DoctorStrangelove posted:

"Neutral-Good is the alignment most often found in cyberpilgrims and Afrofuturists. Dracula and Popeye are both Neutral-Good.

Dabir posted:

My main problem with the demo has been information conveyance and UI stuff. In the terminals, there's no universal 'go back' or 'exit' button, which means leaving them is kind of annoying. You have to follow a different mental path to get out every time, depending on what screen you're currently on, when I'm expecting a single button press to do it. It's also kind of a pain that there's no way to change the controls from within a game, you have to go back to the main menu to do it. I know the game autosaves, but it doesn't FEEL like it autosaves, if you follow, so I'm always expecting to lose a bunch of progress if I back out. It also took me waaaay too long to figure out how to level up - I guessed that the iron cross in the bottom left probably meant I could, but clicking it did nothing, and I couldn't see an obvious option in the quick menu or in the terminals.

In combat, I found that I can tell where enemies are no problem, and I can point at them and shoot just fine, but everything beyond that is intensely confusing. I can't really see the HP bars at all. I have no idea when the fish are actually going to attack, and when they do their attacks seem to come at me way too fast to react to. Picking which gun i want to be using at any given time is also kind of a pain, but that might be a me problem - the default direction that the mouse wheel scrolls through the bandolier is the opposite of what I expect from how the gun's are arranged along the bottom of the screen, and I never got around to fixing it because as I said, it felt like my progress wasn't safe.

The fact that the only way to get rid of gun's is at a terminal is a problem, IMO. I've been playing a lot of the original Phantasy Star Online lately, and filling your tiny inventory and having to go back to the ship to sell your poo poo is a pain, but in PSO you always had the option to throw your useless poo poo on the ground to clear space. Barkley 2 has the same problem, but worse - there's no option to throw gun's away that I found, and there's no telepipe equivalent to get back to where you can dispose of your gun's quickly. Having to leave potentially amazing gun's behind when you have a Polarized Broken Minigun of the Pensioner or whatever taking up a bag slot sucks. Also, breeding is a very tedious process with M+KB controls, but smelting when you're at smelt cap - which I reached very early - feels super wasteful.

Charles posted:

So what was that demo that somebody posted here last week?

Dabir posted:

Oh yeah, a couple of other things. I got stuck on the map screen the first time I brought it up, because no keys closed it and I couldn't see the exit button at the bottom. The animation for it folding away is nice and all, but when you don't know what you're looking for it's nearly invisible. Having to go into the quick menu and click the map button every time I wanted to check where I was was real infuriating, a dedicated map button would be a big help there. Also, it was weird that notes, items, map and so on were accessed from the quick menu, but when you closed them you went back to gameplay, I feel like that should have taken you back to the quick menu.

FrankieSmileShow posted:

The combat improved ENORMOUSLY in the past week. It was an absolute disaster one week ago. Some simple tweaks to balance made a huge difference.

Novasol posted:

I paid Wilmer's rent and he still got evicted

Shanty posted:

I think You can access maps by pressing the M key

Novasol posted:

I've gotten out of the hoosegow, and now all my paths out are blocked by Dark Drakerz. I'm guessing I reached a dead end, or the end of the demo.

Also, I paid Wilmer's rent and he still got evicted

mp5 posted:

What does the backer update say

quote:



For backers only

Demo Time:
First of all, Happy Father’s Day to all Fathers of Backers and Backers who are Fathers.
I’m going to attempt to keep this short but a few disclaimers that should be understood before firing up this vidcon:

This represents only a week of concerted issue repair and bug fixing. There are still lots of little issues, and probably a few big ones. (a massive thank you to the small crew of peeps who helped play test and bug fix!)

EXPECT YOUR GAME TO BREAK AT SOME POINT DUE TO A BUG.

EXPECT SOME QUESTS TO SUDDENLY BE UNRESOLVABLE DUE TO BAD QUEST LOGIC.

EXPECT A LACK OF POLISH AND EFFECTS IN PLACES DUE TO THE WORKING NATURE OF DEVELOPMENT.

This demo includes Character Creation, Tir na nOg, The Sewers, and The Hoosegow. Anywhere else that you go will probably immediately lock you out and keep you from exploring.

