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KickStarter ICY: Frostbite Edition

Brutan

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Shadorwun: Hong Kong
I know it's taboo to ask but I'll do it anyway, how are the sales going?
 

4249

I stalk the night
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Joined
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Divinity: Original Sin 2
Uh, after completing the Sacred Items quest, I can just get it again and again and again, same dialogues, same events. Is this intended? I'm kind of starting to feel like I should wait for a patch for two to iron out most of the bugs. Seem to be encountering them very often.

edit:
Now I managed to break the shop tooltip somehow. No description appears when I click items in the shop. Also what are these two empty slots with I letters in them:

aRV8j4r.png
 
Last edited:

OwNathan

Innervoid Interactive
Developer
Joined
Nov 11, 2013
Messages
210
Uh, after completing the Sacred Items quest, I can just get it again and again and again, same dialogues, same events. Is this intended? I'm kind of starting to feel like I should wait for a patch for two to iron out most of the bugs. Seem to be encountering them very often.
You can wait for tomorrow, we should release some major fixes

I know it's taboo to ask but I'll do it anyway, how are the sales going?
Hard to say, we'll have to wait 2 weeks for the whole refunds thing.
 

mindx2

Codex Roaming East Coast Reporter
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Perusing his PC Museum shelves.
Codex 2012 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire RPG Wokedex Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I know it's taboo to ask but I'll do it anyway, how are the sales going?
Don't see it as taboo around here as developers (AoD, Telepath Tactics, SitS, QfI) have been quite open and forthcoming about their sales. It's very refreshing to see them be as open as they have been and tells me a lot about them (or as much as one can get on the Interwebz).
 

OwNathan

Innervoid Interactive
Developer
Joined
Nov 11, 2013
Messages
210
Alright, think I'll stop for tonight then :)
Feel free to express even bad impressions, after all feedbacks will help us. That merchant thing will be fixed with the next patch.

Don't see it as taboo around here as developers (AoD, Telepath Tactics, SitS, QfI) have been quite open and forthcoming about their sales. It's very refreshing to see them be as open as they have been and tells me a lot about them (or as much as one can get on the Interwebz).
Yeah, shouldn't be a secret, it's really helpful for other developers too. That's why we're going to to multiple reports in the next months, to help other indies to do their market search.

Anyway, steamspy.com is quite reliable for Steam, though it updates slowly.
 
Joined
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2,071
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Siberia
Lucked out in giftstravaganza thread and got a key, played for 2 hours and ended up buying a copy for a friend. We usually play similar games simultaneously to see where our choices will get us. Though Choice of robots - is still the best for that kind of thing.

Overall i like it so far, despite some wonky writing and a few bugs. There's never enough games like KoDP, Academagia, Zafehouse and such. Needs more work obviously, and mod support down the line would be nice.


:greatjob:
 

Ninjerk

Arcane
Joined
Jul 10, 2013
Messages
14,323
I had different reports, but all of them pointed out the bad writing in the first parts of the game, but an improvement while progressing through the plot. Some said the level was sometimes bad, but sometimes good, and that gives me hope. I trained a lot to improve my english, I started to read in english and I fell more confident now, I'd really like to keep writing but to do that I clearly need to know what went wrong in ICY.

Since it doesn't take a lot to rewrite some parts of the game to make them better, with some feedbacks I think ICY could be dramatically improved.
I've pulled a couple of books out of my now (relatively) small collection to illustrate one of the bigger problems I see with your writing, and it isn't that you're unfamiliar with English.

Image dump with spoiler(s) inside the cut:
After introducing the PC's "family" (this word is used many times to describe what I guess are ad hoc tribes of people trying to make it in this world), their camp is attacked by slavers. After days of being led around "the Plains" (I guess), the slavers happen upon some neutral travelers.
mFv2Qzt.png

FrioAkY.png

TVngd9F.png

jQnbpvO.png

cBFc9Qu.png

D3pPCpe.png

nNOjnGm.png

mqCBJUg.png

D7H5xkY.png

E33e2jC.png

I want you to think about this exchange (and everything before and after it, because there are problems elsewhere, too) as I quote a couple of passages here from the first books I could find that might scratch the itch this sequence gives me. They're both pretty pulpy, but they'll certainly do.

