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 warboss wrote:
Silly gearhead... morale rules are optional in HG which generally means no one uses them. Just like your gears, they're in it till they're overkilled! :(

Actually, they're not in the game as of the Field Manual....

Hi guys, Agonarch from Mektek here.

I'd like to correct some assumptions that have been made and some incorrect assertions that have probably arisen from those assumptions, and I'll remain around to answer questions as much as I can.

First off, GBL, I apologise for whatever has made you so bitter towards Mektek, I do know that some of our guys can be short with their answers and if this reaction was a result of someone being rude to you then I don't begrudge you it at all. I'm one of the newer guys on the team, so I don't know what it was about and don't have anything against you. I don't know who didn't answer your questions or why, but I'll do my best to do so for you now. Not everyone gets their questions answered, try not to take it personally.

The Good
Now, the first thing I need to clear up is the "Never Completed Anything" aspect. Mektek has been a team for well over 10 years - in fact they've spent over 10 years working on MW4 even without including MW3 or earlier games. Mekpaks have been available and widely played from 2003 up until recently, with several versions being completed. In 2010, in spite of not making any money off anything, Mektek managed to negotiate a deal with Microsoft to build Mektek's "Free Release", giving them access to a lot more development materials and the ability to distribute the game (now hard to get on shelves) to the community, again, for free. By this point, the Mekpak was at version 3. Each Mekpak was practically an expansion in itself, with people liking some over others but each new version featuring significantly more features, mechs and equipment than the last. There was another expansion patch released for version 3.

That is already the longest running mod team I can think of. It's one of the very, very few examples of someone getting Microsoft to cooperate in this way. Not just something impressive, several somethings, and several somethings released, with the first free release being a complete stand alone version of the game with more changes than any official expansion. One of the Mektek mechs was even brought into BT canon!

Once they were a studio, that wasn't the end of it. They're behind the software in the battletech pods some of you will have played;
http://www.mechjock.com/

I don't know how many more completed, well made projects you want, GBL, but this is all just stuff from the old Mektek staff alone without including the new Heavy Gear guys like Jack and Clancy (I think this is the comparison you were after?). I have to admit, this is the first forum I've been on where Mekteks ability to complete was in question, so I'm more than happy to answer questions about this within reason.

The Bad
Let's bring up the stuff you've listed as the bad stuff: a few people decided they wanted a version 4 of the Mekpak. Jehosephat, the guy who originally worked out how to extend the game to allow so many new features to be added and the lead developer, had a stroke. The community reaction was horrible and far from supportive, so Jeho left to get his health back. Jeho's work on this was critical, and even if it were possible to pick up from where he left it at this point, nearly 10 years in, everyone figured that we'd just have fun with the current version (a lot of debate was around over whether some of the v4 changes would be good anyway). Everyone enjoyed versions of 3, for at least a couple years after all this. I don't mean to blame the fan reaction for this outcome, I'm not sure Jeho could've helped any more than he did if people had been nice. Mekpak 4 didn't get released, so that's one point at least you can point at in the last 10 years, from a free mod team.

"Issues with the team" is something so far back I barely know about it from the outside. You'll have to be more specific about that if you want more information so I can find out for you - Mektek remained stable throughout even when it was just a mod team, and is certainly stable ever since it's been a professional studio.

The Ugly
A lot of people were just upset at us when we dropped support for the Mekpak and shut down the servers (I was here for this bit). I'm not sure why Mektek gets so much of the flak for this, even though they held it together much longer than anyone else, they seem to get the blame for it all falling over in the end. From what I could see though, we really didn't have a choice - we didn't want to stumble into the legal hellstorm that was being kicked up around Battletech at the time if it came to our doorstep, not to mention that situation would've been completely a lose-lose for Battletech in general (not to mention the Heavy Gear project could've potentially been dragged into it, completely unacceptable). GBL, if you think it's just co-incidence that this all happened around the bankruptcy of Smith and Tinker then either you're less cynical than I thought, or you hate Mektek more than I thought.


I really hope that's cleared some things up for some people. Now that's out of the way, on to more HG related stuff;

The Kiickstarter
The kickstarter launch.. we got screwed with misinformation about the market there. I'm should probably not go into details about what went wrong right at the start there, maybe later I'll be able to, but it doesn't really matter now. Marketing predictions of the stretch goals were reflective of how much it would cost to reach those targets by the deadline given (I'm not sure why that was done that way, and worse, it wasn't clarified that those tasks would still be worked on even if the goal wasn't met, just to a later deadline!). Many of the late stage stuff had initial design work done on it because work on stuff like singleplayer would have to be started as early as time allowed, perhaps I can get permission to show off a singleplayer design doc from part of mission 1, would anyone be interested in that? (it would obviously be full of spoilers).

One of the great things about kickstarter is that we can get feedback directly from you and not have to rely on a marketing company, and things like singleplayer missions which we had been forced to put to the back of the list due to faulty market info we suddenly had a good excuse to bring forwards again. We're now dealing directly with the players, which cuts up time we could be using for development but is more than worth it - what people are saying they want is a lot closer to what I was hoping to make (special thanks for supporting singleplayer and LAN, guys!).

What warboss said is true, we're not out until we're actually out. One of our stumbling blocks has been getting coverage, I've been told that from our metrics simply not enough people know about this project yet for it to succeed - but that may work in our favour. If you guys tell me what you want to see, what you think needs further explaining and what you think is missing then we still have a chance to fix it before we get any surges in visitors. At the moment, we're working on getting some gameplay footage as that seems to be in highest demand.

Regardless of anything anyone has said so far, thanks to all of you for caring enough to be involved in making such a huge and detailed thread on this!

So, go ahead and I'll answer what I can. I've answered a lot of stuff but I've only read through the thread once and I'll need to go back and make notes before trying to respond properly. A lot of stuff will become obsolete with stuff we show soon on kickstarter, I hope.

Thanks for the update, Agonarch.

Thanks for signing up and braving the storm here. I know BrandonKF is probably breathing a big sigh of relief now that his long watch is over. The situation with the crowdfunding on the website and kickstarter seems to outsiders is a bit more complicated to outsiders than your post would make it. Bad marketing demographics didn't cause the countdown to end with an error 404 non-functional website for hours. Bad market research didn't cause a typo in the initial video or an utter lack of normal crowdfunding info for weeks on the crowdfunding website (like platforms supported, estimated release date, end of the crowdfunding, info on what happens to the money if the goal isn't reached, etc). What's done is done but it feels to those of us on the outside that this whole endeavor (at least from the publicly released side) was rushed with no attention to detail which would be the deathknell for something as complex as a "AAA" game (I'm not a fan of the term).

I want to give you my money but the efforts so far have instilled no confidence in me. From poor initial effort to the (what I consider) completely unrealistic game type and funding goals for a first time full game effort, Stompy/mektek isn't making it easy for me to do so. In the end for me personally, I don't own and don't plan on owning a modern PC gaming rig so I've been out of the demographic of your customers despite being very interested in HG (see my blog sig) and owning a modern console, 2 laptops (capable of playing smaller indie games), and multiple android gaming capable devices.

The best advice I can give you (admittedly from a simple consumer standpoint as I haven't made a video game since 1992 in my PASCAL high school programming class) is to come out with some sort of less ambitious game within the next year to get the ball rolling both in terms of brand recognition as well as steady income. You don't jump from a new indie studio (which is what I would call a company who had only created mod packs for other games) to a "AAA" studio in one quick jump in 99.99999% of cases (Mojang being the only exception that I can think of). Come out with a small turn based multiplayer XCOM enemy unknown wargame for mutliple cheap platforms (iOS, android, PC indie game, console indie arcade release) to both cater to the existing tabletop fans as well as to energize the market for a future bigger offering like the F2P arena game you've not been able to fund. Get your name and the name of the game brand out there in the wild first before attempting to conquer the Mt. Everest of gaming genres.

 warboss wrote:
Thanks for signing up and braving the storm here.

Yup, seconded. Welcome to the mosh pit. Hopefully people won't throw too many elbows! That said...

 warboss wrote:
I want to give you my money but the efforts so far have instilled no confidence in me.

I'm not as down on the F2P model as other people are - I've played WoT and MWO, and while they didn't hold my interest they were fun enough games in their own right. The first video looked really nice, and I hoped that was the gameplay vid. Then I saw the GDC video and went... eh.

Since then, you released the Gearbay vid and I thought - wow, that looked awesome. That actually makes me excited to play - but it's not gameplay. It's just a cinematic.

My real issue with HGA isn't the F2P model (bring it on!) or anything else, other than what appears to be a very clumsy management of the initial launch of the product. The initial private crowd-sourcing was opaque and had few protections, while the KS campaign seemed to be written by someone who had take a nice long hit on the crack pipe. There seemed to be no attempt to tailor the campaign to either market, and communications have been all over the place. Instead of sticking to the F2P model and explaining why it's going to be awesome, there appeared to be a panic and a shift towards single player content (which is nuts from my perspective until you get the arena game done).

The combination has made me very leery of supporting the organization, because I'm afraid the technical side might be as disorganized as the marketing / advertising side. That's may be completely unfounded - but the marketing is the face of the organization, and that's all I have to go on.

So yeah. Give me a F2P like the Gearbay example, and I'll sign up and play, and maybe even contribute. But you guys really need to take the guy managing your message back out behind the shed.

You should also take your project manager and whoever is in charge of financing the project behind the shed, while you are at it.

Howdy Agonarch! You get points for bravery, to be sure.

Okay, here's my weigh-in: I agree that the current project is too ambitious, all things considered. It looks cool, but it's too much for the time being.

I love Heavy Gear (in case my name wasn't a giveaway,) and I credit HG2 on the PC for getting me started into miniatures wargaming. I own a large stack of HG rule and sourcebooks, and even though I don't actually play the game (or any other,) I still read them for enjoyment, and I but and paint minis when I can. The best thing that Heavy Gear has to offer is its settings and stories, and its diverse technologies (NOT just gears!); I think it's one of the better game universes out there, and I don't see HG:A playing to those strengths. In fact, focusing primarily on arena combat (yes, I know about the proposed single-player story) dredges up unpleasant memories of the TV show.

Anyway, as it's currently proposed, it seems to be relying too much on flash and wow, but it's trying hard to be seen in a market flooded with flashy and well-established games. In order to get attention, I think it needs to be fundamentally different, as in you might to well to scrap the project and start again with something else entirely. Look at Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun Returns: they're both from VERY well-established designers and with heavy fanbases, and both are isometric CRPGs. I've been aching for a Battletech CRPG for ages, as much as I enjoy Mechwarrior, because the exclusive focus on 'mech combat leaves out soooo much, and there's a heckuva lot more than just that in Battletech. My suggestion is to work on a game that is less technically-demanding, but that will allow you to create a more immersive and interesting playing experience, focusing on character and storytelling, something that people can play alone just as well as with others. Don't over-reach and try to do a big expensive studio game, because without something really unique and special to set it apart and garner interest, it's not likely to succeed. For me, arena combat in Heavy Gear is a very minor sideshow and isn't very interesting, and doesn't strike me as enough of a draw for someone not already familiar with the setting.

There are people still concerned about the skill of the Mektek team and that's fair enough - when I cleared up that other stuff I only focused on the old Mektek team who primarily came from the modding team because that's what seemed to be the concern. Iin the last 6 months they've hired people who've worked on MechWarrior 2, Heavy Gear, Heavy Gear 2, MechWarrior 3 and 4, amongst many others (you were talking about a computer upgrade, well, Jack was the lead designer of Crysis and in one way or another that guy seems to have been responsible for all of my own computer upgrades the last few years so I know how you feel, although this time the upgrade was to make one of his games rather than play it ). There has been several decades of game development experience added to this team, and it's far from a group of first time developers at this point.

Most of the people you're speaking to now are designers or developers, not marketers. I can see how you might assume the marketing could relate to the technical side, but those are very different and separate things (which is how this problem happened in the first place). As far as I know, in spite of funding, we're still the only one to have demo'ed multiplayer anything in UE4. I know the GDC tech demo was 'meh', and it was, for sure - the majority of work had been in basic movement, controls and network replication, not leaving much time for gameplay at that point - it was a technology demonstrator to prove to people at the time that we could work in the engine. As far as I am aware we were the second team to demo anything in UE4 playable by the public at all (beaten by a few hours, and the control on the other game was much simpler than ours). We'll just have to show everyone again what we're capable of on a shoestring, but at some point we're not going to be able to keep stretching our budget anymore, to go with the goals we want I think it needs to be kickstarter.

