The $350,000 minimum budget
During the campaign we have seen a lot of comments which were critical in terms of our minimum budget. Many people thought it might take more than 350.000$ to produce a game worthy of the name Jagged Alliance. That somehow is true, but we want to show you why we are asking for that amount as our minimum.
Why only $350k?
We are not asking for $350k - we are asking for minimum 350k. The more the better. For the $350k we can actually make a good, although smaller, core game using the JA2 mechanics and some modding support to extend the game. We will also be able to make the project larger by adding our own funds as well as engaging with the modding community even further.
So how is this possible?
We can do this because:
- We will see money from Space Hulk sale later in the year and can top off the budget with our own money. We just don’t know how much yet and exactly when money comes in.
- We are using an existing game engine as basis - Unity
- We have an existing framework TBS from previous games that can be expanded upon. We already sunk hundreds of thousands of $ into it, and those are given “free” to JA:F
- We have different technology pieces that we can reuse saving us a huge amount of time coding. From conversation editors over unit customizers to skill and experience systems
- We have access to the entire back catalogue of the series except Wildfire in source form - art, code, design documents - as part of the licensing deal.
- We will be engaging with the modding community to help us on content creation
Overall this means that we do not have to start from scratch on neither code or art. We can re-use and expand on a lot of pieces (although a lot has to be reworked of course), so the job is much more similar to assembling building blocks than starting from a blank piece of paper.
Not only does this all lead to less risk for us in production, it also has the positive effect of less minimum funds required.
There is still a huge amount of work needed! Making games is hard, its expensive and time consuming.
Manpower wise, $350k enables us to establish a 5-7 person team for approx a year. And with additional funds of our own we can possibly double that - making us as large as the JA2 team who had to code their own engine on top of making the game.
We specifically need to work on the following areas:
- Writing story and dialog. We need to write a lot of text, map it onto the sectors, create an interesting island '
- Lots of art and sectors to be built
- NPC conversation systems to be coded. Our previous games have only limited support for story telling, so we need to expand here
- Add modding support
