Touhou Smash crowdfunding and ZUN's fancreation rules (discussion thread)

[Alcoraiden]

Granted, there *will* be naysayers everywhere. It might be that we can come to reasonable terms with some people, but not others, over there. After all, opinions vary everywhere

[zferolie]

I do want to clarify one thing I said after looking around these boards. Making touhou fan games doujin style here is not impossible Like your game for example Porygon. I just think that do make a full fledged fighting game with smash style gameplay is not something easily done. doujin fighters take a lot of time and money to do, and I think crowdfunding is the only way to get it down in any reasonable amount of time

[Ozzy]

I do want to clarify one thing I said after looking around these boards. Making touhou fan games doujin style here is not impossible Like your game for example Porygon. I just think that do make a full fledged fighting game with smash style gameplay is not something easily done. doujin fighters take a lot of time and money to do, and I think crowdfunding is the only way to get it down in any reasonable amount of time

Ah yes, I agree completely with you there. My game doesn't use all original or free-to-use assets at the moment though so it's not completely what a true doujin game should be like, but I hope to change that in the future.

Thanks for noticing my WIP game btw. I do such a bad job promoting it and working on it that I wasn't sure many people here were aware that it exists.

[Alcoraiden]

Yeah, it's way easier to make danmakufu games without lots of outside resources. Not that they can't be downright amazing, and I'm not trying to downplay them, of course, but it depends on the genre and how "from the ground up" you're doing it as to how much you need.

[Sparen]

Yeah, it's way easier to make danmakufu games without lots of outside resources. Not that they can't be downright amazing, and I'm not trying to downplay them, of course, but it depends on the genre and how "from the ground up" you're doing it as to how much you need.

Almost everything we use is an outside resource though. Although many of us learn to compose or create our own graphics, we can't do everything, especially without spilling money from our own pockets. Almost every danmakufu scripter uses outside resources in the form of sprites, shot sheets, music, sound effects, etc.

[Ozzy]

Almost everything we use is an outside resource though. Although many of us learn to compose or create our own graphics, we can't do everything, especially without spilling money from our own pockets. Almost every danmakufu scripter uses outside resources in the form of sprites, shot sheets, music, sound effects, etc.

Yes, but those are much easier (and cheaper) to make yourself than say 3D models and animation. Music and SFX might be more of an issue though. I'm actually curious what Touhou Smash does for its SFX now.

[Saijee]

Sorry everybody, I took Helepolis's suggestion and have just woken up (and read all the comments) ALL GOOD POINTS.

I'm taking this plan into action as fast as I can (ON A SIDE NOTE, THIS PROBABLY MEANS THAT THE DEMO WILL BE DELAYED BUT FOR A GOOD REASON).

There is a lot of things which I can present as green flags to help prove that we do not care about "gold."


1: Up to this point we have a history of creating games for the sake of having people have fun with them: Bullet life, Remnants of a Beautiful Day, Spheroid, Glass Wing.
2: One mentioned, Spheroid, is an example of a game I created even though it did not get properly funded. We are willing to go that far for our games.
3: We have always been presenting Touhou Smash on my youtube as a dev logs to engage fans with the project multiple times every week. We have been doing this for 5 months, there are 85 episodes today.
4: To further excite the fans we even went out of my way to buy airplane tickets to attend Touhoucon and share the game with everyone who was there.
5: Within the campaign, many of the perks allow the fans to be a designer for the game themselves to an effect.
6: A Touhou Smash character consists of at least 135 animations, which is A LOT OF WORK, AND A LOT OF TIME! If we have the ability to put that work load on another passionate animator instead of ourselves, we can save a lot of time so that we can concentrate on the gameplay. (paying someong to animate a Smash character is expensive, I took my calculations from directly talking to some potential animators myself.)
7: Being from America, we do not have the oppurtunity distribute  our previous games through traditional Doujin methods as we cannot reach events like Comiket and.
8: It is just a stupid idea to make a crowd funding campaign for the sake of making money because that would only result in short lived success, when what FSS is after is the feeling that people are having fun playing our games.

[zferolie]

All good points to bring up. Just also remember the cultural difference, and possibly explain why you are doing it this way compared to the normal doujin way, go over the pros over it, and above all make sure to be clear an not too aggressive. I don't think they would respond well to any form of agressive. The Japanese are very proud and protective of touhou.

[Saijee]

You are right, I just wish I didn't need to do this over twitter. Maybe I can get Game Saved to make an article about this....

[Alcoraiden]

We're behind you, Saijee. Best of luck.