Ice, you mention you want to see the gearbay in more detail? I think there's plans to show a walkthrough of the area, that area shown in that clip is playable (though still a bit underdeveloped, did I mention we're looking for funding? ).

The countdown ending in error 404 I'm not sure who to blame, I do know our cloud hosters machine fell over (it had been quiet so they weren't expecting a spike. Genius.. they refunded us some money at least, but it still isn't a good look for anyone). Perhaps we should've had a plan B, but this was a big company that claimed it could be trusted with stuff like this.

I'm pretty sure it's been stated that if the project fails, money collected by the website simply gets returned. Does it not say that somewhere on our site? I need to look into that (not kickstarter fail, complete dissolution of the project. We're still hopeful kickstarter will work otherwise it means going back to those kind of guys who said things like 'don't waste money on singleplayer, it won't sell' and looking sheepish)

The figurative 'guy who needs to go behind the shed' I assume is still back there. He went back there at the very start of all this and refused to do anything, leaving us to scramble in the spotlight. Occasionally he even asks for money from back there. I'm not the biggest fan of "that guy", to put it kindly.

Running and hiding behind the shed is no substitute for being taken there forcibly. Tell him from us that he needs to be autoflagellating vigorously and bathing his wounds in his own tears and shame, or we're sending someone after him.

warboss wrote:Thanks for signing up and braving the storm here. I know BrandonKF is probably breathing a big sigh of relief now that his long watch is over.

Thank the Lord I don't plan on joining any Night's Watch anytime soon...

Agonarch, thanks for showing up.

Seems the forum people decided to delete my last post, so I'll just say that I did respond, Ice, and it was to tell you I didn't think you were a bully. I figure you for an Internet tough guy who also happens to be a straight shooter from where you see things. Which is fair.

God bless, all.

-Brandon F.

 Agonarch wrote:

Hi guys, Agonarch from Mektek here.

First off, GBL, I apologise for whatever has made you so bitter towards Mektek, I do know that some of our guys can be short with their answers and if this reaction was a result of someone being rude to you then I don't begrudge you it at all. I'm one of the newer guys on the team, so I don't know what it was about and don't have anything against you. I don't know who didn't answer your questions or why, but I'll do my best to do so for you now. Not everyone gets their questions answered, try not to take it personally.

Welcome. My position on this whole thing has evolved somewhat. But lets start with the basics.

No one from Mektek pissed me off directly. If I seem somewhat attached its due to my longtime love of MechWarrior and Battletech that was somewhat unceremoniously dropped by you guys.

I posted several questions on your facebook wall, after you went live with your original Unsecured, No Guarantee, Online Credit Card Crowdfunding model.

I wasn't insulted that my questions weren't answered, just grimly amused that you wanted money with zero guarantees and weren't even able to answer slightly harder questions than average.

How much did that make if I might ask?

 Agonarch wrote:

The Good
Now, the first thing I need to clear up is the "Never Completed Anything" aspect. Mektek has been a team for well over 10 years - in fact they've spent over 10 years working on MW4 even without including MW3 or earlier games. Mekpaks have been available and widely played from 2003 up until recently, with several versions being completed. In 2010, in spite of not making any money off anything, Mektek managed to negotiate a deal with Microsoft to build Mektek's "Free Release", giving them access to a lot more development materials and the ability to distribute the game (now hard to get on shelves) to the community, again, for free. By this point, the Mekpak was at version 3. Each Mekpak was practically an expansion in itself, with people liking some over others but each new version featuring significantly more features, mechs and equipment than the last. There was another expansion patch released for version 3.

That is already the longest running mod team I can think of. It's one of the very, very few examples of someone getting Microsoft to cooperate in this way. Not just something impressive, several somethings, and several somethings released, with the first free release being a complete stand alone version of the game with more changes than any official expansion. One of the Mektek mechs was even brought into BT canon!

Once they were a studio, that wasn't the end of it. They're behind the software in the battletech pods some of you will have played;
http://www.mechjock.com/

I don't know how many more completed, well made projects you want, GBL, but this is all just stuff from the old Mektek staff alone without including the new Heavy Gear guys like Jack and Clancy (I think this is the comparison you were after?). I have to admit, this is the first forum I've been on where Mekteks ability to complete was in question, so I'm more than happy to answer questions about this within reason.

The Bad
Let's bring up the stuff you've listed as the bad stuff: a few people decided they wanted a version 4 of the Mekpak. Jehosephat, the guy who originally worked out how to extend the game to allow so many new features to be added and the lead developer, had a stroke. The community reaction was horrible and far from supportive, so Jeho left to get his health back. Jeho's work on this was critical, and even if it were possible to pick up from where he left it at this point, nearly 10 years in, everyone figured that we'd just have fun with the current version (a lot of debate was around over whether some of the v4 changes would be good anyway). Everyone enjoyed versions of 3, for at least a couple years after all this. I don't mean to blame the fan reaction for this outcome, I'm not sure Jeho could've helped any more than he did if people had been nice. Mekpak 4 didn't get released, so that's one point at least you can point at in the last 10 years, from a free mod team.

"Issues with the team" is something so far back I barely know about it from the outside. You'll have to be more specific about that if you want more information so I can find out for you - Mektek remained stable throughout even when it was just a mod team, and is certainly stable ever since it's been a professional studio.

The Ugly
A lot of people were just upset at us when we dropped support for the Mekpak and shut down the servers (I was here for this bit). I'm not sure why Mektek gets so much of the flak for this, even though they held it together much longer than anyone else, they seem to get the blame for it all falling over in the end. From what I could see though, we really didn't have a choice - we didn't want to stumble into the legal hellstorm that was being kicked up around Battletech at the time if it came to our doorstep, not to mention that situation would've been completely a lose-lose for Battletech in general (not to mention the Heavy Gear project could've potentially been dragged into it, completely unacceptable). GBL, if you think it's just co-incidence that this all happened around the bankruptcy of Smith and Tinker then either you're less cynical than I thought, or you hate Mektek more than I thought.

I really hope that's cleared some things up for some people. Now that's out of the way, on to more HG related stuff;

I would like to contrast this Very well crafted, intelligent response, with the current official version of events on Mekteks forum

Mektek Forums wrote:
◾MekTek Studios version of MechWarrior4 was a free release provided with permission + license from Microsoft.

◾MekTek Studios is moving away from MechWarrior/BattleTech so we have been trying to support a new group of MechWarrior fans trying to bring MechWarrior4 back online.

◾Since Smith and Tinker went bankrupt and foreclosed - gaining permission from Microsoft has been challenging for the new group.

◾It does appear that the Free Release was well supported while Smith and Tinker existed but not so much nowadays. We've been told that this is a "money" issue.

◾Since both Piranha Games and Microsoft have not expressed any support for the free release - we are unsure when exactly anyone will be able to bring back MechWarrior4 legally.

To analyse:

In your version of events, Smith And Tinker's Bankruptcy and Battletechs Licensing woes caused you to pass on the license.

On the forums, it reads to me, that it was dropped beforehand, and passed on to a mysterious group we have never heard from. And it was this second group that hasn't been able to relaunch due to the aforementioned issues.

Neither story provides any basis for Mektek being unable to continue support it, beyond "We don't want to".

Because Mektek dropped support, and Mekteks license terms indicated that only they can redistribute it, MechWarrior 4 is no longer available for free to anyone.

It seems to me that a crowdfunding campaign would have been FAR more appropriate in MechWarrior 4's case, than Heavy Gear.

 Agonarch wrote:

I'm not sure why Mektek gets so much of the flak for this, even though they held it together much longer than anyone else

Perhaps because Mektek was the only entity that could, as you were the only entity to get such a favorable license from Microsoft.

 Agonarch wrote:

I don't know how many more completed, well made projects you want, GBL, but this is all just stuff from the old Mektek staff alone

Well there was the Solaris based, multiplayer total conversion for MW4 I know was being worked on.

Also Assault Tech 1, which was a fantastic game in itself, also discontinued when mektek essentially 'Raised Shields"

 Agonarch wrote:

One of our stumbling blocks has been getting coverage, I've been told that from our metrics simply not enough people know about this project yet for it to succeed - but that may work in our favour. If you guys tell me what you want to see, what you think needs further explaining and what you think is missing then we still have a chance to fix it before we get any surges in visitors. At the moment, we're working on getting some gameplay footage as that seems to be in highest demand.

Another one is trying to sell a free to play game. That traditionally doesn't go well on kickstarter.

Another issue is the poor value for money pledge levels. Being able to pre pay 15 dollars into a F2P game before you get a chance to play it, is no choice at all. For something that is essentially funny money, you can afford to give backers any amount. Double it at a minimum.

Another issue is the complete failure of stretch goals. Stretch goals do not equal milestones on your game design document. Stretch goals should reward participants who generate buzz for your game. "If I get 10 of my friends to back, they will triple the amount of in game currency everyone gets, on top of the last three value adds, Whee!"

I am sorry, but you guys swaggered on to kickstarter, with exactly the same plan you had for raising money on your own website, which also failed. It seems like Stompy Bot is a small games company, with the management rigidity of a large one.

To Succeed:
Cancel the kickstarter.
Drastically rescope. You mentioned having a marketing company involved. That's a waste. Kickstarter is overrun by companies that know what their fans want. Not marketing firms.
You don't need UE4 to be successful. If you want community support, use a community engine like Ogre or Unity. If you chose UE4 just so modders would be useful, find something else for them to do or fire them. Unreal scripting is not worth the license fee (for a company of your size).
Now you have kicked UE4 to the curb, you can have a reasonable starting goal. If it is more than 100,000 you are gonna have a bad time.
Outline your single player campaign. Give players things they want.
Stretch goals that are not only extra features, but also more swag.
eg - 150,000 We can afford to commission 2 more Southern Gears + Free T-Shirt for X level and above.
Feel free to add UE and F2P Arena game back in as stretch goals. Make sure these goals reward the backer alongside the project.

Essentially: Be more like Shadowrun Returns, and less like MechWarrior Online.

I look forward to your response.

First off a quick apology: I write this at a time very late where I am, and I'm quite sick, but I feel you've earned answers to this stuff, so I'll do my best. If there's anything wrong I'll correct it as soon as I notice, keep an eye out. Let me know if you spot anything odd you need clarifying (because it may well be a mistake)

GBL wrote:

How much did that make if I might ask?

Certainly, on the bottom right of this page is a counter; http://www.heavygear.com/
It shows the total collected from all sources, including kickstarter, so if you want to know just what's come from out of kickstarter substract the current kickstarter amount from it.

GBL wrote:

In your version of events, Smith And Tinker's Bankruptcy and Battletechs Licensing woes caused you to pass on the license.

On the forums, it reads to me, that it was dropped beforehand, and passed on to a mysterious group we have never heard from. And it was this second group that hasn't been able to relaunch due to the aforementioned issues.

Neither story provides any basis for Mektek being unable to continue support it, beyond "We don't want to".

Because Mektek dropped support, and Mekteks license terms indicated that only they can redistribute it, MechWarrior 4 is no longer available for free to anyone.

The forum version you've pointed to is short, yes, and I did have a longer version there also. That... terser version was put in by Vam as the main version because no-one read my version because it was long, and went on to complain anyway. The fact of the matter is yes, Mektek have moved away from Battletech and yes, MW4 free release is no longer supported. This message is short enough that people read it, but the people who read it and care get upset. I suppose I could add my detailed version to the end there, but that was decided against as adding walls of text to the end might cause people to skip the whole message (people didn't even start the long one in general).

It doesn't say anywhere there about the reason, it only goes into why the new team was having trouble (the same reasons we were worried about). We were trying to pass it on when the Smith and Tinker thing halted anyone from doing anything - if we'd failed to pass it on then we could've at least hosted a torrent or something (technically distributed by mektek's tracker, but not our bandwidth) - the bottom line is the legal issues are what stopped this, the fact that it all happened during transfer to the third party only obsfucates matters.

GBL wrote:

It seems to me that a crowdfunding campaign would have been FAR more appropriate in MechWarrior 4's case, than Heavy Gear.

We tried that before I joined, and that didn't even raise enough money to pay for that round of server hosting (thanks again to the people who did pay in, though). The team paid the difference (as they had for the decade prior), and it was called to an official stop to it when even more problems started rearing up. The attempt to switch to the third party began before any real problems started, but Microsoft had as much as a heads up on what was going on as we did (or more, probably).

GBL wrote:

Perhaps because Mektek was the only entity that could, as you were the only entity to get such a favorable license from Microsoft.

