Double Fine Spacebase DF-9 debacle

[steve58]

...so Double Fine has decided enough work has been done on Spacebase DF-9 and they're going to go from Alpha 6e to Release 1.0 in about a month.  The  forums (Steam and theirs) are in flames.  All this just a month after one of the devs posted:

Double Fine is not a random fly-by-night indie dev and we are not going to silently pull the plug on Spacebase or any other in-development project.  Doing so would be disastrous for our reputation and it would kill us emotionally ;____;

http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewthread/14641/#353671

They may not have done it silently, but pull the plug they did.

Sorry to see this happen.  I bought Spacebase DF-9 during a sale, so its possible demise doesn't bite me too bad, but more development (e.g. smarter AI) would've been nice.  It looks like they've really p*ssed off some of their most devoted supporters and given themselves a major PR mess to deal with.

[RooksBailey]

Every day the news from the world of gaming just gets worse and worse and worse.  And I am really getting sick of it.  At times it seems like a majority of game devs are just engaging in shameless cash grabs.  There are some good devs out there, of course, but my list is getting shorter all the time.   :'(

[Nefaro]

That's a real shame. 

This looked like it could be pretty fun if the devs stuck with it.  But I never picked it up as the complaints about lack of progress had scared me away.  For good reason, we see.  :-\

[Tpek]

What are they doing working on so many titles at once?
They still have to get Massive Chalice out.

[Bletchley_Geek]

What are they doing working on so many titles at once?

I do sense that Double Fine devs are very thinly spread. DF-9 development was going fine - i.e. major updates every month or so - until February this year - precisely when they held their "Amnesia Fortnight". After that they seemed to forget about Spacebase for a couple months.

[Wolfe1759]

Don't know the specific details behind this game however to me it seems that increasingly the transition from Early Access / Beta to Release means "we've run out of money" rather than "this is what we promised you, we've done it and we're proud to announce its release"

[Bletchley_Geek]

I was wondering the same re: funding. But then I found this link posted on the Steam forums

http://indie-fund.com/2013/11/spacebase-df-9-recoups-investment-in-two-weeks/

So they recouped the investment as early as November 2013. 400,000 USD would cover four people working full time at a 90K p.a. salary, leaving aside 40K for running costs (very generous reserve). That's quite some money to pay for quite intensive labour. But I don't think there was that much labour being actually invested in Spacebase after February.

Maybe I am misreading the post on indie-fund.com, and "recouping the investment" means something other than "expenses covered and investors recovering their money".

[jomni]

Why are you guys complaining about a game that's being released? Shouldn't you be rejoicing? At least it's not cancelled.

[Bletchley_Geek]

Why are you guys complaining about a game that's being released? Shouldn't you be rejoicing? At least it's not cancelled.

Because it was far from finished. So this is a cancellation of sorts.

[FarAway Sooner]

Every day the news from the world of gaming just gets worse and worse and worse.  And I am really getting sick of it.  At times it seems like a majority of game devs are just engaging in shameless cash grabs.  There are some good devs out there, of course, but my list is getting shorter all the time.   :'(

It varies case-by-case, but I think it's much more often related to developers' competence rather than their ethics.  If you're a programmer, you don't go to work for a gaming studio for the money.  The hours are brutal and the pay is below-average.  Small firms' frequent inability to manage projects, contain costs, develop efficiently, match scope against funding, etc. dooms the majority of them.

I'm not aware of many shops who just pulled the plug on projects while going on to churn out lots of other software.  Excepting, perhaps, what Microsoft did with Win7...    ;D

[Nefaro]

Why are you guys complaining about a game that's being released? Shouldn't you be rejoicing? At least it's not cancelled.

Because it was far from finished. So this is a cancellation of sorts.

<- What Bletchley said.

[Bletchley_Geek]

It varies case-by-case, but I think it's much more often related to developers' competence rather than their ethics.  If you're a programmer, you don't go to work for a gaming studio for the money.  The hours are brutal and the pay is below-average.  Small firms' frequent inability to manage projects, contain costs, develop efficiently, match scope against funding, etc. dooms the majority of them.

I'm not aware of many shops who just pulled the plug on projects while going on to churn out lots of other software.  Excepting, perhaps, what Microsoft did with Win7...    ;D

That is true. Nonetheless, "competence" may also mean choosing the right tools for the job. And tools mean both the "material" - powerful game engines and programming languages - and the "spiritual" - project management skills.

The problem with Early Access games like these simulations - there quite a few of these "Dwarf Fortress-like" early access titles out there - is that their scope is usually quite vast and it requires to be very organised to take command of the complexity. An example of organised development strategy is that of the Gaslamp Games guys - Clockwork Empires. Ambition isn't a problem in itself, but if you're ambitious, you need to have some project management skills.

Another problem lies in that some of these projects start with a not too good technical foundation.

I mean, Unity and the like are great when it comes to generate prototypes that look good, and look good quickly. The problem is that the "prototype" eventually needs to become "the real thing".  I've spent some time playing around with Unity, and if you want to make something really complex, that scales up as the complexity of the game play grows, you need to have real systems programming skills. There's a crapton of half-baked prototypes being sold as "early access" games hanging out on places like Desura (and Steam, I see): it is indeed quite natural that some devs lose heart when they realize that nothing short of a full rewrite and migration to a less cozy environment as Unity will work for their project to advance.

Don't take me wrong, Unity is great and does a lot of stuff that streamline development. But it creates a false sense of capability, and that can be dangerous.

In this particular case, the game comes out as the result of a prototype written in, to my surprise, Lua. A language which is easy to learn and has a very efficient JIT compiler. It's also great to complement systems written in C++ or C#. It's genius for stuff like putting together building blocks like the AI or animations. But that, in my opinion, doesn't qualify as the best tool to build a game with the complexity that the Spacebase devplan entailed.  The problem with Lua (and Python, but I reckon it's more robust) is that with all the flexibility, comes the possibility of making a mistake, which most of the time won't become apparent until the exact line of code containing the mistake is executed. They're hard to debug and to maintain, generally speaking.

There's a trade-off between the time it takes to get a working prototype and the time it takes to extend that prototype into an actual application. C++ isn't a good language for generating quickly prototypes - something you need to attract funding via Kickstarter or Early Access, but it is a very good language to develop complex systems.

They're releasing the source code, and I am expecting to find it to be a complete mess.