Alien Rope Burn posted:

Once you've seen "X is now playing Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme" everything becomes relative.

John Murdoch posted:

I feel like this is a good time the bring up those devs who went in the other direction, and all of their emotes and backgrounds are of their fursonas and it's basically a dumb scheme to import stuff into Steam Community for their own personal use.

LORD OF BOOTY posted:

okay uh

has anyone ever played Uriel's Chasm

because WHAT IN THE gently caress DID I JUST PLAY

LORD OF BOOTY posted:

yeah i thought the Christian stuff was gonna be some bizarre joke or just there for coolness like in Evangelion or Xenogears, but no, it was totally sincere and the dev meant to get their spirituality across with it

Lucinice posted:

If that game were made today it would probably be about buying in game loot boxes or something.

FirstAidKite posted:

I like how nobody even wants to go near Gender Bender

Rectus posted:

If Matt Furie DMCAs that game, will everyone who bought it lose their horrible Pepe achievements?

Davethulhu posted:

Is this true? I thought bitcoin mining was the cause of video cards currently being overpriced.

LAST WE SPOKE
The last major update to Guardians of Orion was in December 2016. I wanted to go into that a bit and then more importantly talk about the future of the game, including a brand new update dropping this year.

After we had made it to the Official Release (GOO Version 2.0) a few of us had parted ways. It was a strenuous and intense development and in the end I think everyone needed some time away to recollect.

During this time me and Frankie formed a new focus group called DANKIE which we are working on migrating everything towards. For future products this will allow development to be more internal/localized and focus on new technologies and frameworks. In addition to this we’ve also had a lot of former talent from both SPIRAL and TREK come aboard to assist us on current and upcoming productions, acting as a reunion of sorts.

To celebrate development starting back up for Guardians of Orion we wanted to discuss a bit more about our first attempt (Phase 1), what we learned and where we hope everything is headed from here on.

SOME PROBLEMS
There were some problems with Guardians of Orion development Phase 1 due to my Hiring, Design, Political and Communication aspects. Other issues had compounded from these problems.

CROWDFUNDING
The communication problem stems from using models or platforms such as: Indie, Crowdfunding and Early Access where you need to talk about a games direction, future/possible content and more. There were a variety of these types of discussions all over Social Media, Kickstarters and on Steam Updates.

While this is usually (mostly) fine as either the project is successfully funded and fans hold them accountable based on funds received/stretch goals hit OR the project fails to fund and typically vanishes out to never be heard from again.

HONOR
We made the "interesting" choice of continuing to fund the game regardless, going so far as to even reward the pledges we had never received on Kickstarter to thank those that came out.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/orionprelude/guardians-of-orion/posts/1395367

We believed in this game and so we continued the development and released in December 2015 followed by a full year of massive and free updates to all owners. You can see what was added during that entire year of progress (2015-2016) as well as things we still have hopes of adding:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/orionprelude/orion-sci-fi-open-galaxy-mmorpg-shooter


REALITY
Unfortunately the support never came and this was mixed with other significant issues involving some poor hiring choices I had made and some bad feature/tech integration that ended up with extreme consequences on the player-experience side of things.

While I understand frustrations by GOO fans as they were systems we very much wanted in place, it unfortunately doesn't change the fact or nature of these systems or the overall product performance of Guardians of Orion from the very start. It was never self-sustaining, all crowdfunding events had failed (2014, 2015, 2016) and this is something we openly and candidly talked about since October 2015, before the game was even on sale. We continued to cover this during the first year of updates.

[ Trek Industries, Facebook, October 15, 2015 ]
"Guardians of Orion will release no matter what. I've funded the Early Access version (2015) as well as much of the immediate post-release content, including: some weapons, more guardians, new creatures/dinosaurs, more maps and more. We hope the game will sell reasonably well and will of course then use the profits received to grow the game to where we want it to be as well as begin funding some of our next (massive) projects."

PROUD
While a ton of content that we wanted to develop was never able to make it in we are still extremely proud of Guardians of Orion as a consumer product for as low as $1. There are dozens to even hundreds of hours of great friend-based gameplay and it was only ever difficult from a production or development standpoint due to how much we invested and wanted to do.

CLOSURE (PHASE 1)
We've given closure to fans of Guardians of Orion 1 but to be honest I have always been personally hopeful that GOO could receive another update from a variety of reasons, ie becomes self-sustaining, lowered server costs, increased sales/support or another one of our products becoming profitable to the point that we could do it regardless.

THE RIGHT DESIGN (2017+)
Over time we have constantly worked on designs for a GOO1 update and it was simply a matter of finding the right design. We are very pleased to state that we have found a design that we are happy with.

GOO 2018 UPDATE (“PHASE 2”)
VERSION 2.1 is officially announced and in development, scheduled for Summer 2018. We will continue to keep you updated as things progress.
(there's a lot more but honestly just quit here because it will never exist)

quote:

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Gynovore posted:

Honestly, how much net profit can a zero-effort asset-flip game make? Four, five hundred at the absolute most.

