I haven't played this but I would just like to reiterate my opinion, expressed elsewhere, that this sort of graphical style is the way forward in a great many respects.  Nice look.

Looks rather interesting.  I like that sort of visual aesthetic.

I'm interested on how the $4.99 pricepoint works for you.  Are you getting sales?

That's surprisingly fun.  Powerups are somewhat interesting.  Everything about it screams polish.

Might be nice to get some gloss on the blocks-- with a matte finish they don't seem to finish the glitzy polish of the rest of the game.  I think the blocks could look better especially since they're what you're looking at the vast majority of the time.  Maybe prerendered raytraces or something?  But that's a matter of taste.

After clicking gems for half an hour on Bejeweled, in the end was that really worthwhile?

When everything is pushed into subjectiveness, everything breaks down because nothing is better than anything else.  That's the fallacy of relativism.

And I never played Peggle or Bejeweled.  They're worthwhile from the perspective of making 100 million dollars a year for Popcap but I'd suggest that the mechanics in both are inherently much more interesting.

The game was made in ten days

What took you ten days?  The concept is mildly interesting in that it's hard to tell which object is moving slowest.  Big deal.  I got bored with this in 30 seconds.

There is a difference between "I can do something" and "I should do something."  

Is this concept really good enough to justify your effort?  What about the time that you expect others to take playing it?  I realize this is a radical idea but if you don't have a good concept for a game, don't make the game because you're only wasting your time and other peoples as well.

Overall I think you went in the right direction but in the same time I know that you can put more effort into it

You really think that if he dolls this up with snazzy graphics and more options and powerups and whatnot, it will end up being worthwhile?

Not necessarily anything.

I wish them luck-- like I said it would be great if there was a funding source for this sort of thing.  I just don't think it's very likely to be successful.  One nice thing about it is that, at least in theory, it will consolidate the funding begs into one place.

You keep using that term - crowd funding is not venture capital, and is in fact presented as an alternative to traditional funding sources such as VC.

Surely if people can compare it to getting a hamburger at McDonalds-- a finished product-- I can compare it to venture cap.  Right?

It's similar in that you're paying money for a share in something in some intermediate stage of completion.

By the way, make sure you argue with every single point I make in case I say something scary and you miss it.

You are not just asking questions, you have decided you do not like the idea beforehand and are fishing for reasons to support that decision.

What you're doing is saying that the moon is made of green cheese.  It isn't.  I win.

See how easy it is when instead of addressing what people actually think, we can just say what they think and address the words that we put into their mouths?

As far as the legal issue goes I was really just curious.  That is a problem that Kickstarter and other such VC matchmaking arrangements have had.  It's just something to keep in mind.  Not that someone welching out of a project is likely to happen at this stage of the game but sooner or later it will.

also let the record show that valis keeps looking for ways to attack the idea of funding indie games (e.g. legal issues)

Paul, I'm just asking questions here.  Is that OK with you?

I've been involved with VC on both sides, on the funding side since around 2003.  I am talking about large sums of money, in one case a huge sum.  One thing VC people do is to ask a lot of questions.  One of the reasons they do this is to gauge the attitudes of the people involved.

Personally I always did this before I got involved with a project rather than during.

and talking about how rude everyone is being towards him rather than replying to rebuttals to his points

I thought we were just having a friendly exchange of ideas here-- I wasn't aware this was a formal debate.  Do you have your briefcase full of index cards?

Also, why are you so insecure about this?  You seem to really take it personally...

Question: how would it be handled if some developer collects, say, 10 grand, then dies?  Or, say, decides not to make the game after all and to keep the money?  And just disappears, or keeps saying "It'll be done next week?"

Who is financially liable?  I'm not a lawyer but this sounds like it might represent a potential legal problem for the parent organization.

Calling them immature kids is not a smart move if you're really looking for an honest and good-natured discussion on this.

No.  Calling me an "asshole" and a "massive dickhole?"  Now that was not a smart move.

Got a problem with my expression of my opinion on this subject?

Tough.

I don't think you're completely off the mark in some of your views on 8 Bit Funding.

That was easy.

is at least one million people (since more than one million people bought minecraft alone). probably much more, i'd be surprised if it weren't more than five million

As silly as it sounds to say, Minecraft is an extremely high-end and polished product as far as indie games go.

It also happened to hit an extremely lucky and rare sweetspot.

Also, since there's a finite cash reserve, these games (SMB, Minecraft etc) actually drain the pool of money available for smaller projects.

Hey, if this ends up creating some huge cornucopia of money available to provide asset money for independent games, that would be amazingly great.

I would just be absolutely astounded if that were to happen.

