<3sRichardSimmons
Arcane
Well-fucking-put.
Edit: Failed to refresh. Meant as a response to MRY’s post.
Edit: Failed to refresh. Meant as a response to MRY’s post.
You are pushing it a tad bit too far. Still i got "smitten" by that retarded ending that i got. The game is decent and it could be worth 20 bucks.even on the jaded Codex -- seems to be smitten by
Yeah, I ran into the same issue. Maybe a bug?So I threw a bag with sleeping powder at that Gog King. But I still want to kill the fucker. Why don't you let me kill him without interrupting combat and playing that stupid victory fanfare again and again, game? Whyyyyyy'*$/"§$)/("
Hear-hear.Also multiple choice interactions are a poor replacement for item based puzzles. Still no deal breaker because let's not pretend that the QfG games were that big on puzzle solving to begin with. But this is all still way too brainless with time management and combat being the only minor challenges. Sometimes this feels like more an adventure game book than a real game.
Question about Sea Caves:
It is the spring break and I agreed to help Katie find the treasure. I'm supposed to bring tattooed skull and she is going to find the key. Now she shuns me away from the pirate cave after the barricade, and I cannot proceed otherwise (I don't have sufficient throwing to cross the water, and blowing the hole in the ceiling up does nothing except killing the poor beast). Am I fucked? Is there a way to proceed?
Question about Sea Caves:
It is the spring break and I agreed to help Katie find the treasure. I'm supposed to bring tattooed skull and she is going to find the key. Now she shuns me away from the pirate cave after the barricade, and I cannot proceed otherwise (I don't have sufficient throwing to cross the water, and blowing the hole in the ceiling up does nothing except killing the poor beast). Am I fucked? Is there a way to proceed?
Thanks, bros.
It seems that practicing throwing is the only way to go for me. I blew up the barricade but bitch doesn't let me enter cool ass pirate cave and tells me to go look for skull. Blowing the hole does nothing, you can't use it to go down in the cave. Pretty bizarre, I didn't expect such blatant gating without alternative routes.
Looks like most of his Quora stuff is political, but this interested me because it seems a little historically iffy...Pre-rendered videos - speed-efficient, memory-inefficient.
On-the-fly-rendered videos: Slow, but memory-efficient.
Today’s home computers and video game consoles are so fast, and optimized for 3D graphics rendering, that the rendering speed is usually not an issue.
Memory is always an issue. If a large number of pre-rendered videos cause the game to need an extra DVD, that’s a real production cost. Loading those assets from a slow device (e.g. hard drive) takes time, so extra memory use costs speed.
In the 1990’s, when computers were much slower and had far less memory, I worked on an ambitious project for Accolade that involved a lot of characters moving around. The in-house-developed graphics engine had trouble rendering all those characters in real time, so I recommended pre-rendering the animation… until I did the math.
Back then we used 256-color graphics, so 8 bits per pixel - one byte. A 2D render of a character might be 80 pixels high and 50 wide, so that’s 4000 bytes. Not too bad. Now make that character walk - 16 frames in each of 8 directions (hopefully enough to fool the eye into thinking the character can walk freely in any direction). That’s 128 x 4000, so now we’re up to half a megabyte. Define 4 other poses per character (running, kneeling, reaching out, etc.) so multiply by 5 to get 2.5MB. Now multiply by 50 possible characters, and it’s 125 MB. That’s without any code, background graphics, etc. The load times for all that would have negatively impacted game play.
The conclusion was that we could not fit all of the characters on the DVD or in memory with all the other stuff needed for the game. Either we needed to speed up the graphics engine by 20X or more, or make major cuts to the number or quality of the characters. I was arguing with the director on the best way to go (I recommended fewer characters) when Accolade cancelled the project along with several others and downsized.
More recently, I used a pre-rendered cinematic for my new game, Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, and it looked pretty good. World of Warcraft uses pre-rendered cinematics for important moments in the game. So that is a technique that is still in frequent use. It’s strong for cinematic cut scenes, but lacks flexibility and takes up a lot of storage space for game play where the game isn’t in complete control.
Corey Cole, Former Libertarian turned Liberal
Answered Jun 29, 2018 · Author has 334 answers and 406.7k answer views
I went through a similar experience as a teenager, when I was a “born-again Christian.” No, I wasn’t gay, but there was something I liked to do by myself in bed that I had been told was strictly forbidden by the Bible.
This became a turning point in my life, as it was plainly stupid that completely natural and normal behavior should somehow be a “sin”. It caused me to completely re-evaluate everything I had been told about life and the Bible.
Christians are retarded, news at eleven. What does that have to do with the game though?
The adventure game market never went away. It was the publishers who decided that the games weren't profitable enough to develop. As Noah Falstein pointed out, adventure games became increasingly expensive to develop in the late 1990's as art standards improved. Three artists did most of the backgrounds and animation on Hero's Quest (1989, 16-color EGA), while we had over 50 artists for 3 years on Quest for Glory V (1998, 24-bit color with 3D). The budget increased 10-fold in that time.
