Project Consumed announcement and recruitment post!

[EndGameStudio]

Team name:

End Game Studio
Project name:
Consumed

Brief description:
The premise works like this: Remember watching Aliens as a young teen,
perhaps as a child and thinking to yourself "Man I could have done a better job
of survival." all while giggling as the marines run around like chew toys
for the aliens? Well... now is your chance.

Main elements:
Near future technology (No lasers, shields,etc)
Full environment interactivity (Need to block a tunnel, use c4 or dump fuel on the ground and set a fire)
Small detachment of Marines to control.
Player actions change outcome of plot.
Skill's improve with usage as opposed to leveling with a menu based system.
Real-time mesh deformation
full Co-op mode
Player views the world from inside helmet (Think Republic Commando or Metroid Prime) including water deformation, cracks and blood splatters.

Co-operative squad-based game play itself will play a huge role in this game.
That means players will have to watch each others backs and think logically
in various situations.

Creative idea's are a necessity. If you'd like to be part of this team and
have some good idea's, then by all means share them. The best idea's dont
come from just one individual. This is a team effort.


Target aim:

Know this, theres no freeware about it. The goal is retail and we will
deliver. Even if that means publishing this title on the company website
for E-download and doing all our advertising over the net.

Compensation:

This is totally a subject for discussion. All payment details will have to
be covered in a team meeting.

Technology:

We are developing on irrlicht although we are modifying the engine at this point to include the following
General:
* Multiple platform support (Windows, Linux, Mac, XBox, PS3, etc...)
* Multiple CPU Core support
* Next-next generation features
* Programmed in optimised C++
* Modular design/binaries (e.g DLLs)
* SDK available for modding
* Designed for licensing / ease of use

Further information on Engine Technology is given to team members only.

Talent needed:
Lead Artist
Assistant Artists
Character Modelers
Alien Modelers
Indigenous life/Animal Modelers
Object Modelers
Architecture Modelers
Character Texture Artists
Creature and Animal Texture Artists
Object and Architecture Texture Artists
Character Animators
Animal / Creature Animators
2D and GUI Artists
Music composers
Enviromental sound composers
Effect Composers
Assistant Programmers


Team structure:

Patrick D. Quinn
Title :Project Lead


Harry Miles
Title :Web Developer

William Kendall
Title:Programmer

Jay
Title :Programmer

Frank Guardino
Title :Concept Artist

Vincent Toshiro
Title :Concept/Design

Cody Tatman
Title : Music Composer






Website:

Temporary website in place at endgamestudio.com
We also have a Development site for organization of project and team management.

Contacts:
EndGameStudio@theendgame.net

We will also be meeting on AIM and Skype for team meetings and discussion.

Previous Work by Team:

N/a first project. Just a reminder, just because its a new company with no
development history, the talent is whats going make it great. Just like a
good partnership, a good reputation has to be earned.

Additional Info:

The main concept and web space is in place. I am currently engaged in discussions with legal aid, investors, business management advisors, film and entertainment experts. This is a serious project, please only apply if you can devote a good chunk of time to the project a week.

Programming of Engine has started

Feedback:

Any

[Virion]

We are developing on irrlicht although we are modifying the engine at this point to include the following

Don't forget to report all the changes that you made.

[sio2]

Previous Work by Team:

N/a first project. Just a reminder, just because its a new company with no
development history, the talent is whats going make it great. Just like a
good partnership, a good reputation has to be earned.

OK, the company may have no development history but what about the "team members"? Does anyone have any experience with working on a commercial title? Are you raising VC?

I've worked on commercial stuff and have the 3D skills you need, but 99% of these type announcements are by people who have "a cool idea for a game", have no commercial experience, no funding in place and are "share of the profits" type of remuneration. If you are one of the other 1% then we need persuading.

[fmx]

that's quite a long list of artists you need...

you've got a pretty interesting concept there, but its as sio2 says

...
we need persuading

it sounds as though you started pretty recently, but if you could post up some screenshots of how you're currently getting on, then maybe you will attract a lot more attention (although I realise you probably don't have the "content" for things to look very good...)

