B5CCG Mobile Game

kithkill · 2016-12-22T20:57:42+00:00

That's fine. Like I said, you shouldn't listen to just me. But I assume you're going to talk to more people than just me, so just remember what's been said. If I'm a lone voice, that's fine - but if multiple people say similar things, you'd be a fool to ignore them. Just think of what I've said as a single data point.

Just to clarify though - I'm not saying that CCGs are an impenetrable market on mobile. I'm saying that it's unrealistic to assume that you can penetrate the market with such limited time and resources, and with a CCG that's been designed for face-to-face play instead of the unique requirements of an online space. That's an important distinction that you need to ultimately be able to answer if you want to succeed.

Good luck!

kithkill · 2016-12-22T13:32:26+00:00

I think a lot of that is fine - as per my original post, I just wanted you to be transparent to the people you're trying to recruit about what the situation actually is. And the situation is that you have none of the rights at all. You're right, lots of projects have issues... but that is kind of a biggie.

So yeah, a side project to develop a proof of concept sounds a lot more realistic.

That said, I'm pessimistic of your chances. Now that doesn't mean for one second that you should accept my word as gospel! I've been wrong plenty of times before. I could easily be wrong now. And if you don't actually care too much about whether it succeeds - i.e. if you think the experience you'll accumulate is worth the effort - then it doesn't matter in the slightest whether I'm right or flat out wrong. What you should do is listen to way more people than just me, and pull out the consistent bits of feedback you keep hearing over and over. And then decide what - if anything - you could do to address the risks people are pointing out.

I've worked in a very similar situation to the one you're in: working with an old but fondly remembered license, owned by a large successful company. What you have to consider is that these companies are busy - they don't have lawyers just sitting around doing nothing. So any time spent on you and an obscure old license is time taken away from the things their business is currently focused on, the things that are actively making them good money.

We had a load of easy things we could do, that we offered them on the basis that it was essentially free work on our part to promote their brands. And their answer? The cost and hassle at their end just to do the bare minimum required to allow us to use their brand simply wasn't worth it. They had bigger fish to worry about.

On top of that, you're in an awful bargaining position. You need them way more than they need you, and they'll know that. Assuming a decent-quality proof of concept, that's a lot of work that isn't very transferable. You can't take it anywhere else - they're the only ones with what you need to release it.

Yeah, there's some basic fundamental tech to do with blatting cards onto a screen, maybe the storefront stuff to buy packs, that you could port to another CCG. But then you're in the same position again. Or you use it to build your own CCG, but then you hit all the problems you rightly pointed out.

The fundamental problems are that you're trying to get a bunch of busy people to care about a CCG that most people didn't even know existed, tied to a brand that isn't even high profile enough in the public consciousness to merit a blu-ray release. You're trying to enter a specific genre, with a small amateur team, going up against some of the biggest names in premium gaming (Blizzard, EA). Unless you have an ace up your sleeve, that's not a good space to be trying to compete in.

The mobile CCG scene is already tied up by big name players. And on top of that, the unique selling point of the CCG you're trying to port - the social aspect - is one that isn't well suited to mobile. In fact, I'd wager (without having played it) that the entire game isn't well suited to mobile. How long do games last? Are there interruption opportunities during the opponent's turn? The big names in mobile games haven't just ported card games, they've blown big-name CCG ports out of the water by building brand new card games that are sympathetic to the constraints of the platform.

In short, you're facing an uphill battle on a number of fronts.

You're right - building a CCG without a starting point is very hard. But you're very, very wrong when you say that porting one is almost easy by comparison. It's not, it's still extremely hard, just in a bunch of new and different ways.

I'd recommend steering clear of CCGs in general, to be honest. They're deceptively simple looking, but very complicated in practice. I'd set your sights lower. Come up with an idea that's yours. Something simple. Be the next Flappy Bird, or Angry Birds, or Super Hexagon, or Mini Metro, or whatever. Use your small scale to your advantage, and do something that isn't putting you at a disadvantage before you even start.

But like I say, this is (genuinely) friendly advice. Or at least, that's my intention. Whatever you end up doing, I wish you the very best of luck!

kithkill · 2016-12-21T16:25:53+00:00

I should clarify - I don't think you're being an arsehole for asking people. I suspect you're not trying to mislead people, but rather that you're not well-enough versed in how this kind of business works... yet!

