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KickStarter Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption - adventure-RPG from the creators of Quest for Glory

Andhaira

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From Kickstarter comments page:


Corey Cole 2-time creator on August 17
In 20-20 hindsight, we now know this game would have taken at least three years with the original graphics concept, and it would not have looked good. Why three years? That's the minimum time it took for Lori to write the game text and dialogue.

In any case, the point is moot. We didn't change graphic standards because we couldn't make up our minds. We changed them because the original programmer left the team, and the new team couldn't make the old code work. See my post from last month, "It Takes a Team", at http://hero-u.com/it-takes-a-team/.

Again, we had no choice about going from 2D isometric to 3D. Our team of programmers and artists struggled mightily for two years, and the 2D results did not work well (where players could click) and looked mediocre. When our artists showing us 3D images that looked as good as JP's 2D concept art, and the programmers could make them work much better, there was no question about switching.

I just want to make clear that neither of those changes was made hastily or by whim - they were what we had to do to make a good game.

We did the exact same thing on Quest for Glory V for a different reason - it was a beautiful, voxel-driven game in which the frame rate on an average computer dipped to 2 fps. Since that would have been unplayable, we converted everything to 3D polygons. The game looked much worse, but playable trumps unplayable.

As with Hero-U, that change was an expensive decision, adding a year of development, and possibly $2 million to the development cost. In hindsight, it would have been cheaper to use a 3rd party graphics engine, and we would likely have had a better-looking game, but it's impossible to guess these things in advance. When Sierra budgeted out the game at $1.5 million, spending $500,000 on a 3rd-party engine didn't look like a smart move.

We later learned from other Sierra developers that two other divisions of Sierra made the exact same mistake with King's Quest: Mask of Eternity and Gabriel Knight 3. Each group developed a custom 3D engine for each of those games, and none was up to the standard of the best 3rd party 3D engines.

We chose to develop Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption under Unity to avoid making the same mistake. It's an established engine used by thousands of other game companies, large and small. However, the engine does not write the game; it's just one small piece of the puzzle. Whichever engine we used, years of writing, art creation, and programming were still needed to put everything together. Predicting just how long proved impossible - the "first law of Frisbee" is "make no remark more predictive than 'Watch this!'" Soon we'll be able to say that about Hero-U.


Egoncasteel on August 17
"Estimated delivery: Oct 2013" coming up on 4 years overdue, and that's with double dipping with 2 Kickstarter campaigns. Here I thought I backed a Quest for Glory Game not Duke Nukem.

1fd4eab253f1ff236d0807b3c0c1324a_original.jpg

Corey Cole 2-time creator on August 17
We're right on schedule for that, Egon - we started work on Quest for Glory V in 1992, and the game shipped in 1998 - six years. We started design on Hero's Quest in 1982, and it shipped in 1989 - seven years. Then again, we started Hero-U design in 2003, about 14 years ago. Its first incarnation was an interactive web site.
:retarded:



Justin
Superbacker
on August 17

The only thing your last comments proves Corey is how utterly ignorant your original ETA was. In fact, since you keep bring up YOUR specific past projects as a reference then it pretty much shows you knowingly lied about your original ETA. I can't believe you would use such phrases as "we're right on schedule". What happened to keeping it real?

All our games took 6-7 years so this one is right on schedule!!!! Oh but um, we thought for some unknown alien reason that this was originally going to take only 1 year and we based that on um, well....purple cows!

Further more you lied again on your second kickstarter project because you estimated for them total time to be 4 years.....more purple cows?

Don't tell us this game is right on schedule based on YOUR experience when YOU are the one that told us it was only going to take 1 year, then you said 4 years, both of which have passed.