This angle of reasoning I don't understand - with no money for it and no-one willing to spend anything more on the project (after spending a great deal on it), we should've just kept ticking along forever, for free, because we were the only one's who'd already spent the money on lawyers to organise agreeable terms from Microsoft? The legal stuff will have to wait for a bit because I'll be speaking about that later, but even in spite of this we might have found a way if not for legal stuff.

For the record, this is the kind of question most likely to get ignored if you've been asking it elsewhere, as you're basically implying the people who spent a lot of money and time on this that they're dicks for not spending more money and time on this, while offering no money or time. I can answer it because I wasn't in the early team, but if I was I can see how it might upset me. It comes across that you are insinuating you have more right to play a game for free than someone else has to not have to pay for you to be able to. I don't believe this is how this was intended, but that's how it comes across.

GBL wrote:

Well there was the Solaris based, multiplayer total conversion for MW4 I know was being worked on.

Also Assault Tech 1, which was a fantastic game in itself, also discontinued when mektek essentially 'Raised Shields"

Ok, those are the other way around, the first was a tech demo (that failed) and a little unfair to complain about, but the second one I admit there's a point there (although it was still just at a tech-demo stage, there were real plans for more);

Assault Tech 1 was a concurrent project during Mekpak development. I'm not sure if this was late mod team stuff or early studio stuff but it was still completely free, this was a game written by part of the team pretty much from scratch to fulfil some requirements that MW4 couldn't as a tech demo. As I understand, it turned out that the engine wasn't advanced enough to make what they wanted in any reasonable timeframe. It could've perhaps been a good game, but it could never be what was intended, and had proved that. That's exactly why you do tech demonstrators. That said, this it's not like it's not available, go download and play it right now, it sounds like you're complaining they didn't keep it in-house (it was still pretty fun). Quite simply, there's limited resources and they were spent on the Mekpak.

Solaris Assault Tech was the more recent one of the two, and it was done in UDK. This is another victim of the legal situation, which I'll get to.

GBL wrote:

Another one is trying to sell a free to play game. That traditionally doesn't go well on kickstarter.

Another issue is the poor value for money pledge levels. Being able to pre pay 15 dollars into a F2P game before you get a chance to play it, is no choice at all. For something that is essentially funny money, you can afford to give backers any amount. Double it at a minimum.

Another issue is the complete failure of stretch goals. Stretch goals do not equal milestones on your game design document. Stretch goals should reward participants who generate buzz for your game. "If I get 10 of my friends to back, they will triple the amount of in game currency everyone gets, on top of the last three value adds, Whee!"

These are good suggestions, but they're all trumped by the problem you were responding to here of simply not being enough people seeing it. It doesn't matter what we do or show if not enough people see it. That said, I like all of this, and I'll be bringing these things up (I especially like the idea of early adopters getting more extra stuff, that seems fairer to me).

GBL wrote:

I am sorry, but you guys swaggered on to kickstarter, with exactly the same plan you had for raising money on your own website, which also failed. It seems like Stompy Bot is a small games company, with the management rigidity of a large one.

I'm here, talking with you. That wouldn't be allowed by most places I can think of (that said, I haven't shot my mouth about the legal stuff at this point yet, so it may change!). We did get off on the wrong foot with the kickstarter for sure.

GBL wrote:

Cancel the kickstarter.
Drastically rescope. You mentioned having a marketing company involved. That's a waste. Kickstarter is overrun by companies that know what their fans want. Not marketing firms.
You don't need UE4 to be successful. If you want community support, use a community engine like Ogre or Unity. If you chose UE4 just so modders would be useful, find something else for them to do or fire them. Unreal scripting is not worth the license fee (for a company of your size).
Now you have kicked UE4 to the curb, you can have a reasonable starting goal. If it is more than 100,000 you are gonna have a bad time.
Outline your single player campaign. Give players things they want.

If we rescope, then this will not be the same game, we won't be able to give the players anything beyond the bare minimum at the price you've said (which is downright ridiculously low, even by indie game standards). UE4 is not a game, it's an engine - it's programming, not modding. It's cutting edge sure, and that might hold us back a bit in a few areas where Unity or Ogre is better developed by virtue of being older, but Unity and Ogre would be taking the Assault Tech 1 path of moving into an engine that can't do what we want, can't do anything new for the players (UE4 more than makes up for things that are hard with things that are easier or awesomer). Maybe it'd be ok for an MW4 clone, but not much else and nothing like what would keep the experienced guys in this team interested. I don't see Ogre or Unity as being especially community engines, either, compared with UDK.
The money you're thinking of is just ridiculously low, this is probably just a matter of not being aware of what things cost. We could make a low detail, simplified game (like for a cellphone) at those kinds of prices. Take a look at this skullgirls indiegogo page (specifically the cost breakdown) http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/keep-skullgirls-growing. That's for adding one, single character, who they expect will be cheaper than usual, to an existing, 2d, game. $150k, and it's not unreasonable. You're asking us to make an entire 3d mech game with customisation and everything you'd expect, for 2/3rds of adding a character to a fighting game? And you're expecting us to not only be able to do that, but to "give players what they want"? If I've missed something here that makes this more possible, please, tell me!
This is another area where you're likely to get comments ignored, by the way: there'll be some experienced developers on any team who do know how much things cost, and when people make suggestions at lowball prices some of the experienced guys will just ignore you as "some guy who doesn't know what they're talking about". I'm not so quick to do that, but I do see where they're coming from - a lot of people throw stuff up in the air without knowing about it and they don't want to waste their time listening to that, but you've already brought up a bunch of good points so I'm more than happy to take the time here (you've been fairly respectful and I'd take the time even if you had no good points). If you want clarification on why it's likely to cost that much, I think I can do that for you.

GBL wrote:

Stretch goals that are not only extra features, but also more swag.
eg - 150,000 We can afford to commission 2 more Southern Gears + Free T-Shirt for X level and above.
Feel free to add UE and F2P Arena game back in as stretch goals. Make sure these goals reward the backer alongside the project.

If we can reach where we need to, our current design allows us to make and implement new gears much cheaper than this, but I see where you're going here. The disadvantage is that it is topheavy, we need to do a lot more work to get a category started, but once it's implemented we won't risk being stuck in a "maybe 1 update a month" cycle because of the difficulty of implementing more. I like the idea of an f2p system being a stretch goal. I feel like a poor job has been done on incentivising people. Maybe make f2p only available to referrals of backers or something, I dunno (spitballing here).


Now, I'm from here speaking as myself, not as a Mektek Dev. I understand that any legal ramifications of the things I'm about to say fall on me, and me alone. With that said, I fully intend to pussyfoot around because lawyers can terrify me. What I can do at least is bring up enough information for you to look up and draw your own conclusions.
I'll start with some easy facts to verify, this is as of the time just before Smith and Tinker fall over;
Mektek has some Mechwarrior rights,
"Someone Else" has some Mechwarrior rights.

Mektek is supporting MW4. That's old, no-one cares, no big deal. It supports the pods, that's a bit of an issue, but meh, it doesn't really effect "Someone Else". Solaris Assault Tech might, though. Mektek is friendly with DP9, and that might seem scary, I dunno. HG has been talked about but they're working on SAT at present. I think this is where Mektek starts organising the shift of MW4 distribution to the third party.

Stuff starts to get difficult with the shift, something is unusual. This shouldn't have been any problem. Some of the team would already prefer to do HG than Battletech.

Smith and Tinker falls over. The actual shift of the license to the third party still hasn't happened yet, so we're left holding the bag unless they can sort the legal stuff out and take it from us. Right now there's bigger Mechwarriors to fry, and the effort flounders uselessly (and moneyless-ly).

Lawyers pore over everything, hoping to clear up every link they can for sure, but Battletech is a huge rights mess (it's their job to do this, there's nothing wrong with clarifying who has what rights)


This from here is all my understanding as best I can, and I believe everything here to be correct. If there are errors or omissions, I apologise and will correct them as I am made aware (please don't sue me!)

You're presented with (grossly simpified) legal choices. You are Mektek: Pick a Path;
*Defend Rights,
*Drop Rights,
*Don't exercise rights and let others exercise theirs.

If we do the first one, and win, we might be able to make a full game, but we might be left with not enough rights to make a Battletech game (and now no-one else, either). We've very likely just killed Battletech games on pc.
If we do the first one and it falls somewhere in the middle, it's anyone's guess. Very likely chance no-one is left able to make BT games on pc, though.
If we do the first one, and lose, we're in the exact same situation we are now, except we've spent money that could've been on our own project and can never ever bring back the Mekpak.

If we do the second one, it costs us a great deal for no reason. We lose everything and stand to gain nothing, but at least risk nothing peripheral.

If we do the third one, we don't have any chance to kill Battletech games and it doesn't cost us anything (well, current progress on SAT. SAT at this point is a tech demonstrator, but it's proved UDK capable of our requirements. Seeing as we'll have to rewrite SAT as part of developing from this prototype anyway (a standard practice, not a bad program) this is a smaller loss than you'd think). We pick the third "Back away slowly, Hands raised, and hope nothing bites us" option, which isn't a good choice sure, but have you looked at the alternatives? Only one of these has any chance of saving the Mekpak initially, and this one has the best chance of saving it in the long run.

Now all this has come up, the HG stuff that we've been looking at finally persuades the last members of the team who weren't sure. Mektek goes into full negotiations with DP9, a bunch of people are headhunted for HG specifically, and early versions of HG design and prototyping begin with close collaboration with Epic, who've just started to get shiny new versions of this engine available for very early development...


Please note, this is all my best understanding, and I could be wrong about any of this. No-one wants to talk about this because if they DO get something wrong they could be in serious trouble, this is normal for any legal situation and might explain the stonewall you were getting if you were trying to find a way into these 'not so hard' answers (I'm assuming this is what it was, there's really nothing else that I can think of that people might be reluctant to answer). A lot of people come across as demanding the answers, or acting like they have the "right to know" these things, which they do not, unfortunately, and that attitude doesn't sit well with most of the team. You've showed me respect, so I'm showing you respect in return by giving you the best answer I possibly can. If I get banned from talking with you at least you'll know why people don't answer certain kinds of questions (even with their opinions) .


First off a quick apology: I write this at a time very late where I am, and I'm quite sick, but I feel you've earned answers to this stuff, so I'll do my best. If there's anything wrong I'll correct it as soon as I notice, keep an eye out. Let me know if you spot anything odd you need clarifying (because it may well be a mistake)

GBL wrote:

How much did that make if I might ask?

Certainly, on the bottom right of this page is a counter; http://www.heavygear.com/
It shows the total collected from all sources, including kickstarter, so if you want to know just what's come from out of kickstarter substract the current kickstarter amount from it.

GBL wrote:

In your version of events, Smith And Tinker's Bankruptcy and Battletechs Licensing woes caused you to pass on the license.

On the forums, it reads to me, that it was dropped beforehand, and passed on to a mysterious group we have never heard from. And it was this second group that hasn't been able to relaunch due to the aforementioned issues.

Neither story provides any basis for Mektek being unable to continue support it, beyond "We don't want to".

Because Mektek dropped support, and Mekteks license terms indicated that only they can redistribute it, MechWarrior 4 is no longer available for free to anyone.

The forum version you've pointed to is short, yes, and I did have a longer version there also. That version was put in as the main version because no-one read my version because it was long, and went on to complain anyway. The fact of the matter is yes, Mektek have moved away from Battletech and yes, MW4 free release is no longer supported. This message is short enough that people read it, but the people who read it and care get upset. I suppose I could add my detailed version to the end there, but that was decided against as adding walls of text to the end might cause people to skip the whole message (people didn't even start the long one in general).

It doesn't say anywhere there about the reason, it only goes into why the new team was having trouble (the same reasons we were worried about). We were trying to pass it on when the Smith and Tinker thing halted anyone from doing anything - if we'd failed to pass it on then we could've at least hosted a torrent or something (technically distributed by mektek's tracker, but not our bandwidth) - the bottom line is the legal issues are what stopped this, the fact that it all happened during transfer to the third party only obsfucates matters.

GBL wrote:

It seems to me that a crowdfunding campaign would have been FAR more appropriate in MechWarrior 4's case, than Heavy Gear.

We tried that before I joined, and that didn't even raise enough money to pay for that round of server hosting (thanks again to the people who did pay in, though). The team paid the difference (as they had for the decade prior), and it was called to an official stop to it when even more problems started rearing up. The attempt to switch to the third party began before any real problems started, but Microsoft had as much as a heads up on what was going on as we did (or more, probably).

GBL wrote:

Perhaps because Mektek was the only entity that could, as you were the only entity to get such a favorable license from Microsoft.