I've also experienced quite a bit of hostility here, frankly extreme rudeness.  Turns out that some of the most hostile posts have been from people who actually have products currently seeking funding.  In a more serious setting that would be considered a conflict of interest.  Clue for the immature kids: my opinion here has very little bearing on whether platformer #474846 or roguelike #293746 succeeds or not.

Another inauspicious fact: for a lot of these products, you're getting into a space where you're competing with free software, some of which is produced to a surprisingly high standard of production values.  How they are able to do that I really have no idea but they do.

Actually I think the more games are on the site the more publicity and press coverage 8bf itself is going to get.

That's very possible, and the funding source is no longer going to be "in the know" indie devs but the public at large.  And there you're getting into $1/day territory [that is, 1/day for games that are actually finished...]

Don't get me wrong-- it would be wonderful if there was a funding source available for all the unique and original games out there.

I'm just extremely skeptical as to whether that's true.

Valis, if you hate indie games so much, why are you posting here?

Moi, where, specifically, did I say anything whatsoever about my opinion of indie games?

Be specific-- I want to see your answer.

I could very well be wrong.

don't really see how you believe there is little to no market for indie games -- what is your evidence of this, besides just claiming it?

According to statistics from the App Store, the average amount made by games is something like $1 per day.  The vast majority of these games are released by small independent developers.  The vast majority of the games that are more successful than that are released by large dev houses-- this means that the non-indie games skew the results, so the prospects for indie games are in fact even smaller than what the raw average would seem to indicate.

i agree that most indie game projects asking for funding aren't going to get funded

Right.  And the more that attempt to use these funding channels, the less money there is going to be in the total pool.

I'd be very interested to see what the number of funded projects in Kickstarter looks like as the number of total projects increases.  If this funding method is not somehow different from other funding methods and gold rushes in the past, there will be rapid and increasing falloff over time of games that are successfully funded.

from what you said, you'd expect it to be 1% or less

Actually I never specified an exact figure.

[from a post he deleted] Why do you feel the need to continue pissing on other people's parade?  We've heard you in the other threads already.

Are dissenting voices permitted here or is this thread just for those who think this is workable?

Have any experience with venture cap?  I do.  What's yours?

[for even finished indie games.]

Is there a large market for finished indie games?  

If so, there will be a market for unfinished indie games.  If not, there will not be.

Looks to me like the answer to both questions is "no."  If you're putting your platformer out there with 300,000 other platformers, the bottom line is that it takes an incredible fluke to make yours successful.  Braid and Super Meat Boy are flukes.  These represent the peak on the long tail.  Over to the right side, the "long tail" part of the long tail graph, are the rest of the huge number of hopefuls that come out every year.

The funding beg is a way of frontloading the risk so that you don't spend a lot of money on a title that's not going to earn out.  That's great and all but the money is not magically going to arrive out of nowhere when there is very little market for even finished indie games.

Since there is so little market for finished indie games, there will be an even smaller market for unfinished indie games.

Not only that but the more people who become aware of the funding pool, the less money there will be available in the pool.

There is the guy who got 7 grand for an interactive fiction game.  He was successful.  Good for him.  Others (like Azteka or whatever it's called) have been vastly less than successful.

Another reason this is unlikely to go very far is that a large proportion of those interested in contributing funds are, so far, other indie devs.

And if these funding requests somehow reach the public at large (without spending money on advertising which, again, you don't have) you are now in the larger market that isn't interested enough in indie games to support the large number of indie developers.

The math here should be obvious to most people and frankly I'm astonished that it isn't.

The inevitable conclusion of this effort puts people back to square one: creating assets for themselves or funding it themselves, then selling finished products.

Frankly the whole idea of this, as well as being distasteful from another perspective I won't go into here, just seems so unbelievably naive and unrealistic to me.

Let's see procedural maps in this.

Don't lock his thread because of me.  It's not just this guy, it's the whole entire concept of it that irritates me.  I'll just leave it at that and not pollute his thread anymore.  Mouldering guy, best of luck.

Still, I do urge you to find some more viable method for getting cash because I don't really see this working too well.  Another option would be to develop the skills to do stuff yourself instead of paying for it.  Personally if I had a game concept that I couldn't afford to develop I'd be revising the concept into something that I could afford.

But then again, what do I know?

Could you explain how this case(8bit funding) is different than mcdonalds, movies, venture capitalists, scientific grants, etc. ?

Which is it more similar to:

* Physicists asking for money to build the Large Hadron Collider

* Someone at a highway offramp with a "Will Work for Food" sign

If you really don't see how this and buying a Big Mac is different I really don't know how I can help you.