So we probably won’t do this, but I thought we’d get some more outside opinions, out of curiousity and to help us make a decision – should we license out the Breath of Death VII code for other developers to make their own RPGs?
Pros:
Helps developers who want to make RPGs but aren’t the best programmers.
We could see some cool games from other developers out of this.
Alternate source of income for us to help pay the bills between game releases.
XBLIG might become THE place for RPGs on home consoles.
Cons:
We could have an RPGMaker effect where lots of crummy RPGs get released.
RPGs on XBLIG might all start to feel the same if they’re based on the same engine.
Extra work – I’d have to go through and add documentation to explain how the engine works.
Some people might waste their money, not realizing how hard an RPG is to make, even with an engine in-place (there are no user friendly editors with our system- it’s all code editing).
If we did decide to do this, the code license would probably cost a few hundred dollars ($300 sounds about right to me), but again, nothing is set in stone and there’s a very good chance we won’t do this at all.
I think that would be a great idea, but not until after we see any improvements or advancements in the next Zeboyd title or two. It would even be more convenient if it was programmable and editable as in the RPG Maker series. However, I must say the engine and battle system and overall visuals from Penny Arcade: Rain-Slick 3 & 4 is by far the best from you guys!
Keep up the quality work, I only wish others such as I could make classic RPGs as impressive as Zeboyd has.
I know I’m late into this topic, sorry for the Topic Necromancy by the way, But i just had to put my two cents into this one.
I am a Heavy Hardcore Gamer and a Aspiring Designer, I love 3D modeling, Level Design, 2D Texturing and the like. my favorite past time is starting up UDK’s Editor, Photoshop and Maya and just letting my mood take flights of fancy and seeing what it comes up with. But I really would not want to see the Breath of Dead/Cthulhu Save the World Game Engine tainted with becoming just another RPG Maker. It far too good of a game to leave in the hand of rank amateurs.
While I would love to get my hand on the game engine my self and seeing how it ticks. I want it to remain original as it is. So yeah i would just keep the engine under lock and key for as long as you can.
Then again, I am a 3D artist with some programming skill. IE I tend to lean towards the 3D game engines. and being inspired by Cthulhu Saves the World, I am looking into creating a jRPG using UDK as my base engine. with a style like that of FF7 only with real-time rendered locations instead of pre-rendered and a totally original, out of my head story.
This is something i just can’t see my self doing with the BoD7 Engine.
Keep up the awesome work Gentlemen and Make the games you wanna make. I’m looking forward to the Penny Arcade Game you two are working on.
As a gamer and semi developers (Level designer, animator, sounds, etc.), I’d love to see you do it. But as a buisness move, I’d advise against it. Unless you work out a royality fee, it will hurt you in the long run as your products won’t be as unique.
If you can work out a good legal contract with a good royality, then I would think it would be worth the efforts.
i’m of mixed opinions. i image there’s lots of folks out there who aren’t great programmers, but who could make a great rpg with some basic tools. it’s almost the indie thing to do. but all points above are valid as well. i guess i’d lean towards doing it, but reserve yourself the right to review/allow the game before release. you’d become the justin timberlake / puff daddy of xbig indies…sort of
Licensing the engine as is would probably be a bad idea. I do agree that it would probably result in a lot of craptacular RPG clones all hitting using your basic sprites.
If you could do just a few things, you might be able to license it in the future though. I for one would be interested in doing so under conditions like:
1) It is more powerful like we see out of CStW. Backgrounds on battles an higher res sprites
2) You created some kind of certification plan for games using the engine. Basically, set the expectation that the game must meet some well defined quality bars (length of game, not reusing your dungeons, fitting music, etc..)
3) A few tools built around the engine are provided. Some basic tools that enable the user load in new textures and layout maps in a simple GUI. Hopefully the same tools would also provide details warning the user if they are approaching any memory or other restrictions.
Overall, I would love to see more games like this on XBLIG, but I agree that I don’t want this to become something like the massage sims. I want some quality, not just quantity.
I would say it is in Zeboyd’s best interests to not license it at this time. Perhaps once you’ve moved on to a new engine in the future it could be lucrative to licence it out but right now, I think you’d just be asking for someone to take your lunch.
Of course as a consumer, I would love to see more RPG’s on the XBLIG, and perhaps when you’re ready, you can structure the licence in such a way that you can avoid the aforementioned RPGMaker effect.
Well, it looks like everyone’s against it and to be honest, that’s the way we were leaning as well. We only considered it because I’ve gotten several emails from various individuals requesting it, but yeah, it’s probably best to pass on this for the reasons everyone has mentioned.
I have been considering creating a RPG of the same style on XBLIG but to be honest, I would rather code it from scratch. I also don’t think there is any way I could ever make back the cost if I licensed the BOD7 code ($300 + music + sound effects + XBLIG membership fees). If you really wanted to sell people an easier means of making games, I would hope you would make it more of a platform/engine/API that was designed around making it easy to develop a game as opposed to just handing people source code and telling them to do what they want with it. Either is viable but the first option is way more valuable and conducive to actually helping people develop something quickly.
In addition to all that, I’d much rather quality > quantity. You guys should keep doing what you do and focus on releasing quality games to XBLIG. There is already so much stuff on the Indie games channel that we don’t need cloned generic RPG’s cluttering up the spam of avatar games and zombie games that already hurts the viability of XBLIG.
I have to agree with Gibborson. Hold off for now than in the future think about it again.
How I see it, even if XBLIG doesn’t get flooded with crappy RPGs, it could create a fair bit more competition than Zeboyd Games could handle. Indie games doesn’t seem to have a lot of room for too much of the same. (Except dual-stick shooters, of course.)
I would probably wait until after you’ve theoretically improved on the engine for yourselves more. I have no idea what you plan for the future, but I’m trying to say something like once you’ve moved on to SNES level games start licensing your NES engine.