This angle of reasoning I don't understand - with no money for it and no-one willing to spend anything more on the project (after spending a great deal on it), we should've just kept ticking along forever, for free, because we were the only one's who'd already spent the money on lawyers to organise agreeable terms from Microsoft? The legal stuff will have to wait for a bit because I'll be speaking about that later, but even in spite of this we might have found a way if not for legal stuff.

For the record, this is the kind of question most likely to get ignored if you've been asking it elsewhere, as you're basically implying the people who spent a lot of money and time on this that they're dicks for not spending more money and time on this, while offering no money or time. I can answer it because I wasn't in the early team, but if I was I can see how it might upset me. It comes across that you are insinuating you have more right to play a game for free than someone else has to not have to pay for you to be able to. I don't believe this is how this was intended, but that's how it comes across.

GBL wrote:

Well there was the Solaris based, multiplayer total conversion for MW4 I know was being worked on.

Also Assault Tech 1, which was a fantastic game in itself, also discontinued when mektek essentially 'Raised Shields"

Ok, those are the other way around, the first was a tech demo (that failed) and a little unfair to complain about, but the second one I admit there's a point there (although it was still just at a tech-demo stage, there were real plans for more);

Assault Tech 1 was a concurrent project during Mekpak development. I'm not sure if this was late mod team stuff or early studio stuff but it was still completely free, this was a game written by part of the team pretty much from scratch to fulfil some requirements that MW4 couldn't as a tech demo. As I understand, it turned out that the engine wasn't advanced enough to make what they wanted in any reasonable timeframe. It could've perhaps been a good game, but it could never be what was intended, and had proved that. That's exactly why you do tech demonstrators. That said, this it's not like it's not available, go download and play it right now, it sounds like you're complaining they didn't keep it in-house (it was still pretty fun). Quite simply, there's limited resources and they were spent on the Mekpak.

Solaris Assault Tech was the more recent one of the two, and it was done in UDK. This is another victim of the legal situation, which I'll get to.

GBL wrote:

Another one is trying to sell a free to play game. That traditionally doesn't go well on kickstarter.

Another issue is the poor value for money pledge levels. Being able to pre pay 15 dollars into a F2P game before you get a chance to play it, is no choice at all. For something that is essentially funny money, you can afford to give backers any amount. Double it at a minimum.

Another issue is the complete failure of stretch goals. Stretch goals do not equal milestones on your game design document. Stretch goals should reward participants who generate buzz for your game. "If I get 10 of my friends to back, they will triple the amount of in game currency everyone gets, on top of the last three value adds, Whee!"

These are good suggestions, but they're all trumped by the problem you were responding to here of simply not being enough people seeing it. It doesn't matter what we do or show if not enough people see it. That said, I like all of this, and I'll be bringing these things up (I especially like the idea of early adopters getting more extra stuff, that seems fairer to me).

GBL wrote:

I am sorry, but you guys swaggered on to kickstarter, with exactly the same plan you had for raising money on your own website, which also failed. It seems like Stompy Bot is a small games company, with the management rigidity of a large one.

I'm here, talking with you. That wouldn't be allowed by most places I can think of (that said, I haven't shot my mouth about the legal stuff at this point yet, so it may change!). We did get off on the wrong foot with the kickstarter for sure.

GBL wrote:

Cancel the kickstarter.
Drastically rescope. You mentioned having a marketing company involved. That's a waste. Kickstarter is overrun by companies that know what their fans want. Not marketing firms.
You don't need UE4 to be successful. If you want community support, use a community engine like Ogre or Unity. If you chose UE4 just so modders would be useful, find something else for them to do or fire them. Unreal scripting is not worth the license fee (for a company of your size).
Now you have kicked UE4 to the curb, you can have a reasonable starting goal. If it is more than 100,000 you are gonna have a bad time.
Outline your single player campaign. Give players things they want.

If we rescope, then this will not be the same game, we won't be able to give the players anything beyond the bare minimum at the price you've said (which is downright ridiculously low, even by indie game standards). UE4 is not a game, it's an engine - it's programming, not modding. It's cutting edge sure, and that might hold us back a bit in a few areas where Unity or Ogre is better developed by virtue of being older, but Unity and Ogre would be taking the Assault Tech 1 path of moving into an engine that can't do what we want, can't do anything new for the players (UE4 more than makes up for things that are hard with things that are easier or awesomer). Maybe it'd be ok for an MW4 clone, but not much else and nothing like what would keep the experienced guys in this team interested. I don't see Ogre or Unity as being especially community engines, either, compared with UDK.
The money you're thinking of is just ridiculously low, this is probably just a matter of not being aware of what things cost. We could make a low detail, simplified game (like for a cellphone) at those kinds of prices. Take a look at this skullgirls indiegogo page (specifically the cost breakdown) http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/keep-skullgirls-growing. That's for adding one, single character, who they expect will be cheaper than usual, to an existing, 2d, game. $150k, and it's not unreasonable. You're asking us to make an entire 3d mech game with customisation and everything you'd expect, for 2/3rds of adding a character to a fighting game? And you're expecting us to not only be able to do that, but to "give players what they want"? If I've missed something here that makes this more possible, please, tell me!
This is another area where you're likely to get comments ignored, by the way: there'll be some experienced developers on any team who do know how much things cost, and when people make suggestions at lowball prices some of the experienced guys will just ignore you as "some guy who doesn't know what they're talking about". I'm not so quick to do that, but I do see where they're coming from - a lot of people throw stuff up in the air without knowing about it and they don't want to waste their time listening to that, but you've already brought up a bunch of good points so I'm more than happy to take the time here (you've been fairly respectful and I'd take the time even if you had no good points). If you want clarification on why it's likely to cost that much, I think I can do that for you.

GBL wrote:

Stretch goals that are not only extra features, but also more swag.
eg - 150,000 We can afford to commission 2 more Southern Gears + Free T-Shirt for X level and above.
Feel free to add UE and F2P Arena game back in as stretch goals. Make sure these goals reward the backer alongside the project.

If we can reach where we need to, our current design allows us to make and implement new gears much cheaper than this, but I see where you're going here. The disadvantage is that it is topheavy, we need to do a lot more work to get a category started, but once it's implemented we won't risk being stuck in a "maybe 1 update a month" cycle because of the difficulty of implementing more. I like the idea of an f2p system being a stretch goal. I feel like a poor job has been done on incentivising people. Maybe make f2p only available to referrals of backers or something, I dunno (spitballing here).


Now, I'm from here speaking as myself, not as a Mektek Dev. I understand that any legal ramifications of the things I'm about to say fall on me, and me alone. With that said, I fully intend to pussyfoot around because lawyers can terrify me. What I can do at least is bring up enough information for you to look up and draw your own conclusions.
I'll start with some easy facts to verify, this is as of the time just before Smith and Tinker fall over;
Mektek has some Mechwarrior rights,
"Someone Else" has some Mechwarrior rights.

Mektek is supporting MW4. That's old, no-one cares, no big deal. It supports the pods, that's a bit of an issue, but meh, it doesn't really effect "Someone Else". Solaris Assault Tech might, though. Mektek is friendly with DP9, and that might seem scary, I dunno. HG has been talked about but they're working on SAT at present. I think this is where Mektek starts organising the shift of MW4 distribution to the third party.

Stuff starts to get difficult with the shift, something is unusual. This shouldn't have been any problem. Some of the team would already prefer to do HG than Battletech.

Smith and Tinker falls over. The actual shift of the license to the third party still hasn't happened yet, so we're left holding the bag unless they can sort the legal stuff out and take it from us. Right now there's bigger Mechwarriors to fry, and the effort flounders uselessly (and moneyless-ly).

Lawyers pore over everything, hoping to clear up every link they can for sure, but Battletech is a huge rights mess (it's their job to do this, there's nothing wrong with clarifying who has what rights)


This from here is all my understanding as best I can, and I believe everything here to be correct. If there are errors or omissions, I apologise and will correct them as I am made aware (please don't sue me!)

You're presented with (grossly simpified) legal choices. You are Mektek: Pick a Path;
Defend Mechwarrior Rights,
Drop Mechwarrior Rights,
Don't exercise rights and let others exercise theirs.

If we do the first one, and win, we might be able to make a full game, but we might be left with not enough rights to make a Battletech game (and now no-one else, either). We've very likely just killed Battletech games on pc.
If we do the first one and it falls somewhere in the middle, it's anyone's guess. Very likely chance no-one is left able to make BT games on pc, though.
If we do the first one, and lose, we're in the exact same situation we are now, except we've spent money that could've been on our own project and can never ever bring back the Mekpak.

If we do the second one, it costs us a great deal for no reason. We lose everything and stand to gain nothing, but at least risk nothing peripheral.

If we do the third one, we don't have any chance to kill Battletech games and it doesn't cost us anything (well, current progress on SAT. SAT at this point is a tech demonstrator, but it's proved UDK capable of our requirements. Seeing as we'll have to rewrite SAT as part of developing from this prototype anyway (a standard practice, not a bad program) this is a smaller loss than you'd think). We pick the third "Back away slowly, Hands raised, and hope nothing bites us" option, which isn't a good choice sure, but have you looked at the alternatives? Only one of these has any chance of saving the Mekpak initially, and this one has the best chance of saving it in the long run.

Now all this has come up, the HG stuff that we've been looking at finally persuades the last members of the team who weren't sure. Mektek goes into full negotiations with DP9, a bunch of people are headhunted for HG specifically, and early versions of HG design and prototyping begin with close collaboration with Epic, who've just started to get shiny new versions of this engine available for very early development...


Please note, this is all my best understanding, and I could be wrong about any of this. No-one wants to talk about this because if they DO get something wrong they could be in serious trouble, this is normal for any legal situation and might explain the stonewall you were getting if you were trying to find a way into these 'not so hard' answers (I'm assuming this is what it was, there's really nothing else that I can think of that people might be reluctant to answer). A lot of people come across as demanding the answers, or acting like they have the "right to know" these things, which they do not, unfortunately, and that attitude doesn't sit well with most of the team. You've showed me respect, so I'm showing you respect in return by giving you the best answer I possibly can. If I get banned from talking with you at least you'll know why people don't answer certain kinds of questions (even with their opinions) .

Thanks for your openness, Agonarch.

Thanks for posting such a detailed response Agornarch. That was more effective communication than I've seen from HGA so far, quite frankly, and if nothing else that's a bit reassuring. You obviously spent quite a bit of time with the messages, which is a stark contrast to pretty much everything that came out of the both launches. Maybe you should be doing the marketing management instead of whomever is currently dropping that ball!

 Agonarch wrote:

GBL wrote:

Stretch goals that are not only extra features, but also more swag.
eg - 150,000 We can afford to commission 2 more Southern Gears + Free T-Shirt for X level and above.
Feel free to add UE and F2P Arena game back in as stretch goals. Make sure these goals reward the backer alongside the project.

If we can reach where we need to, our current design allows us to make and implement new gears much cheaper than this, but I see where you're going here. The disadvantage is that it is topheavy, we need to do a lot more work to get a category started, but once it's implemented we won't risk being stuck in a "maybe 1 update a month" cycle because of the difficulty of implementing more. I like the idea of an f2p system being a stretch goal. I feel like a poor job has been done on incentivising people. Maybe make f2p only available to referrals of backers or something, I dunno (spitballing here).

The above praise said, one thing I don't think we're seeing eye to eye on is the the KS rewards, especially as incentive tools. In game cash is a fickle tool to get players excited because it's mundane - anybody can get access to it, with a bit of time (or deep enough pockets). Most of the rewards are the lower tiers are basically ball caps, keychains, posters, the music score - etc. All kitchy items that isn't going to appeal to everyone. But you guys do have complete control over the things that could excite players - and they are paradoxically locked in the higher tiers!

A savvier campaign might have been to put in milestone along the funding path that provided benefits a multiple tiers that could only be obtained through the kickstarter, and make the benefits far more explicit. For instance, you guys hand out Team Techs like crazy. But the only verbiage for them is 'makes repair times faster'. How much faster? How does that impact my ability to play that model? What will that *give* me, in concrete terms, not vague 'faster repair times'. Let's say your following a model that says for each 100 credits of damage to a vehicle, that vehicle is out of commission for 1s. Then, a normal Team Tech reduces that to 0.75s. You could easily apply 'skilled technicians' to reduce that to 0.7 or 0.6s, and that's a concrete value that players understand they are getting. For each $100,000 you reach, you reduce the repair time for these 'prime techs' by 0.1 or something similar - you give players concrete reasons for wanting to spread buzz about your system.

