats. I know that majortom once "decoded" the .trk format, and I'm sure there will be more great utilities if a tool programmer from the community has a better understanding of the formats and doesn't have to experiment to find out about the basic structure of a .TRK / .CAR file.


One question at the end, could you provide some more information about the seven Limited Editions?



Good luck

[Lukeno94]

XYY's comments about the structuring of things are *exactly* what the Kickstarter should be being used for, and that is something I would be able to fully support, rather than the current mess.