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Where the Water Tastes Like Wine - American folk tale adventure where you wander through the US

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
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Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is an upcoming game about traveling, sharing stories, and surviving manifest destiny. Featuring gorgeous illustration by Kellan Jett, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine combines 2D visuals with a 3D overworld US map. Players wander through the United States - and through a century of history - to meet a variety of people, each with their own stories to tell.

Game Features:
  • A variety of folk tales and personal stories to encounter, told by characters from all over America
  • Beautiful combination of 3D overworld and 2D illustration in its own unique style
  • Stories by a wide selection of excellent writers
  • An emerging fantastical, psychedelic, surreal, and creepy tinge as the game continues

Dim Bulb Games was founded by Johnnemann Nordhagen, co-founder of Fullbright and sole programmer on Gone Home. WTWTLW, a game inspired by the folk tales and folk music of America, is the first project by the studio.

http://www.wherethewatertasteslikewine.com/
 

aratuk

Cipher
Joined
Dec 13, 2013
Messages
466
"Each character is also heavily researched and drawn from historical contexts such as the miners' strikes, the Pullman Porters, the Bonus Army, the Long Walk of the Navajo, and many others."

I've been interested in this, but I'm wondering just how uh, preachy it might be. I mean, I've already read A People's History of the United States, thanks. Any firsthand accounts?
 

Liquorice

Educated
Joined
Nov 11, 2017
Messages
140
Looks lovely. Very atmospheric. Will probably buy it during a sale
 

AdolfSatan

Arcane
Joined
Dec 27, 2017
Messages
1,871
As it's been made obvious, the game relies heavily on its story to go on. The problem is that the quality of the writing is mediocre at best. If you're feeling the itch for an all-American classic, go read Steinbeck and listen to some Odetta.
 

Wapcaplet

Educated
Joined
Oct 14, 2017
Messages
20
Postmortem by Johnnemann Nordhagen

On a critical level, the game has not performed as well as I had hoped or expected. Coming off of all the attention, and especially the awards, I had assumed that if it failed to find an audience, it would at least be recognized by the press as something exciting. However, I forgot that festivals and awards bodies, as well as preview coverage, focus heavily on the ideas and promise of a game and maybe consider only the first few hours of play. Reviews look at the whole experience, and many places found that lacking. The game currently has a score of 75 on Metacritic. Some folks loved the game, others found it mediocre, often because of the pacing issues I mentioned above. A 75 isn’t terrible but it’s not what I wanted, obviously, nor do I feel like that number represents the actual quality of the game.
Commercially, it’s a disaster. I can’t discuss exact numbers, but in the first few weeks fewer people bought the game than I have Twitter followers, and I don’t have a lot of Twitter followers (and this tells you a lot about how effective marketing via Twitter is).

So far, I have made $0 from the game. That may look like a high number, but consider that it took four years to make — that works out to approximately $0/year. Compared to the $120,000+/year salary of a 15-year veteran in a AAA studio, it begins to look a lot smaller! And then if I go into the hourly breakdown… I don’t have an actual count of hours spent making the game, but there was a lot of crunch that went into it, so I am guesstimating I made about $0/hour. That’s not a lot! And then once you factor in the ~$140,000 I spent paying my contractors and collaborators for the game, you begin to see that maybe it wasn’t, financially speaking, worth it. I guess I will have to wait a bit longer to buy that Juicero.
My favorite part:

4. Forgetting that the PC uses a mouse and keyboard. This sounds silly, but it’s a trap other solo devs could fall into — assuming players would consume the game as I did. Whenever I play platformers or third-person games on my PC, I use a gamepad —and I did the same for Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. As a result, the controls were tuned and polished for gamepad, and the mouse and keyboard, while functional, were relegated to second place. However, we shipped on computers, not consoles. Even if PC gamers have a gamepad, they often prefer MKB controls. This meant that for reviewers and early players, the controls were suboptimal. It also had more subtle effects — a controller only has so many buttons, and it’s common to mash them all at various times to experiment with what the game can do, leading to natural discovery of under-tutorialized systems. However, no one goes into a game and starts hammering on their keyboard to discover things . So players would miss the button that opens the map, not know how to access the inventory, and not understand about whistling and hitchhiking.
Who the hell designs a game where randomly mashing buttons is an adequate substitute for a game manual or a proper tutorial?
 