Maybe techs will have a cost associated with them - you have to play say 10k a match for a tech - you could easily give KS backers a 'free' tech that never goes away as a benefit. Or if you're working in XP for techs, KS backers get a flat 25% bonus to all techs, that increases 5% for each 1000 backers added to the system. There are any number of possible benefits you could add that have no direct cost to you using this model, that still provides milestones in the KS campaign for people to work towards. An even more savvy approach would to be let them pick from support personnel as they want, after you clearly define the benefits for each of those support personnel. In such a way you're selling the game to people, not dictating it to them, and making them want to get as many people online as possible.

Which is really the failing that I'm seeing, and what GBL is referencing - the approach for the KS (and soft launch) basically screamed traditional mecha game, instead of being focused and savvy about the conventions of the market you were applying to. Contrast what you have setup right now and something like:

Fresh Meat: Basic Arsenal - Your begin play with an selection fo weapons, ready for use. Backers get two of each autocannon (LAC, MAC, HAC) which excels in tracking light targets, one of each light rocket pack wich can tear through structures, and five grenades ready to scatter your opponents to bits.

Fighter: You get the Basic Arsenal + one Premier Support Personnel selected from the list below. Premier Support cost 25% less and are 10% better than the in-game support that can be bought.

Duelist: Talented Rookie: Your manager has obtained a talented pilot that starts can quickly learn the ropes. The rookie gains +2.5% XP and comes with one skill already learned. You also get the Basic Arsenal and one Premier Support Personnel.

Southern Veteran: You start with one Jager Prime and Sidewinder Prime, which gain XP at a faster rate (+2.5% XP) and have a unique skin to demonstrate Southern Glory to everyone you come across.

And so on. Then, for milestones:

$50,000 - All Basic Arsenals are upgraded to contain two light bazookas and two panzerfausts, armor busting weapons sure to ruin your opponent's day

$100,000 - All Premier support becomes 10% more efficient than their basic counterparts, and are reduced in cost to %50.

$150,000 - All basic Arsenals are upgraded to contain one medium bazooka and one medium rocket pack, granting you greater punch out of the gate

$200,000 - All rookies come with two skills already learned. All Prime units gain additional Rep (+2.5%) in their respective arena.

Note - none of the above costs anything other than pride in some 'grand design', which isn't a pragmatic problem. It's only an issue if you have a design astronaut, which would be a serious problem.

I'm not saying the above is perfect or even good, but I was able to slam it out in 10 minutes, and it 'feels' more appropriate for KS than what you guys presented. And incidentally would cost you less cash on any given package since there's none of the physical goods getting in the way. Which is why I say it comes across as you guys not thinking long and hard about the venues you've chosen and how you're going about asking for money.

There's some interesting stuff you guys have going on, but seriously - your marketing and approach is illogical in the extreme. Load up players on the stuff that won't cost you anything other than bits (and maybe design time for things like the skin), and make it clear why it's a benefit, and you'd do significantly better than you already have, I thinkk.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

BrandonKF wrote:

Seems the forum people decided to delete my last post, so I'll just say that I did respond, Ice, and it was to tell you I didn't think you were a bully. I figure you for an Internet tough guy who also happens to be a straight shooter from where you see things. Which is fair.

Uh.... you do realize Internet Tough Guy is a pejorative, right? You might be trying to say something but being tripped up on meaning, but you just said I'm not a bully, I'm a thug?

Note: most, if not all, "you" in the following are 2nd person plural.

What I'm seeing is that your are still putting the cart before the horses.

First, you are overambitious. Don't start with that big game, start with something smaller. Like an android/iOS app. That gives you money, exposure and a chance to prove that you can work as a team*. More importantly, the risk is much, much lower. Right now, you are asking people to gamble a lot of money.
That's also one of the big problems with your communication, BTW. No, you are not valiantly saving a genre from doom, re-inventing gaming or anything like that. Your communication, right now, is more bragging than fact. You over-promise and over-praise yourself. You are creating unreasonable expectations in those who believe the hype and look way over your depth to those who don't. The insistence that F2C is in any way different from F2P is especially puzzling. It makes you look either delusional or completely uninformed about your market.

Second, you are asking for money for an undefined project. You went from a F2P multiplayer game to a F2P single player game after the market rejected the multiplayer. Fair enough. Problem is, that's a huge shift, and indicates that F2P is not going to work. Since that's how you plan to make money, that bring the entire project into question. People who pledged on your site pledged for a project that is no longer going to happen, since you changed it based on the reactions to the Kickstarter. In effect, that says that you will get the money and do whatever you want with it, since you did not hesitate to change the entire project when it suited you.

This tell me that the project is under-defined, that you have no real business plan, nor market research.
You need to stop, regroup and define what you want to do, make sure it's actually profitable and that it's possible to get the funding you need to do it. Otherwise, you are only going to waste a lot of your time, effort and other people's money.

But hey, you can do what you want. I'm not the one doing the work, and I won't have to deal with the fallout if you fail. Especially if you do as I suggest and fail. You failing would not kill HG, DP9 is already doing that just fine by themselves, and the mecha genre is not going to be affected be the failure of an obscure game.

On that last point, you might want to actually get some publicity. I'm in your prime demographic, and I have seen exactly 0 adds.

* Big names are rather meaningless when it comes to software. You need a team and a support structure. The junior programmer doing the boring parts is more important than the lead designer, and a good QA department is more important than both combined.

@Agonarch:

I appreciate the candid responses here that have been somewhat lacking both on the dp9 forums in the HGA thread as well as on the kickstarter. How much do you think would a smaller scale/scope game like a turn based Xcom: Enemy Unknown style game cost? No single player initially but rather just versus bots and multiplayer with limited animations/art assets needed for this compared with a full FPS. The tech for something like that doesn't seem to requirement heavy and should be doable on multiple cheap platforms like iOS/Android/PC and even indie games on the xbox. Doesn't UE3 have a feature that allows you to develop and export the work to multiple platforms right away? IIRC, UE3 licensing (now that UE4 is the flashy favorite child) costs nothing upfront and only charges an end licensing fee if you sell a certain amount afterwards ($50k comes to mind but I can't be sure about it). Further stretch goals could be a change from isometric to full 3d (with somewhat forced angles like xcom), single player campaign, addtional factions beyond just the starting north/south/CEF, skins, maps, gears, etc. The above isn't as flashy and likely to get your name on the front virtual page of gaming sites (which HGA doesn't seem to be doing either) but it's likely a whole lot cheaper and easier to get out the door and earning cash sooner. I'm not saying that you have to use the exact d6 mechanics of HG to resolve the combat but anything tabletop-ish is likely to appease alot of the tabletop fans yet still be video-game enough to appease computer gamers (if shadowrun is any indication) without coming off as jumping on the Mechwarrior popularity bandwagon again.

Counter argument: Salary for a computer programmer for one year - $40,000 to $75,000 depending on region, market, and specialty.

In other words, at a certain point in the history of this sort of project, everyone stands up and says "We'd like to be able to eat, and not need a second job to afford to do this."

 solkan wrote:
Counter argument: Salary for a computer programmer for one year - $40,000 to $75,000 depending on region, market, and specialty.

In other words, at a certain point in the history of this sort of project, everyone stands up and says "We'd like to be able to eat, and not need a second job to afford to do this."

It might be a good idea to quote the original argument you're countering. I don't think you're directing it at me but my post is the one above yours.

 Agonarch wrote:


First off a quick apology: I write this at a time very late where I am, and I'm quite sick, but I feel you've earned answers to this stuff, so I'll do my best. If there's anything wrong I'll correct it as soon as I notice, keep an eye out. Let me know if you spot anything odd you need clarifying (because it may well be a mistake)

GBL wrote:

How much did that make if I might ask?

Certainly, on the bottom right of this page is a counter; http://www.heavygear.com/
It shows the total collected from all sources, including kickstarter, so if you want to know just what's come from out of kickstarter substract the current kickstarter amount from it.

Fantastic, actually I didn't know the website had been updated. The last time I saw it, it was a few days in to the kickstarter, and the FAQ still had 'Why we don't do a kickstarter" as an item.

 Agonarch wrote:

GBL wrote:

In your version of events, Smith And Tinker's Bankruptcy and Battletechs Licensing woes caused you to pass on the license.

On the forums, it reads to me, that it was dropped beforehand, and passed on to a mysterious group we have never heard from. And it was this second group that hasn't been able to relaunch due to the aforementioned issues.

Neither story provides any basis for Mektek being unable to continue support it, beyond "We don't want to".

Because Mektek dropped support, and Mekteks license terms indicated that only they can redistribute it, MechWarrior 4 is no longer available for free to anyone.

The forum version you've pointed to is short, yes, and I did have a longer version there also. That... terser version was put in by Vam as the main version because no-one read my version because it was long, and went on to complain anyway. The fact of the matter is yes, Mektek have moved away from Battletech and yes, MW4 free release is no longer supported. This message is short enough that people read it, but the people who read it and care get upset. I suppose I could add my detailed version to the end there, but that was decided against as adding walls of text to the end might cause people to skip the whole message (people didn't even start the long one in general).

It doesn't say anywhere there about the reason, it only goes into why the new team was having trouble (the same reasons we were worried about). We were trying to pass it on when the Smith and Tinker thing halted anyone from doing anything - if we'd failed to pass it on then we could've at least hosted a torrent or something (technically distributed by mektek's tracker, but not our bandwidth) - the bottom line is the legal issues are what stopped this, the fact that it all happened during transfer to the third party only obsfucates matters.

This passes muster.

 Agonarch wrote:

GBL wrote:

It seems to me that a crowdfunding campaign would have been FAR more appropriate in MechWarrior 4's case, than Heavy Gear.

We tried that before I joined, and that didn't even raise enough money to pay for that round of server hosting (thanks again to the people who did pay in, though). The team paid the difference (as they had for the decade prior), and it was called to an official stop to it when even more problems started rearing up. The attempt to switch to the third party began before any real problems started, but Microsoft had as much as a heads up on what was going on as we did (or more, probably).

Well I had no idea, which is a problem with crowd funding.

But as someone who frequently pops in to and out of battletech related forums, I would have thought I would have known. Kickstarter has been running for years, was it considered?

 Agonarch wrote:

GBL wrote:

Perhaps because Mektek was the only entity that could, as you were the only entity to get such a favorable license from Microsoft.

This angle of reasoning I don't understand - with no money for it and no-one willing to spend anything more on the project (after spending a great deal on it), we should've just kept ticking along forever, for free, because we were the only one's who'd already spent the money on lawyers to organise agreeable terms from Microsoft? The legal stuff will have to wait for a bit because I'll be speaking about that later, but even in spite of this we might have found a way if not for legal stuff.

For the record, this is the kind of question most likely to get ignored if you've been asking it elsewhere, as you're basically implying the people who spent a lot of money and time on this that they're dicks for not spending more money and time on this, while offering no money or time. I can answer it because I wasn't in the early team, but if I was I can see how it might upset me. It comes across that you are insinuating you have more right to play a game for free than someone else has to not have to pay for you to be able to. I don't believe this is how this was intended, but that's how it comes across.

Consider this: The talk on various battletech communities at the time, was that Mektek was the gatekeeper of the MW4 franchise, and that they had bold plans to revitalize it and keep it going. As far as my memory goes, mektek members were talking this up too. Some people were cynical that you had the technical know how to do this, that you would have access to the source, and screw it up(not me, I was as giddy as a schoolgirl). But Mektek was always adamant that they could revitalize this ageing platform and turn it in to something that the community would love. Thee were no messages of this being a short term deal, or limited in any way, by anything but optimism. I don't know what things were like on the Mektek forum, but this is the semi official feeling emanating from it. Your terms with Microsoft also made things impossible for another group to jump in and take it from you if things went south. So in this way everything was squarely on Mektek. In hindsight, it was probly doomed to fail, but I for one got attached to the ideology.

 Agonarch wrote:

GBL wrote:

Well there was the Solaris based, multiplayer total conversion for MW4 I know was being worked on.

Also Assault Tech 1, which was a fantastic game in itself, also discontinued when mektek essentially 'Raised Shields"

Ok, those are the other way around, the first was a tech demo (that failed) and a little unfair to complain about, but the second one I admit there's a point there (although it was still just at a tech-demo stage, there were real plans for more);

Assault Tech 1 was a concurrent project during Mekpak development. I'm not sure if this was late mod team stuff or early studio stuff but it was still completely free, this was a game written by part of the team pretty much from scratch to fulfil some requirements that MW4 couldn't as a tech demo. As I understand, it turned out that the engine wasn't advanced enough to make what they wanted in any reasonable timeframe. It could've perhaps been a good game, but it could never be what was intended, and had proved that. That's exactly why you do tech demonstrators. That said, this it's not like it's not available, go download and play it right now, it sounds like you're complaining they didn't keep it in-house (it was still pretty fun). Quite simply, there's limited resources and they were spent on the Mekpak.

