It's been about 5 month since the release of firefly. I was wondering if there's anything that can be said about the likelyhood of the extension being ported? I can only assume it's been moderately successful nsinfe three was a sale recently.
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Any idea as to what would be ported first if t makes it to that threshold?
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I would think that porting over to F3 would be more important, no?
I don't wanna be mean, but the limited success of Firefly might just be caused, not by the product itself, but by the way you marketed it.
I mean, look, there are already plenty of 3d engines. Independent video games studios are not going to choose your product over Unity or Unreal Engine just because they would like to avoid a 5 to 10% commission --> They need performance, reliability, plugins and a large community. Firefly has none of it. Period.
So your core market can only be the casual developers, who just want to have fun making their own games, but most of them are not going to commercialize it. And this customer segment, don't care at all of royalties, because 5% of zero is $0. So you can't compete with the pricing of Unity. However, you could compete with something else. The casual developers are not specially looking for performance, or royalties, they want easiness. A quick and funny tool to make cools games. And they are willing to pay for that tool.
Now, look at firefly, honestly, it's neither easy nor intuitive to use. That's a very bad start.
Then, you don't even have a trial version. Honestly, it's 2017. We have freewares, opensource solutions everywhere, and you don't even provide a trial version? You're assuming your customers are thugs who are just going to hack your trial version to get your useless software for free... Common'! This is not serious. Nobody is willing to pay 80 bucks for a brand new/unknown software (probably full of bugs) with no trial version when dozens of free alternatives exist.
Finally, you've made another mistake. DOCUMENTATIONS! For God's sake! When I decide to use a library over an other, to use a tool over an other, I look at the community and the docs. We need clear docs with a lots of tutorials, and specially the casual developers (your goddamn core market!). You have 90's ish creepy video game examples (you could have made a mario like example), only one fake 3d game tutorial, and when your customers are asking you questions, you tell them to read the docs...
To recap, I think firefly could still be a success if you just fix the lack of docs/examples/tutorials, create a trial version, a maybe, make the interface of your plugin more intuitive.
ADS_3000 allow me to respond on some of your feedback...
DOCUMENTATION: There is PLENTY of documentation available. You have a entire section of Library.clickteam.com dedicated to Firefly. You have over 10 tutorials packed with it. And two complete walk-through files. Windybeard never having used it, was able to build the 3d version of Chocobreak in one sitting will live streaming.
COST: We put five years in to mapping 3d to something anyone can use that is familiar with Fusion. This is real 3d game development via the event editor. Its not a scripted language or a shell for some other method of programming. Its the Same system of Actions, Conditions and Expression we are used too. IF someone is ready and able to work more efficiently, faster and better in Unreal or Unity. Go for it! I would like to note that when Unreal and Unity launched they didn't start huge, they worked up to it. Maybe you can give us that same opportunity. We have never been a "Free" tool. Most people appreciate the profit mongering regulation we do, Our model has allowed our successful users keep the 5% to 15% they would have otherwise had to give up should they have used one of those other tools. Unity btw starts at 3,000 usd in gross receipts before expecting their share. Overall the cost of Fusion Standard and firefly is less then 200 bucks. That's three AAA console game titles. Everything in the world can't be free. If your not trying to pay your own way yet, you will understand when you are. If you are already paying your way. Then why should our work be worth zero dollars and not yours.
CUSTOMERS: Our initial customer base for Firefly is folks like you, Our user base. People familiar with the Event Editor. And guess what, most of us been working 2d this whole time. Including me, access to the world of 3d game development is new to us all. If you look at the examples on Clickstore you can see they are rapidly getting better, more detailed with high poly counts, etc. The last one Disaster at Firefly Station looks pretty good if you ask me, Certainly not something the N64 could have kept up with. Our next demo will be a FPS with zombies and a survival aspect. The best examples of what Fusion can do never come from Clickteam anyways they come from our awesome community. Triadian's next update should include shader support, normal maps and shadows. Again maybe you can give us some time after release to catch up.
In summary as I read your post for the fourth time, It kinda seems like you want a whole lot, but not have to pay anything for it. Clickteam doesn't ask for a lot. But what we do ask for our products is what keeps us making new stuff. If you like what we do we ask for your support in the form of purchasing said stuff. If you don't like it then hey that is how you roll and we wish you luck with how ever you move forward in your development career.