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Tom Selleck

Arcane
Joined
May 6, 2013
Messages
1,203
From one of the postmortems linked to in the original Medium postmortem:

Last of all, I had a look at how past fiction handled this subject. In leftist fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, black communists became archetypal characters. Modern scholars have critiqued the paternalistic overtones of these portrayals, as the characters would be viewed exclusively through the lens of white protagonists. I reflected on Meghna Jayanth's talks about writing NPCs with agency, and went over the draft with a critical eye, trying to identify if any of the existing criticism I'd read could apply to what I'd written in the vignette, then made edits.

Just the kinda shit I want to deal with in a 'game'. The paternalistic repercussions of the white rape gaze.

Just write a fucking book, people, dios mio. If you think what you have to say needs to be read, then your quality will shake out one way or another. But like, WHAT A SHOCK that this 'game' has made $0 on Steam.

I am also very happy that we managed to represent a huge amount of America’s diversity in the writing staff for the game, and I’m proud that we gave a number of new or unheard voices a place to tell their stories.

I, for the life of me, can't imagine the developer could have been so obtuse to not understand making a product nobody wanted in a cut-throat marketplace would have led to any outcome but the one in which he's found himself.
 
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Latelistener

Arcane
Joined
May 25, 2016
Messages
2,570
Where The Water Tastes Like Wine was a 'commercial disaster,' dev says in painful post

"I’m not sure that games like this one can continue to be made in the current market," Johnnemann Nordhagen said.

Story adventure game Where The Water Tastes Like Wine struggled critically and flopped commercially, lead developer Johnnemann Nordhagen said today in a post-mortem of the game, in which he argues that its difficulties don't bode well for experimental indie games.

"Commercially, it’s a disaster," Nordhagen said. "I can’t discuss exact numbers, but in the first few weeks fewer people bought the game than I have Twitter followers, and I don’t have a lot of Twitter followers." (At the time of writing, Nordhagen has 4,272 followers.)

Although Nordhagen received support from publisher Good Shepherd to complete and market the game, Where The Water Tastes Like Wine has yet to break even. "So far, I have made $0 from the game," he said. "That may look like a high number, but consider that it took four years to make — that works out to approximately $0/year … And then once you factor in the ~$140,000 I spent paying my contractors and collaborators for the game, you begin to see that maybe it wasn’t, financially speaking, worth it."

"Joking aside — that’s dismal. And terrifying," Nordhagen said. "At the end of the day it’s astounding that a game that got this much attention from the press, that won awards, that had an all-star cast of writers and performers, that had a bizarre celebrity guest appearance(!) failed this hard. It scares me."

To Nordhagen, it's evidence of a growing trend for indie games: quality, acclaim, and attention aren't guarantees of success. "That last part should be worrying for anyone in the indie games industry," Nordhagen said. "[Where The Water Tastes Like Wine] could have been a non-commercial game, but it would have had to be very different. It would be far less polished, it wouldn’t have had the collaborators that it did, I could not have paid people who couldn’t afford to work for revenue share or for the love of the game (thus, I fear, cutting out some of the most valuable voices that this game was a platform for). I could have developed it as a side project, but it took me four years as is. Basically, I’m not sure that games like this one can continue to be made in the current market."

Nordhagen also discussed the development factors he believes contributed to Where The Water Tastes Like Wine's uphill battle. For example, it received relatively little playtesting, especially close to launch, and it abruptly lost both of its main artists mid-development. "I didn’t originally have the knowledge I needed to tackle many of the issues I encountered during development," he said, adding that the game itself "was too much to take on as a solo dev, and especially too much to take on as a commercial product."

Nordhagen previously worked as lead programmer on Gone Home, which was well-received when it released in 2014. Encouraged by Gone Home's success, Nordhagen was optimistic about Where The Water Tastes Like Wine. However, in 2018, he's unsure if creating games like these is even feasible.

"In 2014, starting a similar project seemed like a good creative and financial risk," he said. "Four years later, making any commercial game at all seems like a bad idea, and taking on the risk of an experimental, ambitious game like Where the Water Tastes Like Wine sounds terrifying."

Writer and designer Steve Gaynor, who also worked on Gone Home, made a similar point about experimental games when we spoke to him following the release of Fullbright's Tacoma, a delightful narrative-driven game whose sales paled in comparison to Gone Home's at launch.

"I think there were a lot of things about Gone Home’s launch that were kind of 'lightning in a bottle,'" Gaynor said. "2013 I think was a very different time for smaller indie games coming out that were kind of reaching into the triple-A fidelity space. Also I think that we were lucky to be responding to what I think was a real desire for more games that were less violent or more focused on story or whatever. And so yeah, Tacoma’s release I think has been a much more realistic version of what launching a game is usually like."

