I knew coming in that it was overly ambitious (heck, my website stated that from the very first days), but I think that shooting for the stars was a good way to just explore the current limitations of tech and try to do things that no one else was doing - reason be damned.
The best thing that happened was not something entirely tangible. I have witnessed the most beautiful side of humanity in my struggles (however trivial my struggles are in the global scope of the world).
Stop trying to give my money back, I don't want it! VQ has been a fascinating project to watch, and I was always more interested in the tech than in any particular game that gets made with it.
I'm happy to hear it'll be open sourced, and hopefully people will continue to push it forward! I've been meaning to pick up some C++ and graphics programming...
It's not that I hate money, it's that I pledged on Kickstarter so you'd make a cool thing. You made a cool thing, I got to read about its development and watch all the update videos, and now you're releasing it to the community under MIT (or similar) license. As far as I'm concerned we're square.
I know the Kickstarter project was planned as an RPG and maybe you could have throw together a game using the engine as it stood a year ago just to call the project done, but I don't think that would have been a better outcome.
Feel exactly the same. Backed the kickstarter because I was once (a long time ago) also interested in writing a voxel engine but never had the time, and since then - everything voxel related peaked my interest.
The updates were always nice, and I've always thought of it ending up as an SDK/playground for voxel technology, and never as eventually a real game. If it would become opensource, in my view - that would make it a successful kickstarter, and not a failed-one.
I think part of it is that you made the sincere offer of refund, and gave people control over that. Regardless of how reasonable it is for a sincere creator to keep the money on a failed project, people still appreciate being able to have the option to 'pull out' on failure.
Agreed, same here! I was in the Kickstarter, and I don't need my money back. I'd rather Gavan keep it, and not have some debt hanging over him. It's the nature of Kickstarter that not everything makes it. Honestly, I've gotten more out of my $30 just from the updates about the engine (and the fact that you're open sourcing it!) than I've gotten from a lot of the other Kickstarters I've backed.
And that your engine is an outstanding piece of work!
Maybe you've gotten used to it from having worked on this so much, but it's a breath of fresh air to see unusual approaches being pursued in a game engine. So much of the industry is dominated by either 3D triangle meshes or retro pixel art, and VQ has shown that these aren't the only ways forward.
Fully agreed. I'd rather someone innovate, be passionate yet fail than do the same old garbage (not literally, just so much stuff is cookie cutter these days) and "produce"
I was one of the people who pledged $20. It caught my eye because it was a unique approach that I'd thought of myself in much less concise terms and told myself that I'd think more about or try "someday". Pledging was like outsourcing my someday to you!
As I posted before:
I don't want a cent back. I didn't pay for a "product", I paid to watch him try this novel approach to a game engine. Money well spent.
Now "Transformers 3" on the other hand... I paid to watch that too. Michael Bay, you owe me $12 back for that stinker.
I haven't contributed to the Patreon but have been following from the side lines. From my perspective, this isn't a failure at all. You've created high quality updates as you've progressed in your project and you're leaving the project open source for the community. I know that if I were to have given you money, I would feel entirely satisfied since you're giving your work back to the community. I can't wait to poke around the source.
I knew coming in that it was overly ambitious (heck, my website stated that from the very first days), but I think that shooting for the stars was a good way to just explore the current limitations of tech and try to do things that no one else was doing - reason be damned.
The best thing that happened was not something entirely tangible. I have witnessed the most beautiful side of humanity in my struggles (however trivial my struggles are in the global scope of the world).