We keep going around in circle with this, I expect you to at least "keep it real". Quit with the nonsense comments. Absolutely nothing about this project is on schedule!
Redshlrt on August 26
Is there any info to share on the unusable programmer work mentioned in the 'Money Matters' update from 2015? I haven't been following all the updates and trying to play catch up and search through comments is tough. I'm curious why that much work had to be scrapped


1fd4eab253f1ff236d0807b3c0c1324a_original.jpg

Corey Cole 2-time creator 4 days ago
@Redshirt: Sorry for the slow response. You asked about "unusable" work. Generally it's when a developer (artist or programmer) implements a prototype, but doesn't finish it. We scrapped most of the 2D characters and backgrounds because they looked bad in comparison to the later 3D work. We still have a small number of 2D props in the game, hopefully not noticeable to players.

Two different programmers worked on sound and music subsystems, but did not finish their work, and it didn't fit into the systems we're using now. One of our top early programmers prototyped multiple scenes of the game using a combination of 2D and 3D, but they looked very primitive next to later work, so we scrapped them and started over. We're also remaking the opening video, because the art style in it does not fit with the current look of the game.

I should emphasize that this is a normal aspect of all game development. We hope to avoid it each time (and sometimes do), but often have to "bite the bullet" and accept throwing out earlier work. Quest for Glory V was a case where we initially developed prototypes using 2D, switched to an in-house Voxel engine that looked great, but was too slow, then developed a traditional polygon-based 3D engine that was fast enough, but looked primitive. That caused the project to run years late and millions of dollars over budget.

On both Quest for Glory I and II, we had scenes that were fully developed, but didn't work as intended. The Kobold Cave in QG1 had crashing bugs and had to be completely rewritten. The harem scene in QG2 was originally "guess the programmer's mind about the right path to take or die", so we had that rewritten. Both of those changes delayed the project release, and were very dangerous to do at the last minute, but had to be done.

Other than Lori and me, John Paul Selwood is the only team member who has been with us throughout the project. We've even had him redo a lot of his own earlier work as the graphic style developed and as he is maturing as an artist.

Just quoting for posterity as we all know how this story is going to end.

grrm_size3.jpg


Infinitron
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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We later learned from other Sierra developers that two other divisions of Sierra made the exact same mistake with King's Quest: Mask of Eternity and Gabriel Knight 3. Each group developed a custom 3D engine for each of those games, and none was up to the standard of the best 3rd party 3D engines.
Since I view Hero-U as nothing but a tragedy for all parties, that part of the post doesn't interest me much. But this part does. Maybe it's old news (Blackthorne?), but I hadn't seen it before. Sierra built an adventure game empire on the back of reusable engines: AGI (up until KQ4?) and SCI (up until SQ6?). For the most part, the games used these two engines (albeit with variants) with two basic mechanics (parser then verb bar), which meant that not only could the development crews start with a grounding in the engines, they could also (I assume?) share resources and tips and tricks. And players knew more or less how to play every Sierra game of an era if they'd played any one of them.

Then abruptly they decide each of their games needs a bespoke engine nothing like the old ones, none of them playing like the others?! Why?
 

Boleskine

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Sep 12, 2013
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https://www.kickstarter.com/project...ion/comments?cursor=18225578#comment-18225577

Corey Cole 2-time creator 3 days ago
Malik, absolutely you have every right to comment. As for funding, we've been out of funds for two years. Everything since then has come out of loans, and Lori's and my retirement accounts. It's safe to say at this point that we've personally spent as much on this project as we received from both Kickstarter campaigns. It's a huge risk.

Justin, we're very close on the testing schedule you mentioned. The first group of testers have been in the wine cellar for about a month. There is a single reason we haven't expanded testing to the full set of Alpha Test backers, and it has nothing to do with the game. We have integrated bug reporting with Asana, and that feature has been having problems. Since the programmer in charge of it only works two nights a week, and we have to do a full game build to test each change to it, it's taking a couple of months to get right. Currently, there is a problem with Macintosh builds that we need to fix before I can open up testing to a larger group. In say an Electronic Arts game, the same things would be happening, but you wouldn't hear about them until the game launched.

Meanwhile, the game and testing are progressing well. I'll post about that in the next update, but we now have 25 testers going through the full game story in the castle and wine cellar. We'll add the Sea Caves in a patch in about two weeks.