The first is the opening to The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler:
It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.

What does Chandler (by way of his protagonist in the first-person POV) tell us here? How does he tell it?

It seems to me his protagonist is pretty detail oriented. He isn't just "wearing a spiffy suit." It's blue--powder blue to be exact--and it's accompanied by a no-nonsense professional attitude because he's trying to cash in on a big job. How big? The entryway isn't just "two stories big"--"...[it] would have let in a troop of elephants..." and Chandler goes on to describe (what is in actuality I believe to be a painting, a Waterhouse perhaps, but I doubt it somehow). Chandler conjures the image of elephants to describe how impressively large the entryway to the estate is, and I doubt being a native-Italian speaker makes an elephant, nevermind a troop (however numerous that is), any smaller. His internal monologue about the painting puts the protagonist directly at odds with the Romanticist ideal of the piece he's mocking--more specifically that the knight isn't the hero he pretends to be.

The second passage I want to point you at is the introduction to Count Zero by William Gibson (second in the Sprawl trilogy, I think):
They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Dehli, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.

Because he had a good agent he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway. The Dutch surgeon liked ot joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in the shed, in a support vat.

It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned the square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccarides. They bought the eye and genitals on the open market. The eyes were green.

Short and to the point. Gibson needs to be, because he's overloading us with terms we likely have little familiarity with. We all likely have at least a small share of familiarity with TNT, but hexogene? Shark-cartilage polysaccarides? Slamhound? There's clearly some high-level science and technology at play, even if some of it is probably bullshit on a conceptual level. Gibson is also telling us a little about the protagonist, and a whole hell of a lot more about the setting. Turner works for someone important, and in this world people who work for important someones can survive being nearly vaporized in an assassination attempt via potent explosive and... slamhound (whatever that is).

As I said before, this stuff isn't even great by any standard but the most general, but the authors convey quite a bit by not only in the what they are telling but especially the how they are telling it.

=====

So to get back to the scene I selected (by frame):

1) What is a "peaceful approach" in the world of ICY? How do they signal a parley? Were the player and his fellow slaves marched to what appeared to be a pre-determined meeting spot? Did the mercenaries emerge from a treeline with a white flag tied around the barrel of a gun (and for that matter, as another nit to pick, what makes these guys mercenaries and why can the player character tell that they are mercenaries when he's never seen them before)?

2) You've described their weapons as "polished and shiny." That's it? This is a good opportunity to make use of elephants and such. Maybe the player character has a memory of a stash of ancient coins, useless in this brave new world (maybe, I still haven't seen anything about money except that there are apparently mercenaries--perhaps this is the language barrier in action), and you could relate it to them somehow. I don't know. Just give the reader something to relate to rather than a couple of interchangeable adjectives.

High-tech equipment. What year is it? How long ago did everything change? Where did civilization stop advancing? We have no frame of reference yet for what "high-tech" could possibly mean, except perhaps that the three mysterious figures are wearing daylight-compatible night-vision goggles (or something).

3) No really huge sins are committed here. It would be nice to call attention to the character and their specific equipment, but I figure if you can figure out what will fix frame 2 that it will follow in this frame.

4) We've already been told that the bandits are in a state of "reverence and awe" when they observe the mercenaries. This would be a perfect opportunity to describe how this particular bandit approaches them. What is his body language when he talks to them? Does he shrink as he approaches or shift his weight from foot-to-foot? The next frame seems to suggest there's some skepticism on the part of the mercenaries--shouldn't we have a clearer picture of the trepidation of the bandits at potentially getting nothing out of this exchange? This is post-apoc, after all.

5) What makes the silence "intimidating?"

6) What does the medical equipment look like? Is it all in good repair? Are there tubes? Does the needle appear sterile? It's possible the player character doesn't know the importance of sterility in medical equipment, but the player likely has some idea. Remember when you as the narrator (if your game relies on narrative elements) are talking to the player and when someone or something in the environment is talking to the player character. The player needs to feel the sting of the needle when it goes in!

7) "They go away and..." EXPAND.

8) "They walk away bringing Goran and Irma..." EXPAND. How do they take them away? How are they restrained? How is the player character restrained? Do the mercenaries take different precautions than the bandits?

