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Sunhunter Pledge Information - Update

    • 1281 posts
    May 20, 2018 8:35 AM PDT

    In a recent Q&A, Brad said Pre-Alpha is about halfway done. That fits into his earlier comments that Alpha will start the end of this year.

    • 8 posts
    June 26, 2018 5:53 AM PDT

    bigdogchris said:

    In a recent Q&A, Brad said Pre-Alpha is about halfway done. That fits into his earlier comments that Alpha will start the end of this year.

    Sounds abour right. I Alpha his last game and it took awhile to get through that. The process is slow and not rushed.

    • 844 posts
    June 26, 2018 10:10 AM PDT

    @spaceinvader?

    "Sounds abour right. I Alpha his last game and it took awhile to get through that. The process is slow and not rushed."

    Really? because the last game was Vanguard, and that did not go so well. And there was no public alpha.

    • 363 posts
    July 26, 2018 7:27 PM PDT

    Wish I could. I would love to help you guys out and be an investor, but I'm currently not that positive on the cash flow. Maybe in another year. ;)

     

    • 1247 posts
    August 11, 2018 8:22 PM PDT

    CanadinaXegony said:

    kreed99 said: Cash grab. That made me lol irl.

    The thing is..our pledges help to push this game forward.   This is an independent team...no big brother (Sony or Blizzard or Activision) looking over their shoulders telling them how it will be due to shareholders and bean counters.     Therefore the pledges are what will bring this game to release along with the VERY important hard work of all the VR team members. :)   Been here since the start, not about to vacate the premises any time soon...when there is so much advancement now. :)   A game built for gamers by gamers. :)

     

    Cana

    ABSOLUTELY. Well said.

    • 844 posts
    August 12, 2018 11:09 AM PDT

    CanadinaXegony said:

    kreed99 said: Cash grab. That made me lol irl.

    The thing is..our pledges help to push this game forward.   This is an independent team...no big brother (Sony or Blizzard or Activision) looking over their shoulders telling them how it will be due to shareholders and bean counters.     Therefore the pledges are what will bring this game to release along with the VERY important hard work of all the VR team members. :)   Been here since the start, not about to vacate the premises any time soon...when there is so much advancement now. :)   A game built for gamers by gamers. :)

    Cana

    As in life, game making is not a science and there is usually never one right or wrong reason or answer.

    Being an Indy team has advantages and disadvantages. Being part of a much larger organization has it's advantages and disadvantages.

    Having been part of a small studio, that was part of a big organization I can tell you yes, they do exercise some control. But you would probably be surprised how much creative control actually still resides in the small studio. Most corporate offices know they are not game designers. They are there to make sure money is made and spent as wisely as possible. To make sure studios have the resources they need.

    And frankly, as a small studio, having access to massive amounts of resources when you run into trouble can be the difference between utter failure or a clean polished product.

    And when I say resources I mean technical knowledge, design experts, engineering experts, netcode experts, QA experts, Cloud experts, DB experts, memcache experts, Art experts.

    It cannot be overstated how many Indy games never see the light of day due to simple technical problems that a small team cannot understand, forsee, or fix.

    Most large game organizations began organically and are largely made up of dozens of smaller studios with one central corporate location. Not all, but most.

     

    I worked on a game, our studio, about 80 people, for about 10 months. Our corporate office put it under some rigorous play-testing with their experts and it came back with very poor results. Somethign with how the mechanics worked was not meshing well with players. (and frankly we knew it also, many did not care for how it played) Our lead designers went heads down with some help from other designers that corp. provided. They came up with some big changes. We scraped our release date, went over-budget and ground it out. We added on months and worked hard.

    A couple months later, success. Our new version was very highly liked by the corp. play-testers. We launched, the game went to the top of the charts and to date a couple years later, that game has made close to $1BUS. Yes thats a "B". From a 70+ member studio, with some help from big brother.

    The bottom line here is, big corp. entities can be a good thing. And save games from themselves, or even from never seeing the light of day.

     

    I call our studio small at 70 people. maybe 5 were office support.  It is probably more accurately mid-sized at 70people. VR at 30ish members, small.


    This post was edited by zewtastic at August 12, 2018 11:12 AM PDT