[Kickstarter] The Banner Saga

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Thu Mar 29, 2012 3:49 pm

Artwork looks spectacular. Add to that turn-based, HOMM-style hex fighting, and I am so in (Norsey theme/story is gravy):

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sto ... ?ref=email" target="_blank

Also, yet another project I am backing on Kickstarter that blows past its goal in a week. I'm beginning to wonder if that's the norm?

Update: If you pledge $50, you will get all 3 chapters (previously pledging just got you the first chapter 1 (which is standalone)). I doubt I will double my pledge to get all three, but will take more of a wait and see on this. My thinking is if I don't like the one I will already get at the $25 level, I doubt I will want to play subsequent chapters. If I do like it, then I can buy the next chapters separately (if they continue with Kickstarter).

I haven't really browsed the forums, but from what I see in the video, it looks like just one game component (plus story and cut scenes I guess), which is the hex based combat? I wonder if, similar to HOMM, there will be other things such as castle/resource management, or some kind of playing board where you move your characters? I'm actually ok with just story + combat, but I wonder if that might get repetitive if nothing else to do.

Lordnine · Post by **Lordnine** » Thu Mar 29, 2012 4:07 pm

I loved the style of this, I was one of the original backers.

Smoove_B · Post by **Smoove_B** » Thu Mar 29, 2012 6:38 pm

I too had to support it when I saw the hand-drawn animations. Who does that anymore? It looks great.

Lordnine · Post by **Lordnine** » Wed Apr 18, 2012 12:34 pm

Bump in case anyone else is interested. They are down to the final days and have raised just under $600,000.

TiLT · Post by **TiLT** » Thu Apr 19, 2012 2:57 am

Smoove_B wrote:I too had to support it when I saw the hand-drawn animations. Who does that anymore? It looks great.

They're actually rotoscoping, from what I understand. You're technically correct in that the animations are hand drawn in that case, but what they're really doing is that they film "actors" performing the moves and then draw on top of the video. It's a hideously expensive way to do things, but it can produce very unique results. See stuff like Another World (or Out of this World as it's called in the US) and A Scanner Darkly to see other examples of this tech.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Thu Apr 19, 2012 8:37 am

Last Express also used it I believe.

silverjon · Post by **silverjon** » Thu Apr 19, 2012 10:31 am

And loads of stuff by Ralph Bakshi.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Fri Apr 20, 2012 12:56 pm

I was afraid of this happening:

"When is the game going to be released?
We originally estimated the end of the year. We've been careful not to dramatically change the scope of the game but as you can probably tell we've added a LOT of stuff, way more than we ever expected. We don't see it going something like six months over schedule but we do want to honest that it could go past this year."

They feel pressure to add 80 billion features, ports, MP, translate it into Latin, create a version for the colorblind, et al, when they exceed their goals (and reading their forums), then it ultimately turns what was supposed to be a nice, quick release by a small indie team, into a bloated, drawn out, "whoa, we've never been HERE before...this could take some time as we figure out how to do these things" situation.

A negative Nelly might say Kickstarter simply transfers the burden of one, single "my developer/publisher used to say I had to make games this way" to thousands of "my backers say I have to make the game this way".

Lordnine · Post by **Lordnine** » Fri Apr 20, 2012 1:27 pm

There is a big difference here though. These are features that the developer WANTED to include but knew they would never have the time or budget to accomplish. A normal publisher on the other hand adds in features that they think will make the game sell better without considering what the original vision was.

The other issue is that most of these games weren’t avoiding a publisher for creative reasons, instead they couldn’t get a publisher in the first place.

Zurai · Post by **Zurai** » Fri Apr 20, 2012 1:28 pm

In addition, most of the additional features and all of the ports were promised as post-release features. Multiplayer? Post-release. Console ports? Post-release. Etc.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Fri Apr 20, 2012 1:59 pm

Unless my reading comprehension is worse than I thought, the devs state that they are going to miss the intended production date due to adding "a LOT of stuff."

Or in other words, feature creep. If you guys read it differently, lemme know (certainly possible!)

Lordnine · Post by **Lordnine** » Fri Apr 20, 2012 2:10 pm

Again, a lot of the stuff that is being added (although maybe not all) is things that were cut or things they would have liked to do but knew they didn’t have the budget for. The big multiplayer feature that they are getting close to funding is, for example, something they said that they wanted to do but knew they didn’t have the time/money to pull it off.

If you want to make Game A but only have the money to make Game B that is what you do. If down the road someone offers you 7x the budget you asked for to make Game B suddenly Game A doesn’t seem so far fetched anymore.