9) What is the order to start walking? How do bandits talk in ICY? Give us something. ANYTHING!

=====

Stylistically, the way you write for your game(s) may differ in part because of the difference in media and you will certainly need to tailor your writing to what it is in any particular scene you're trying to convey. However, for a game that obviously leans so heavily upon its textual elements, it sure is curious how barren the descriptions are for what is happening from moment to moment. It isn't mitigated in the slightest by the illustrations (which are pretty darn good, btw, kudos to your artist(s)) that are repeated several times for each scene.

I was going to quote a passage from a textbook I got when I was a freshman or sophomore in college (Intro to Creative Writing I think, but it's been 10 years, IDR), but it's late, I'm tired, and I'm over typing things as you can well guess. I hope this was helpful.
 

OwNathan

Innervoid Interactive
Developer
Joined
Nov 11, 2013
Messages
210
I've pulled a couple of books out of my now (relatively) small collection to illustrate one of the bigger problems I see with your writing, and it isn't that you're unfamiliar with English.

Image dump with spoiler(s) inside the cut:
After introducing the PC's "family" (this word is used many times to describe what I guess are ad hoc tribes of people trying to make it in this world), their camp is attacked by slavers. After days of being led around "the Plains" (I guess), the slavers happen upon some neutral travelers.
mFv2Qzt.png

FrioAkY.png

TVngd9F.png

jQnbpvO.png

cBFc9Qu.png

D3pPCpe.png

nNOjnGm.png

mqCBJUg.png

D7H5xkY.png

E33e2jC.png

I want you to think about this exchange (and everything before and after it, because there are problems elsewhere, too) as I quote a couple of passages here from the first books I could find that might scratch the itch this sequence gives me. They're both pretty pulpy, but they'll certainly do.

The first is the opening to The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler:
It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.

What does Chandler (by way of his protagonist in the first-person POV) tell us here? How does he tell it?

It seems to me his protagonist is pretty detail oriented. He isn't just "wearing a spiffy suit." It's blue--powder blue to be exact--and it's accompanied by a no-nonsense professional attitude because he's trying to cash in on a big job. How big? The entryway isn't just "two stories big"--"...[it] would have let in a troop of elephants..." and Chandler goes on to describe (what is in actuality I believe to be a painting, a Waterhouse perhaps, but I doubt it somehow). Chandler conjures the image of elephants to describe how impressively large the entryway to the estate is, and I doubt being a native-Italian speaker makes an elephant, nevermind a troop (however numerous that is), any smaller. His internal monologue about the painting puts the protagonist directly at odds with the Romanticist ideal of the piece he's mocking--more specifically that the knight isn't the hero he pretends to be.

The second passage I want to point you at is the introduction to Count Zero by William Gibson (second in the Sprawl trilogy, I think):
They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Dehli, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.

Because he had a good agent he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway. The Dutch surgeon liked ot joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in the shed, in a support vat.

It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned the square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccarides. They bought the eye and genitals on the open market. The eyes were green.

Short and to the point. Gibson needs to be, because he's overloading us with terms we likely have little familiarity with. We all likely have at least a small share of familiarity with TNT, but hexogene? Shark-cartilage polysaccarides? Slamhound? There's clearly some high-level science and technology at play, even if some of it is probably bullshit on a conceptual level. Gibson is also telling us a little about the protagonist, and a whole hell of a lot more about the setting. Turner works for someone important, and in this world people who work for important someones can survive being nearly vaporized in an assassination attempt via potent explosive and... slamhound (whatever that is).

As I said before, this stuff isn't even great by any standard but the most general, but the authors convey quite a bit by not only in the what they are telling but especially the how they are telling it.

=====

So to get back to the scene I selected (by frame):

1) What is a "peaceful approach" in the world of ICY? How do they signal a parley? Were the player and his fellow slaves marched to what appeared to be a pre-determined meeting spot? Did the mercenaries emerge from a treeline with a white flag tied around the barrel of a gun (and for that matter, as another nit to pick, what makes these guys mercenaries and why can the player character tell that they are mercenaries when he's never seen them before)?