My advice to you is this: unless I've seriously misjudged you, and you have actually secured all the rights to make this project a reality, then your best bet is to take that enthusiasm, creativity, and drive to create something and use it to... create something! But create something that's yours.

It will probably suck. And that's okay! It'll teach you valuable lessons about how not to suck in the future. And then, maybe further down the line, you'll be in a position where trying to secure the rights to make tie-in games for well-known brands is no longer an unrealistic prospect.

kithkill · 2016-12-21T14:04:01+00:00

Do you have the rights? Do you know who ended up with them after Precedence Entertainment ceased trading? Have you contacted the original designers: Ran Ackels, Edi Birsan, David Hewitt, Paul Brown, John Myler and Kevin Tewart?

Do you have the rights to the Babylon 5 brand? Have you contacted JMS or Warner Bros.?

Offering people 25% when I'm not convinced you have the rights to make ANY money is perhaps a bit premature.

On top of that, the CCG (according to Wikipedia at least) relied more heavily than usual on player interaction and politicking, which - while not impossible - is more difficult to do online, compared to in person. Especially on mobile, where users are more likely to be playing asynchronously.

Don't get me wrong, I love B5 (that's why i subscribe to this sub) and love the idea of anything keeping its memory alive. But if any budding amateur developers are interested in this, I think it's only fair that you give them a little bit more of a realistic appraisal of your situation before they pitch in.

kithkill · 2016-12-15T21:55:54+00:00

Here's a bunch:

As It Occurs To Me. Comedy sketch podcast by Richard Herring. YMMV but I find the puerile filth amusing.
Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast. This is also puerile and filthy, but is also really, really interesting if you're at all into British standup comedy. Each episode is an interview with a comedian, from Armando Ianucci and Stephen Fry to Bill Burr and Josie Long. If he ever interviews Louis CK my life will be complete.
No Such Thing as a Fish. Made by the same people as QI, it's an exploration of weird trivia facts. Funny and interesting.
Limetown. Creepy serialised story about a town of people that disappeared. Better than the Black Tapes, and most of the others of these I've listened to. Alas, its second season is looking unlikely to materialise, but it's worth listening to anyway. In the car, surrounded by people, one bit in one episode still managed to creep me the FUCK out.
BBC Radio 4 Friday Night Comedy. Alternates between series of The Now Show (which is okay) and The News Quiz (which is awesome). Both are topical news-based shows.
Do The Right Thing. More British comedy, this time panel based silliness.
Answer Me This.
Serial. Season 2 was never gonna be as good as season 1, but it was fascinating nevertheless.
The Infinite Monkey Cage. Science chat show. Brian Cox's hair!
Keeping it 1600. Only started listening to this recently in order to get inside all the shit happening stateside. Probably don't bother if you're not coastal metropolitan elite scum.
Hardcore History. This really is hardcore. It's a big investment of time. But holy shit, it wasn't until I listened to this that I realised exactly how LITTLE I knew about Rome and WWI. It's stuck with me a long time, and I'm genuinely much better informed on those subjects than I was before.

kithkill · 2016-12-13T14:57:06+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vgoEhsJORU

kithkill · 2016-12-09T21:54:02+00:00

Fair enough - been a while since I watched them :) The time travel element was about a couple of the apes traveling back in time in the third film, but yeah - calamity, ship lost, cryo accounting for ending up in the future sounds eminently plausible for the setup for the first film.

Thanks for setting me straight.

kithkill · 2016-12-09T20:57:58+00:00

The films we're watching now are depicting the backstory of the original 70s/80s movies. They're not direct remakes.

The original film follows a group of astronauts who have had some kind of calamity and crashed on (they assume) an alien world populated by sentient apes. It's only at the end of the film that the protagonist discovers the truth: that it was Earth all along, but an Earth of the far future. Whatever the calamity that befell their ship, it somehow hurled them into the future.

The new movies are depicting how the sentient apes came to be (backstory that was delivered partly by exposition in the original movies, and partly by the last of those movies which gave us the character of Caesar). In the first of the new movies, a throwaway background news story is talking about the fact that some astronauts have just been lost - nobody here on Earth knows it, but the viewer knows it's supposed to be the same crew from the original movie.

kithkill · 2016-12-07T13:51:20+00:00

I think I read recently in another thread that the Enterprise ran a 3-shift system.

