[Query] Paid vs. Gratis Development/Scripts...

I think that after publishing first wave of VS games (not including Daedalic ones) all the community around Visionaire will be much wiser. I simply believe that games like Stasis will eventually attract a lot of new developers. However I would double the licence prices - like 100 euros for a single indie licence is I think reasonable enough. Also I hope that every user of VS will be generous if he/she will make some money with his or her game:

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Well, as regards me, i had planned to send you money as a thanks, when the game is finished. I really admire your help, and not just yours, i really enjoy this community.

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Hi,
I've just started playing with Visionaire a couple of weeks ago so don't really know anything yet. I've been trying to learn the engine but was amazed to find there is pretty much no documentation from the developers on their own product (which makes it very hard to learn!!!). That only leaves trying to learn by browsing the forum.

I'm amazed with how many questions on the forum get answered by you! It's great as a new member of the community to see someone on here who loves it and keeps it going by giving up their time - it appears from an outsider's perspective though that the fundamental problem is a lack of documentation on the product.
Based on the lack of documentation, if I wasn't seeing so much help on the forums (particularly by you!) then I wouldn't even be persevering with trying to learn the engine.

To answer your question - I'd expect the developers to offer this sort of support on their product. Would I pay for it myself? If I was trying to make a game I could sell and needed answers then yes because I wouldn't have any other choice. I'm not in that position though, so no, I wouldn't be likely to pay someone for help in the foreseeable future. Once I pay money for a product I don't want to shell out more to find out how to use it.

On the flipside though, from what I've seen, when people stop helping on forums, products die a quick death unless the developers pull their finger out and re-energise the community themselves.

For the sake of the community I'd hope you didn't get (understandably) frustrated with helping people, but it appears that if there was better documentation your help wouldn't be needed so much.

Cheers!

haha, you know the amusing thing about what you have just said? No? I am the one who is providing the documentation, albeit, very, very, bloody slowly. I don't get paid to write up the documentation. It's provided in my spare time, as & when I can. Lately not very much as I'm busy with other things.

Also the thing with the documentation is that I will not be providing a step by step guide on how to do this, or that. It will just be an overview of the engine/editor & what each thing (button, action, menu etc) is for, or what it does. It does already contain things like tips, scripts/snippets & a few tutorials though.

Tutorials in my opinion should be created by members of the community, although I don't mind providing one or two, but they are quite time consuming to create, write-up, record & edit.

There's actually quite a few people on this forum who, these days send me direct pm/emails for help instead of posting in the forum first. I believe that there are plenty of capable people on the forum who can provide support besides myself.

P.S: There is loads of documentation on the old 2d wiki, but I can't say how much of it is still valid as most of it is from years ago. Visionaire Studio has change a fair bit since whenever most of the stuff in the old wiki was written. We now have for instance: multi-platform export support, windows/mac versions of the ide (linux on the way at some point), a new sound engine, ttf font support, updated script (text) editor, updated lua handler, openGL shader support, loads of new lua functions & data structure tables, bundle of new action parts, mobile support, 3D character support etc etc. 3.7.1 to 4.0 was quite a big jump & there's more new features on the way in the upcoming build.

P.P.S: There's loads of documentation on the new wiki, unfortunately a lot of it is to do with Lua script as it's the side of developing in VS that interests me the most. I often add new scripts, workflow functions & snippets to the wiki. Writing overviews of the editor is, well bloody boring to tell the truth, thus I tend to focus more on the scripting side of documentation, even though I know I should probably provide some new pages for the editor related stuff.

Hi. Well. It depends, I guess.

First off, you should have an idea of what is worth to get paid for and what not. How much effort you are willing to offer for free?

Assuming I would ask you for a favour and it wouldn't be as easy as thought at first, it would be absolutely ok if you would say: Listen, it took a lot of more time to make this happen and therefor I want to have an equivalent amount of money. I would pay for or donate something. Howsoever.

As a craftsman myself I had a very similliar problem once in the past. It's not easy. The question is: what would you pay for your own work?

I was going to write a philosophical message, but decided against it.

I know rough ballparks of what other people would be charging for various things & I know what I would charge on an hourly basis (development) or word/line/character basis (scripting), but it's unrealistic to expect everyone to be able to afford to pay those amounts. Majority of people on this forum for example are just hobbyists/students giving Visionaire Studio a go, although there are a few that are actually striving to create a commercial game such as Chris of Stasis & Kris of Jason the Greek, to name a couple; albeit the latter has now jumped ship to unity - actually quite a few of the promising looking projects have jumped to unity after successfully funded kickstarter campaigns.

Let's see: I would probably charge anything from €1 to about €60 for scripts depending on size & complexity of each script. Development, I would charge somewhere between €20 to €40 per hour (depending on the project) - I've been told that other people would charge a lot more than that per hour (freelance).

But you have actually missed the whole point in why I created this thread. I just wanted to know how many people would be willing to pay as opposed to expecting everything for free.

As already said: I would totally buy the scripts I need. The prices sound quite affordable. No current need at the moment though since I'm having a pause at creating my game.

Donate buttons are a strange thing, I have a little application that has been around for 4 years now, at first when the app launched I got a few small donations then they faded away until the last 6 months were all hell broke lose and wow it was worth the wait!
The BIG bug bare for me was someone used my app in a commercial project and demonstrated it as his own, you really need some decent licenses and conditions in place, which I didn't..
The worst thing for me it send me into scrooge mode so I'm not the sharing caring person I used to be and I struggle to try to make my app better because even though only one person abused it (as far as I know) the niggling doubts are there
on a side note Karma is a bitch, the guy went bankrupt