There have been too many "never-saw-the-light-of-day" projects, so I hope you can understand why most of use might be a little wary.

"persuasion" is the key word I guess.

[rogerborg]

First, if you're the sort of person who responds to questions or criticism with a moan about Irrlicht or these forums or developers in general, then please just stow it; if you can't ride above scepticism from some anonymous people on the intartubes, then you're never going to complete a game anyway.

* Multiple platform support (Windows, Linux, Mac, XBox, PS3, etc...)

How do you expect to raise the $10 million minimum that you'll need to fund development and production across all those platforms? With a tip jar?

This is not a flippant question. I have 2 kids and a mortgage. Persuade me that you'll be able to compensate me for my time, regardless of whether the game ships or not. $50 at the current exchange rate buys you half an hour of my time.

* Next-next generation features

Then why are you using Irrlicht? It doesn't even have DX10 support yet!

Seriously, take a look at what you've just announced. That you're going to do a $10 million project with a free engine, random intartubes nobodies, (apparently) no previous experience of your own, and no funding plan beyond a tip jar.

[JP]

I hope you've got a lot of PS3 devkits lying around too, i don't think you can just grab them at leisure (they cost £10,000 and probably aren't released to indie folk). Seeing as irrlicht won't work on PS3 yet you'll also probably need a dedicated team of people working on an PS3 implementation of irrlicht which would be quite tricky if you don't have anyone with PS3 experience!

[omaremad]

Something of this scale cant be achieved by people who have full time commitments and get paid nothing... dont expect to gather any slave coders here.

Look at mods to existing games, they takes years to make (15 months on average) and they are simply modifications to things that are based on millions of lines of code made by paid people. Very few mods see a completion.

One thing i would say is: go ahead if you actually have real life contact with your team (and they are very STRONG friends), just don't expect a multi billion dollar project that gets ported to 100 platforms. (ps: i`d go for shareware like doom). Most commercial projects include from 40 - 120 individuals with experience and motivation (both in $$$$ and career progress), so once again no one wants to slave over another persons dream.
[/quote]

[shogun]

I love the term "next-next gen". I know that was already discussed, but it just shows how stupid those buzzwords are. Because current technology is "next-gen", we have to make next-next gen. Hilarious.

[CuteAlien]

How do you expect to raise the $10 million minimum that you'll need to fund development and production across all those platforms? With a tip jar?

Come on, there's a lot of money to be made with a tip jar in your hand (especially with a shotgun in the other hand).

[EndGameStudio]

It seems I have quite a bit to respond to. Lets get started.

OK, the company may have no development history but what about the "team members"? Does anyone have any experience with working on a commercial title? Are you raising VC?

I've worked on commercial stuff and have the 3D skills you need, but 99% of these type announcements are by people who have "a cool idea for a game", have no commercial experience, no funding in place and are "share of the profits" type of remuneration. If you are one of the other 1% then we need persuading.

We have a couple of team members who have worked on past projects, but nothing to this scale. As of now we have talent that ranges from NBC to Bantam books (They have rights to the written Alien and Predator series.) We also have some skill in talks from someone who worked on the Blade Runner movie.

As to Capital, no. As of now this project is coming entirely out of my pockets. I have a lunch with a potential investor on Wensday of next week.
I will keep you updated as to that.

it sounds as though you started pretty recently, but if you could post up some screenshots of how you're currently getting on, then maybe you will attract a lot more attention (although I realise you probably don't have the "content" for things to look very good...)

There have been too many "never-saw-the-light-of-day" projects, so I hope you can understand why most of use might be a little wary.

"persuasion" is the key word I guess.

Yes I started this project last month and it has gone from, using 300 dollar engine that would get us no dev tools and no source code to, to us developing our own engine, to us using this engine. Once we finally decided on a engine (last week) both of our current programmers got started. As of now they got a couple headers done, but thats about it so no screen shots as of yet. But they are forth coming.

Roger Borg, since your post is far to long to quote, I will simply answer your questions. No I am not the type of person to respond to criticism with moaning or general whining. I am a professional writer and a adult. It would not do well to burn my bridges before I have any bridges to burn if you get my drift.