SlapBone · Post by **SlapBone** » Fri Apr 20, 2012 2:15 pm

Carpet_pissr wrote:they are going to miss the intended production date due to adding "a LOT of stuff."

Or in other words, feature creep. If you guys read it differently, lemme know (certainly possible!)

They are going to miss their intended production date due to adding a tiered purchase program. EA will be kickstarting next.

TiLT · Post by **TiLT** » Fri Apr 20, 2012 2:25 pm

Carpet_pissr wrote:Unless my reading comprehension is worse than I thought, the devs state that they are going to miss the intended production date due to adding "a LOT of stuff."

Or in other words, feature creep. If you guys read it differently, lemme know (certainly possible!)

I don't think you know what the term "feature creep" means. It refers to adding features merely for the sake of adding features (in order to make a product "better", developers add features that aren't part of the core design. This is also called "bloatware") or an uncontrolled influx of new features from multiple, uncoordinated people and the problems this causes. Neither seems to apply in this case.

The devs for The Banner Saga started with modest goals in terms of game content and art/music. With a larger budget they realized they can now get closer to their ideal vision of the game while also adding more quests and story decisions. This requires more people or more time, but most likely both.

This is going to happen a lot with successful Kickstarters. With no upper limit to the amount of money a project can receive, it's quite possible for the people involved to have to increase the scope of their projects. This is great for projects that are ready for this kind of thing (like most games where more content is relatively straightforward to produce), but potentially catastrophic for projects not ready for it (say, an application with a very specific and limited purpose), leading to actual feature creep.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Fri Apr 20, 2012 2:42 pm

Thanks for the correction.

coopasonic · Post by **coopasonic** » Fri Apr 20, 2012 3:05 pm

TiLT wrote:This is going to happen a lot with successful Kickstarters. With no upper limit to the amount of money a project can receive, it's quite possible for the people involved to have to increase the scope of their projects. This is great for projects that are ready for this kind of thing (like most games where more content is relatively straightforward to produce), but potentially catastrophic for projects not ready for it (say, an application with a very specific and limited purpose), leading to actual feature creep.

I don't see the "have to increase the scope" part. With some of the high profile projects, they advertise what they will do with the money if they hit certain stratch goals, but I don't see this as a necessity. They may feel they have to, but they don't really have to.

TiLT · Post by **TiLT** » Fri Apr 20, 2012 3:53 pm

coopasonic wrote:I don't see the "have to increase the scope" part. With some of the high profile projects, they advertise what they will do with the money if they hit certain stratch goals, but I don't see this as a necessity. They may feel they have to, but they don't really have to.

That's technically true, but I think that attitude would seriously hurt the public opinion on Kickstarter projects. The alternative to expanding the scope would simply be for the developers to keep the extra money for themselves or for future projects. That wouldn't go over very well with the backers. That is why the scope needs to increase. The backers want to see their money leading to increased value. The company's actual income is supposed to come from post-Kickstarter sales.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Fri Apr 20, 2012 5:45 pm

coopasonic wrote:They may feel they have to, but they don't really have to.

You obviously have not been on some of those backer forums. Peeps are searse about their $15!

silvaril · Post by **silvaril** » Sat Apr 21, 2012 1:27 am

Heya

It seems likely to me that part of the issue is with the call for adding in stuff post release.

That requires scope and design work now, in order to integrate the future feature set.
If the previous scope was for fire and toss the launcher, the new scope of fire, reload, fire some more likely requires significant rework on the design.

And may even require re-coding areas that previously passed muster.

Lordnine · Post by **Lordnine** » Thu Jun 21, 2012 8:50 pm

Looks like they received their bonus goods for pledges. That's a lot of shipping tubes.

I remember one of the other Kickstarter groups ended up with almost nothing after expenses but this group looks like it budgeted correctly.

Of $730k, 10% immediately comes out for amazon, kickstarter and failed payments. We actually had a shockingly low number of these failed payments, but this alone leaves us with roughly $650k.

Actual prizes cost us about $22k to produce. $22,000 certainly is a lot for posters, tshirts and some fancy art, but this was not a surprise to us since we had gotten estimates and set prices based on that.

Shipping costs are a bit troublesome, especially since we have a fair number of international backers. We estimated that shipping would cost roughly an amount equal to the prizes themselves. When comparing our prices to other kickstarter campaigns we felt that we couldn't ask for more than the standard international shipping rate- between $10 and $20. This helps but does not cover the cost. Now any time I see a campaign asking for an extra $10 for international shipping I just assume they have no idea what they're talking about. That said, it's not like this will cut into our budget by a significant amount with the kind of volume we're pushing. Between prizes and shipping that's another 18% of our total funds.