[Disgaeafan1]

Yeah, it's super important here to get a translator or somebody with impeccable Japanese. Language faux-pas are soooo easy to make just in normal conversation, and it's even more important when it comes to something like this.

And dont be afraid to run drafts by some of the members here (in PM of course). We want this to be quality stuff. We're 1000000% behind ya Saijee.

[Colticide]

Best of luck on getting it resolved! I have no qualms over the demo being delayed if it means the project has a higher chance of getting this issue over with. Do what you can the best that you can.

[linguiwen]

Sorry everybody, I took Helepolis's suggestion and have just woken up (and read all the comments) ALL GOOD POINTS.

I'm taking this plan into action as fast as I can (ON A SIDE NOTE, THIS PROBABLY MEANS THAT THE DEMO WILL BE DELAYED BUT FOR A GOOD REASON).

There is a lot of things which I can present as green flags to help prove that we do not care about "gold."

1: Up to this point I have a history of creating games for the sake of having people have fun with them: Bullet life, Remnants of a Beautiful Day, Spheroid, Glass Wing.
2: One mentioned, Spheroid, is an example of a game I created even though it did not get funded,  which goes to show that I am willing to go that far with my games.
3: I have always been presenting Touhou Smash on my youtube as a dev logs to engage fans with the project multiple times every week.
4: To further excite the fans, I even went out of my way to buy airplane tickets to attend Touhoucon and share the game with everyone who was there.
5: Within the campaign itself, many of the perks themselves allow the fans to be a designer for the game themselves to an effect.
6: It is just a stupid idea to make a crowd funding campaign for the sake of making money because that would only result in short lived success, when what FSS is after is the feeling that people are having fun playing our games.
7: A Touhou Smash character consists of at least 135 animations, which is A LOT OF WORK, AND A LOT OF TIME! If we have the ability to put that work load on another passionate animator instead of ourselves, we can save a lot of time so that we can concentrate on the gameplay. (paying someong to animate a Smash character is expensive, I took my calculations from directly talking to some potential animators myself.)

i would actually suggest putting the demo out with just 2 playable characters and get it out ASAP (obviously AFTER getting contact with ZUN, but I think it is wiser to scrap the idea of putting Tenshi in the first demo, she can be added later in an update)
that way those against you using crowdfunding for fear of moneygrab will see that you are actually passionate about the project out of love for Touhou instead of for the money, and that you have something feasible to show everyone
the demo probably won't be as good as planned with only 2 playables, however it will at least get the point across that you have put a lot of work into TSSB, and you are looking for funds to speed things up as you are more than capable enough to create the game yourself given more time

[Helepolis]

Well for some positive news it seems the blog at Tohomemory has been removed. Apparently they discovered or heard from Saijee or someone that the information is misunderstood.

Edit: Even more positive news:

You are right, I just wish I didn't need to do this over twitter. Maybe I can get Game Saved to make an article about this....

Seems that have worked out if you did so. The blog writer actually apologised in red here for the misunderstanding: http://gamesaved.hateblo.jp/entry/touhou-smashbros-wiiu after the explanation from Saijee.

As mentioned above. Language barriers are indeed troublesome when you're getting down to serious doujin business, you need to contact a friend/known person to relay a well composed msg/twitter/e-mail to avoid any misunderstandings.

Edit 2: http://blog.livedoor.jp/tohomemory/archives/42316928.html  Tohomemory has indeed removed their blog entry after reading the news at Game Saved.

Now Saijee, all that there is left is a blessing (approval) from ZUN. With or without crowdfunding, you should respect his answer/judgement if he denies the crowdfunding and allows the work itself. Peace of mind can also lead to faster development and maybe some people will contact you after this incident and offer help for free? Life is full of surprises you know.

[Sparen]

With or without crowdfunding, you should respect his answer/judgement if he denies the crowdfunding and allows the work itself. Peace of mind can also lead to faster development and maybe some people will contact you after this incident and offer help for free? Life is full of surprises you know.

This would be an excellent and favorable scenario. With some luck and some hope, maybe this scenario will happen.

[Saijee]

Ok guys, I know that I'm several hours behind, but no Japanese bilingual was available all this time. But I did finally respond to Ruw's tweet. Still not very happy with not being able to explain anything within that twitter character limit.

[Ozzy]

What was said?

[zferolie]

Great to hear that news articles are correcting themselves. Now like Hele said we just need to here from the man himself.