Are we going to make the November 15 release? Realistically, probably not, but it's going to be close. As we get more feedback from the testers, most of our team has to switch to bug-fixing mode, and Lori and Josh need to rewrite sections of the text and dialogue to better explain anything testers find confusing.

What you're getting for this is a game that is much more sophisticated than Quest for Glory, with triple the dialogue of "the CD-ROM from Hell", Quest for Glory IV. Lori continues to flesh out the dialogue with more options every day. A typical QGIV scene had five or six game events; they often have 20 or more in this game. That means more realistic, living dialogue that we hope will let players feel is if they are participating in an interactive film, not just playing a game.

Will we succeed? We'll all find out soon. In the meantime, Lori and I are confident that we are giving backers the ambitious game experience we promised them five years ago. We knew it would be hard then; we didn't know it would be "five years" hard. But looking back, I don't see how we could have done this much faster. Even without the setbacks from developers leaving the team, Lori and Josh have been writing all this time, and it's all necessary to give players real choices and many, many surprises throughout the game.

I may be embarrassed at the many mistakes I've made over the last five years (or ten, if you count the years when I *didn't* work on a game before we started Hero-U), but I have zero guilt. We're working hard and making a really special and unique game. We could have done something cookie cutter in two years, but it wouldn't have been this Hero-U.
 

DeepOcean

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Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Jesus Christ, the hype for this one will be big or just kill me with disappoint, hope is a good game and the Coles aren't thinking on retiring again and if they keep making games, that the next one don't be this hard, I would enjoy a few good adventure games to come.
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
Developer
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Messages
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I don't think there will be any hype for this. Quest for Glory is pretty much forgotten by now, the game will probably be rather ugly by the indie standards and I kinda doubt that the gameplay will be any good. QFGs always had excellent concept and atmosphere, but gameplay-wise they were pretty crude. You understand this once you play that QfG 2 fan remaster where the stuff is actually polished.

Given that they've missed the golden spot for release (by several years, at the very least), this will probably be a rather silent trainwreck.
 

Lhynn

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Aug 28, 2013
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Lets keep calm and think positively guys, the game is definitely 100% coming!
 

V_K

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at a Nowhere near you
QFGs always had excellent concept and atmosphere, but gameplay-wise they were pretty crude. You understand this once you play that QfG 2 fan remaster where the stuff is actually polished.
Huh? QfG2 (and I've only played the remake) is like the weakest of the bunch because of stupid timed events. It's far, far behind QfG1&4.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
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California
Everything about that update makes me uncomfortable. It's like an Aaronfsky movie writ small. Each of these statements is either candid or deceptive, and I'm not sure which is more horrific.

(1) The Coles are putting themselves in line for bankruptcy.
(2) Their coder has spent ~2 months on bug reporting. Not on reported bugs. On the reporting itself.
(3) "[W]e hope ... players [will] feel is if they are participating in an interactive film, not just playing a game."
(4) "I don't see how we could have done this much faster."
(5) "I have zero guilt."

I really hope the game delivers -- road to redemption, indeed.
 

Barbarian

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Jun 7, 2015
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https://www.kickstarter.com/project...ion/comments?cursor=18225578#comment-18225577

Corey Cole 2-time creator 3 days ago
What you're getting for this is a game that is much more sophisticated than Quest for Glory, with triple the dialogue of "the CD-ROM from Hell", Quest for Glory IV. Lori continues to flesh out the dialogue with more options every day. A typical QGIV scene had five or six game events; they often have 20 or more in this game. That means more realistic, living dialogue that we hope will let players feel is if they are participating in an interactive film, not just playing a game.

But why?

With a limited budget and time constraints they could very well shoot for something like QfG1, a self-contained masterpiece with a few good hours of gameplay and tons of replay value. Yet they go overboard.

