Deadguy2322 posted:

How the gently caress did the forums of Something Awful, of all places, get overrun with this kind of Lilly-livered “progressive” type? Everything is so “problematic”! Jesus loving Christ, can’t anyone just take a loving joke anymore?

spit on my clit posted:

what nazis

Lampsacus posted:

Ah yes, the thread about game with questionable dated humour brings out the questionable dated goons.

Honestly I think Barkley 2, should it be released, dunk heavily on the lovely ideas propagated in this thread and on these forums. Particularly by those still stuck in 2005. I'm sorry the world grew up without you.

Groovelord Neato posted:

jrpgs are absolute garbage as a genre and it's one of only two i've played from start to finish.

Endorph posted:

i understand why barkley would make you think jrpgs are bad, but i assure you they're very good, barkley's just kind of a bad meme game people have weird nostalgia for

Ada posted:

jrpg "gameplay" is just padding between the only good parts of the genre, it being a vehicle for writing and story. Barkley has good writing so it's already in the 95 percentile of jrpgs.

Diabetes Forecast posted:

Honestly as someone that near totally gave up on JRPGS because of the absolute garbage pile that is FFX this was one of the few games that reminded me that they could be fun, and was why I even bothered to get into the Wild Arms and Breath of Fire games.
And also why I can't begin to get why people like Fire Emblem.

Hentai Jihadist posted:

I guess people are supposed to play JRPGs for the story but they have pretty much the worst stories and writing in games.
I missed out on the supposedly golden snes era but looking back on the ones I've played since the only two I can think of with a genuinely interesting story and characters is Nier 1 and Barkley

Rhopunzel posted:

i have no horse in this JRPG race but i played lisa and quit after like an hour because i like to play games that don't make me miserable and have likable characters that weren't designed by a 12 year old with ADHD

Sleeveless posted:

Barkley has Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, and Juwanna Mann in it and it still has less gross sexual assault and pedo stuff and transphobia than the average classic JRPG.

TheNamedSavior posted:

Translation: "I've only played Final Fantasy so therefore I am knowledgable about an entire genre to state my uninformed opinion about it as fact."

I'm not even very much of a JRPG fan but this is literally "how not to make an argument" 101. Imagine if you saw someone hating on Western RPGs because of Fallout 4, or Mass Effect 3, or Invisible War, or loving Wizardry 4 (not a bad game, but a lot of people just STRAIGHT UP can't get out of the first loving room, and that's not good game design). This is literally it.

Dark Souls is a loving jrpg and it barely resembles FF at all. But you'd think it was a western game if you listened to forums like something awful's causally Orientalist nonsense towards literally anything made by Asians.


Cool, casual ableism. Totally isn't gross or immature at all~!


Jeez, that's funny, saying japanese media is totally more pedophilic than the west you guys is literally one of THE oldest way for racists to depict Asia as being awful monsters when literally half of Hollywood is run by pedophiles. Love that the post doesn't even give out any examples of "average classic jrpgs" being transphobic pedo rape fantasies. As we all know, the best way to frame an argument is to not give examples at all.

spit on my clit posted:

what the gently caress is you talking about son

i literally did not know who this richard spencer jerkwad is, and they told me. now i know. if anything you should be dunked on for your "but WE'RE better than that, right guys?" bs.

Lampsacus posted:

I was wrong, I made a mistake. You have to understand, there are posters in SA who make 'what nazis' posts as if to say "richard spencer, alt right, etc aren't nazis and are actually cool and good".

Lampsacus posted:

I was wrong, I made a mistake. You have to understand, there are posters in SA who make 'what nazis' posts as if to say "richard spencer, alt right, etc aren't nazis and are actually cool and good".
And we are better than nazis. Well, I like think we at least some of us aspire to be.

spit on my clit posted:

"Sorry. Im sorry. Im trying to remove it" - dril

Lampsacus posted:

?? I said I was wrong. Why are you being so lovely?

TheNamedSavior posted:

Dark Souls is a loving jrpg

The Big Word posted:

The main thing I like doing is, to post about the batkely game, but also its good to make posts where people know that Im definitely either a neo nazi or an astonishingly stupid person, but they can't tell exactly which — ~ Jokers Trick ~

bball tactics guy posted:

Hi, I'm the person who worked with ToG to make B-Ball Tactics. I worked on both B-Ball Tactics and Barkley 2 from March 2014 to around mid-2017, when I had to leave for various personal reasons. I was brought on the project about a year after releasing my own action RPG, also written in Game Maker. Being a huge fan of Barkle 1, I also backed Barkle 2 for $25 at the time.

