UFO:Alien Invasion
General => Discussion => Topic started by: laos on May 22, 2012, 02:41:56 pm
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What is stopping you from starting a kickstarter campaign to make some improvements? How about using it as a support/donation tool rather than selling a game? This could be an ongoing effort with several kickstarter projects for various parts of the game.
Could be worth a try ...
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They could probably set up a donation system without the use of Kickstarter.
Is non-commercial funding even possible at that place?
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What is stopping you from starting a kickstarter campaign to make some improvements? How about using it as a support/donation tool rather than selling a game?
Kickstarter's Project Guidelines (http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines), for one thing.
I also get the sense that the team doesn't really have an obvious way to turn cash into progress—no one's working on it full-time, and it seems impractical to build up a sufficient endowment to let someone quit their job and go full-time. IIRC it was mentioned somewhere that modeling and texturing is a bottleneck, so potentially funding could be put together to hire a specialist for some specified amount of work, but that gets into messy administrative things that you then need to convince someone to take on.
Edit: actually, that would probably work (say, a campaign to fund a new alien race or something)—the main issue there is that that's the sort of thing that can rob motivation from people already contributing or considering contributing for free. Not guaranteed, but it isn't risk-free.
~J
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Thought you couldn't.
You skewed the URL a bit, by the way.
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Fixed!
Stupid BBCode. Some places want URLs in quotes, some places want not, some take either…
~J
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We/Someone should "pay" someone to do some opensource stuff? That sounds really weird.
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Well, Dwarf Fortress seems to pull along nicely with the occasional donation.
Then again, that one's pretty much two relatives going at it. Not much of a team.
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Not should but might. There are different ways to say «Thanks».
It will be nice to have some money, because it will allow to get normal designer and clean design of the game. May be some modelers.
But I always thought about google summer code event.
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Well, Dwarf Fortress seems to pull along nicely with the occasional donation.
Afaik dwarf fortress is Freegame produced by a company, not a Opensource game produces by some guys that have nothing better to do with their time like us :D. They probably released their code as opensource but thats completly different how our project are developed.
Not should but might. There are different ways to say «Thanks».
It will be nice to have some money, because it will allow to get normal designer and clean design of the game. May be some modelers.
Well you can support add a support button where people can spend some money which will be shared on the team to say thx and support the core team - but earn money to pay someone to do opensource stuff - sounds still weird to me. It also could mean that everyone want to get money for working on this project if we hire anyone for money.
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Basically, a shitstorm waiting to happen. Just like the Balkans in the early 20th century. I'm sure we all know how that turned out.
Afaik dwarf fortress is Freegame produced by a company, not a Opensource game produces by some guys that have nothing better to do with their time like us :D. They probably released their code as opensource but thats completly different how our project are developed.
Ach. Point taken. Devil's still in the details.
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What is stopping you from starting a kickstarter campaign to make some improvements? How about using it as a support/donation tool rather than selling a game? This could be an ongoing effort with several kickstarter projects for various parts of the game.
Fossfactory and elveos are more appropriate sites for that.
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I for one would be willing to pay $200 for this game if it were complete, you could also put stretch goals in for things like:
stategic coop - have other players control their own bases in other parts of the world vying for political recognition
ios port
different weapons
destructable environments
psionics
alternate endings
better developer tools
character leveling? abilities?
more research options
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earn money to pay someone to do opensource stuff - sounds still weird to me
Mozilla Foundation. Firefox is opensource but some peoples work full time for it and get salary. Ubuntu (Canonical) is similar, they earn money providing services, not selling code itself.
It's not weird, you just should know what you ready to give and what you want to get. By the way opensource doesn't mean free. It can be licensed and require payment for use if you want use it legally.
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Mozilla Foundation. Firefox is opensource but some peoples work full time for it and get salary. Ubuntu (Canonical) is similar, they earn money providing services, not selling code itself.
It's not weird, you just should know what you ready to give and what you want to get. By the way opensource doesn't mean free. It can be licensed and require payment for use if you want use it legally.
Yes i know, but you cant compare this with our project.
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Yes i know, but you cant compare this with our project.
Why not? Yes, it's different scale. But if there is enough interested peoples... That's main point. Say, there is on Kickstarter project for game console (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console). They are using Android and it doesn't look like they are going to really hide hardware design.
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Why not?
Again, how are you going to turn the cash into progress? Hiring someone who doesn't already work on the game would be thorny in many ways, and I don't think there's any serious prospect of raising enough for one of the current devs to quit their job and work on UFO:AI full time (even if you manage to pay their salary for a year, unless they're already unhappy with their job or there's a real prospect of managing to do it again next year that's just not enough—you'd need at least several years up-front to make the risk acceptable).
Mozilla Corporation, in contrast, is large enough to in fact turn donations into full-time employees.
Now, it's possible that there are resources that could be purchased to help develop the game, maybe a dedicated build/test server or something, but there's another can of worms there: I'm pretty sure there's no UFO:AI Corporation, so anything like that would be owned and physically possessed by one of the devs. How do you ensure ongoing availability of that resource? How do you make sure it gets used to develop UFO:AI and not for the personal affairs of the possessor? This can be a problem even without actual wrongdoing—perception can be just as important.
There's really no point in discussing the matter further until we fill in the "???" in "1) Collect donations, 2) Use the money to ???, 3) UFO:AI is better!".
~J
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There's really no point in discussing the matter further until we fill in the "???" in "1) Collect donations, 2) Use the money to ???, 3) UFO:AI is better!".
I agree with this. If you don't know how to use money to reach promised goal, you shouldn't ask for them. I was just saying that is possible even for this project. But taking money you take responsibility, you can't just spend them for nothing.
So, we can discuss what can be done to make UFO:AI better with some small funding. If it looks worth it - something can be started on Kickstarter or somewhere else. But right now i doubt here is easy target for that.
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Btw, ninex already runs and maintains a ufoai server which runs build tests, hosts the compiled maps and the website, and otherwise helps keep this project going. Once a year we run a news post to help raise money for his server, and we usually get there with no problem, thanks to donors.
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Why not? Yes, it's different scale. But if there is enough interested peoples... That's main point. Say, there is on Kickstarter project for game console (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console). They are using Android and it doesn't look like they are going to really hide hardware design.
The main reason what will rise problems is: Why should someone get payed for the work he's doing for UFO:AI and someone else not? I would feel a bit deceived if this would happen. Everyone puts hard work into the stuff he contributes. Also we dont have a big core team, lacking of some positions like a main 3d and 2d artist etc. If we had these positions occupied, you probably could say - okay, there is a core team which guarantee a steady development etc. and i want to support them - so shut up and take my money. Atm the development of UFO:AI is just "too open" and without an open one - UFO:AI may have died many years ago.
The story with ninex is another one, that guy definitely deserve the support because he have to pay money for the servers.