Solaris Assault Tech was the more recent one of the two, and it was done in UDK. This is another victim of the legal situation, which I'll get to.

You call AT:1 a tech demo now, however the ModDB page for the game, run by Mektek, lists it as Remake of MW2. And while one of the downloads is a tech demo, its an older release than the beta and the 2.3.0 Full Version Release. I understand that you want to defend your current organization, but you cannot rewrite history.

 Agonarch wrote:

GBL wrote:

Another one is trying to sell a free to play game. That traditionally doesn't go well on kickstarter.

Another issue is the poor value for money pledge levels. Being able to pre pay 15 dollars into a F2P game before you get a chance to play it, is no choice at all. For something that is essentially funny money, you can afford to give backers any amount. Double it at a minimum.

Another issue is the complete failure of stretch goals. Stretch goals do not equal milestones on your game design document. Stretch goals should reward participants who generate buzz for your game. "If I get 10 of my friends to back, they will triple the amount of in game currency everyone gets, on top of the last three value adds, Whee!"

These are good suggestions, but they're all trumped by the problem you were responding to here of simply not being enough people seeing it. It doesn't matter what we do or show if not enough people see it. That said, I like all of this, and I'll be bringing these things up (I especially like the idea of early adopters getting more extra stuff, that seems fairer to me).

You have this in reverse. Not enough people saw it, because no one shared it. No one shared it because of the above, and numerous other reasons. A tiny miniatures company recently made 12,000 dollars in 30 seconds, because people loved what they were selling, and they had a well thought out kickstarter, and people pledged, and shared with their friends, and they shared it and so on.

 Agonarch wrote:

GBL wrote:

I am sorry, but you guys swaggered on to kickstarter, with exactly the same plan you had for raising money on your own website, which also failed. It seems like Stompy Bot is a small games company, with the management rigidity of a large one.

I'm here, talking with you. That wouldn't be allowed by most places I can think of (that said, I haven't shot my mouth about the legal stuff at this point yet, so it may change!). We did get off on the wrong foot with the kickstarter for sure.

This is very after the fact. I acknowledge that its good to have a developer to talk to, and you are doing a good job. It is definitely a step in the right direction for you guys. However, most successful kickstarters reach out to, and speak with their fan base before launching.

 Agonarch wrote:

GBL wrote:

Cancel the kickstarter.
Drastically rescope. You mentioned having a marketing company involved. That's a waste. Kickstarter is overrun by companies that know what their fans want. Not marketing firms.
You don't need UE4 to be successful. If you want community support, use a community engine like Ogre or Unity. If you chose UE4 just so modders would be useful, find something else for them to do or fire them. Unreal scripting is not worth the license fee (for a company of your size).
Now you have kicked UE4 to the curb, you can have a reasonable starting goal. If it is more than 100,000 you are gonna have a bad time.
Outline your single player campaign. Give players things they want.

If we rescope, then this will not be the same game, we won't be able to give the players anything beyond the bare minimum at the price you've said (which is downright ridiculously low, even by indie game standards).

That's correct. It shouldn't be the same game. You have failed to market the current one to us. Part of the issue, is that you have said "This is the amount of money we need to do everything" not " Here is a good base, we can expand from here"

You have far too many things that are absolutely required to release this game, and I believe it is in part, due to the fact that you have already assembled the team, promised wages and asked for money after the fact, rather than asking "What is a realistic goal, and if we exceed that, who can we hire to take on the extra workload"

 Agonarch wrote:

UE4 is not a game, it's an engine - it's programming, not modding.

I would appreciate it if you didn't assume anything about my knowledge in this regard.

UE4 is a sought after engine due (in part) to Unreal Script, allowing less technical savvy people to get involved (Like say, a modding team) this was my assumption due to Stompy bot consisting of an ex modding team.

 Agonarch wrote:

It's cutting edge sure, and that might hold us back a bit in a few areas where Unity or Ogre is better developed by virtue of being older, but Unity and Ogre would be taking the Assault Tech 1 path of moving into an engine that can't do what we want, can't do anything new for the players (UE4 more than makes up for things that are hard with things that are easier or awesomer). Maybe it'd be ok for an MW4 clone, but not much else and nothing like what would keep the experienced guys in this team interested. I don't see Ogre or Unity as being especially community engines, either, compared with UDK.

"More cutting edge" isn't an issue. Ogre is very cutting edge itself. Sinbad spins up extra components for a fee, and there are also Full Featured Engines with Tools similar to UE4 built upon it like NeoAXIS.

But with the team Stompy Bot has put together, you would believe that they could build anything they needed on top of a Community Developed Open Source engine anyways.

 Agonarch wrote:

The money you're thinking of is just ridiculously low, this is probably just a matter of not being aware of what things cost. We could make a low detail, simplified game (like for a cellphone) at those kinds of prices. Take a look at this skullgirls indiegogo page (specifically the cost breakdown) http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/keep-skullgirls-growing. That's for adding one, single character, who they expect will be cheaper than usual, to an existing, 2d, game. $150k, and it's not unreasonable. You're asking us to make an entire 3d mech game with customisation and everything you'd expect, for 2/3rds of adding a character to a fighting game? And you're expecting us to not only be able to do that, but to "give players what they want"? If I've missed something here that makes this more possible, please, tell me!

I said rescope. I am not asking you to make the current game for less money. I am telling you to make less game for less money, and if people support you, and if you reach critical mass, people may give you the money to make it how you have it set up now.

I used to have a chat log with a university friend of mine. Annoyed that I cannot find it at the moment. I had linked him to a similar discussion on the CBT forums where a novice animator was claiming that it took 2 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a single model similar to the mechs in MechWarrior Online. This feels like the same conversation. I may have been out of the industry a while, but I know what can be done, especially if people are happy to sacrifice for their craft. The numbers were an example only, based on what I have seen other kickstarters do. I can never know your exact costs, without known all of your exact expenses. Normally when planning a project I would use my best estimates of the time it takes to create a asset, based on feedback received from the artists responsible. Shadowrun Returns had half of your initial goal and made 1.8 million dollars. I know that their team is approximately the size of yours, and they had about the same amount of media attention as you. What's the difference?

I am pretty sure that Harebrained Schemes have other games in development, so they can afford to task staff to other projects if Shadowrun Returns had failed to produce that amount of money. However they have already blown through all the kickstarter money, and have also used traditional funding and good old savings to bring us something they want to make. So the question isn't can you afford to make a game for 100,000, it is can you afford to have a higher starting price, knowing that the more you ask for leads directly in to less exposure on kickstarter.

 Agonarch wrote:

This is another area where you're likely to get comments ignored, by the way: there'll be some experienced developers on any team who do know how much things cost, and when people make suggestions at lowball prices some of the experienced guys will just ignore you as "some guy who doesn't know what they're talking about". I'm not so quick to do that, but I do see where they're coming from - a lot of people throw stuff up in the air without knowing about it and they don't want to waste their time listening to that, but you've already brought up a bunch of good points so I'm more than happy to take the time here (you've been fairly respectful and I'd take the time even if you had no good points). If you want clarification on why it's likely to cost that much, I think I can do that for you.

I never brought any of these numbers up on the facebook page, I cant even find my questions any more, but they were more general questions asking about how you intended to run the company, your general background and if the project failed, would there be refunds.

My numbers are an example, and you argue the example but not the lesson, you need to ask for less money, or fund yourselves traditionally and come back when you can afford to ask for less.

But aren't you so nice, to come on here and insult my intelligence when your friends wouldn't even bother.

 Agonarch wrote:

GBL wrote:

Stretch goals that are not only extra features, but also more swag.
eg - 150,000 We can afford to commission 2 more Southern Gears + Free T-Shirt for X level and above.
Feel free to add UE and F2P Arena game back in as stretch goals. Make sure these goals reward the backer alongside the project.

If we can reach where we need to, our current design allows us to make and implement new gears much cheaper than this, but I see where you're going here. The disadvantage is that it is topheavy, we need to do a lot more work to get a category started, but once it's implemented we won't risk being stuck in a "maybe 1 update a month" cycle because of the difficulty of implementing more. I like the idea of an f2p system being a stretch goal. I feel like a poor job has been done on incentivising people. Maybe make f2p only available to referrals of backers or something, I dunno (spitballing here).

F2P is sort of like crowdfunding on the other end. I know that you say you aren't going to do it, but people don't want to pay upfront to help you launch a game, that will nickel and dime them once they get in.

You would do best to give kickstarter backers something really massive, like permanent premium accounts that ignore the F2P system. And to make that around the 50 dollar tier. Not the 3 month premium, but show them that if they get in at that level, they never have to worry about F2P. And going forward from that, make the tiers above, attempts to lure those people into higher tiers with swag and gifts.

 Agonarch wrote:

Now, I'm from here speaking as myself, not as a Mektek Dev. I understand that any legal ramifications of the things I'm about to say fall on me, and me alone. With that said, I fully intend to pussyfoot around because lawyers can terrify me. What I can do at least is bring up enough information for you to look up and draw your own conclusions.
I'll start with some easy facts to verify, this is as of the time just before Smith and Tinker fall over;
Mektek has some Mechwarrior rights,
"Someone Else" has some Mechwarrior rights.

This is interesting

 Agonarch wrote:

Mektek is supporting MW4. That's old, no-one cares, no big deal. It supports the pods, that's a bit of an issue, but meh, it doesn't really effect "Someone Else". Solaris Assault Tech might, though. Mektek is friendly with DP9, and that might seem scary, I dunno. HG has been talked about but they're working on SAT at present. I think this is where Mektek starts organising the shift of MW4 distribution to the third party.

Stuff starts to get difficult with the shift, something is unusual. This shouldn't have been any problem. Some of the team would already prefer to do HG than Battletech.

Smith and Tinker falls over. The actual shift of the license to the third party still hasn't happened yet, so we're left holding the bag unless they can sort the legal stuff out and take it from us. Right now there's bigger Mechwarriors to fry, and the effort flounders uselessly (and moneyless-ly).

Lawyers pore over everything, hoping to clear up every link they can for sure, but Battletech is a huge rights mess (it's their job to do this, there's nothing wrong with clarifying who has what rights)


This from here is all my understanding as best I can, and I believe everything here to be correct. If there are errors or omissions, I apologise and will correct them as I am made aware (please don't sue me!)

You're presented with (grossly simpified) legal choices. You are Mektek: Pick a Path;
*Defend Rights,
*Drop Rights,
*Don't exercise rights and let others exercise theirs.

If we do the first one, and win, we might be able to make a full game, but we might be left with not enough rights to make a Battletech game (and now no-one else, either). We've very likely just killed Battletech games on pc.
If we do the first one and it falls somewhere in the middle, it's anyone's guess. Very likely chance no-one is left able to make BT games on pc, though.
If we do the first one, and lose, we're in the exact same situation we are now, except we've spent money that could've been on our own project and can never ever bring back the Mekpak.

I don't want to argue "what you should have done"

I only know what you have done, and how that was presented to myself. And its on this basis that I have formed my opinion.

I thank you for trying to peel back the curtain, but it isn't really helping.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

mrondeau wrote:

Note: most, if not all, "you" in the following are 2nd person plural.
That's also one of the big problems with your communication, BTW. No, you are not valiantly saving a genre from doom, re-inventing gaming or anything like that. Your communication, right now, is more bragging than fact. You over-promise and over-praise yourself. You are creating unreasonable expectations in those who believe the hype and look way over your depth to those who don't. The insistence that F2C is in any way different from F2P is especially puzzling. It makes you look either delusional or completely uninformed about your market.

Holy crap, I had noticed this myself, but didn't really know how to put it in to words. Contrasting to the language from Harebrained Schemes, which was very self deprecating and thankful, HG does sound somewhat bragging.

Not to mention wrong, over the last couple of years we have had a handful of successful online mech games.

mrondeau wrote:

You need to stop, regroup and define what you want to do, make sure it's actually profitable and that it's possible to get the funding you need to do it. Otherwise, you are only going to waste a lot of your time, effort and other people's money.

BrandonKF wrote:

Seems the forum people decided to delete my last post, so I'll just say that I did respond, Ice, and it was to tell you I didn't think you were a bully. I figure you for an Internet tough guy who also happens to be a straight shooter from where you see things. Which is fair.