Structurally, the game I made was quite similar to how Barkley 2 was supposed to be in that it was a long-form indie RPG that was written in Game Maker. Thematically, the games are very different, but no matter how any RPG presents itself, it needs a lot of common components in order to make it playable, like a scripting system to handle cutscenes and other movement that takes place outside of player control, interfaces to manage your gameplay and to convey the game's writing, combat AI, motion planning, all stuff like this.

In making my game, I got a ton of experience working on basically everything you would need to make an RPG work, so I thought I would be a good candidate. Plus, I'm also Gaming World scum, and that helped. So when ToG brought me on, I was excited to see how I could apply all of this knowledge. And I was a bit confused when I was asked to work on a minigame instead of the core game, but I rolled with it because the idea seemed interesting. I was tired of making grand decisions that contributed to a vision of my own making, and was happy to be of service to other people's ideas for a change.

~ Visions of B-Ball - a brief explanation of B-Ball Tactics ~

B-Ball Tactics is the working title. The final title was supposed to be "Tactics: Ballre". I will hereafter refer to this game as "TTX", because I am tired of typing the name out.

We worked on TTX parallel to Barkley 2 proper, with the eventual goal of integrating a final version of it back into B2 as one of the overarching quests the player can complete. The idea is that one of the basketball fans in Tir na Nog would ask you if you wanted to help clean up a derelict b-ball court and play some of that classic b-ball, and if you agreed, you could choose to play a series of pickups over the course of the game that would eventually end in a gigantic tournament where you have the option of either throwing the final match for a game-breaking amount of money, or playing it straight. If you go through with it, you trigger one of the game's endings by accidentally doing a Chaos Dunk and destroying Necron 7 and everyone on board, including yourself (you were just so in the zone, you know).

TTX was also designed from the ground up to be an asynchronous online multiplayer game that you could download for your phone, where you could play with friends or just random people online, similar to Hero Academy (or, going way back, play-by-email), where you would take as much time as you needed for a turn and when you're done, hand it off to the opponent. The idea here was two-fold: we could push out a demo to the backers as a way to ensure them that the game isn't dead, and we could put it on Steam and the mobile app stores for a couple bucks to accrue some chunk change for the rest of development. I don't know that it would have amounted to much, but it would've been something. Unlike the B2 version, the mobile version of this game was never intended to have AI, because you were supposed to play with other people over the wire exclusively.

bhroom and I never really had the sort of head-smashing design confrontations that the other devs had because we largely agreed that TTX as implemented would be a fun game. The only real thing I pushed back on was when bhroom had an idea to add rideable mounts to TTX - depending on the implementation it would have completely broken everything I had done up to that point.

As it stands, TTX is probably the most complete out of everything (fellow developers, please correct me if I'm wrong about any of this). It has a full gameplay loop, the vast majority of art is final, and it was very near feature-complete as of November 2015. The only things missing from the game are:

- Zaubers (would affect players and the field in various ways sort of like Final Fantasy Tactics)
- Navigation menus for getting the players in and out of matches
- Matchmaking and online communication so that players can play together - we were supposed to use a cloud service called Flox for this
- Various API integrations (GameCenter, Google Play, Steam)

It's also a solid game with a great ruleset and is very enjoyable to play. As an attempt to translate basketball pickup games into a parody of tactical RPGs, it does a really good job. Again, this is bhroom's design, I was just brought on board to implement this ruleset.

I eventually faded away in mid-2017 after working on a few Barkley 2 bits and pieces, because I had recently started a full-time programming job (cause the rent’s due) and that was taking up all my time. My life pretty much imploded much in the way that cboy's did in late 2016 as well, so that didn't really help things.

At the beginning of this year, I checked the repo and it had plenty of commits, so I was sure that the game was still being worked on.

~

I can say that I don't think that any lack of communication to the backers was based out of malice, more that bhroom was waiting for that feature lock or progress milestone to be met that would make B2 worth showing off, and it never came. I offered to write some backer updates for TTX, and we both seemed to think that was a good idea, but it never happened.

I do think that the backers and fans were dismissed for a long time, and it concerned me that whenever I would see somewhere where we were very plainly getting roasted by people who thought the project was dead, (whether it was here or on Kickstarter, or on rpgcodex or wherever else people are keeping tabs on this game), the answer that I got was basically to not worry about it, and that we'll just keep doing what we're doing and eventually the work we put into this game would become self-evident in the end.

The way I see it, these issues between the core dev team and the project manager are now intractable. Maybe that wasn't the case a year ago, but it's obvious now - this game is not getting completed, and if it does, it'll be a shadow of the game that the Barkley 1 devs intended it to be.