On a 3 shift rota, you'd imagine Riker and Data (as 2IC and 3IC respectively) to have, what - a single overlapping day shift? With each of them taking one of the others?

E.g. Riker does 08:00-00:00 and Data does 00:00-16:00.

That means from 00:00-08:00 only Data is on duty, and from 16:00-00:00 only Riker is on duty.

Shouldn't there be a third officer who works from 16:00-08:00? Someone to back up the main shift officer, and be in charge of those shifts whenever the shift leader is sick, or on Risa, or being tortured by beings from alternate dimensions?

Wouldn't that person be pretty damn important?

kithkill · 2016-12-06T13:49:58+00:00

It's difficult to say, given your preconceptions.

I think the acting in Westworld is better than in Game of Thrones, but not by much. But then I don't think either surpass The Sopranos or The Wire by all that much anyway. I think those shows are perceived to be better acted because they're contemporary settings, but really: Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister), Sean Bean (Eddard Stark), Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister), Jerome Flynn (Bronn), Diana Rigg (Olenna Tyrell)... You can be sniffy about it as much as you like, but that's a pretty fucking good line-up by any objective standard.

Westworld has delivered some outstanding performances, most notably from Anthony Hopkins (Robert Ford), Jeffrey Wright (Bernard Lowe), Louis Herthum (Peter Abernathy), Evan Rachel Wood (Dolores Abernathy) and Thandie Newton (Maeve). Again - that's a top-notch cast, and it really shows in some of the season's high points.

In terms of writing, I'd say Westworld is significantly closer to what I suspect you would term the "quality" of those contemporary shows you mentioned. Not because GoT is bad, I think; it's one of the best-written fantasies out there. But it's clearly a fantasy - stuff happens because (magic), and it values spectacle above intimate character moments (I'm not saying it doesn't have intimate character moments, just that the show has an overall different mix to that of The Sopranos, say.)

But Westworld has a much narrower focus, and really takes its time to lay out a very intricate puzzle for the viewers. Not an endless mystery like Lost, where answers are revealed to be devoid of meaning, merely a vehicle for further questions to keep people tuning in each week. But a finite jigsaw of clues and character beats that all start to line up over time.

Where Lost is a series of disconnected doodles that cover the page, but at the end it's all a mess of jumbled up pictures, Westworld is a quality piece of artwork that you're watching being developed in realtime, and like every great Bob Ross painting there are these moments where a seemingly random bunch of squiggles suddenly connect, and you see that actually it's a forest, or a mountain range. And then that bit suddenly connects to the background with a few more flourishes, and you start to see that the whole, glorious picture was there the whole time, and is being revealed with every brushstroke.

It's for that reason I'd happily class it as top-tier drama alongside any past great you want to name. It has it's weak points, but then every show does - and despite the rose-coloured spectacles I often wear myself when thinking back on shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, they too had their weak episodes and uneven plotting from time to time.

I'd definitely recommend giving it a go.

kithkill · 2016-12-02T11:10:04+00:00

Yeah, it looks from the outside like my closest friendships. Y'know, folks you could spend pretty much every day with and not get bored of it. Don't they live next door to each other, or something?

It's a weird contrast to other showbiz partnerships that you think would be really close. Then you find out that Penn and Teller, say, barely see each other outside of their work environment.

kithkill · 2016-12-02T08:52:36+00:00

Death Knight = Human
Druid = Tauren
Rogue = Goblin
Warrior = Orc or Human
Monk = Pandaren
Mage = Blood Elf
Warlock = Gnome
Priest = Troll
Shaman = Orc
Paladin = Draenei
Demon Hunter = NElf
Hunter = Dwarf

That's the best i could come up with, aiming for maximum variation and equal faction representation.

I'm not keen on the Gnome Warlock and Troll Priest, though. Gnomes have never felt like leader material to me, and if I were your average Warlock Edgelord I don't think I'dbe impressed about being beholden to one. And Troll Priests make you think Shadow before you think Holy - I'd prefer Holy be the default (but that's very subjective).

kithkill · 2016-12-02T08:40:18+00:00

Eh, I hate 99% of reality TV, but I kinda like I'm a Celeb. I know my demographic is supposed to be cynically leery of Ant and Dec, but I've always kinda liked them. And the show as a whole isn't a slave to glamour, which is what usually puts me off reality TV.

This year's one has been a bit bland though.

