LibrarianCroaker posted:

Yo I don't know about that guy, but I need to know more about this.

The White Dragon posted:

something awful dot com thread title posted:

Barkley 2: Hoopz is Chaos Dunking in Heaven: Chapter 1 of the Dark Drakerz Saga

Sleeveless posted:

le epic not giving failures and con artists carte blanche to run off with money because they posted a few jepgs of concept art and transcribed their epic idea guys ideas from half a decade ago gimmick, brought to you by the brain geniuses who worked themselves into prodromal mental illness over getting bored of bethesda games after 200 hours

cboy posted:

Hey guys, this is Chef Boyardee, one of the writers and musicians for the game, and I was one of the original Barkley 1 guys.
...

cboy posted:

Hey guys, this is Chef Boyardee,

ImpAtom posted:

Honestly I'm just happy people are breaking their silences. I don't really need the game to be finished. I'm just glad the bandaid has been ripped off and people can like... go back to doing things without being asked about Barkley. You guys did enough, it was a failed Kickstarter and that's that.

Vax posted:

When you read that update you are okay maybe somehow hopium inserted

Then you read GZ prediction https://twitter.com/GZStorm/status/1135304375562252288

and all hope dies instantly

Unbelievably Fat Man posted:

Imho the story of this is fascinating and rules. Somebody release the gamemaker files so there can be multiple illconceived attempts to turn the rubble into a full game

Natrox posted:

Hey Chef, thanks for this write-up. Just wanted to let you know that you and the rest of the Barkley 1 crew (and to an extent, GamingW in general) inspired me to pursue game development as a career. I now work on Tomb Raider, thanks to a game about Chaos Dunks.

Thanks!

rodbeard posted:

The funny thing is that's how Fez got made.

Alan Smithee posted:

I just got here from kotaku

what's this about a dark drakerz

Gortarius posted:

Just to throw in my two cents into this barkley toilet...

I can't with 100% certainty confirm every bit of what GZ (Hiratio) has said because I wasn't in the ToG inner circles until there was like 4 people left in 2016 or whatever, but I have ZERO reason to doubt anything that he has said here from my experiences working on this wretched game, and from just talking to him about all the weird things going on and shady back-alley attitude. I peaced out from the project the same time as him for many of the same reasons he did.

This is such a complicated mess, and from a span of 6 years, that I might be misremembering stuff here and there, but I'm trying to write all of this to the best of my recollection:

For me, it all started back in fall of 2012 when they were looking for some help for B2 and since I sort of knew some of them and I liked Barkley1 I said sure, count me in. I did various systems they asked me to do, like the Character Creation system and the various minigames like the Booty Bass, a Diving minigame and a DwarfNET prototype that me and GZ later worked into a functional framework for some juicy DwarfNET content that never came. There are more than that but I picked these examples because they are probably the ones most people might have actually seen of this game via conventions or streams.

Back in those early days it was the Ideas Guy bonanza out there. Everyone had ideas and quests they wanted to bring into the game, good or bad, and everyone was hyped to the gills about making some barkley. It's in good portion because of those whacky ideas and the refusal to let go of them that sunk this ship and I too at the time contributed to that, although I don't think they gave two shits about my ideas beyond briefly entertaining them. It was their baby and I was just some Joe Shmuck that was helping them out, and I was perfectly fine with that.

I wasn't involved in the writing at all, until I thought that maybe I could help these guys script some off the NPC's. Their writing was good, and I knew mine was not, so I just tried to make the NPC's with their writing on them work as well as I could, testing them out for logic errors and stuff like that. The NPC/Event scripting system at the time was not user-friendly in the slightest but somehow work was getting done, or so I thought. Chef and Bort were still onboard at this point and all seemed good, or as good as one would expect anyway.

The compile times slowly got unacceptable and we thought there wasn't much we could do about it, the game was just so big (not true as evidenced by the superior scripting system GZ devised much later and discovering the "Dark Drakers", which I will explain later). This is about the time when it all began to sour, and I want to say this was like 2015 to 2016. Chef disappeared in a poof of smoke and Bort became a family man. I sensed that there was some beefs going on in ToG, but it seemed like something that could have been resolved, so I didn't pay it too much attention to it like a total fool.

Because of these departures I found myself in a much more central role and was suddenly in the mysterious inner circle. At this time I had also learned the tips and tricks of the mapmaking racket and had unofficially become the map maker. People would give me blueprints of game areas, and I would map them out to the best of my ability, and later on I would become obsessed with making the maps seamlessly weaving into each other. This was extremely dumb because it was basically just an artificial limitation, even if I liked the end result. I did also change a bunch of maps on my own accord because I thought they sucked, which lead into some beef, but those beefs were usually resolved within hours/days.

This is also about the time when I discovered the Dark Drakers, which soured the whole thing further. Dark Draker is a filler character in B2 who talks about being faster than the snapping maw of a drake. I discovered that an entire areas worth of NPC's were just carbon copies of Dark Draker with a different name given to each, AKA the illusion of work being done. Just these 10% finished NPC's basically littering the project to make it seem like it was all good. I suppose the plan was to eventually make them into distinct NPC's but the problem was that the whole game was plagued by the Dark Drakers, and they GREATLY attributed to the poo poo compile times. I also discovered/was told about some of the more hidden mechanics of the game which can only be described as the concoction of a lunatic. For example, two separate ingame time system both dictating quests and NPC behavior (with NPC's also being dictated by quest variables, items the player has etc.), leading to impossible to fix content. Thank the lord one of these system was later discarded.