We do not need 10 million at the current moment. I had this discussion with one of the programmers just last night. I was telling him that we are focusing right now on getting a PC version of the game finished and then reserving options to port in the future. As we will most likely be publishing and distributing ourselves it would not be financially viable and far too time consuming to work on all platforms at the same time.

I simply want the options to cross pollinate (heh).

My programmers assure that they can make the current version of Irrlicht work for our needs. I trust my men it is as simple as that.

Something of this scale cant be achieved by people who have full time commitments and get paid nothing... dont expect to gather any slave coders here.

Look at mods to existing games, they takes years to make (15 months on average) and they are simply modifications to things that are based on millions of lines of code made by paid people. Very few mods see a completion.

One thing i would say is: go ahead if you actually have real life contact with your team (and they are very STRONG friends), just don't expect a multi billion dollar project that gets ported to 100 platforms. (ps: i`d go for shareware like doom). Most commercial projects include from 40 - 120 individuals with experience and motivation (both in $$$$ and career progress), so once again no one wants to slave over another persons dream.

Ask my current team list why they are willing to work on "my" dream, the fact of the matter is, because they believe in this project. Most of them came along because they have a interest in the horror genre and want to see it done right.


I see alot of mention about compensation. I have discussed this many time with the team and people interested in coming aboard. Compensation is not a option ATM. I am a full time at home College student who works on this project with all his free time. That is I work on this project for upwards to nine hours a day.

Compensation for some of the members is a percentage of the ENTIRE first years revenue including merchandise (such as shirts). Revenue is not profit, it is whatever the company makes off this project.

Compensation for others is a paid position once this project is finished.

Compensation can be many things, its up to the individual, but if you need money now than this is not the project for you.

As it is I am in talks with four different investors from different fields of expertise.

I have one man who wants a adaption of a sci-fi cyberpunk comic called CALIBAN and is willing to fund this project if we take on his project next.

Another wants twenty percent of all profits to fund us.

We have interest, just no money atm. And I believe like our predeccesors
we do not need initial capital. Look how many projects that are now multi-million dollar companies started in basements and garages?


Thank you for your comments and keep them up.

[rogerborg]

Ah, here we go.

I have spent all the free time I have in the last month (that is working nine hour days outside of school)

Well, gasps of surprise. Everything looks possible when you've never failed before, and the roof over your head isn't dependent on success.

Lest anyone thinks I'm being a dick unnecessarily, it's really because of this hilariously arrogant claim:

Know this, theres no freeware about it. The goal is retail and we will deliver.

I have to admire your spunk, but this forum and others like it are absolutely rife with similar grand projects that just vanish into nothingness, and every one of them was run by someone who was sure that they were different, and that all the bitter, cynical (experienced) naysayers had no idea what they were talking about. None of them are different, and neither are you. You are not a unique snowflake.

Look, seriously, it is possible to produce a retail game if you aim for a very simple concept, well executed. But doing a mainstream concept, going toe-to-toe with big dev houses, on consoles? It's not realistic. It's not even within the realms of fantasy.

You're looking at 2 years to market, absolute minimum. Yes, you are. Can you even beat yesterday's games? Can you beat this? How about this?

You've probably got some models running around a quake level, and think you're half way there. Whoopee, so has everyone else who's built the Irrlicht demos. But do you honestly believe that you can do something that's 2 years ahead of what you can see in the links above, using an an engine that's conceptually still about 5 years behind the cutting edge?

The best you can hope for is to learn how ventures like this fail. I'll give you a hint: the critical error was made in the concept, rather than the implementation.

[EndGameStudio]

Why yes, I do think you are being a unnecessary dick. Thank you for asking.

While you have some valid questions the way you direct them at me is with nothing but contempt. Rudeness I can deal with, contempt no.

Yes that is OUTSIDE of college, that means that after busting my rear for six hours a day in college, I turn right around and work another nine hours on this project.