Once we've dealt with all that business we've got about $600k to work with. I want to re-emphasize that this came as a surprise to none of us!

As for development, contractor salaries take the lions share. We've now contracted (not hired) two programmers, a sound design team, a dedicated composer, a QA specialist, a writer, an interface artist, a community manager and an entire animation production house working for us to produce more content than we ever dreamed at higher quality. That, my friends, is currently where a good 50% of our total funding goes.

We've got the mundane business expenses like a (rather miniscule) office lease, software like adobe products, dropbox and fmod, computer upgrades, and hardware coming out to about 5% of our budget.

We're anticipating the relatively small operation costs of maintaining our own server-side data on amazon's cloud so people can download the game from us and play online without Steam.

Lastly, we've put aside the remaining funding as our safety net which will be re-evaluated as we go. You never know when things are going to go unexpectedly wrong.

We're still not taking personal salaries. We'll be living off our savings until our game starts making income.

To summarize: so far, so good.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 3:21 pm

"At this time, Factions is coming out in November. We really want people to have something they can play, and the full Saga is now slated for the first half of 2013. "

Sad trombone.

I wonder what percentage of the current KS games I backed will be pushed back from their original completion dates? I have to say it again, it seems 75% of these Kickstarter updates (for the approx. 4 or 5 games I am backing) are about how the team is getting overwhelmed with the mass amount of shwag they have to mail out, and prizes and surveys, and gathering details about people who get to be mentioned in the game, etc.

Obvious bias coming from a non-prize getting backer, but damn, isn't the game itself more important than the stupid autographed soundtrack? (of a game that hasn't even hit the light of day, no less!)

TiLT · Post by **TiLT** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:04 pm

Carpet_pissr wrote:I have to say it again, it seems 75% of these Kickstarter updates (for the approx. 4 or 5 games I am backing) are about how the team is getting overwhelmed with the mass amount of shwag they have to mail out, and prizes and surveys, and gathering details about people who get to be mentioned in the game, etc.

That will have to be those games' problem. It's not The Banner Saga's. The "problem" here is that they got so much more funding than they had expected that the game grew larger than originally envisioned, which pushes the game back. Several other games have grown beyond the initial pitch due to large amounts of backers, and as any software developer can tell you, you can't just add more developers to an increasing software spec and expect to finish at the same time, not at the scale we're talking about here. Either the developers use all the extra money on crap nobody cares about, or they use it to enhance the game. One would think you'd be happy.

Lordnine · Post by **Lordnine** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:07 pm

Carpet_pissr wrote:"At this time, Factions is coming out in November. We really want people to have something they can play, and the full Saga is now slated for the first half of 2013. "

Sad trombone.

I wonder what percentage of the current KS games I backed will be pushed back from their original completion dates?

While I agree that the amount of “bonus” items that have to be sent out takes up a ridiculous amount of time I don’t think it should be surprising that most of the successful Kickstarters take longer than originally expected. In most cases reach goals mean that the projects have two-three times more content to create than the project originally planned for and in most cases the teams haven’t grown with the increased demand. There just isn’t enough time to do everything in the same timeframe when you double the scope of work.

In the case of Banner Saga I believe they were originally going to release the game in episodes (self-contained campaigns) but thanks to all the extra funding they are now releasing as one complete epic campaign.

Daehawk · Post by **Daehawk** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:07 pm

Not read the thread...looked a little online...sounds fun. ill read up on this one. i love Vikings and I don't think anyone has focused on them to this degree.

And I should start a Kickstarter. need to find a subject.

Baroquen · Post by **Baroquen** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:38 pm

If it had been billed as competitive multiplayer, I wouldn't have backed. No interest in Factions. Will wait for the single player campaign eventually...

Their choice to shift the focus of their gameplan, but still annoying for me.

Zurai · Post by **Zurai** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:44 pm

Baroquen wrote:If it had been billed as competitive multiplayer, I wouldn't have backed. No interest in Factions. Will wait for the single player campaign eventually...

Their choice to shift the focus of their gameplan, but still annoying for me.

They're shipping Factions because it's ready. The focus of the game is still single-player, and you're getting what they originally envisioned as 3 (single-player) games instead of just 1 (single-player game). What's to complain about?

tals · Post by **tals** » Sun Nov 25, 2012 9:16 am

I missed the original kickstarter - for those that did you can now get into beta for the MP aspect of the game through

http://stoicstudio.com/forum/enter-the-fray.php" target="_blank

It's really good! Looking forward to the SP however the MP is very good considering this was not in the original plans.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Thu Jan 31, 2013 4:17 pm

I'll say it again - LOVE their art!