Anyway, it is not that these old sierra guys forgot how to develop and design games. Not at all. The thing is that they never learned how to produce games. We love to badmouth "the suits" but there was a good reason why even in the old days sucessfull companies needed competent people to take care of budgeting, schedule, marketing and sales.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Did Sierra really have great producers and "suits"? Or did they just have the inertia of an established template set by their earliest games and a modesty forced by technical limitations?

(3) "[W]e hope ... players [will] feel is if they are participating in an interactive film, not just playing a game."

I think what they meant by "interactive film" is that the quantity of different text responses from NPCs will be so rich that it'll feel like you're in real life (so, a live action "film") rather than in a game? That seems the only way to harmonize that statement with what comes before it.
 

almondblight

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Did Sierra really have great producers and "suits"? Or did they just have the inertia of an established template set by their earliest games and a modesty forced by technical limitations?

The article in this thread does a pretty good job at showing what the Sierra system was. It doesn't surprise me that someone who could create great stuff inside that ecosystem would have trouble outside of it. For example, think about how much problem the programmers have been for Hero-U. In the Sierra system they'd get a stable programmer at the beginning, and there's a good chance they would be using an internal engine they were experienced with.
 

Blackthorne

Infamous Quests
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Codex 2014 Divinity: Original Sin 2
Shit happens. Let's see what happens when this eventually gets released.

My personal thoughts? The game may be fun and we might all even like it. I don't think it will be anywhere close to a financial success for them, though... the marketplace isn't too favorable at the moment. So, even if they win.... they stand to lose. It's a heavy lode.


Bt
 

Lhynn

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Financial success was never on the table, they made it clear when they first started. To be honest this sounds more and more like they were writing a "how not to" guide more than actual development.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/transolargames/hero-u-rogue-to-redemption/posts/1965158

Finding the Balance in Hero-U

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Finding the Balance

Balancing the Testing Process
So far we’ve proceeded very cautiously with pre-Alpha testing of Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption. Sierra never sent unfinished games out “into the wild” until they had gone through weeks of in-house testing. There was no Beta testing for any Quest for Glory or our other games

Looking back, I shudder at that process! It “broke” a couple of times, notably with Quest for Glory IV. Players started out in a cave, made it out… and frequently crashed the game in the next scene. Very few people had online access then, so there was no easy way to patch the game and fix the hundreds of problems with the shipping version

With Hero-U, we are making sure we don’t repeat those mistakes. We started out by letting a few backers test part of the game. Sure enough, something broke. Oddly, it wasn’t Hero-U! Instead, we found ourselves debugging the bug-finding process. Our ISP wouldn’t let us send out registration confirmation emails. Then the bug reporting tool itself broke

We are also balancing putting the final touches into the game while resolving hundreds of reports. Most of these are things such as corrections to spelling and grammar (in several languages due to the game setting). Some are more serious - players found they could get rich by finding the same leather jacket over and over, and selling the extras. (That also happened in Quest for Glory II, where players could get rich harvesting the Dervish’s beard.) A few have been actual game stoppers

This is normal and good. The small QA staff at Sierra often filed thousands of bug reports for a single game before they deemed it ready to ship. My personal best was about 100 reports on Castle of Dr. Brain, a relatively small and simple game that we all thought was rock-solid before we handed it off to QA. According to the QA lead, yes, 100 bugs *is* rock-solid. :)

So You Want to Be a Tester
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Bug? Or Advanced Hiding Skills?

Over the next month, we will gradually open more areas of the game to testers, and we will also invite more testers with each “build”. If you backed Hero-U at a level that included Alpha and/or Beta test privileges, keep an eye on your email for an invitation from the support account at hero-u.net

I will offer test builds to the rest of our Alpha testers over the next few weeks, and we hope to move into the Beta phase in mid-November. Entering Beta testing will mean that we believe the game is completely playable, although it may still have some rough edges. Beta will continue until we are satisfied that the game is complete, crash-free, and fun to play. Being a playtester is both exciting - you get to be one of the first to see a new game - and at times frustrating. You will report a problem - possibly a showstopper - and it may take us two weeks or more to fix it. Playtesting is not for the faint of heart.

