Screenshots Of The New Unigine-Based Linux Game

[Aiua]

As long as it's not a MMO I guess this is a definite buy.

+1
I hope the story and gameplay will be good, but this is already a great news, I'm looking forward to it

[Desiderium]

This is _very_ interesting! I just hope the team doesn't end up concentrating too much on the graphics, just because now they can showcase that on Linux too, and forget about the fact that RPGs must be deep, immersive and long. Far too many current RPGs are too linear, too short, too shallow, simply because the developers concentrated too much on graphics and forgot about the contents. Also, what kind of RPG will it be? Story-centric, like Dragon Age, or free-roaming, like Oblivion and Fallout 3?

@MisterIO

Our priority breaks down as Gameplay>Story>Graphics, but I can assure you all of them will be pretty decent. I don't like giving promises ahead, but in this case our team has skill to prove what we say. You don't have to take me by my word if you do not wish, but eventually you'll see, so keep tuned!

As for the RPG type, we aim for an open world that the player can roam alone or up to with a couple of friends.

And no, this is NOT an MMO. It's a co-op RPG.

Norbert V.
Digital Arrow

[ad_267]

Awesome, I've been waiting for this type of game for Linux for a long time.

[devius]

Holy crap!

[MisterIO]

@MisterIO

Our priority breaks down as Gameplay>Story>Graphics, but I can assure you all of them will be pretty decent. I don't like giving promises ahead, but in this case our team has skill to prove what we say. You don't have to take me by my word if you do not wish, but eventually you'll see, so keep tuned!

As for the RPG type, we aim for an open world that the player can roam alone or up to with a couple of friends.

And no, this is NOT an MMO. It's a co-op RPG.

Norbert V.
Digital Arrow

That's very good news! If that ends up being true, I'm gonna buy it for sure!

[madjr]

@MisterIO

Our priority breaks down as Gameplay>Story>Graphics, but I can assure you all of them will be pretty decent. I don't like giving promises ahead, but in this case our team has skill to prove what we say. You don't have to take me by my word if you do not wish, but eventually you'll see, so keep tuned!

As for the RPG type, we aim for an open world that the player can roam alone or up to with a couple of friends.

And no, this is NOT an MMO. It's a co-op RPG.

Norbert V.
Digital Arrow

wow the gameplay and story will be amazingly out of this world then if you're already considering the unigine graphics to be the "least"

[elanthis]

As for the RPG type, we aim for an open world that the player can roam alone or up to with a couple of friends.

I look forward to more details. Some people here are idiotically assuming you're going to recreate Dragon Age with multiplayer just because you are using an engine that has a few pretty demos.

(Clearly, the engine subsumes the need for an artist to model, skin, animate, and integrate high quality character art assets. You can just upload a stick figure in BMP format to Unigine and it comes out looking like a Hollywood actor in a Blu-ray movie, right? The actual modeling is irrelevant, it's all just a shader Unigine has that turns a single untextured cube into any photo-realistic environment you want. You can do $25,000,000 worth of art assets with just $10 and pocket full of dreams. Fallout 3 could have been made in 2 weeks and been an MMO that would instantly destroy World of Warcraft's $2.16 billion/year profit machine, if only Bethesda had a Unigine license.)

[BlackStar]

Co-op RPG == ultimate win!

I've been looking for such a thing ever since Neverwinter Nights 2 (which kinda sucked).

@elanthis: a good engine can cut down development time and cost significantly, but it cannot make things from thin air. An RPG with 150 monsters needs 150 monster models (plus animation, voice acting and scripting). If every model costs $2000(*) to develop, then you'll need $300000 no matter if you are using Unigine or Rage5 or (now-dead, sucky) Gamebryo.

The million-dollar question for smaller developers is how to reduce these costs. My dream is a free/low-cost clone of the Spore creature creator.

(*) pulling numbers out of my ass

[devius]

The million-dollar question for smaller developers is how to reduce these costs.

Easy. Make sure everybody in the team has a very low fixed income, since the actual work is usually the main source of expenses. When the game comes out split the profits by all team members. This is highly risky but, if the game sells well can be a viable option, although it requires some effort and very good will at the beggining.

