In defence of Dizzy: why the Oliver twins need £350,000
Mark Seymour November 27, 2012 - 12:25 pmNews: The Oliver twins have defended their decision to request 350,000 big ones to crowdfund a new Dizzy game.
With 24-days left on the clock, the Dizzy Returns Kickstarter campaign has made just shy of £17,000 of the £350,000 the Oliver twins hope to raise. That’s a big number, particularly in terms of Kickstarter. To put it into crowdfunding perspective, were Maia and Sir, You Are Being Hunted to end at the time of writing (and with Strike Suit Zero thrown in for good measure), combined the three games would have made roughly £20,000 less than the total figure the Oliver twins are requesting to fund Dizzy Returns. So what’s the deal? The Oliver twins have explained their decision on the Dizzy Returns Kickstarter page.
“At first glance it sounds like a lot of money to develop a game. Saying that, teams of hundreds of people at large studios create AAA titles for consoles and PC and spend tens of millions of dollars in the process. It’s also true that games can be made on a much smaller budget. There are independent developers creating mobile games for a fraction of that cost, sometimes individually or in small teams of just a handful of people. Our company, Blitz Games Studios, is somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, employing over 200 talented and creative people, with game teams typically made up of anywhere between 10 and 70 people.”
“At its very simplest the cost of making any game is a combination of content, people and time; the more content there is in a game, the more people working on it and the more time spent adding and polishing features will always mean a higher cost. We believe that £350,000 is a realistic amount that reflects the number of people, the amount of time, and the amount of content we want to dedicate to Dizzy Returns.”
The pair are likely using Kickstarter as a means to gauge interest in a new Dizzy game without financial risk, but it reeks of over-ambition. The Olivers claim 12 people will work on Dizzy Returns; that it will be five times larger than the original games with console-quality graphics, professional voice-over work and at least ten self-contained areas stretching out from a central hub world. It sounds big, but does a nostalgia project like this need to be?
The duo also talk about the puzzles they plan to incorporate into Dizzy Returns.
“We also want to include a variety of fantastic new types of puzzles. Physics based (balancing a scale with items of the correct weight in order to open a door), light (using a magnifying glass to start a fire using the sun’s rays) and also time (the ghost will only appear in the Haunted Woods at night). Obviously these are just basic examples of these mechanics – imagine what puzzles containing all three would be like…”
Oh, I don’t know guys, 2002?
Comments (1)
Is Dizzy really that fondly remembered these days? Fantasy World Dizzy was the first game I played when I got my Spectrum +2 (128k and a dedicated tape deck!), otherwise I doubt I’d even remember it.