2) You've described their weapons as "polished and shiny." That's it? This is a good opportunity to make use of elephants and such. Maybe the player character has a memory of a stash of ancient coins, useless in this brave new world (maybe, I still haven't seen anything about money except that there are apparently mercenaries--perhaps this is the language barrier in action), and you could relate it to them somehow. I don't know. Just give the reader something to relate to rather than a couple of interchangeable adjectives.

High-tech equipment. What year is it? How long ago did everything change? Where did civilization stop advancing? We have no frame of reference yet for what "high-tech" could possibly mean, except perhaps that the three mysterious figures are wearing daylight-compatible night-vision goggles (or something).

3) No really huge sins are committed here. It would be nice to call attention to the character and their specific equipment, but I figure if you can figure out what will fix frame 2 that it will follow in this frame.

4) We've already been told that the bandits are in a state of "reverence and awe" when they observe the mercenaries. This would be a perfect opportunity to describe how this particular bandit approaches them. What is his body language when he talks to them? Does he shrink as he approaches or shift his weight from foot-to-foot? The next frame seems to suggest there's some skepticism on the part of the mercenaries--shouldn't we have a clearer picture of the trepidation of the bandits at potentially getting nothing out of this exchange? This is post-apoc, after all.

5) What makes the silence "intimidating?"

6) What does the medical equipment look like? Is it all in good repair? Are there tubes? Does the needle appear sterile? It's possible the player character doesn't know the importance of sterility in medical equipment, but the player likely has some idea. Remember when you as the narrator (if your game relies on narrative elements) are talking to the player and when someone or something in the environment is talking to the player character. The player needs to feel the sting of the needle when it goes in!

7) "They go away and..." EXPAND.

8) "They walk away bringing Goran and Irma..." EXPAND. How do they take them away? How are they restrained? How is the player character restrained? Do the mercenaries take different precautions than the bandits?

9) What is the order to start walking? How do bandits talk in ICY? Give us something. ANYTHING!

=====

Stylistically, the way you write for your game(s) may differ in part because of the difference in media and you will certainly need to tailor your writing to what it is in any particular scene you're trying to convey. However, for a game that obviously leans so heavily upon its textual elements, it sure is curious how barren the descriptions are for what is happening from moment to moment. It isn't mitigated in the slightest by the illustrations (which are pretty darn good, btw, kudos to your artist(s)) that are repeated several times for each scene.

I was going to quote a passage from a textbook I got when I was a freshman or sophomore in college (Intro to Creative Writing I think, but it's been 10 years, IDR), but it's late, I'm tired, and I'm over typing things as you can well guess. I hope this was helpful.
Jeez, that's a feedback!

Thank you very much for this. I found myself to have a some quite limited thought patterns in english, add that to the fact that also in italian I don't like that much getting into description and I guess we have the problem before our eyes. I tend to keep description short, put as much details as I can in them and that's difficult in english with my limited vocabulary. Why some descriptions seem so trivial? Because I tried to express a concept and I failed to convey it with the right words. The whole script is getting reviewed and those problems will disappear, in the meantime I already decided to follow a new workflow: write in italian, translate in english, add a lot of comments about what I want to convey and wait for a good editor to edit it. That should give me the advantages of writing in my native language, being able to have thousands more words, patterns and structures to write things down.

Thanks again for your feedback, going through ICY's writing helped me understand a lot of things, with the right attitude I could already be able to improve things! Having such a direct feedback is the best way for me to understand where I fail.
 

Ninjerk

Arcane
Joined
Jul 10, 2013
Messages
14,323
Jeez, that's a feedback!

Thank you very much for this. I found myself to have a some quite limited thought patterns in english, add that to the fact that also in italian I don't like that much getting into description and I guess we have the problem before our eyes. I tend to keep description short, put as much details as I can in them and that's difficult in english with my limited vocabulary. Why some descriptions seem so trivial? Because I tried to express a concept and I failed to convey it with the right words. The whole script is getting reviewed and those problems will disappear, in the meantime I already decided to follow a new workflow: write in italian, translate in english, add a lot of comments about what I want to convey and wait for a good editor to edit it. That should give me the advantages of writing in my native language, being able to have thousands more words, patterns and structures to write things down.

