[gavanwoolery]

$30,000 can take you a long way. I stretched $5000 for 6 months producing a game, living like a peasant (in California, no less). These people just spent their money foolishly on a number of items. Salary is number one, whatever you have left after that can be used for other stuff. Why they did not budget salary first, I have no freaking idea. What is annoying is that it gives Kickstarter projects a bad rep, when there are those (such as myself) looking to use Kickstarter for legitimate/better thought-out purposes.

And for the record, I looked forward to this game in particular, even tried to donate money to them outside of kickstarter...

But please don't get me started on YogVentures (ugh)... http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterkewlgames/yogventu...

[ricardobeat]

What's your opinion of YogVentures?

I have a suspicion that developing an open-world game not based on voxels is a very challenging thing, but then I don't work in game dev.

edit: should've read the full description.

Are the interpolated lines also used for collision/physics?

[gavanwoolery]

My opinion is that it is kind of a scam. If they can pull it off, I would love to be proven wrong. But so far all they have is a no-name development team that does not even have a website, and it looks like they just used a prefab engine like Unity to produce their demo video.

I've developed with voxels for over 10 years...Marching cubes is nothing new (in fact, I "invented" it on my own without knowing that the algorithm existed) - and how they model the world is the least of their concerns. Making an open world game of any sort is very challenging, and no one has done it that successfully to date (even Minecraft is still more of just a sandbox than a game, although I respect it nonetheless). Not that I would recommend against developing this type of game, it just probably not the first type of thing you want to tackle without sufficient experience (I should know, I've scrapped over 8 engines working on open world games).

Again, I have nothing against the YogCast people, but if they fail miserably it makes raising money for other Kickstarter projects more difficult.

[ricardobeat]

Hey, you're the atomontage guy! I'd give you a couple million if I could :)

Totally agree. There are many examples of developers who seriously underestimated the costs for a full game. With the influx of projects, I believe some kind of vetoing will have to be implemented for projects >50k.

[gavanwoolery]

Thanks, I'm not the Atomontage guy though; his name is Branislav Síleš (although I am a supporter of his project :) ). I built an engine called Genesis in 2004-2006, and since then many unpublished projects (latest at gavanw.com).

$50k is actually a good amount for an independent project...if the team could demonstrate that they can make sufficient progress with that type of funding, it could open the doors to more. Although, since Kickstarter takes 5 percent it wants as much funding to come in as possible.

[ricardobeat]

Aw. I saw the posts and followed the links on your blog thinking that was you. Are you developing a similar engine?

[epaik]

Just wanted to clarify, they are actually using voxels.

The technique used to achieve a smooth voxel world is called Marching Cubes. Although the voxels are cube in nature, the marching cubes algorithm smooths out the appearance of these cubes depending on their proximity to other cubes. This allows for a smooth world, while allowing for dynamic manipulation of the environment.