I would just let it die, Liam. I'm sorry that this has all fallen apart, but I think the best thing would be to just let it be. Release the source. You are, of course, free to continue to work on this if you're really that hellbent on it, but I don't know how you're going to continue without GZ, Laz and Bisse without scrapping all their work. This project in its current incarnation absolutely cannot continue without them.

This sucks real bad, and I’m sorry to the backers and to everyone involved, especially Laz and Frankie, who really went above and beyond for this game.

bball tactics guy posted:

commenter posted:

That simple bball tactics game that they said would come out soon years ago that never came out was probably a good sign this was a doomed project.

There's a pretty bizarre story behind this. So the last time I worked on TTX was in November 2015. It was ready for at least the backers to get a demo, for sure, and all the things I said above about the game being released before Barkley 2 were still true at this time. And then I found out that we weren't going to release TTX because we would have to finish Barkley 2 first, since no one would know what TTX was, despite the central idea being pretty understandable (turn-based strategy basketball with cool dunks). I have no idea how or why this decision was made.

bball tactics guy posted:

Bisse posted:

One. Design wise, everything was always massively complicated. Suggesting we keep things simple was ignored, because No that's not the game we want to make. It was sometimes impossible to discuss effort vs value.

Hard agree with this.

bball tactics guy posted:

multiple authors posted:

shoulda made bball tactics the combat btw.

---

why wasn't bball tactics the combat??

This is a great idea. Just take each area and make basketball courts befitting the theme of the area, plop the protags on one side of the court and the monsters on the other, and duke it out. Again, pretty much everything is done on TTX as it was supposed to be implemented in Barkley 2 except for some sort of turn-based AI.

I don't think it will happen.

bball tactics guy posted:

multiple authors posted:

just gimme goddamn bball tactics.

--

I want bball tactics to absolutely murder my phone's battery!

> Yeah, honestly? Me too. You and me both.

bball tactics guy posted:

On an abstract level, you could maybe get away with saying that this isn't wasted time because it was being worked on alongside the main game, but that's not how it works in practice.

Since this game was on contract, I kept meticulous time-tracking and clocking records. At least 1,100 work hours went to TTX instead of Barkley 2. This doesn't count showing the game at trade shows or non-clockable meetings where we hashed out design.

This is 27 full-time work weeks. This is 27 weeks of familiarity with the systems, 27 weeks of bug fixes, 27 weeks of implementing a vision, 27 weeks of collaborative work with talented developers to boot this cursed game out the door. So in a practical sense, it ended up wasting a *lot* of time that I could've spent fulfilling the Promise That Had Been Made.

bball tactics guy posted:

Hiratio posted:

[on control of design and "firing" Laz]

> This makes me really angry, Liam. What possible purpose could doing this serve?

bball tactics guy posted:

lordosis_gamer posted:

Re: the stupid cube, it’s some real forest for trees stuff. Here we have a prototypical version of something (a zauber) that utilizes a host of representative functions (altering PC’s stats and collisions, casting animations, global speed changes during spell chargeup, object spawning that interacted with bullets, etc.) and instead of it being taken as an instrumental task to complete (for money), it’s an opportunity to engage in endless arguments with the game’s supposed designers about what “good design” (blech) is, what it should be instead, on and on and on.

“there was no design lead,” “there’s too many cooks in the kitchen,” “bhroom talks too much and he doesn’t listen to other opinions.” You start to wonder why.

The mind reels as to why you think this would be an acceptable thing to say. People toiled on this game for years, and you're talking about the combat lead, and a guy who made a loving genetic algorithm in service of one of the core gameplay ideas of this game, not some entry-level game programmer who's never done any of this before. Why shouldn't he get a say? Have the argument. The "endless arguments" are actually a healthy part of the game design process, but only if the person you're arguing with is allowed to have their own opinion.

bball tactics guy posted:

frankie posted:

People here talk about bhroom like he's the "PR guy" but he's done a lot of work on making sense of all of these ideas and figuring out much of the math for balancing them, there's these big complex spreadsheets he made to organize and list all of these things and how they combine etc, like growth charts to see how many times you can fuse weapons together before they become too strong that, after tweaking, could export out a file we could import in the game to change the game's balance.

--

I feel like my previous post was a bit misinterpreted. I didn't mean to describe Liam as being the "ideas guy". I think that's a pretty unfair description of what he did and what happened. And like I said in an earlier post, I think he also did some very solid work on figuring out the logic of balancing the gun fusion stuff, and other similar math stuff through his spreadsheet witchcraft. Not to mention his actual initial job, which was managing peoples' tasks and time, and all the business stuff.