Uh.... you do realize Internet Tough Guy is a pejorative, right? You might be trying to say something but being tripped up on meaning, but you just said I'm not a bully, I'm a thug?

Tripped up on meaning would be putting it mildly, Ice.

Suffice to say, I was saying I appreciate that you, mrondeau and HudsonD and the others are straight shooters. And I meant to use the words 'internet tough guy' not as a pejorative (so whoever flagged that, thanks for not asking me first what I meant), but meant it as a way of saying, "You're tough, you know your stuff, and I respect that, I just don't have the know-how to really argue with your standpoint."

That's all.

As I can see, Agonarch's letting you guys know what's going on. But, well, it is what it is. God bless.

-Brandon F.

This one is going to be shorter, there are a good number of excellent points brought up that I want to take back and point at people so I'll be doing that, but I want to at least answer a few more of these before I go less active (I'll still be around, just don't know how often I'll be able to check back here for few days)

GBL wrote:

Well I had no idea, which is a problem with crowd funding.

But as someone who frequently pops in to and out of battletech related forums, I would have thought I would have known. Kickstarter has been running for years, was it considered?

No kickstarter for this - Mektek Studios is Canadian and has been pushing to be able to put something on kickstarter for some time. That's part of the reason for the launch timing (though we could've delayed it). It's open to US or UK organisations only (although backers can come from anywhere)

GBL wrote:

Consider this: The talk on various battletech communities at the time, was that Mektek was the gatekeeper of the MW4 franchise, and that they had bold plans to revitalize it and keep it going. As far as my memory goes, mektek members were talking this up too. Some people were cynical that you had the technical know how to do this, that you would have access to the source, and screw it up(not me, I was as giddy as a schoolgirl). But Mektek was always adamant that they could revitalize this ageing platform and turn it in to something that the community would love. Thee were no messages of this being a short term deal, or limited in any way, by anything but optimism. I don't know what things were like on the Mektek forum, but this is the semi official feeling emanating from it. Your terms with Microsoft also made things impossible for another group to jump in and take it from you if things went south. So in this way everything was squarely on Mektek. In hindsight, it was probly doomed to fail, but I for one got attached to the ideology.

I thought that's what the free release was? They kept it going for years after that agreement, and things were no less favourable for future deals with Microsoft than they were when Mektek started for anyone else (Microsoft reserves all rights) - MWO didn't have any trouble, for example, it's just a matter of who was willing to front up with the money required to try to make these agreements. Microsoft was never going to be the one to pay for someone's legal fees because they liked a game a lot.

I don't know what extra access the team got from this, but I do know it wasn't as much as you're implying - most of the tools and things used for the mod were written by team members themselves - it needed to be next to no work for Microsoft for this to have any chance of success (which is reasonable - there's no way anyone could ask them to pay for something that was only ever going to cost money).

GBL wrote:

You call AT:1 a tech demo now, however the ModDB page for the game, run by Mektek, lists it as Remake of MW2. And while one of the downloads is a tech demo, its an older release than the beta and the 2.3.0 Full Version Release. I understand that you want to defend your current organization, but you cannot rewrite history.

It's not a matter of changing history. The main developer on this described it to me as a tech demo, that is what it appears to be, and it does appear to be based on MW2 (that developers favourite MW). It was developed through to a playable version 1 and released freely, I don't see what you're quite arguing here. We don't seem to be in disagreement. I don't know about the forum stuff surrounding it, it's possible that they held hope that it could've been built into what they wanted, but it just turned out not to be the case in any sort of reasonable timeframe. One of the problems with development is that you just don't know what's going to be a problem if you're working with stuff people haven't done before. You might get everything built, designed, tested, find out something doesn't behave how you expected, you can either redesign it to fit the system better (if it's serious, may require quite a rewrite) or you can make missiles expensive and ECM powerful (to deter people from using them) and keep making big tweaks like that as people complain so it looks like you're doing due diligence when you know full well the design is broken, not the numbers.

GBL wrote:

You have this in reverse. Not enough people saw it, because no one shared it. No one shared it because of the above, and numerous other reasons. A tiny miniatures company recently made 12,000 dollars in 30 seconds, because people loved what they were selling, and they had a well thought out kickstarter, and people pledged, and shared with their friends, and they shared it and so on.

That's an interesting and I think probably accurate point. One of my arguments has been that we're not showing enough information about the game for people to use as ammunition to explain it to their friends. One of the earlier posts here mentioned Techs being listed in a lot of stretch goals, but never really explained - this prevents people from understanding what that is, and seeing how it can have clear value to them (and therefore be worth that particular goal). I might build up a wiki so that people can see further details on a lot of this information - I know one of the first things I do when getting a new game is to go through skill or equipment lists and try to work out what stuff I'll be aiming to use together.

GBL wrote:

This is very after the fact. I acknowledge that its good to have a developer to talk to, and you are doing a good job. It is definitely a step in the right direction for you guys. However, most successful kickstarters reach out to, and speak with their fan base before launching.

We should've had more developers out and about, then this wouldn't have all been such a surprise. I agree wholeheartedly here, and a lot of feedback I've had leading up to and immediately since the start of the kickstarter has been gold.

GBL wrote:

That's correct. It shouldn't be the same game. You have failed to market the current one to us. Part of the issue, is that you have said "This is the amount of money we need to do everything" not " Here is a good base, we can expand from here"

You have far too many things that are absolutely required to release this game, and I believe it is in part, due to the fact that you have already assembled the team, promised wages and asked for money after the fact, rather than asking "What is a realistic goal, and if we exceed that, who can we hire to take on the extra workload"

We can't have a team you know and trust to be able to do the work, and a team who we hire when we have the money. At the moment, everyone here knows the score, and everyone is here because they want to support either Mech Games or HG. If no-one can get paid even enough to eat, then there will be attrition, sure, but you can't have this both of those ways.

The comment about scaling back to something simpler but clearer is a good one, but people have as much said to us "Not doing it if not singleplayer" which leaves us in the tough spot you're talking about. We can shuffle stuff to fit in the current budget by changing priorities, but fitting the minimum that people want in a lower budget? We'll need to look at it, regardless.

GBL wrote:

I would appreciate it if you didn't assume anything about my knowledge in this regard.

UE4 is a sought after engine due (in part) to Unreal Script, allowing less technical savvy people to get involved (Like say, a modding team) this was my assumption due to Stompy bot consisting of an ex modding team.

I apologise if I've inferred anything here, but I wasn't making a sudden assumption - you don't appear to know a lot about UE4, that's not an insult to your character, knowledge or intelligence, it just appears to be the case (and is fine, it's unlikely anyone would know anything about it if they hadn't worked with it). UE4 for example is almost entirely C++ with epics own functions on top, there is no Unrealscript at this time. I don't mean any offense by any of this.

GBL wrote:

I said rescope. I am not asking you to make the current game for less money. I am telling you to make less game for less money, and if people support you, and if you reach critical mass, people may give you the money to make it how you have it set up now.

I used to have a chat log with a university friend of mine. Annoyed that I cannot find it at the moment. I had linked him to a similar discussion on the CBT forums where a novice animator was claiming that it took 2 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a single model similar to the mechs in MechWarrior Online. This feels like the same conversation. I may have been out of the industry a while, but I know what can be done, especially if people are happy to sacrifice for their craft. The numbers were an example only, based on what I have seen other kickstarters do. I can never know your exact costs, without known all of your exact expenses. Normally when planning a project I would use my best estimates of the time it takes to create a asset, based on feedback received from the artists responsible. Shadowrun Returns had half of your initial goal and made 1.8 million dollars. I know that their team is approximately the size of yours, and they had about the same amount of media attention as you. What's the difference?

I am pretty sure that Harebrained Schemes have other games in development, so they can afford to task staff to other projects if Shadowrun Returns had failed to produce that amount of money. However they have already blown through all the kickstarter money, and have also used traditional funding and good old savings to bring us something they want to make. So the question isn't can you afford to make a game for 100,000, it is can you afford to have a higher starting price, knowing that the more you ask for leads directly in to less exposure on kickstarter.

The rescoping part will certainly be looked at - as for the Shadowrun examples: this really isn't that comparable with us - There is a big, big difference, of course its easier if you have millions of dollars to cover any shortfalls you have and make up dips in coverage. Shadowrun Online before Shadowrun Returns did its kickstarter is a fairer comparison.

GBL wrote:

I never brought any of these numbers up on the facebook page, I cant even find my questions any more, but they were more general questions asking about how you intended to run the company, your general background and if the project failed, would there be refunds.

My numbers are an example, and you argue the example but not the lesson, you need to ask for less money, or fund yourselves traditionally and come back when you can afford to ask for less.

But aren't you so nice, to come on here and insult my intelligence when your friends wouldn't even bother.

I apologise if I've insulted your intelligence somehow by missing the point, but again, I wasn't intending any offense here- simply stating the kind of question that's likely to get snubbed (not just us, from anyone). Questions about team members or refunds should absolutely have been no problem to answer. I don't think we'd be having a conversation anything like this if you weren't intelligent

GBL wrote:

F2P is sort of like crowdfunding on the other end. I know that you say you aren't going to do it, but people don't want to pay upfront to help you launch a game, that will nickel and dime them once they get in.

You would do best to give kickstarter backers something really massive, like permanent premium accounts that ignore the F2P system. And to make that around the 50 dollar tier. Not the 3 month premium, but show them that if they get in at that level, they never have to worry about F2P. And going forward from that, make the tiers above, attempts to lure those people into higher tiers with swag and gifts.

This all needs to be reviewed in my opinion.

GBL wrote:

This is interesting

It was silly, maybe helpful but I felt you had a right to know how it looks from here. I still wouldn't recommend this to anyone.

I don't want to argue "what you should have done"

I only know what you have done, and how that was presented to myself. And its on this basis that I have formed my opinion.

I thank you for trying to peel back the curtain, but it isn't really helping.

I don't begrudge you your opinion, you made it with the best information that's available and I can see how it might go that way. Maybe the new team-members like me would consider dumping the mekpak without thinking too much about it (IMO, it was pretty good but old now), but remember the older members of the mektek team have spent up to 10 years on that thing. Of all the things you'd say about those guys, would one of them be "They're not stubborn"?

GBL wrote:

Holy crap, I had noticed this myself, but didn't really know how to put it in to words. Contrasting to the language from Harebrained Schemes, which was very self deprecating and thankful, HG does sound somewhat bragging.

Not to mention wrong, over the last couple of years we have had a handful of successful online mech games.

OK, to reasonably respond to this I'll have to step out of the Dev shoes again for a sec..

I do think the spin can get a little thick sometimes, I'm not personally much of a fan. Vote for me to write instead The base of a lot of the stuff I agree with, though. I.. can't.. name.. names.. but they've been disappointing as mech games. Some cases I'd go as far as to say they're not actually mech games and more team action FPS games instead. Nothing wrong with that, but not a mech game. I do know "Someone" might be worried about what this kind of game might do to their market share, but I see our main competition as being "Someone Else" entirely, we're not talking about the same kind of game or gamer in most of these cases.


This has been a really helpful place for responses, I'd like to invite you guys to join our focus group. They email stuff out for you to do a survey and give responses before stuff goes live which is a big bonus at the moment because we're still hardly telling anyone anything - so hopefully that'll become less of a draw soon

Email johnn(at)stompybot(dot)com if you're interested.


..That didn't feel much shorter.

Brandon - I never thanked you for sharing this around. Well done standing fast against the Earthers, brother! (We'll get them to Terra Nova yet)

I too will try to keep it short. If I didn't reply to one of your comments, its due to it not being necessary for me to agree to it, or because I hate repeating myself and feel that cyclical arguments serve no one.

 Agonarch wrote:

GBL wrote:

Well I had no idea, which is a problem with crowd funding.

But as someone who frequently pops in to and out of battletech related forums, I would have thought I would have known. Kickstarter has been running for years, was it considered?

No kickstarter for this - Mektek Studios is Canadian and has been pushing to be able to put something on kickstarter for some time. That's part of the reason for the launch timing (though we could've delayed it). It's open to US or UK organisations only (although backers can come from anywhere)

Theres a French company on there at the moment, I think the trick is to set up a US bank account, and perhaps incorporate in one of the states where it is cheap\free to do so. Perhaps this wasn't an option for Mektek? I don't know enough to comment.

 Agonarch wrote:

GBL wrote:

You have this in reverse. Not enough people saw it, because no one shared it. No one shared it because of the above, and numerous other reasons. A tiny miniatures company recently made 12,000 dollars in 30 seconds, because people loved what they were selling, and they had a well thought out kickstarter, and people pledged, and shared with their friends, and they shared it and so on.