Thanks again for your feedback, going through ICY's writing helped me understand a lot of things, with the right attitude I could already be able to improve things! Having such a direct feedback is the best way for me to understand where I fail.
You might consider doing some of what I'll call "investigative reading." Pick a relatively short novel (short story collections would be great, too) that's written in English and every week or two and try to bang it out in a couple days. Keep the books pretty mainstream (e.g. bestseller crime thrillers, military novels by the likes of Clancy or W.E.B. Griffin, etc.) so you don't have to deal with terribly complex themes or metaphors. Pay attention to how they describe scenes, characters, etc.
 

Abelian

Somebody's Alt
Joined
Nov 17, 2013
Messages
2,289
I found myself to have a some quite limited thought patterns in english, add that to the fact that also in italian I don't like that much getting into description and I guess we have the problem before our eyes.
Don't disparage your English skills. Your entire reply was well-written and used non-trivial vocabulary.

As an additional reading recommendation, I would suggest you read some Hemingway short stories, as he's a prime example of a writer using simple English to write compelling narratives.
 

Ninjerk

Arcane
Joined
Jul 10, 2013
Messages
14,323
IIRC, D.H. Lawrence would be a good author to read up on, especially the short story about the kid and his rocking horse. I can't remember the title.
 

OwNathan

Innervoid Interactive
Developer
Joined
Nov 11, 2013
Messages
210
You might consider doing some of what I'll call "investigative reading." Pick a relatively short novel (short story collections would be great, too) that's written in English and every week or two and try to bang it out in a couple days. Keep the books pretty mainstream (e.g. bestseller crime thrillers, military novels by the likes of Clancy or W.E.B. Griffin, etc.) so you don't have to deal with terribly complex themes or metaphors. Pay attention to how they describe scenes, characters, etc.

As an additional reading recommendation, I would suggest you read some Hemingway short stories, as he's a prime example of a writer using simple English to write compelling narratives.
Thank you both for your suggestions. Right now I'm finishing American Pastoral by Philip Roth, then I'll head towards the authors you mentioned. About short novels, I'm reading Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors, I guess that should be perfect to start paying more attention to the whole narrative structure.


Don't disparage your English skills. Your entire reply was well-written and used non-trivial vocabulary.
I guess everything becomes harder when I have to get out of my comfort zone. Discussing on a forum about games is something I did for most of my life, while writing a whole game was a completely new experience.
 

Saduj

Arcane
Joined
Aug 26, 2012
Messages
2,547
Question for Inner Void - How do character attributes affect the game? I went 3-4-3 and couldn't tell what effect it was having on the game. Get the feeling that maybe I should have min-maxed.

Finished my first play through on Sunday. Took about 5 hours. Overall I enjoyed it but combat gets too simple/boring towards the end. It may not be the main focus of the game but there is enough of it that it should be interesting. Towards the middle of the game, I had so many bullets that every combat encounter went the same way: Back off if fight starts at melee range then use "attack with gun" option until enemies are all dead. Making the player equip the whole group instead of just the main character might help with the "too many bullets" issue. But I also think combat needs to have more options and the game needs to find a way to make different options viable in different situations. I'm not really clear on how the mechanics behind combat work so its hard to make specific suggestions.
 

OwNathan

Innervoid Interactive
Developer
Joined
Nov 11, 2013
Messages
210
Question for Inner Void - How do character attributes affect the game? I went 3-4-3 and couldn't tell what effect it was having on the game. Get the feeling that maybe I should have min-maxed.

Finished my first play through on Sunday. Took about 5 hours. Overall I enjoyed it but combat gets too simple/boring towards the end. It may not be the main focus of the game but there is enough of it that it should be interesting. Towards the middle of the game, I had so many bullets that every combat encounter went the same way: Back off if fight starts at melee range then use "attack with gun" option until enemies are all dead. Making the player equip the whole group instead of just the main character might help with the "too many bullets" issue. But I also think combat needs to have more options and the game needs to find a way to make different options viable in different situations. I'm not really clear on how the mechanics behind combat work so its hard to make specific suggestions.
That's something we will improve in the next months, we're considering different options but we don't know yet if we'll only be able to improve the current system or work on a new one. In both cases, we want to improve the overall variety and let the player use more skills and attributes during fights.

About attributes, right now they have some passive effects, they unlock some dialog options and are sometimes used while hunting, scavenging or fights.
 