New update says single player expected by mid 2013. We shall see...the original out date was Nov 2012...then first half 2013, now mid 2013.

IceBear · Post by **IceBear** » Thu Jan 31, 2013 4:34 pm

If mid 2013 is June, then that's technically the first half of 2013

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Thu Jan 31, 2013 5:03 pm

I will bet half my silver arm coil that they will not hit June 2013.

IceBear · Post by **IceBear** » Thu Jan 31, 2013 5:18 pm

Oh, I doubt it'll ship then either, but just saying they haven't changed what they just said before. They said first half of 2013 as their estimate, but with the new update it's going to be at least the last part of the first half or later (which is what I suspect too)

Lordnine · Post by **Lordnine** » Mon Feb 18, 2013 8:45 pm

A time of reckoning is upon us. All of us at Stoic are proud to announce, after burning the midnight oil for many moons, that beta has ended for The Banner Saga: Factions and soft launch is today!

What does that mean? In industry terms, soft launch is a short period in which a game is finished and complete, but released to a limited public.

Also, it is a thank you to our generous and wonderful backers to get a head start on the release build of the game. Your progress is being saved this week and carries over for the official launch.

This is the multiplayer portion of the game for those who aren't aware. They said in the email that this means the combat engine is now where they want it and will now focus purely on the single player campaign.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Mon Feb 18, 2013 8:56 pm

Yay! I'm not even going to peek at the PvP until I see a campaign ready to play.

Lordnine · Post by **Lordnine** » Tue Feb 19, 2013 12:46 am

I've played a few rounds now. I lost all of them but I think I understand the game mechanics at last. It feels more like chess than say XCOM but I can see it becoming a lot of fun.

You choose which units to being into a fight and decide where they start on the board. Units are moved in order so it actually matters the order in which you place them in your roster. Large units have a footprint of 4 instead of the 1 that all others have so it's possible to make blockades to protect weaker units from larger heavy hitters.

Units gain promotions if you do well enough, so far I haven't gotten to see any because XP income is very very slow, at-least if you're losing. It's possible wins grant you a nice boost.

Match making seems to be based on a point value, field an army with a higher point value and it matches you against comparative teams. Will need to test this more as most people I've fought are using the starting build.

The art and animation look great, the starting intro movie even had pretty good voice acting. I think multiplayer will be a fun diversion but the meat of the game will be the campaign.

Lordnine · Post by **Lordnine** » Wed Feb 20, 2013 1:21 am

Played a few more games and I really enjoy it. Once you become familiar with the game mechanics there is a surprising amount of depth. I’ve finally managed to upgrade one of my units, an archer (now lovingly named Lego Lass), and while the unit is better it doesn’t seem so much better as to unbalance the game. By using careful unit placement I’ve taken on numerous other players now who had more “promoted” units than I do.

Is anyone else playing?

Turtle · Post by **Turtle** » Wed Feb 20, 2013 4:23 am

Turns out you can join the multiplayer beta by buying into the multiplayer portion early. So now I'm in. Will try it out.

TiLT · Post by **TiLT** » Wed Feb 20, 2013 4:43 am

The beta is over. The Banner Saga: Factions (ie. the multiplayer version of the game) is live now, though it's closed off to non-backers until the 24th.

tals · Post by **tals** » Wed Feb 20, 2013 4:57 am

I have it, I stopped playing just because the game was evolving too quickly so sounds like I now need to go back in - what I tried previously I liked

Baroquen · Post by **Baroquen** » Wed Feb 20, 2013 6:50 am

I loaded it up last night. Was impressed in that everything looks smooth and polished. I think I'll really enjoy the campaign when it eventually comes around. Even played a round or two of the pvp and had fun. Will be playing again soon.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Sat Feb 23, 2013 7:48 am

This was all I needed to read to placate me (from latest update)

"Making a single player game is vastly more simple than making a multiplayer game, and these challenges cost us more time than we would have liked.

At the same time, if we had not gone through this process, the game, both single and multi-player, would be significantly lower quality than it is now, without a doubt."

However, target out date for SP is now mid to late 2013.

And when I browsed and saw there were micro transactions in game - almost had a heart attack. Thankfully, that will only be in Factions, the MP, PvP game that I paid for and backed, but didnt want, and that has apparently consumed the Banner Saga.

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