That's an interesting and I think probably accurate point. One of my arguments has been that we're not showing enough information about the game for people to use as ammunition to explain it to their friends. One of the earlier posts here mentioned Techs being listed in a lot of stretch goals, but never really explained - this prevents people from understanding what that is, and seeing how it can have clear value to them (and therefore be worth that particular goal). I might build up a wiki so that people can see further details on a lot of this information - I know one of the first things I do when getting a new game is to go through skill or equipment lists and try to work out what stuff I'll be aiming to use together.

I agree, but it might be an oversimplification. Kickstarter is simultaneously driven by self interest and group think. People first of all want to get something, your game is free to play, and the pledge levels don't deliver, so that isn't an interest. Secondly people want to be involved in something that will succeed, and as you aren't tracking towards success for reason 1, you aren't tracking towards it due to reason 2.

 Agonarch wrote:

GBL wrote:

That's correct. It shouldn't be the same game. You have failed to market the current one to us. Part of the issue, is that you have said "This is the amount of money we need to do everything" not " Here is a good base, we can expand from here"

You have far too many things that are absolutely required to release this game, and I believe it is in part, due to the fact that you have already assembled the team, promised wages and asked for money after the fact, rather than asking "What is a realistic goal, and if we exceed that, who can we hire to take on the extra workload"

We can't have a team you know and trust to be able to do the work, and a team who we hire when we have the money. At the moment, everyone here knows the score, and everyone is here because they want to support either Mech Games or HG. If no-one can get paid even enough to eat, then there will be attrition, sure, but you can't have this both of those ways.

The comment about scaling back to something simpler but clearer is a good one, but people have as much said to us "Not doing it if not singleplayer" which leaves us in the tough spot you're talking about. We can shuffle stuff to fit in the current budget by changing priorities, but fitting the minimum that people want in a lower budget? We'll need to look at it, regardless.

This is I think part of the problem. You guys have a done all this team assembly, market research and asset development, and now that you have had contact with the proverbial enemy, you are too rigidly structured to adapt to it. It is difficult to send home people who are die hard supporters if you were to change your plan. However you tackled this as if you were heading to a publisher to seek funding.

It is old news now, but I have always felt that Stubbs the Zombies development should become the model for practically the entire industry. The team was small, with flexible goals, and anything they were unable to produce was given to a contractor they brought in. Their post mortem is a Good Read

 Agonarch wrote:

GBL wrote:

I would appreciate it if you didn't assume anything about my knowledge in this regard.

UE4 is a sought after engine due (in part) to Unreal Script, allowing less technical savvy people to get involved (Like say, a modding team) this was my assumption due to Stompy bot consisting of an ex modding team.

I apologise if I've inferred anything here, but I wasn't making a sudden assumption - you don't appear to know a lot about UE4, that's not an insult to your character, knowledge or intelligence, it just appears to be the case (and is fine, it's unlikely anyone would know anything about it if they hadn't worked with it). UE4 for example is almost entirely C++ with epics own functions on top, there is no Unrealscript at this time. I don't mean any offense by any of this.

I wasn't aware that UnrealScripting was being deprecated for UE4. It is still listed as a feature for UE3. Between US and Kismet I have seen a team of script monkeys produce a decent quality game, and it is this that I assumed was your intention.

 Agonarch wrote:

The rescoping part will certainly be looked at - as for the Shadowrun examples: this really isn't that comparable with us - There is a big, big difference, of course its easier if you have millions of dollars to cover any shortfalls you have and make up dips in coverage. Shadowrun Online before Shadowrun Returns did its kickstarter is a fairer comparison.

I don't think they have "millions of dollars" to make up for shortfalls.

I will put it like this, Shadowrun Online is what you were trying to do, and they only barely scraped home.

Shadowrun returns would be by far better to emulate, in that they asked for $100,000 less than SO, and raked in 3 times as much money in the end.

 Agonarch wrote:

GBL wrote:

Holy crap, I had noticed this myself, but didn't really know how to put it in to words. Contrasting to the language from Harebrained Schemes, which was very self deprecating and thankful, HG does sound somewhat bragging.

Not to mention wrong, over the last couple of years we have had a handful of successful online mech games.

OK, to reasonably respond to this I'll have to step out of the Dev shoes again for a sec..

I do think the spin can get a little thick sometimes, I'm not personally much of a fan. Vote for me to write instead The base of a lot of the stuff I agree with, though. I.. can't.. name.. names.. but they've been disappointing as mech games. Some cases I'd go as far as to say they're not actually mech games and more team action FPS games instead. Nothing wrong with that, but not a mech game. I do know "Someone" might be worried about what this kind of game might do to their market share, but I see our main competition as being "Someone Else" entirely, we're not talking about the same kind of game or gamer in most of these cases.

The spin is very thick, but its not humanizing at all. As far as your layperson sees, this is a AAA games company with its hand out for preorders for something that is free anyways. Shadowrun returns on the other hand, was the former creator of a property, revitalizing it as a game that people wanted to play, years later, with a small dedicated team, and if you like, you can help out and be part of the fun. Its a clear difference. And another reason to lay off, cancel the kickstarter, and come back in 3 months time with a better idea of what to expect.

As for other mech games, the market is suddenly saturated by them. I don't really see much in the way of a call for an "eSports Arena" mech game

Here is another question(s). You may not be able to answer, that's fine.

Are you being paid yet? Is there already money in this project? And if so how much? When the kickstarter finishes(presumably, with the refunding of all backers), will development continue?

I ask because, if you don't want to take advice, you would be better going the MechWarrior Online route, that is to say, taking preorders for premium accounts just before beta, not at the beginning of development.

P.S. I hope your marketing company is no win - no fee

You can run a KS out of the USA even if you're company is from abroad,

but you need a USA shell company, 'office' and bank account and setting this lot up (if you can) takes a lot more time than you imagine

Raging Heroes (the french company I think you're refering to) had been working on their KS plans for 9-12 months when they released the info in Jan 2013,

they expected to be able launch on 4th March 2013, but 'administrative delays' (ie trouble setting up the USA end of things) meant it launched 4th June 2013

so 3 months extra on top of whatever time/effort/waiting they'd put in to that side of things already.

So (i'm speculating here) if MekTek were in a situation where there was no money coming in and funds were running low that might have been time they didn't have

GBL wrote:

I said rescope. I am not asking you to make the current game for less money. I am telling you to make less game for less money, and if people support you, and if you reach critical mass, people may give you the money to make it how you have it set up now.

People keep asking them to de-scope, but one thing that's being missed is that making an Arena based game may be what they are passionate about - it's what they want to do. There's no guarantee that if you make a 'descoped' game that it will be successful - there's a very good possibility that it may not make back it's development costs, because that's (traditionally) been a tough market. That's why everybody else has gotten out - it's just not profitable. And further, there's no guarantee that any good-will from the first game will translate to the second game - you could legitimately claim they don't know how to to FPS, they only made a strategy game! Etc, etc.

I'm happy for SB to make a Arena FPS - it's not something that would capture my interest for an extended period of time, but I played WoT for a couple of months, so they'd get that from me at least. Sure, they would be competing with MWO - but the play styles would be different enough they might be able to co-exist.

Ah well, it's a moot point. They aren't going to hit their KS, so I suppose I just get to wait for Titanfall.

Titanfall... AKA Heavy Gear by a different IP.

That's a good point, IceRaptor, but crowdfunding isn't all that different from pitching to studios: if what you want isn't close enough to what the backers want, then you're going to have difficulty securing funding, no matter who those backers are.

I second the talk about backer swag: make it really meaningful and permanent. I'd personally advise against too many physical goods, since they can easily eat up funds that would've been much better-spent on development.

 IceRaptor wrote:

GBL wrote:

I said rescope. I am not asking you to make the current game for less money. I am telling you to make less game for less money, and if people support you, and if you reach critical mass, people may give you the money to make it how you have it set up now.

People keep asking them to de-scope, but one thing that's being missed is that making an Arena based game may be what they are passionate about - it's what they want to do. There's no guarantee that if you make a 'descoped' game that it will be successful - there's a very good possibility that it may not make back it's development costs, because that's (traditionally) been a tough market. That's why everybody else has gotten out - it's just not profitable. And further, there's no guarantee that any good-will from the first game will translate to the second game - you could legitimately claim they don't know how to to FPS, they only made a strategy game! Etc, etc.

I'm happy for SB to make a Arena FPS - it's not something that would capture my interest for an extended period of time, but I played WoT for a couple of months, so they'd get that from me at least. Sure, they would be competing with MWO - but the play styles would be different enough they might be able to co-exist.

Ah well, it's a moot point. They aren't going to hit their KS, so I suppose I just get to wait for Titanfall.

Titanfall... AKA Heavy Gear by a different IP.

Well if they are passionate about this game, they should make it. Crowdfunding has not been successful. So the other option they have is traditional funding. If they cannot get that, and they are unwilling to rescope for crowd funding, no game gets made at all.

Well, I've pulled my pledge as a vote of no-confidence.

Agonarch, I appreciate you coming to the boards. I really REALLY hope you guys listen to the feedback that people have been giving you all. Go back to the drawing boards, maybe rein in your ambitions a bit, create a nice, streamlined, organized, and coherent vision, demonstrate that you've got the leadership to make it happen, offer fans a game that they really want, and we'll see if we can't make it work next time.

I'll be clear: I WANT A GOOD HEAVY GEAR COMPUTER GAME AND WILL GIVE YOU MONEY TO HELP MAKE IT HAPPEN.

Kickstarter has been cancelled. :(

The writing's been on the wall for a loooong time. I wonder if today was just the final punctuation; it looks like quite a few others had the same thought as me:

Just a recap of the Heavy Gear Assault story.

HG: Give us money, without any assurances.
Fans: What about Kickstarter
HG: We don't need Kickstarter, this is a "Soft Launch"
Fans: No money then.
HG: Kickstarter!
Fans: What about (Laundry list of reasons this Kickstarter will fail)
HG: We haven't had enough exposure
Fans: No, Really.
HG: We are a single player game now.
Fans: That's nice, but what about the people who pledged on your website, also, it still sounds like a F2P game, just with missions you do alone. That's not what we want. Why don't you go away and come back when you have something we want.
HG: The real issue is that you don't understand, our F2P system is different from all those other games, in that it is exactly the same.
Fans: *crickets*
HG: This Kickstarter isn't over until the end, anything can happen.
HG: Kickstarter is cancelled.


What to take away: If you haven't already, fire your marketing department/company, stop acting like you are EA and don't need our money, and come back when you are ready for crowdsourcing.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Gearhead wrote:
The writing's been on the wall for a loooong time. I wonder if today was just the final punctuation; it looks like quite a few others had the same thought as me:

Holy crap gearhead, I think you may have been the last straw.

Your comment on the kickstarter is not only 100% correct, but was the last one they had for a day or so, and 2 hours later they cancelled it.

Gearhead wrote:
Hello everyone. I'm sorry, but I'm retracting my pledge. I know the project won't hit it's goal, but I'm doing this as a vote of no-confidence.

Here are my feelings on the matter: Heavy Gear is pure awesome, and I really REALLY want to see another computer game for it. The fact that StompyBot and MekTek want to do one is good, but this is a very bumpy start, and I honestly think that they need to pull back and overhaul the project. For the love of Pete, LISTEN to what fans are telling you: This is too big, too ambitious, and so far, too vague. Start smaller, and do something based more on what people tell you they want to play, and not quite as much on what you want to make; whether it's a big publishing corporation or a gaggle of fans, you're going to have to make changes and compromises to please them in order to get funding.

PLEASE, learn from this experience. You want to make a Heavy Gear game, I want to play one (oh, how I want to play one!!) but this isn't it, and so far the team hasn't demonstrated to my satisfaction that they're ready to make it happen yet. Yes, there is experience and talent, but I'm not seeing a good, solid, unified and planned-out vision yet.

2 Hours Later HG Kickstarter wrote:
@Everyone: Thank you for your dedicated support. We appreciate and highly value everyone's opinions here which is why we have decided to cancel this KS campaign and continue crowd funding on heavygear.com. We believe very strongly in resurrecting the Heavy Gear franchise and giving the fans what they want. We are currently evaluating other strategies to raise awareness regarding Heavy Gear and looking at multiple means to get the Heavy Gear name out there. Thank you for your support everyone and stay tuned.

The "Continue funding on HeavyGear.com" part is the most worrying thing. That needed to be cancelled and refunded more than the Kickstarter.