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Unity Seaside Mystery [v0.33] [KsT]

3.80 star(s) 91 Votes
Discussion Reviews (91)
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sskcod

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Aug 6, 2017
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-CookieMonster666- said:
$7796 per month amounts to $93,552 per year. IDK where KST lives, but I know that in the United States $93K per year in some locations isn't even enough to sustain a single person. In most of the U.S., it's fine, but it's not enough to hire anyone to do anything. My point is that what they earn may or may not be enough to hire anyone to do anything.
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I don't think KST is in the US.
But you can live decently with 93k per year. Even in a closet apartment in New York. A bit like a rat, but you decided to live in the big city. It's on you.
And in other areas of the US? You can live like a king with that.
But regardless.Software development is a business. A booming business. If you are good at it? Your aim is to grow. Hiring people can help you grow.
Look at Seaside Mystery? Don't you see that the aim is to sell it on Steam in the future? It's obvious.
The Twist was targeted for a niche market. Now, KST is aiming for the big leagues.

Hiring someone also doesn't mean your business earns more, even if the person you hire is great at their job. What's more, developing a game is enough work that they couldn't just hire one employee and then sit back and manage. In your restaurant example, if you're cooking, hosting, doing paperwork, opening and prepping the store, cleaning and closing the store, advertising for the store, ordering the product, etc., you'd probably feel overworked. Your sole motivation might be to have your business thrive.
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Are we really going to have this discussion? Hiring someone doesn't necessarily mean your business earns more. So? What did we learn?
But in our specific example here, we suspect that KST is a single person project. I think that hiring a maid to cook and clean can save some time and allow KST to focus on their work.
Now, imagine if a decent coder was hired? Or a graphics expert? Or a good writer? Even part time. For 1000$ a month or 3000$ a month.
It's an investment.

Now, if you think that a better product, more content, is going to cost you and not necessarily bring you new revenue? Well... You better find another job quickly. Or save your money to buy a hot dog stand, because you are a dying business.
Is video game development a dying business? I see tons of absolutely incompetent fools making money... HOW?

And having a good coder to give you the tools to develop, it can be such a doorway to introduce content quickly. Once you have a good engine exploitation skill-set, you can start parallel projects. You can expand all over.

Imagine that you now hire the 1 person you can afford. Firstly, it's debatable whether you can actually "afford" them. Technically you have the money to pay, but you're probably not earning enough for both you and your employee to get a living wage; either you yourself are underpaid by a lot, the employee is underpaid by a lot, or you both are underpaid but just not by as much. (Again, this depends on where in the world KST lives, but $46776 is considerably below the average salary and standard of living in the vast majority of the United States.)
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Listen man, I will end this debate right now.
Hire someone in China for 600$ a month.
In Poland for the same. in Russia. In Spain. In India. Why do you bother investing in saturated markets? It's like me starting a factory in Switzerland. I won't. I can't afford a coffee machine there.

Secondly, just because you hire someone else to do a lot of the jobs you yourself would otherwise do doesn't mean suddenly all you're doing is focusing on management. At the restaurant, you would never hire someone to work 12 hours a day, and yet the typical hours of any restaurant would cover at least that time frame. Would you be planning on running a slave shop and doing nothing yourself? If not, you'd still be doing a ton of the work yourself. It's not really all that different with development: you'd still need someone to do QA, to proofread, to handle animations and still renders, to write the story, to assign sound effects, to code, etc. Even among 2 people that is still an awful lot of work.
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And do you think that a restaurant with a master chef is cleaning the toilets is a better business idea?
And do you think that the chef can do all these jobs properly? He is a master chef? Excellent at buying the ingredients at the best price? Elite accountant? Excellent driver to do the deliveries himself? etc?

KST is an average coder at best.
KST is lacking language skills to make the game in English. We saw some mistakes that indicate that English isn't the first language.
KST is an average planner. The vision of the game is always evolving, new features are added and not planed for from the beginning. Take a look at the "gallery" system in The Twist. Added in a weird manner in the game.
And I can go on.
Now, don't let me be all negative here. I focus on the negative to advance the project. Not to be negative over nothing. It's amazing if it's really a single person behind this.
But I, myself, can't make a game by my lonesome. Graphics would suck as I can't draw worth a s***. To start with. But I know how to hire people to get the job done for me.
I do that for a living actually. I'm in management and business. Not in coding or drawing.

Thirdly, your employee is generally not nearly as motivated for your business's success as you are. So while you yourself might be more willing to slave away ridiculous hours and handle huge amounts of work, you cannot expect the same of your employee, at least not in general. You might get fortunate and hire a "rabid fan", someone who's "passionate about art", etc., but there's a fairly low chance it works out that way. So now you're exhausted, doing all of the work you yourself still have to handle, while also needing to keep an eye on someone else who may or may not stay on task like you need them to.
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Motivating your employees is a tricky topic. If you exploit them harshly... Yeah... They will slack off.
But if you give them fair shares in the income? That's another story. Skin in the game swings both ways.
And you seem focused on quantity over quality. You should check that. In creative fields, asking for quantity is often counter productive. You have to nurture an environment and mindset focused on creation. Not ask for quantity and results directly.


Your example of writing 2 sentences every two months in a story you're telling is just silly. If that were all KST were doing, that would be completely understandable. Obviously, there's no work on asset creation (like trees, rocks, signs, clothing, etc.). Clearly there's no need for any coding. There are absolutely no bugs that need to be fixed. Nobody needs to put in sound anywhere in the game. There's no way anyone has to do anything other than just writing a couple of sentences. :LOL: Those aren't even remotely comparable in terms of work. Maybe you were being hyperbolic, but it still is a pretty bad comparison. I get the idea of being the one receiving the story, but that completely ignores the amount of work that is required to put the story out as this game. Game development sits somewhere between writing a book and producing a Hollywood film. It's almost certainly much more in the vein of writing than a film, but there are still a lot of tasks beyond just writing that are required.
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Honestly? I read the changelog or whatever, and I'm like "nothing new. SKIP."
And it's been so for quite a while. While I'm curious in the project. I'm amazed to see someone make so much money this way... It's impressive.

While you may say, "failing less than the others isn't praise worthy", I would point out that judging others without knowing their full situation is also not praiseworthy. Are you some oracle who understands KST's situation completely? Are you a close personal friend in whom KST confides every single thing in their life? There's no way any of us are qualified to know whether any given developer is doing all they can or not. The only method of determination we have is by comparison. You're free to consider it a failure still, ofc. I just don't share your assessment, since I have no idea what's going on IRL for them.
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I don't know their full situation. But I know enough.
And I've managed businesses where I lost money for the first 3years. Did you eat rice for 3years to start something? I did.
93k$ per year? Oh, poor thing...

With all of the above said, I do agree with one of your points: if KST is focusing on many different projects, they should change that and focus on a single one. I have no idea that they've done anything else other than The Twist, but I'm not all that familiar with them or their situation. I definitely think a single focus is far better than several, though.
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I'm not aware of another side project from KST's. I think The Twist is over. Done.
And their full resources are on this single project.

But I still think that it is a single person operation. With limited exterior help. And it's a poor management choice.
Managing = taking risks
 
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3.80 star(s) 91 Votes