Brutan

Savant
Patron
Joined
Oct 9, 2014
Messages
127
Location
Romania
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Shadorwun: Hong Kong
I finished the game a while back.

In a nutshell: the game is good, as a backer I'm satisfied and would back again if given the chance.

The longer version:

- what I liked:
1. Interesting setting.
2. Interesting story.
3. A good mix of Visual novel with with RPG aspects.
4. The different choices given throughout the game. Well most of the occur in mid to late game.
5. The ending.

What I would have liked to see:
1. A little more dark/evil options. I can't stress this enough. I mean the game world has raiders + slavers and yet I'm not given the chance to blackmail/abuse my party members, decide the fate of the enemies I slain. For example, there's a woman in my party with kids, I would have liked to be given the option to threaten her that I'll do something to the kids or at least threaten her that I could leave her behind with them.
2. While the game has random encounters I would have liked a little more variety, like you meet a family (as in two parents with kids) in desperate need of food and how do you react to that (hopefully and all options would be for do gooders).
3. Random events between party members.
4. Party rules on how you treat your prisoners, party members, outsiders etc.

- what I didn't like:
1. The black guy incident. I roleplay I character that looks out for his interest first, second for the family and couldn't care less about strangers. In fact he has no problem with abusing strangers if it helps him or his family. Naturally, I didn't want to get in the fight with the white dudes and wanted to wait to see how it goes and maybe attack the survivors. Of course the game didn't let me do that, even though i picked the option, I was leader of the group AND I had a high intimidation skill(does that even do anything by the way?) a little girl decided that she won't stand for it and decided to attack the white guys(with all my party members ignoring by order). Ok, we win and the black guy is thanking me. Me? After I clearly didn't want to help him. That felt weird as hell. He even joined my party(okay, that's only half bad since I asked him).
That whole episode was a mess for a character that's not a hero just waiting to help people.
2. The ending part of the game was a bit rushed IMO. I got the feeling that all those factions (especially the native tribe) all come at me, presented their case and just begged me to take their side. It seemed like let's ram though a couple of factions so he can choose some endings.

Questions:
1. Are you planning a sequel? Something akin to Shadowrun? I mean the same setting, some gameplay improvements but a different story. The game has a solid foundation IMO. I would gladly back another Ingogo campaign.
2. How did the sales go? Were they according to expectations? Are they enough to hope for a sequel?
 

OwNathan

Innervoid Interactive
Developer
Joined
Nov 11, 2013
Messages
210
We're now working on improving the game, sequels are not likely to happen very soon for different reasons:
  • we'd like a change and work on something different, with new and fresh ideas, instead of focusing again on a ice age post apocalyptic setting;
  • it took us 12 months to fully develop ICY but it would take less than 6 months to have a sequel with deep improvements all around the structure, meaning that the game would be ready to soon and sell nothing;
  • when we'll work again with ICY's setting, we'd like to do something different, deeper and more emotionally compelling on the gameplay side.
So we're now working on some radical improvements (more choices, more quests, a longer ending, some better gameplay features) on ICY and on a new game. It won't be a visual novel/RPG like ICY, but we intend to keep creating RPGs, meaning game with choices and roleplay. Thanks to the experience we made and the new people we added to the team, we'll be able to create something way more interesting. ICY sales went decently and, according to what the publisher said, it should be a profitable project, allowing us to keep creating games.

Anyway, it's hard to say if we'll ever see an ICY 2, the only sure thing is that is not going to happen really soon to avoid a total failure.
 

getter77

Augur
Joined
Oct 12, 2008
Messages
861
Location
GA, USA
Just keep polishing ICY to the utmost and carry that attitude forward on the projects to come---it will definitely inspire ever-greater confidence from your growing audience.
 

Deuce Traveler

2012 Newfag
Patron
Joined
May 11, 2012
Messages
2,899
Location
Okinawa, Japan
Grab the Codex by the pussy Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
Is there a manual? I am going through the Steam version at this time, and have been unable to locate one on the Steam page, inside the installed folder, or in game.
 

OwNathan

Innervoid Interactive
Developer
Joined
Nov 11, 2013
Messages
210
Sorry for the late answer. We added some tutorials into the game, which will soon turn into a small PDF manual. Now you just need to press the "?" to access them.
 

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