Starcraft Universe Trailer

[The Oracle]

Like a good little kickstarter project, they have shit all for organization. They have both a kickstarter page and a website and rarely use either. Instead they post on facebook. They started open alpha early 2012 and supposedly only just got past it this month. Their forum is also full of bots.

They gave these guys $85,000 USD.

So they basically took the money and ran. Anyone here at CC contribute to the cause by chance?

[Lavarinth]

I can't imagine the project cost anywhere near 85k judging by the state of completion it was in.

If there was a breakdown of what went where, it'd be a different story- but with little transparency, it was likely an attempt at just siphoning out money from people. And it worked.

[The Oracle]

I can't imagine the project cost anywhere near 85k judging by the state of completion it was in.

If there was a breakdown of what went where, it'd be a different story- but with little transparency, it was likely an attempt at just siphoning out money from people. And it worked.

Do they have custom assets?

[Revolta]

kitbashed from world of warcraft lol

[Lavarinth]

I can't imagine the project cost anywhere near 85k judging by the state of completion it was in.

If there was a breakdown of what went where, it'd be a different story- but with little transparency, it was likely an attempt at just siphoning out money from people. And it worked.

Do they have custom assets?

I'm not aware of any custom assets, personally.

I should probably try it out before stating that as final, however.

[IskatuMesk]

I can't imagine the project cost anywhere near 85k judging by the state of completion it was in.

There is a reason why those sites are called "scamstarters". See: Star Citizen. 90 million and hasn't even started making a game yet.

[UntamedLoli]

I can't imagine the project cost anywhere near 85k judging by the state of completion it was in.

If there was a breakdown of what went where, it'd be a different story- but with little transparency, it was likely an attempt at just siphoning out money from people. And it worked.

Do they have custom assets?

I'm not aware of any custom assets, personally.

I should probably try it out before stating that as final, however.

They were too busy glorifying kitbashing as being remotely near the quality of making a custom model. The whole point is that the end result doesn't look like a frankenstein but all of them very obviously do, and yeah, WoW models. There is a breakdown on their kickstarter page.

[IskatuMesk]

I had a look at what they paid for instead of paying for actual custom assets. There's crummy kitbashes. And then... there's that Buru "port". Oh my. Oh dear. Oh boy.

[The Oracle]

I had a look at what they paid for instead of paying for actual custom assets. There's crummy kitbashes. And then... there's that Buru "port". Oh my. Oh dear. Oh boy.

Forgive the ignorance. What is a KitBash? And what is a Buru?

[IskatuMesk]

Kitbash is to take pieces of other models and slap them together to make something "new". It originated in spriting, as you surely saw a lot of things to that extent in Brood War. Some kitbashes are very masterfully done (a few on SEN, and the uplink center HKS made) in which they basically look like they were originally created like that. But the vast majority look just like a bunch of random bits of stuff were cobbled together for the heck of it.

Buru is a Silithid boss in World of Warcraft. SCU used the mspaint bucket function to make his texture a bright brown and then made him shiny and called it a zerg unit. Well, the exact version they modified is actually from Mists of Pandaria, but that only makes it more offensive because they could have used the higher resolution source texture and modified that instead of butchering it.

/edit

For the record I don't think kitbashing or porting are necessarily wrong or bad, but anyone making assets should show some kind of quality control and that is not commonly displayed by the sc2 community. Almost all people who port WoW models either butcher them or don't even bother to update them for sc2, and most kitbashes are at the best extremely schizophrenic.

[UntamedLoli]

Yeah, I have more issue that anyone is being paid to make kitbashes that look as poorly made as theirs do rather than with the concept itself. Their quantity over quality really shows.

[Eredalis]

If this project is really dead under this circumstances, then...

...just LOL!

[CowardI]

This seemed OK. However, it sounded a little too good to be true from the get go.

[ArcanePariah]

As far as I'm aware, the project is still going.

As for 85k being a lot of money... that's actually too little. For comparison, a full time game programmer expect usually to make in the 50-60k range, starting. So 85k over 2 people over 2 years... isn't enough.

Arguably, this is one component of why games tend to be rather buggy. They simply can't hire the best coders, who easily ask for 100k+ salaries, and have to compete with the likes of Wall St, Silicon Valley, and then all the midrange stuff (Oracle, Microsoft, many hardware companies, medical companies and so forth). Either game companies are going to have to start paying more or doing a better job of attracting people to them, and that will be hard given how little people are willing to pay for games (relative to other software, most other software costs 10x as much as games, either in direct sale price, or in service price).

The main thing with these kind of projects is not to get them done. It really isn't. It is to demonstrate you can organize such a thing to begin with, which surprisingly is hard, both in initial setup and sticking to it. My own project led to me getting my current job, because it demonstrated I had the persistence to see a project through, regardless of other circumstances (in case I have not stated this before, I work on Night of the Dead and currently we are doing its sequel NOTD 2).

[Revolta]

This wasn't a game, this was a mod. people in the sc community do close to studio quality voice acting for free, same with programming and graphic design.