This demo is not intended to represent the entire working state of the rest of the game. The rest of the game needs a lot more work. This first demo is just to show backers what exactly was worked on and have it playable. (see the last update for a better state of the quests)

Gamepad works is most situations but crucially, doesn’t let you select objects far away. This will lock you out of the sewers. We tried to get this ready by today but ran out of time. If you want to play with gamepad, the only thing to do right now is unplug controller when you can’t manipulate something, use your mouse, then plug gamepad back in. It should reconnect automatically.

Balance has been tweaked towards the easy side, but there are certain unlucky combinations of gun’s that could keep you from advancing. This is a balance and design issue but is hopefully rare. If you encounter diminishing returns, best to start over.

DOWNLOAD HERE FROM ITCH:  THE BARKLEY 2 JANKY DEMO
NOTE: This update is going out to backers only just to make sure the demo is working on with a broader audience.  A Public Demo will come out later as soon we know there are no SERIOUS issues.  I'll just make the itch.io page above public and tweet it out.
Comments – if you want to comment on the build, there are a few opportunities to:
1. Here in this update.
2. Google Form - https://forms.gle/hn6dHmmRNxrfUM8J8. This is just a way to either comment or report a bug if you so desire.  We have our own ticket tracking system so this is just for anyone who wants to voice anything.If we do anything like this in the future, this will certainly evolve.
3. GitHub Issues - https://github.com/talesofgames/barkley2_bugs/issues. Same kind of thing as the one above but probably more geared towards specific issues. I don’t expect many people to use this but it’s there regardless.
4. Discord – we have a development discord that we will reorganize to get everyone who is interested a place to chat. I think we’ll get all backers a link sometime this week. In the next update I’ll have information about that (as well as BBALL TACTICS).
The demo also has a steep learning curve at points. So, I’m going to explain just a few things:

Saving

The game saves automatically.  If something doesn't make sense or the game freezes up or crashes, you should be able to start the game again and load your save to the spot right before the crash happened.  When totally stuck, delete your User/(name)/AppData/Local/Barkley2 folder.  The folder is hidden so you'll need to turn on the ability to see it in Folder Options.

Maps

You can access maps by pressing the M key or clicking Q for the Quickmenu and then selecting MAPS at the top. The TNN Map is not finished pixel art but it does have two places on the map that can point you to the right direction:  



When you start the game you should buy a map from Dubre, who is right where X1’s face is on the map above. After that, you can explore around, but 3 points to touch on are:

 Tutorial Classroom – This is relatively light but has text descriptions of all the systems in the game, in some form or another.

 Pay Rent – this is your first quest in the game, on the West Side of town.

 Sewers – This is the combat area in the game, and at the North of Town.

Those three places should give you enough time to wander around and get the gist of the game.

Smelting and Reloading

The game cycle works by having you collect a bunch of gun’s and destroy the ones you don’t want for materials or “smelt points” that can be used to refill your other gun’s with ammo. The UI of the Utility Menu is admittedly less-than-efficient in this process but you just need to head to GUN’S -> SMELT, and then GUN’S – RELOAD in order to get this done. 



Breeding

While breeding gun's is consciously obtuse, the end results of most gun's are fairly simple.

Unless gun's are wildly different in value, their "child" will almost always get stronger.  Since this demo is only really dropping the same value gun's, you should always expect a better gun as a child.  There is no need to learn the system inside and out. 

That said, there are some AFFIXES that are bad.  Those are intentional and are supposed to push players to breed OUT those bad genes and keep the good ones.

There are a lot of gun drops in the game, and lots and lots of materials to play with.  The design focus is one experimentation and not on maximizing the stats of "the perfect gun."

Experiment and hopefully you'll enjoy!

That's it for now.  I'll follow up on the first few days of this demo being out mid-week.
Liam

Chas McGill posted:

I'm amazed that it took until now to increase the gun'sbrasting rate. I pray to clispaeth that more sane improvements are allowed.

E2M2 posted:

Hentai Jihadist posted:

LOL he still thinks it's coming out

Gortarius posted:

Give it a few centuries.

Cheen posted:

I paid for this game, but not through kickstarter but like right after through the website- can i get a demo copy pl0x

oddium posted:

the demo is already better than double fine’s extremely thin spacebase df-9, which they apparently still sell on steam