I do not think claiming retail will happen is arrogant at all, what that is telling you is that we have a goal and we will all work tirelessly to perform it.

What arrogant is would be me saying this game WILL be better than Doom 3 and Lost planet (Which I did not particularly care for.)

I have not made Those claims. What I laid down was what we want to do, nothing arrogant in there. What arrogant is is claiming to know what the game industry is and is not. As it is I see you posting in here with your negativity trying to pull other people down because you feel superior. That my friend is arrogance.

[Virion]

It is worthless to quarrel over here. Just keep us updated when you got some screen shots, videos or even better, the demo that can be shown to the community. In my opinion that's a better way to recruit team members, because I have seen too much and experienced/got myself involved into similar cases (ok that's a long story of the past). We will sure happy if you and your team mates can done something nice with Irrlicht engine.

By the way, just some thoughts:

I am a professional writer and a adult.

I thought should be an adult instead? Sorry I am not a native English speaker and I'm probably wrong.

[EndGameStudio]

You are correct.

[CuteAlien]

rogerborg is not an unnecessary dick, but actually trying to help you realize that you are about to spend a lot of time working on something which will, with an extremely high probability, land in the trashbin. We just see that too often and it's every time sad to see.

It starts with the problems in that thing which you seem to think of as concept. It is fairly similar to a lot of concepts of people who have no idea of gameprogramming.

Full environment interactivity... first of all, every piece of interactivity means more work for programmers. And with that I mean even every single additional button! Just to help you to even start to get an idea what you are talking about here:

First "Full interactivity" is not a definition of a 3D world as it means absolutely nothing. You know you can't simulate a world on molecular level ;-). So you have to create restrictions. Finding clever restrictions which work is *the* big deal for a game designers. Not thinking of features, but finding working features which give players the illusion of interactivity is the hard work!

You could for example create a lego-world. Fairly interactive (and not trivial to do), but it won't look so great for several reason. Legobricks would cost a lot of polygons as you would need a lot of them for every simple wall. And making them movable will reduce the available polygonnumber even more. So in the end the world would look rather primitive. So now you might want to produce walls which use less polygons. But those are no longer so easy to make interactive. To still have some interactivity you will now need to have several states for each wall. For example "solid" and "blown up". The complexity for that will increase with the number of states - and it's not a linear increase (so adding a fire state additionally will make it more than twice as complex). And you have to program the situations in which states change - like when will a solid wall change to a blown up wall. Which will most likely lead to an editor which supports triggers (which you have to program). And maybe a nice particlesystem so that the blowing up does not look stupid. If it needs to be not as trivial as shoot wall => blow wall up you might even need a simple scriptengine for that already.

And thats only for the visual feedback so far. But you don't stop there, but add even more complicated stuff. Marines to control. Hm, lets see - you are talking about AI. Which is hard. In an interactive 3D environment - which is very hard. With group behaviour and controlled by the player. Whoa.. I did such AI stuff once - it was the hardest code I had to write so far. Even harder than programming a whole 3D Racer from scratch (and it also did take longer). But even there I had not to care about mesh deformations and the interactivity was rather restricted.

And so it goes on and on...

You have simply no idea what game design is about. Just to repeat it: It's _not_ about adding features!

Before you start wasting the time of several people do your homework. And that means not starting blindly with a projects and spending lot of hours doing stuff, but finding out as first(!) step *what is possible*. You forgot that step - or didn't even know it's needed when doing games.

So that's how you can do that: Find sites which do offer games which were done by independent teams (like for example manifestogames.com). Do check out those projects. Find out how many people worked on those and how long they took for it (google can help you, but often they will even just tell you if you ask). Add a lot of time to that, as most people there are industry veterans with years of experience. Next you might even google a little more to find out how much they sell on average. And realize thereby that offering royalities is a rather sad joke...

As next step find a small and dedicated team which is willing to spend - lets say 1 year fulltime - on doing a game which is on such a level. A team which can live without money and does not expect to get any. If you manage to find 1 or 2 people who are still with you after that year, you might be able to start a second project which is a little bigger. And maybe, just maybe you will even find a way to get some money for that second project.