Another thing to consider was that bhroom has connections to an absurd degree. I won't go into detail in this thread, but the kind of producer magic he could pull off constantly surprised me. He got our interviews and articles, and he made loads of other things happen that a random indie dev with no connections would not have been able to accomplish. He's a smart cookie, so it's equally surprising that he can't seem to tell when the state of his project is busted beyond repair.

bball tactics guy posted:

quote:

Hey guys, this is Chef Boyardee,

Dude I miss you, you're the reason I tried octopus nigiri. I hope you're doing well.

bball tactics guy posted:

Bisse posted:

[gelatinous cube]

You were absolutely right to fight hard to keep this out of the game. If we put it in, we would have to balance against it, and if we eventually realized that it wasn't a good idea, we would have to remove it and balance everything *again*, not to mention throw stuff out that relied on the cube being in the game. Good on you for having the foresight on this.

bball tactics guy posted:

commenter posted:

why does your game have z-height issues, what even is at different height levels

I guess the rooftops in the city if they're not stealthily just accessible via ladders that are secretly just bridges

Speaking as someone who briefly worked on z-height, it was mostly supposed to be used for the Mountain Pass so that projectiles that were being fired from enemies wouldn't hit you if you were on a different cliff height from them.

TheNamedSavior posted:

Translation: "I've only played Final Fantasy so therefore I am knowledgable about an entire genre to state my uninformed opinion about it as fact."

I'm not even very much of a JRPG fan but this is literally "how not to make an argument" 101. Imagine if you saw someone hating on Western RPGs because of Fallout 4, or Mass Effect 3, or Invisible War, or loving Wizardry 4 (not a bad game, but a lot of people just STRAIGHT UP can't get out of the first loving room, and that's not good game design). This is literally it.

Dark Souls is a loving jrpg and it barely resembles FF at all. But you'd think it was a western game if you listened to forums like something awful's causally Orientalist nonsense towards literally anything made by Asians.


Cool, casual ableism. Totally isn't gross or immature at all~!


Jeez, that's funny, saying japanese media is totally more pedophilic than the west you guys is literally one of THE oldest way for racists to depict Asia as being awful monsters when literally half of Hollywood is run by pedophiles. Love that the post doesn't even give out any examples of "average classic jrpgs" being transphobic pedo rape fantasies. As we all know, the best way to frame an argument is to not give examples at all.

Star Guarded posted:

Tactics: Ballre

Star Guarded posted:

Uncle Wemus posted:

goddamnit someone finish this game

Star Guarded posted:

Hey folks. My close friend who was the coder on bball tactics wanted to chime in with his own story about development, after reading through the thread. I'm posting it for him because he doesn't have an SA account. Note that I am not the coder of bball tactics.

oddium posted:

frankie did they show your game in the devolver thing for two frames

FrankieSmileShow posted:

Lisa isn't an easy recommend, but it is really good. It loves tonal whiplash and its got some pretty horrible subject matter, its not for everybody. Combat and exploration aspects are really well executed, and the game is filled with things catching you off-guard, like a few really solid horror bits.

Star Guarded posted:

Hey folks. My close friend who was the coder on bball tactics wanted to chime in with his own story about development, after reading through the thread. I'm posting it for him because he doesn't have an SA account. Note that I am not the coder of bball tactics.

Alan Smithee posted:

wow

what's the definitive LP video to watch

Rhopunzel posted:

shut up retard

Patware posted:

give the barkley 2 code to devolver on a usb glued to a brick thrown through their window

they have the energy tales of game's lost

CYBEReris posted:

the sewer furries being, intentionally or not, very trans-coded

Rhopunzel posted:

i have no horse in this JRPG race but i played lisa and quit after like an hour because i like to play games that don't make me miserable and have likable characters that weren't designed by a 12 year old with ADHD

The Ultimate Doge posted:

What

Dabir posted:

Come on, don't be obtuse. They were born as one thing, always felt in their hearts that they were really something else, they were persecuted because of it, they desperately seek out surgery to make their outer selves resemble their inner selves... Remind you of anything?

E: That said, looking at your rap sheet, your brand seems to be lazy trolling, so I'm not sure why I'm bothering.

Blattdorf posted:

I was going to ask a similar question because, surprisingly, all this new lingo is not immediately obvious. Why is it "coded", though? Can you be "homosexual-coded" or "female-coded"?

Blattdorf posted:

I was going to ask a similar question because, surprisingly, all this new lingo is not immediately obvious. Why is it "coded", though? Can you be "homosexual-coded" or "female-coded"?

Blattdorf posted:

I was going to ask a similar question because, surprisingly, all this new lingo is not immediately obvious. Why is it "coded", though? Can you be "homosexual-coded" or "female-coded"?