Divekick Revisited: Lets all Chill Out a Little
Originally published at Kayinworks. You can comment here or there.
it gets scarier and scarier for my words to be given more and more weight. It makes it more dangerous for me to be glib or be humorously hyperbolic. Keits and the Divekick team have been given a disproportional amount of shit for things I’ve said and done, often for things I didn’t even mean to imply. So lets go over this again.
Problem Kayin has with the Divekick Kickstarter:
*You do not need QA to get on steam at an indie level.
*Legal costs are probably not necessary (but are less insane than QA).
*30k is just a bad asking price in general, unless you plan on stopping the project if you don’t make it.
*Sloppy disclosure of costs and information.
*Overreaching in goals and ambition.
I broke this down to either ignorance or shadiness and I had a long talk with Keits. It was 100% ignorance. It’s easy for me to forget that I’m the guy with experience beating on the little guy here. So lemme explain to you how Keits could come to think this all was a good idea.
Imagine your a guy making a game in the Fighting Game Community. There aren’t many “indies” to ask for advice. Maybe Mike Z? Maybe you go to Seth Killian? So you go to Seth and say “I want to get a game on Steam. What does that take?”. Now, Seth works at Capcom. Like I pointed out in the comments in the last, while a small crew of the right guys (or even one guy) could make Divekick for 0 or close to that, Capcom would take like, 100k or more. Their infrastructural is way more complex and they have way more overhead and they’re not designed for small platforms. So he gives you a bunch of numbers that sound a bit high. But he’s Seth Killian! Or whoever, it didn’t have to be Seth, all I know is Keits did ask people in the industry and those people have an inflated sense of cost due to the nature of the businesses they work with. I see this a lot. People will be like “Oh wow, the art on this game looks expensive” because they’re in a position where they buy their assets as opposed to a lot of indie situations where you have an artist who is volunteering at a desk, slaving away at the hopes of eventual returns. The economics are totally different. Businesses don’t gamble, but indie devs do all the time.
So then you’re like “Well this is a lot of money! lets cut this down a bit!” and you cut your kickstarter costs by a lot. You THINK you’re being conservative, but you’re not. Now, you don’t know about getting games on steam or whatever, but if one person in the FGC knows, EVERYONE KNOWS, and you’re called out on it. Now, a lot of my criticism hold up, but in this context you can figure out why they came to be. So on one hand, I stand by a lot of things I said, but on the other hand I know Keits knows. He, in honesty said to me “Ignorance is my biggest enemy”. He’s learned these lessons. He does not deserve to be hounded and beaten for them. He also tried to hide the fact they were rewriting things to keep things smooth, but in reality that little decision which could have explained a lot of the costs backfired. I no longer am against the Divekick Kickstarter now that I know with confidence that Keits is trying to the best of his ability to do the right thing and is receptive of criticism. Now that we all have some context about what Keits is dealing with, lets cut him some slack, alright? He’s trying and I think has done a lot of things in the past to merit at some forgiveness and I apologize for being so glib and casual about the whole thing. I didn’t expect people to read into the things I said so much. But that wasn’t my last mistake!
DerpKick
But now we have this. Way to go, me. But lemme explain how this came to be.
I was talking to a friend about the Kickstarter rewrite and we were theorizing how long it would take due to the relative simplicity of the game (we’ll get into that shortly). Eventually the conversation mutated into “How long would it take you to make a bare bones divekick?” to which I said to their surprise “15 minutes”. And I did. Then it leaked onto an IRC channel and people started streaming it and hosting it elsewhere so the best thing I figured I could do is link it on twitter my self and take ownership. I figured giving context to it would reduce the damage done.
But what does Derpkick represent? To a lot of people it’s “Divekick can be made with 15 minutes of effort”. Is that really what I made? I said my self - Derpkick is barely playable. It’s silly as hell and the values for movements were the first I put in that felt semi acceptable. If I were to do my KICKER’S HISTORY DIVE-A-MITE clone, I’d start from scratch so I had better infrastructural. Derpkick is NOT able to support a real game. Even if I were to try a real clone, I’d be cheating in so many ways. I wouldn’t be making much art for it. I’d be reusing or taking stuff. I wouldn’t be recording tons of voice clips or anything. I’d also have a model of how the game works to copy and mutate. I’D ALSO be using a lame ass game editor that makes working on stuff like this way faster. You’d also never get anything like netplay out of me. I’m also a single person who doesn’t need to organize. Who knows how long it’ll take Divekick to rebuild - but if all goes well, not longer than it would take me to clone it - and they’d be doing it under a much better environment that would give the game much more of a future. Making games is never easy, especially if you have high standards. Things you think will take no time at all can take FOREVER to do. Art is also a big one. High resolution art does not come easy and is perhaps one of the slowest parts of the process. Now they wanna stuff something like GGPO into it and have REAL matchmaking and not “plug in your IP” netplay? That’s not easy. What Derpkick is and what Divekick is are not the same thing. Derpkick isn’t named Derpkick because Divekick is derpy, it’s named Derpkick because IT is depy. Derpkick is derpy as hell!
Why do I even wanna clone Divekick (even though I won’t)? Is it because I hate it or think it’s easy to do or whatever? Nah man, it’s because I have a ton of ideas that would have no place in Divekick proper and the Divekick idea seems so fun to me that I would love ot be able to play with it and push that design space. The fact I am interested in it SUPPORTS Divekick. It should not be treated as an insult. Derpkick was simply made as a quick joke/experiment and it is irresponsible to read into it anymore than that. It shouldn’t be rubbed into Keit’s face as if it’s as fun as a project he’s labored on this hard. I mean come on, does Derpkick have Mr. N?
Speaking of which, Instead of hating on Keits, could we all just hate on Marn instead?