[elanthis]

@elanthis: a good engine can cut down development time and cost significantly, but it cannot make things from thin air. An RPG with 150 monsters needs 150 monster models (plus animation, voice acting and scripting). If every model costs $2000(*) to develop, then you'll need $300000 no matter if you are using Unigine or Rage5 or (now-dead, sucky) Gamebryo.

So the average character model takes about 1-3 months of development in the modern RPGs like Mass Effect or Dragon Age. Just for the artist (no voice acting/sounds), which includes all of the concept art, rigging, modeling, skinning, animating, and then just a ton of tweaking and changes to get it Just Right. Three months at 40-60 hrs/week. Lets go for the low end. That's 40*4=160 hours. Say the programmer is working cheap, at only $30USD/hr (again, a low-ball figure). That's $4800USD. Some of that work can be shared between different models, so that's not a per-model figure, but it's a lot closer than $2000. And again, $4800 is a lower-end estimation.

Easy. Make sure everybody in the team has a very low fixed income, since the actual work is usually the main source of expenses. When the game comes out split the profits by all team members. This is highly risky but, if the game sells well can be a viable option, although it requires some effort and very good will at the beggining.

EXTREMELY good will. Why settle for a low fixed income when the low-end of the game industry field for fresh-out-of-college programmers is $60k USD, with $80k-$120k USD achievable by most programmers actually worth hiring within 6 years of starting their career? The heavy weight rockstars can get over $160k USD, too. (I dont' have a link to these figures, they're from a Game Developer Magazine article though if I recall.)

It would also entail a large amount of risk, as you said. Game projects fail. Most of them fail. Sometimes it's because of money, sometimes it's because of bad business, but most of the time it's just because you can't actually guarantee a game will be fun.

There is no scientific formula behind making a good game. There's a ton of DONTs in the game design process, but very very few examples of things you can toss in that are guaranteed to make the game a success. You can't actually know if your game will be good until well after you've sunk time into building a good portion of it. At that point, if you find out your game isn't fun, you've got two choices: scrap a lot of your work and change directions, or scrap all of your work and start a new project.

Both of those happen a LOT. Most games are developed behind closed doors and the project isn't announced publicly until it's well along in development, so you rarely see it happening, but it does happen. Bioshock is one of my favorite examples, because they released their early design docs earlier this year for fun. The original game design was completely different than what Bioshock actually was. They started building the original design, realized it wasn't all that great, switched things up, and came out with one of the most highly acclaimed games in the last few years.

This is a problem for developers on a budget. Switching gears mid-development is costly. If you're trying to work on a fixed budget, you can easily end up in this situation with no way to actually afford doing what needs to be done. Overwhelming odds are the project just folds.

As a developer, that's a problem. Even if you're the best damn game programmer in the entire world, you can't guarantee that the rest of the team and the game design and even the market itself is going to allow your project to be a success. Working with the hope that your game will make millions and then pay off insanely risky. Seriously. Insane. As in, you'd have to be a crazy dumbass to go in for it.

Non-indie developers sometimes start up that way, but they expect to get funding within a few months. They get a few talented people together to basically throw together a game pitch demo, and then go find one of the big publishers to pay them to finish it. Which means that those developers are only working for peanuts for a couple months, not the 1-6 years it takes to release a modern AAA game. If you're a good developer, you can go find just as many well-funded interesting projects to work on as you can poorly-funded indie projects. The game industry is always hiring and there's a shortage of truly talented programmers and artists.

I really think you should revisit the movie metaphor. Indie movie makers can make some fantastic movies. I have some friends in the southeastern Michigan area who have done a few fun zombie flicks, a sci-fi post-apocalyptic flick (thank you Detroit for your dilapidated, crumbling buildings), and a few dramas. Good movies. Still, indie film makers will never, ever recreate something like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Harry Potter, Fifth Element, Iron Man, etc. These just are not indie-class movies. It's not possible. Their budgets (even if you remove the "big name actor" paychecks) are in the hundreds of millions.

Another way to look at it: at some point though you have to realize that you can't get an Aston Martin for $50k and you're going to have to settle for a Mustang. Mustangs are still nice, sexy cars; but they're also still not the best of the best. That's just how it is.

Digolus very well may come out and may very well be a great game. As stated and with some of the assumptions people are making here, though, it's incredibly risky. And it's definitely absolutely not going to be of the same scale as the recent big-name RPGs.