Meanwhile, players were satisfied with the very primitive art of the first-person shooter games. It was all about the action, and players had no problem with low-budget, blocky stone walls. So if you're a publisher, do you make games that cost $500K and sell 200K copies, or ones that cost $2M+ and sell the same number of copies? It was a no-brainer.
Again as Noah pointed out, art standards in the FPS games have improved, and now the average AAA FPS game budget is $25M. This has created a big opportunity for crowd-funded adventure games with much smaller budgets. The picture has reversed in the last 15 years, and now adventures are less expensive to develop than shooters.
But the audience never went away, and Myst didn't kill the genre (except by raising expected standards and development costs).
I doubt it. When you can round up by $200k, you're doing all right. Also, other posts involve him explaining how his father was a millionaire and he grew up with a trust fund (which his father ultimately took away), explaining that "most millionaires are seniors who worked for decades," assuring a poster that $5 million is "plenty to feel rich," explaining why a multimillionaire would still play online poker (there are lots of online poker posts), etc. Actually a lot are about being a millionaire. It's one of five or six recurring topics (probability, poker, politics, religion, and to a lesser extent game development).[EDIT2: "It isn’t enough to just redistribute all the wealth in the world. There isn’t that much to go around. You would have to do that on top of redefining attitudes towards wealth so that people will be happy with clean water, enough food, and a roof over their head." I can't tell if this is a Modest Proposal, a lament, or a policy position.]
Perhaps it is a self-description? As said roof is now collateral
Both games have some of the problems of Hero U but I think the timer, school routine stuff on Hero U goes a little overkill, I think, there are too few puzzles on Hero U and practically zero good inventory puzzles (beyond some really basic stuff) when the combat isn't good enough to carry the gameplay alone.mind comparing to heroine and infamy?Mini review, no spoilers.
Here's another interesting thing: In May 2018, Corey said that they had "spent about $1M so far." But in July 2018, he says "my budget was $800k." I wonder whether that means they went hundreds of thousands over budget, whether $800k = "about $1M," which is a pretty glib kind of accounting but I guess some people can afford round numbers, or whether he's actually not sure how much was spent on development.
My budget was $800K, of which two Kickstarters supplied only $500K with the rest as expected out of pocket. And we went over that budget, but by a fraction compared to all the games I listed above.
So presumably at this point, when the ask was $400,000, the budget cannot have been $800,000 -- right?!We know that you are taking a leap of faith by supporting our new game, and we want to assure you that we will use the money wisely. Our goal is the minimum budget with which we can make a high-quality game. ...
Fortunately, our team is up to the task. We have created multiple best-selling, award-winning games with budgets ranging from $250,000 to over $4,000,000. In particular, our team members led the development of six acclaimed projects - all comparable in budget to this Kickstarter project - that shipped on time and under budget. We know exactly what we can and can't accomplish at various budget levels and schedules.
I have budgeted out the entire game development with contingencies depending on the amount we raise. As long as we reach our Kickstarter goal, we have a specific plan for making the game - a budget for art, for programming, etc. Most of use are working at "cost-of-living" rates so that we will be sure to finish the game.
We worked out a series of budgets for Hero-U based on possible fundraising amounts. The “sweet spot” was at $800K, which would give us $650K towards game development. The catch was that we knew we could not ask $800K ... Should we have asked more than $400,000 in October 2012? The funding campaign would have failed, and we'd have gotten zero.
Sigh.Step one was to realize that we did not have to live within the Kickstarter budget – It is a "starter", not an upper bound
Why not? They asked for 400,000, but were operating with a budget of 800,000. It follows that they were prepared to supply the remaining 400,000 themselves. What's the problem with that?So presumably at this point, when the ask was $400,000, the budget cannot have been $800,000 -- right?!
I guess nothing, if it is upfront. Otherwise, it's a considerable undisclosed risk. "If you pay us $400k and if the next Kickstarter for $100k succeeds and if the bank loans us $200k, then the game will ship as we promised it" is different than "If you pay us $400k, then the game will ship as we promised it," no?Why not? They asked for 400,000, but were operating with a budget of 800,000. It follows that they were prepared to supply the remaining 400,000 themselves. What's the problem with that?So presumably at this point, when the ask was $400,000, the budget cannot have been $800,000 -- right?!
That's certainly one way to put it. Another is: "We are so committed to the development of this game that we are planning on funding it partly out of our own pocket." If anything, I'd say it would have been good PR. They seem to think so too, considering how forthcoming they've been with the admission that they went over budget. I'm assuming they were good for the money when they launched the KS. I don't believe they would be stupid enough to hinge development on a loan that they hadn't yet secured, not when there was half a million dollars of non-refundable backer money involved."If you pay us $400k and if the next Kickstarter for $100k succeeds and if the bank loans us $200k, then the game will ship as we promised it"
I didn't follow the Kickstarter, so I couldn't say whether they were upfront about 400k not being enough to fund the game, but I gather they weren't.