As for Ruw, is twitter the only way to get in touch with them? They have to have an e-mail or something. Twitters character limit is gonna be a huge pain in the butt

EDIT: I am forgetting, what did the original touhou memory blog say exactly? was it bashing the game for wii u and crowdfunding?

[tohosubs]

Ok guys, I know that I'm several hours behind, but no Japanese bilingual was available all this time. But I did finally respond to Ruw's tweet. Still not very happy with not being able to explain anything within that twitter character limit.

I'll just talk to you in this thread from now on.

Your bilingual speaker doesn't seem to be that good at writing Japanese and also doesn't seem to understand Japanese PR (or any sort of PR, really). I suggest you find someone else and start over.

The first step should have been to apologize for the misinformation, since it really is in large part due to your lack of outreach to the Japanese community. I think it's reasonable to claim that going ahead with the crowd-funding was the only way to get ZUN's attention, but I doubt Japanese fans are going to find that convincing when you didn't even make the effort to address the points of concern, all quite obvious to them, in clear Japanese from the very beginning. That's part of the reason why they think you have an attitude problem.

So let's say you apologize, and they, being very forgiving, see that you just didn't understand how things are done in the world of Touhou doujin. You'll then have to explain why crowd-funding is crucial, taking care to explain that you're college students and need the money to buy really essential things like full versions of 3DCG software. But you may have destroyed any credibility there by offering those increasingly ridiculous Favorite Maiden tiers, and I'm really not even convinced that crowd-funding is actually crucial. The proper doujin way would be to release a small demo (say 2 players) for very cheap, use that earning to finance an expansion, and so on until you have the final product.

I would really like to see this project succeed. I hope this will help convince you to take the right actions.

[zferolie]

Well hello there. Nice to meet you.

I can see how the lack of proper PR could hurt. Is there anything different between american and Japanese?

So the japanese community is not very happy huh? Thats a shame. The creators could have done things differently but its sad to hear they lost all credibility due to this.

He did explain the maiden teir thing to us when we asked, saying it started low to reward fast people, even though it normally costs 2.5k to make a full character with voices and animation and such. He probably should explain it though again for the japanese community.

Still, interested to see where this goes, and if they can win the japanese crowd. You seem to like the idea, and I am sure the idea of this game is popular. It's just how its going about that is not, correct?

[tohosubs]

Well hello there. Nice to meet you.

Hi. Nice to meet you. I go by persceaux.

I can see how the lack of proper PR could hurt. Is there anything different between american and Japanese?

Not that I know much about either, but there are many more set expressions of politeness in Japanese that anyone doing PR ought to be comfortable with.

So the japanese community is not very happy huh? Thats a shame.

Nope, they're really not. I've been reading every tweet search result for 東方 大乱闘 and 東方 スマブラ for a while and also threads on 東方裏, etc. Of course, almost no one in Japan bothers to read the IndieGoGo campaign, much less the discussion here on MotK. There were a handful of users who noted the misinformation about WiiU early on. A few also correctly blame the Nintendo Nuggets article for it. But even they don't sound very supportive of the project; the one user I found tweeting about the discussion in an English-language thread (presumably this one) said that he was becoming increasing disappointed with the creators' responses.

The creators could have done things differently but its sad to hear they lost all credibility due to this.

I said they may have. They certainly need to tread very carefully from here on if they want this to have any hope of succeeding.

You seem to like the idea, and I am sure the idea of this game is popular. It's just how its going about that is not, correct?

There are a lot of positive comments about the game itself, but I see as many comments that are critical of the graphics and motions, especially the characters' face. Of course it's partly because they have a bad impression of the project now, but I see the same comments about faces on the Nico uploads of the trailers (here and here) from even before the misinformation spread. I also saw multiple tweets hoping that the game will support net-play, but I know Saijee has said that this is unlikely.

__
Edits: missing words and other minor changes.

[Alcoraiden]

If you're going to be a doomsayer with no advice, I suggest not saying anything at all. It's kind of jerkish to shit on someone's project without even trying to offer solutions and/or "what you can do differently" etc.


tohosubs: Yeah, the amount of commenting on the models astounds me. One, the game is in progress, two, it's pretty darn good for a "from the ground up" smasher game. And the reason they're asking for money is so they can get the programs they need to do, among other things, rendering/modeling. Also I've seen some pretty bad touhou fangames in terms of graphics.

I thought Saijee said he had native speakers. I'm surprised the dialogues are going so poorly. o.O

[tohosubs]

tohosubs: Yeah, the amount of commenting on the models astounds me. One, the game is in progress, two, it's pretty darn good for a "from the ground up" smasher game.