What does it mean to be a tester? You will get to experience the often chaotic process of bringing the game from “almost done” to “truly ready for release”. Lori describes it as attending a series of dress rehearsals for a theatrical play. At dress rehearsal, everything can and will go wrong – costumes don’t fit, actors forget lines, the door of the set falls open, and people keep missing their cues. It looks like “insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.” (Shakespeare in Love)

Yet, somehow, when the curtain opens the next day, everything comes together and magic happens. How? “It’s a mystery.” (same film). In reality, of course, it’s a combination of hard work and getting the feedback we need to solve most of the problems with the game.

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Streets of Caligari (Work in Progress)

Getting the RPG Balance Right
Playtesting is also a “matter of balance”. As with most role-playing games, Shawn will face increasingly difficult challenges as the game progresses. To handle them, he will have to become smarter, more fit, more charming, and more agile.

How much money does Shawn need? How much time does he have to complete a challenge? Is he strong enough to endure the hardships he faces? We want to make sure that he has the skills he needs at each stage of the game without making the challenges too easy.

Hero-U is designed so that most, possibly all, combat is avoidable. Shawn can sneak around enemies, steal from them, and use diplomacy to avoid fights. Some of our playtesters may choose the “peaceful path” and make sure that the game is completable - though more difficult - without combat.

Others will specialize on checking combat and skill improvement balance. We want to make sure players can realistically improve Shawn’s skills enough to tackle challenging puzzles late in the game. Of course, it’s also fun to watch Shawn improve through his actions.

Then there are the relationships. Shawn should be able to make friends with most of his classmates, maybe even reaching True Love status with one (or two or three, if he plays the game that way). How many “One and Only” rings can one Rogue find and give away? Is Shawn a genuinely nice guy or a devious trickster? It all depends upon the choices that the player makes. All actions have consequences. That’s why we need a huge cadre of testers - there’s so much variation to the game.

Keeping in Touch
If you move or change your email address, please make sure you let us know on BackerKit. This page should work for all backers: https://hero-u-adventure-role-playing-game.backerkit.com/backer/review.

Let your friends know that Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption is at last nearing completion. They may preorder the game at a discount, or order a Meep (yes, we still have some left) at http://www.hero-u.com.

What’s the Schedule?
We had hoped to reach Beta testing around this time, with a possible game release by mid-November. Realistically, there is still too much to do. We’re now looking to reach Beta in mid-to-late November, with a game release in December or January. Once you get your copy of the game, please check back regularly to see if we need to patch it post-launch.

We will likely ship the physical goods - mostly posters, yearbooks, and boxed copies of the game - about three months after the digital game release. That reflects a combination of lead time, leeway to make game patches before pressing physical disks, and time Lori and I expect to be devoting to publicity, preparing the physical add-ons, and the myriad administrative tasks that suddenly appear every time a game is released.

An Interview with the DOS Games Club
Lori and I had a chat with two of the leaders of the DOS Games Club (https://www.dosgameclub.com/interview-with-the-coles/). This is a group that picks an old MS-DOS game each month. Everybody plays that game, then meets to discuss it, similar to a book club. Back in August, they all played either Hero’s Quest or the remake, Quest for Glory 1. Martijn reached out to us to learn more about how we made those games, and we were happy to share our experiences. You can visit the above link for more information, or listen to the podcast directly at:

http://www.dosgameclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ep7.mp3
 

Boleskine

Arcane
Joined
Sep 12, 2013
Messages
4,045
They've definitely made progress on the technical/visual side. The game looks fairly polished.
 

Barbarian

Arcane
Joined
Jun 7, 2015
Messages
7,307
At this point I just don't want the Coles to go bankrupt or worse.

They are bound to. Even if this game turns out to be great, it is not the kind of game that gets a lot of sales.

Hopefully codexers will do their part at least.
 

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