Documentation: Yes, there's documentation, but, as an example for the many ways the documentation is rather lacking, name one good 3D platformer example in Firefly. That terrible 2.5D one included with Firefly doesn't count, especially since it uses the built-in platform movement, and especially since, well, as I've already implied, it wasn't very good. Compare to P3D, where I beta-tested it, and yet I was able to start work on Quadratic Attack 3D while there still was minimal documentation. And Quadratic Attack 3D was a platformer. In an engine that initially primarily supported a first-person perspective. (Fun fact: Quadratic Attack 3D was originally going to be a first-person run-and-gun platformer instead of a third-person one.) Also, the examples that were added later covered a decently large variety of 3D games (platformers, flight simulators, first-person shooters, and one example even had the option to switch to an isometric perspective), whereas Firefly doesn't really have any examples that show a practical use of 3D for anything other than graphics.
Oh, and creating a 2.5D game ain't the same thing as making a 3D game, which is more likely than not what most people bought Firefly to do. So far, the only truly 3D game that appears to have been made with it is Disaster at Firefly Station.
Cost: *shrugs*
I honestly don't think a free trial is the way to go. Better tech demos and such would help, though... I'd gladly make something myself if I could only figure out how to make a 3D platformer and/or I felt like it'd be worth my time to make whatever tech demo it is I'd make. Then again, I'm pretty close to finishing War for Robovania, so maybe I could see about doing something once that's done...
Now, all that being said, I do like the potential that Firefly has, and I'm certainly looking forwards to where it's going. However, there are also a few gripes of my own that are unrelated to those other ones...
1. No "overlaps another object" mode of collision. This may sound like a trivial thing, but trust me, it's not. Making any half-decent custom 3D movement pretty much relies on having that, and yet it's something Firefly simply does not have. The big problem is that, due to the kind of event that a normal collision is, it always runs before other events, which is not desirable behavior 9 times out of 10. As it stands, we basically may as well rip out the collision detection and 3D movement code from P3D and use that instead, since the way Firefly works right now basically requires that we not use any of the built-in movement and collision features anyways, and P3D's already done all the hard work. Uppernate's complained about this one quite a bit on the Clickteam Discord server admittedly, but honestly, this particular thing is definitely holding me back from wanting to work on a Firefly game of my own.
2. There's a move camera with gravity option, but no such option for non-camera objects. I mean, wut? Wouldn't more third-person games need that feature than first-person games? I'm... honestly confused about this one, it just doesn't make much sense to me that cameras would have gravity and non-camera objects wouldn't, I'm surprised it isn't the other way around, especially since a camera could just be rigged to perfectly follow a non-camera object. Again, this holds me back from wanting to make a game in Firefly at the moment.
Again, I like the potential Firefly has, and it sounds like there's already some progress being made in regards to making it better, but that being said, at the moment, I'm not really sure it's quite there yet.
P.S. Disaster at Firefly Station looks well beyond an N64 game. It does look like One Must Fall Battlegrounds, though, which was released more than a decade ago. Now, I'm not sure a PS2 could run it, but a PC of that era might be able to run something like that. Not that I'm complaining, I actually think One Must Fall Battlegrounds looks pretty good for the time it was released.
I would like to point out that Scott Cawthon had created 6 games using this software. His estimated revenue is well into the millions. He has spent at most 700 dollars for the engine he used. Assuming he made 30 million (which is a low estimate) that would be 125 a month from unity over a 3 year period totaling 4,500 dollars. For unreal, 130000 a quarter in royalties. That estimate doesn't include any non that games and I'm sure is extremely low estimate. Click team doesn't pride itself as a AAA game tool creator. So comparing it to AAA software is like comparing someone in high school programming to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. By all means, use unity or unreal but why attack a software with a crew and customer base multiple times smaller than those two? Unreal has mortal Kombat grossing well over 100 mil, using there 5 percent for CI. Clickteam has casual developers finding their CI, that's a huge difference. It's aggravating to see three people get so much hate for something they spent 5 years trying to perfect. kisguri, keep up the good work. I bought firefly day one and really enjoy it as well as helping with video tutorials. It's scary at first as a visual learner but it comes around and pays for itself.
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