There was many schemes on how to move forward on many occasions. Every now and then there would be a burst of gumption, and work was being done, and it all seemed good again, briefly. But you can only run away from the problems for so long. The combat in the game was always too complicated, too ambitious, and criminally ignored. It was a total disgrace, and I did bring this up a few times, but ToG didn't seem to give a hoot, or there was always some excuse why it shouldn't be worked on right now. There was too many "affixes" for the guns, there were too many types of gun, there were too many gun materials, too much everything basically.

Most of the gun stuff eventually sort of worked, and Frankie really outdid himself by making those 1000000 different gun sprites. Frankie was the only person who produced a consistent and high quality stream of work, and did way more than he needed to. It's a total disgrace that all the art he did is essentially in the toilet now.

With combat the crux of the issue wasn't not having enough sprites or the guns not working 100% like intended, but the enemies. They were a total loving disgrace. But again, it wasn't seen as important enough to do something about it in an RPG game. To my knowledge, to this day there are no functional bosses.

2017 seems like the year with most of the streaks of when a good amount of work was being done. Things were getting made but of course the project was already long overdue. The new scripting system was in full swing which was approximately 20000 times better/faster/easier to use than the old one. I can't stress enough how much more efficient it made content creation. Compile times had dropped down to around 45 seconds. Too bad the writers were no longer there. Instead we tried to emulate the barkley1 sort of writing ourselves, but of course it was rather mediocre.

In 2018 GZ vanished for a long time and I just thought maybe he had some personal stuff to figure out, or that he had jumped off a bridge. That was not the case, he was merely crestfallen to his very core in regards to Barkley2. This was also the year when there would be times when I was the only person working on the game for weeks at a time, and at the longest, a month at a time. The whole debacle finally came to it's "climax" near the end of 2018 when it become absolutely crystal clear to even me that this is a bad joke and it's never going to work out if it just keeps going on like it had up to that point. GZ had more insight into things so he had figured out this a lot sooner, but regardless, when he quit, so did I because at that point there was no realistic way of getting this poo poo done. I was so stupid that it took me 6 years to become disillusioned.

This is boring and longwinded as all hell, but this is basically the short version of my story and I hope I haven't misremembered anything. I don't want to see this piece of poo poo game ever again in my life.

Bisse posted:

This sounds like the most likely way to get the game out, to be honest. Just slap a 'to be continued' screen wherever the usable content ends, let people play what's there, and see if it's worth moving onwards.

It would be interesting to see how a crowdsourced game does, if there will be some passionate driver to tie the thing together. Plus dumping a pile of godlike assets drowned in steaming crashing garbage on the fans to figure it the hell out themselves is the most The Magical Realms of Tír na nÓg: Escape from Necron 7 - Revenge of Cuchulainn: The Official Game of the Movie - Chapter 2 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa thing ever.

Alan Smithee posted:

I just got here from kotaku

what's this about a dark drakerz

Phobophilia posted:

the moral of the story is to not hype up a goon project and just freaking do it, i mean baba and hypnospace came out recently no mess no drama

lih posted:

Instead of a 'To Be Continued' screen, in traditional JRPG fashion just hack together whatever remaining assets and planned plot beats so the game degrades from 'playable but clearly unfinished' to 'completely broken mess full of Dark Drakers' to 'nonsensical collage with no gameplay and remaining plot described entirely in text' as it goes on.

lih posted:

Instead of a 'To Be Continued' screen, in traditional JRPG fashion just hack together whatever remaining assets and planned plot beats so the game degrades from 'playable but clearly unfinished' to 'completely broken mess full of Dark Drakers' to 'nonsensical collage with no gameplay and remaining plot described entirely in text' as it goes on.

uncurable mlady posted:

someone should pitch this to noclip, i bet danny would do a video on it

Bisse posted:

What could we have done differently to avoid this massive garbage void of time and work? loving Playtesting. We should have playtested everything from day 1. We should have had as a standard workflow to implement one thing, playtested it, and got feedback before even dreaming of doing something else. We should have playtested once a month. All our problems would have become instantly obvious. After two years when it became apparent that this was an issue, I brought this up thousands of times, to deaf ears, there was always some loving reason why we couldn't playtest at that specific moment. Gun's breeding wasn't complete so the player couldn't see the whole experience. We needed affixes first. We needed more polish first. Everything needed to be connected first. Who cares? We need a good core gameplay before anything else matters. This is the one big learning I take away from this project into all future projects, and you should too. This was also a chicken and egg problem, we never playtested, meaning the game was never really playable by an outsider, meaning we could never playtest, meaning it was never... on and on. It was a huge effort to get demos ready for conventions, and while the game was really liked it also needed someone there to explain it (from what I hear - I never went to the conventions, sadly) When we came back from cons we had lots of feedback, but never really did anything with it combat wise.