Part of the issue is that Japanese fans have no way of knowing that right now. (Even I'm not sure off the top of my head where to find that information.) That's just one of the many things to be made clear.

I thought Saijee said he had native speakers. I'm surprised the dialogues are going so poorly. o.O

These speakers are probably linguistically but not culturally native.

[N-Forza]

I realize that the crowdfunding effort is not to make a profit but to speed up production. That's fine and all, but from the doujin point of view, that's not a very good argument. You have the Super Maiden Wars series, Ankake Spa's games, and Tasogare Frontier's stuff like DynaMarisa. They are all ambitious, high-quality games made from the ground up, all on the circle's efforts.  They might have employed the use of royalty-free materials in some cases, but that's about it.

As ambitious as this game is, if you have to resort to crowdfunding, you're probably biting off more than you can chew.

And I would like to remind everyone that xenophobia or whatever has nothing to do with this. And to be perfectly honestly, I'm not entirely sure that they're going to care too much about "PR" given how they know they're dealing with foreigners. Granted, it would be awesome if we could find someone with flawless Japanese, but I think as long as the proper intent is communicated, progress can be made.

[cuc]

As ambitious as this game is, if you have to resort to crowdfunding, you're probably biting off more than you can chew.

From a game design and development perspective, they are also setting highly unrealistic stretch goals such as Metroidvania-style story modes and too many additional characters. While these stretch goals are unlikely to be reached, their very existence do make From Soy Sauce look like inexperienced developers who promise too much without knowing the limits of what's humanly possible.

[Alcoraiden]

I disagree that crowdfunding is a sign that you really can't make it work and it's too much for you. There have been many successful game projects out of crowdfunding. I think it's not a very good idea to either A) make big assumptions about the skills of these developers, and B) claim that an entire method of game support/funding is bunk. People here seem to be sliding into the cynical "you can't do this/this is doomed" area, which isn't exactly making the devs hopeful, I expect. I'm glad they even tried any of this -- no one, I hope, expected them to do a perfect pristine job of it all.

[Colticide]

I disagree that crowdfunding is a sign that you really can't make it work and it's too much for you. There have been many successful game projects out of crowdfunding.

American games yes, but the only exception to that for Japan are those mentioned before and they already had a international point of view of their games. Plus those games weren't doujin IIRC.

[Ozzy]

You have the Super Maiden Wars series, Ankake Spa's games, and Tasogare Frontier's stuff like DynaMarisa. They are all ambitious, high-quality games made from the ground up, all on the circle's efforts.  They might have employed the use of royalty-free materials in some cases, but that's about it.

How many people are in these circles anyway? FSS only has 3 people (to my knowledge) and I don't know how many of them can animate.

[Jeremie]

This is getting old fast. At first this sounded like a very ambitious project and that was awesome. Now it's unfortunately a mess and it's been brought by an attempt to rush things while trying to justify that with positive words and from what I've seen everywhere about the project, this seems to be a recurrent issue. Let's not kid ourselves either please. ZUN isn't going to worry about the quality of this game when all you need to do is look at the huge list of game made by fans at the expense of their own time and resources. Some of the games that came out are quality stuff and some are with nice 3D and even good voice acting so this project is nothing spectacular although the ambitions are great and interesting. 

Sadly, our interest and eagerness to see this game being a reality is not the deciding factor. If ZUN says no to crowdfunding, then no is no and based on their culture, it's completely justified and nothing wrong if that's the case. Saijee's time and the one of the people who works along is important yes. However, the same is true for the people who made other Touhou fan games who did it on their own whether they were small or big projects. Let's not forget that Touhou is very much the same and ZUN's efforts brought so many people together and it managed to spread among people with the efforts of these fans and that as a result, we're here today.

[N-Forza]

I didn't mean to imply that crowdfunding was a sign that the project was outside of any feasible scope. However, even Broken Age had to get split up into two games due to unforeseen issues, and that was for an experienced game developer. Goals need to be realistic, and you shouldn't promise the moon in an effort to get more backers. I'm not saying FSS is incompetent, but they are lacking in a few areas that should have been addressed beforehand, and addressing them through the campaign, while normally not a bad idea, isn't really in the spirit of doujin works, which is likely ZUN's biggest problem.

How many people are in these circles anyway? FSS only has 3 people (to my knowledge) and I don't know how many of them can animate.

There's probably a fair number of people, but they're still all one circle. I imagine if they needed someone to help with any one task, they found someone willing to help to join their circle, or learned themselves.