Nordhagen's post-mortem focuses on the game's development and reception, but he's not the only member of the team to look back on Where The Water Tastes Like Wine. Lead editor Laura Michet wrote a lengthy analysis of the herculean task of coordinating the game's many writers, and several writers, like Emily Short, have explored how they wrote their individual characters. You can find more analyses in Nordhagen's post.

https://www.pcgamer.com/where-the-water-tastes-like-wine-was-a-commercial-disaster-dev-says-in-painful-post/
 

Viata

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Joined
Nov 11, 2014
Messages
9,885
Location
Water Play Catarinense
"Joking aside — that’s dismal. And terrifying," Nordhagen said. "At the end of the day it’s astounding that a game that got this much attention from the press, that won awards, that had an all-star cast of writers and performers, that had a bizarre celebrity guest appearance(!) failed this hard. It scares me."
Well, that should teach him that any of those things means nothing if he is not an AAA developer.
 

Ezeekiel

Liturgist
Joined
Dec 19, 2016
Messages
1,783
Where The Water Tastes Like Wine was a 'commercial disaster,' dev says in painful post

More like, a lot of people naively fell for Gone Home's bait and switch bs, discovered it to be a half hour tech demo for an engine fit for 1998 with the most idiotic premise ever and thus learned the hard way to do a bit more research before buying...

The level of delusion on display on part of the dev and writer is amazing though, as is common with these types.
 

mastroego

Arcane
Joined
Apr 10, 2013
Messages
10,246
Location
Italy
Where The Water Tastes Like Wine was a 'commercial disaster,' dev says in painful post

...

"At the end of the day it’s astounding that a game that got this much attention from the press, that won awards, that had an all-star cast of writers and performers, that had a bizarre celebrity guest appearance(!) failed this hard. It scares me."
Never heard of it before, but from these telling clues, I would say SJW-enhanced game?
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
I, for the life of me, can't imagine the developer could have been so obtuse to not understand making a product nobody wanted in a cut-throat marketplace would have led to any outcome but the one in which he's found himself.
Well, I assume it was a mix of (1) feeling an artistic compulsion to make this game; (2) feeling a political obligation to do so; (3) wanting to collaborate with these writers and artists; and (4) believing that this would be anointed by a politically sympathetic press as must-play (Gone Home was one of his prior games). Even as it is, he and his game have achieved a degree of fame, prestige, and awards that would be enviable for many independent developers. Hopefully he'll break even and be able to continue making the games that move him, rather than having to work for the man.
 

AN4RCHID

Arcane
Joined
Jan 24, 2013
Messages
4,714
The lesson a lot of people took from Gone Homo's success seems to be that there is a market champing at the bit for games with awful gameplay and ham-handed stories full of gay shit. Steve Gaynor himself seems to have internalized this lesson, as he followed up with some horrible looking Faggots in Space walking sim.

Games that follwed the different lesson, that people are interested in first-person exploration in familiar, relatable environments, like Firewatch and Everyone's Gone to The Rapture, are still making money. Not to say those are great games or deserve their success ofc, but I think they hit closer to what the original appeal of GH was.
 

Shackleton

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Patron
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Dec 29, 2011
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Knackers Yard
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
Sometimes, when games get pitched to the evil publishers and they say "nope, won't sell, don't waste your time" they might actually have a fucking point.
 

aratuk

Cipher
Joined
Dec 13, 2013
Messages
466
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I don't know how much you believe in physiognomy, but here is a photo of the person behind this game.

maxresdefault.jpg
 

Dexter

Arcane
Joined
Mar 31, 2011
Messages
15,655
Let me guess. San Francisco-based developer?
Nordhaggen then goes on to debrief, stating that while the game was costly, he'll be okay financially, though he plans to move away from the costly San Francisco and go into his next project without the expectation to make money off it. "Basically, I’m not sure that games like this one can continue to be made in the current market," he says.

The lesson a lot of people took from Gone Homo's success seems to be that there is a market champing at the bit for games with awful gameplay and ham-handed stories full of gay shit. Steve Gaynor himself seems to have internalized this lesson, as he followed up with some horrible looking Faggots in Space walking sim.

Games that follwed the different lesson, that people are interested in first-person exploration in familiar, relatable environments, like Firewatch and Everyone's Gone to The Rapture, are still making money. Not to say those are great games or deserve their success ofc, but I think they hit closer to what the original appeal of GH was.
The studio behind "Everybody's Gone to the Rapture" closed down after letting go the majority of its staff, because it sold hilariously bad like a lot of this hipster trash: http://archive.is/ZQ5zz
l6LzOXI.png
 
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