Jon Shafer's "At the Gates": a kickstarter game

[Bacchus]

there were three of them - "The Conifer Games team: Jon, Jonathan and Kay (from left to right)." from the kickstarter link.

*quick Google*
So, a man, his girlfriend, fully employed elsewhere, and the girlfriend's roommate, similarly in full employment. Yeah, that sounds legit...

Also:
"People ask me, 'What if you need more money?'" Shafer says. "I'm like, 'Well, I'll sell my house and sell my car.' They're like, 'Sell your house and your car?' 'Yeah. I don't need it. I need my computer. If I had to sell my computer, that'd be a problem. But my house is a house.' So what? I can get another house, another car. Whatever."

[Sirian]

I believe Jon did hock his house and his car. I haven't interacted with him since before his "going dark" period, but the post from last fall mentioned health problems and injuries. It's plausible those things happened and set him back, but if he still intends to finish the game, he would do well to keep his news feed up to date.

After years of delays, no one can be blamed for reaching a point of distrust and exhausted patience. Jon broke a lot of schedule-related promises, and I imagine that if he bails on the project without delivering anything, that his reputation may never recover from that.

I did not personally invest in Jon's game, but I do wish him well. Like Sulla and many others, I've been curious to see how this project will conclude and whether the gameplay turned out to be fun, in the end.


- Sirian

[antisocialmunky]

That sucks, what do you think his chances are of getting to headline another game title after given the situation? I disagree with his method of design but he certainly seems like he needs some work if he mortgaged his house and sold his car 0_o.

[Sullla]

Jon Shafer is a creative type, with everything positive and negative that term entails. He comes up with some legitimately amazing design ideas for strategy games, and he's passionate about making them a reality. Unfortunately, he is awful at the logistics side of game development: having realistic/achievable goals, meeting deadlines, and knowing when to walk away from cool ideas that simply can't be implemented with the time and resources available. Jon is someone who needs a business type helping him out to save him from his own creativity when it runs overboard and leads him into trouble. I was also saddened when I heard that he was selling his car and committing his life savings to this project. It had the feel of an addiction that was spiraling out of control and destroying his personal life. The whole At the Gates saga is legitimately depressing for everyone involved.

I continue to believe that the much-maligned publisher/developer relationship has a good reason for existing. Without publishers to establish spending budgets and set deadlines, far too many developers would never release their games at all, or pull the Stardock route and release games that are effectively never finished. And yes, many publishers are horrible in a million different ways, but they do serve a necessary purpose.

[haphazard1]

This is unfortunate to read about. Count me as another person who thought the game concept sounded interesting, and would have really liked to see if it could work. Does not sound like that is going to ever happen, at this point.

Cases like this one are why I do not back Kickstarters. The skill set needed to design and create an interesting game (or other product) is quite different from the skill set needed to manage the development process, and very few people have both. Add the need for a third skill set (salesmanship to promote the idea and attract the funding needed), and it really is not too surprising that so many projects never result in finished products.

[Bacchus]

That's why you back kickstarter projects which have a team behind them, not just a guy and some mates. Diversity of skills and outlook, plus sanity checks, plus ability to carry on should something happen, as it inevitably does. Mostly sanity checks though, as any PhD student will confirm, truly solo long-term projects take you to crazy town mentally.

[haphazard1]

That's why you back kickstarter projects which have a team behind them, not just a guy and some mates. Diversity of skills and outlook, plus sanity checks, plus ability to carry on should something happen, as it inevitably does. Mostly sanity checks though, as any PhD student will confirm, truly solo long-term projects take you to crazy town mentally.

And once multiple people are involved, you need yet another skill set: management of personnel and inter-team dynamics. Really, it is amazing anything succeeds, isn't it?

[Sirian]

That's why you back kickstarter projects which have a team behind them, not just a guy and some mates. Diversity of skills and outlook, plus sanity checks, plus ability to carry on should something happen, as it inevitably does. Mostly sanity checks though, as any PhD student will confirm, truly solo long-term projects take you to crazy town mentally.

Sorry, not buying. This generalization has been proven wrong in some cases.

Two games that I've really enjoyed -- Banished, and Stardew Valley -- were both one-person projects, start to finish. Banished was truly one person, and Stardew Valley was 98% one person with a few contracted bits.

In the case of Banished, an artist with prior experience decided to take the plunge in to the design and coding side, and pulled off a very solid title in an underserved sub-genre.

The guy who made Stardew Valley was partially supported by his girlfriend, and he is now a multi-millionaire. And it took him five years to finish his game.

The difference between these guys and Jon Shafer is broken promises and timelines. They didn't solicit public funding, and they released their game -- and profited from their good work and good ideas. For every story like these two, there are tons of failures, but that happens across the spectrum on business startups. One has to wear a lot of hats to make any small business succeed.

Jon was in position to make this work. He just-- hasn't. I don't know that the final jury is out yet on this project of his, even, but it could be. Certainly there are plenty of bad signals, and more accumulating, but to dismiss out of hand the notion that games can be made by one person is simply false. It can, and has, been done -- and my two examples are not the only ones. We're in the midst of a reformation to the games industry, with electronic distribution opening up connections between niche games and niche markets that has enabled a much wider selection of games to be published successfully than in prior decades.


- Sirian

[sunrise089]

In the boardgaming world, KS is now almost a standard platform for quality delivery, even established publishers use it.

Right, because in board games there's a good rationale for how the production cost is much cheaper if everything is printed at once. That's not true for video games distributed via download.

In most cases I'm frustrated at the claim that people "ran out of money" for IP work. They didn't really "run out," they took the money and then didn't do the promised work. If my employer hires me to work on a project on a contract basis, paying up front, and I either do no work or I do half of it and then decide I wasn't paid enough and bail the money didn't run out, I was just a bastard.

Kickstarter in an amazing invention - it's a marketing tool to extract money from nerdy guys with mid/high incomes and generally inexpensive tastes, in exchange for a feeling of moral superiority. See this, just change "sex" to "business."

[haphazard1]

I think it is likely that the problem was not so much that the promised work was not done (or at least attempted to be done), as that the promised work was badly under-estimated. The plan/budget was built around the project taking N person-months of effort, but it really needed about 1.5 N, or even 2 N, or more.

No way to know for sure from the outside, unless a lot more information is provided by those in the know. But that would be my guess.