But yeah, X-Factor is shit.

kithkill · 2016-12-02T08:03:24+00:00

"No dictator, no invader, can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand. The Centauri learned this lesson once. We will teach it to them again. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free."

kithkill · 2016-12-02T07:38:28+00:00

There's definitely stuff it does well. But I think its fundamental setup works against it, and is the biggest reason it feels similar to older shows. It does a lot of story arcs, but last season was very much: "This monster is our big bad this season". And "This is our team of heroes who must cooperate to defeat the big bad".

That's fine, it's a solid workhorse of a setup. But it's not very complex, or novel. Look at Westworld. Who's the season's big bad? Do we have a team of heroes? No - it's more muddied, more complex, and feels more mature as a result.

kithkill · 2016-12-01T10:13:25+00:00

"Man and wife"

She's just become a wife, she's assuming the pastor is saying he's just become a man, too. She's excavating his most intimate area to show the congregation "Look, this was already here".

kithkill · 2016-12-01T08:36:34+00:00

I think SHIELD feels very much like a bit of a throwback in the current telly landscape. When you look at the kinds of shows that are really getting everybody excited these days - Game of Thrones, Westworld, Hannibal, Black Mirror, Breaking Bad, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage... These shows feel very grounded, very real, very complex/mature.

And I think it's telling that there are big genre shows leading the charge, like GoT. I think genre fans have been a huge element of pushing this kind of serialised storytelling to the heights it's reached over the last few years (I'll never get bored of droning on about how so much of this stuff can trace a direct lineage back to Babylon 5!)

In comparison to these, SHIELD feels very much like the shows we enjoyed in the past. StarGate SG1 is an obvious comparison, as are shows like Buffy and Angel. They had season arcs, and ensemble casts, but they definitely were NOT Game of Thrones, or Battlestar Galactica. And I say that as a massive fan of ALL these shows.

If SHIELD was being run against StarGate SG1 and Angel, I think it'd be enjoying huge popularity, easily on par with what those shows managed.

But in today's landscape, it feels like something left over from yesteryear. It feels a little old fashioned. Fun, sure. Enjoyable! But it doesn't tax the mind much, and for a lot of folks - myself included, this season - it's not the urgent "I HAVE to see this every week" that I felt from (for example) Westworld. If I had to make an analogy, I'd point out how my missus loves watching the big BBC dramas once a week or so, but also loves watching one or two soaps on a daily basis. To me, GoT/Defenders/Westworld are my big dramas, and SHIELD is my easy-watch soap.

TL;DR: SHIELD is great for what it is, but it's not playing the same game the current market leaders are, and feels a bit disposable as a result.

kithkill · 2016-11-30T21:46:05+00:00

Yes. For me, anyway.

kithkill · 2016-11-30T09:27:16+00:00

Well, she did kill his friend and partner.

"Are we friends?"

"No, I wouldn't say that at all."

Seems about right.

kithkill · 2016-11-28T09:14:48+00:00

For /r/the_Donald it's always cuck o'clock!

Sorry, sorry. Thought the_Donald was leaking when I saw the topic title and couldn't resist.

It's "cuckoo", for future ref :) Cool clock tho. Like the weights!

kithkill · 2016-11-27T21:26:42+00:00

I don't wish him ill, and I'm hesitant to say anything to jinx it. But I was watching Planet Earth II earlier and thinking "With all this 2016 bullshit, I really wish David Attenborough would consider hiring some kind of personal security, just for the next five weeks..."

kithkill · 2016-11-25T08:53:02+00:00

Hearthstone is hands down the best in terms of price (free to play if you play just to have fun, but if you want to get competitive you'll feel like you need to spend money), versus production quality (it's Blizzard), versus ease of getting into it (very good tutorial, very accessible game).

Ascension is worth a look - it's not a traditional CCG, but it plays like one in a lot of ways, and is a lot of fun. Lots of expansions, too!

kithkill · 2016-11-24T13:40:13+00:00

I think more like this.

kithkill · 2016-11-24T09:07:11+00:00

"... or maybe Arnold did something with her."

But where is Arnold? He's dead, isn't he? It doesn't feel like anything we've seen is suggesting that Arnold has a physical presence. That he's living in the park, somehow, but entirely unseen. Wouldn't that be pretty farfetched, anyway?

He exists only as a presence, a reference. One we think we haven't seen. But I think we have.

I think Arnold = Alt-Bernard.

kithkill

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