Zetsubou-san posted:

Mystery Sex Dungeon of Ys

Synthbuttrange posted:

does anyone actually own a body pillow or do people just have a ton of cases.

Dareon posted:

Parasite Eve was based on a Japanese horror novel.

Zanzibar Ham posted:

Or did he go back and finish it some long rear end time after?

Barudak posted:

Im sorry, people liked Vallhalla for reasons other than it looking like a lost msx title?

Flannelette posted:

Has anyone said if the actual game part is good?

Barudak posted:

Sorry Toby, I played your game and lusted for everyones death but actually got bored killing and stopped playing it so I guess I learned a valuable moral lesson or something

FirstAidKite posted:

I don't like the word twee though because I feel like it doesn't really even mean anything. Like, what *is* twee? As far as I can tell, just based off of everything I've seen twee thrown around to describe, it means "anything I don't like that was made by a young person"

corn in the bible posted:

If people canceled their preorders of fo76 they could not uninstall the preload of the game

Kchama posted:

It was not! It had some stupid name I have no idea the meaning of. It did have a zone called TERF Town where all the TERFs lived.

Discendo Vox posted:

tell me more.

Dark_Swordmaster posted:

Please post porn games.

kirbysuperstar posted:

The worst part is finding out Australia is responsible for those (now three) games.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

There's a few games lately that do this!

kirbysuperstar posted:

Well how much worse can it make a product, really.



Oh.

Dareon posted:

I've heard a lot of this kind of thing about Nazi Germany, and every time I hear something new I reflect that we (meaning the rest of the world) got lucky that there was so much incompetence among the Nazi high command. Like, Hitler was paranoid about his generals and began issuing battle plans himself (He was no better a strategist than he was a painter), even to the point of not allowing forces in the field to retreat without his explicit orders. To say nothing of his expenditures on various paranormal boondoggles and quests for legendary relics.

HopperUK posted:

After watching From Beyond, frankly I think Miskatonic University just isn't a very good option for grad school.

FirstAidKite posted:

I miss Dinner Date

resistentialism posted:

When is someone going to make a game about very large witches

Schwarzwald posted:

Wait, you're allowed to charge arbitrarily high for steam jank?

I think less of every awful game developer after learning this. They need to step up their game.

quote:

It is impossible to state how poor this game is, and that's not counting the excellent "translation". (Maybe it reads better in French or one of the other languages, but I somehow doubt the story is saner.)

- As a visual novel, the game is a debacle. The story is an atrocious mess of jargon which is apparently a side-story to the creator's epic "Dragon and Weed" (This is not a joke, it explains this in a heavily abridged form in a submenu you can find) saga that you can bet your arse I'm never going to look up. There are maybe 4 "branch points" in the game. They do nothing. Save and click either option! Nothing changes at all. As a result, you're just here to watch whatever strange superpowered wankfest this is play out over a few hours, with the occasional break in the form of...
- Quick-Time Events. No, seriously. Keep your hand on the keyboard and make sure you're familiar with french keyboard layouts, because that's what the keys are bound around. Earlier in the game there are more of these and then they just stop, like even the developer realized how dumb they were and didn't care enough to remove them. At least one failed to register for me until I restarted the game, so don't go in expecting them to be tightly-coded, either.
- The game says it runs in some sort of custom 3D engine! Probably to allow for the QTEs. It's not very good and somehow it crashed twice on me in the process of playing. A visual novel with no branch points crashed on me. Just take in how much of a wreck it is that this is a thing I'm writing. It wasn't a hard thing to test, fella.
- I don't speak the other languages to compare, but the English script is a debacle. Characters will repeat the same line back at each other randomly, some phrases are just entirely garbage (my favorite line in the game: "It's seems that Menkens hathwart someone he shouldn't. Men of the Bad Santass are here and not to joke..."), and more than a few lines just stopped a word in and continued on like the script wasn't matching up with timing somehow. Others were just still in French for no reason. Unlike a lot of VNs, there's no rewind function, so I hope you like being left in the dark or restarting entire chapters to figure out what the hell is going on. It's not going to help.
- The art is terrible. Action scenes don't feel kinetic, they feel like someone on Deviantart just learned Photoshop has filters. One of the climactic moments of the story has a man take off his shirt and then suddenly the screen is a mess of glowing red chains, because "he used to tame the tigers". It then cuts to black and suddenly he's beat up a little.
- I hope you don't want a soundtrack, because the only accompaniment the game has are some three-note "baby's first music" compositions, a lot of generic stock sound effects like gunfire or explosions, and most of the game is silent. Entirely silent.
- I guess the obscene price on here is part of some kind of weird scam by the creator to get you to buy it from him elsewhere directly rather than give Steam a cut. (I got a review key.) It's not worth buying, so take neither route. This thing is a trainwreck, and in that sad "400 passengers dead" style rather than the "oh man it's so bad it's good" fashion.

Schwarzwald posted:

I can't be impressed with a 100$ VN any more. There should be another zero at the end of that price. At least.