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Vapourware Barkley 2 - the new Codex vaporware champion

Tito Anic

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Magalan
It is dead.

Chef vanished from the project 2 1/2 years ago. I've tried contacting him multiple times and haven't received a response. Bort left around the same time to be a family man.

The Kickstarter was not necessary, especially in hindsight. The majority of work on this game was unpaid. Myself, Bort, and Chef are the original Barkley 1 creators. I did not join the Kickstarter with them because I was aware of the many problems that could (and did) arise.

I was asked to join the project 3 years after the KS when the project had little money and was in shambles. I was committed to trying to finish the game but it was consistently set back by horrible management and I ended up quitting. The person who owns ToG and is running it now had nothing to do with Barkley 1 and has zero game dev experience. He is the ToG PR guy.

When I quit, Lazrool also quit. We were the only two remaining who understood the technical inner workings of this game. Laz worked on this project nearly from the start, pro bono, and was tired of the nonsense as well.

There is no incentive for "ToG" or anyone attached to the KS to talk about this debacle.


https://www.kickstarter.com/project...pg-sequel-to-barkley-shut-up-and-jam/comments
 

Haba

Harbinger of Decline
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Land of Rape & Honey ❤️
Codex 2012 MCA Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2

Grauken

Gourd vibes only
Patron
Joined
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Messages
12,784
As the game continued to age, people left the project for lots of reasons, mostly due to taking jobs or losing interest
Kickstarter work ethics hard at work.

I assume they were also paid in imaginary potential revenue instead of real money, hard to remain interested at that point
 

lightbane

Arcane
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
Messages
10,156
Well, it's sad but it was obvious what was going to happen. Now then, the dude behind Routine must step up and admit it as well.
 

Baron Dupek

Arcane
Joined
Jul 23, 2013
Messages
1,870,765
not much drama, just KS business as usual
1536803697713.jpg

still - pity cuz still a great game, e
 

Hobo Elf

Arcane
Joined
Feb 17, 2009
Messages
13,997
Location
Platypus Planet
As the game continued to age, people left the project for lots of reasons, mostly due to taking jobs or losing interest
Kickstarter work ethics hard at work.

I assume they were also paid in imaginary potential revenue instead of real money, hard to remain interested at that point
Unless someone says otherwise, I'm going to assume that the people who got bored and walked off were also the same people who took the kickstarter money.
 

Generic-Giant-Spider

Guest
Look, the first game was some silly and goofy RPG that because of how intriguingly stupid it was made it easy to keep playing to see what exactly happened next. For fuck sakes, guys, you're not making the sequel to some deep, rich, beloved RPG. It's a game about Charles Barkley having performed a chaos dunk and sending the world into a dystopian dream. Within fifteen minutes of the game beginning I'm introduced to his kid who is using the sprite of Skate from Streets of Rage 2, and Michael Jordan is some evil police detective that has his face sloppily fit on an MS Paint body.

I don't know what the fuck they're trying to accomplish with this game. I don't even know why they needed a Kickstarter in the first place for it. The humor and absurdity of the whole situation is why people gave attention to the first title at all. People liked your first game, which was ultimately a stupid fun game. So just make that. Just make a stupid fun game. Don't feature creep the fuck out of it, don't try to make some deep detailed world that is probably going to be ignored and bloat things up or make things confusing. Just look at what people liked about the first game and do more of it. Throw in some more beat 'em up sprites for characters, have Lebron James appear as a Terminator robot or whatever the fuck, just have fun with the stupid concept that lead to the first game. Do drugs or something for inspiration.

It's too late now because they went the Kickstarter route and have been talking about this like it's the Second Coming with Jesus riding a unicorn to save us all so everyone that invested won't accept anything less. But that's what they should have done to begin with, that's just my perspective on this whole shitshow.
 

CyberWhale

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Mar 26, 2013
Messages
6,058
Location
Fortress of Solitude
As the game continued to age, people left the project for lots of reasons, mostly due to taking jobs or losing interest
Kickstarter work ethics hard at work.

I assume they were also paid in imaginary potential revenue instead of real money, hard to remain interested at that point
Unless someone says otherwise, I'm going to assume that the people who got bored and walked off were also the same people who took the kickstarter money.

They probably felt entitled to it because of their previous pro-bono work. Not having a single, preferably responsible, person in charge is a huge mistake if you're making some kind of a project (video game in this case). Instead of sharing it, he should have given it out only on delivery. If the old team wasn't interested in working on those terms, find freelancers who are.
 
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Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
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
More from SA: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3519798&userid=103527

Chef vanished from the project 2 1/2 years ago. I've tried contacting him multiple times and haven't received a response. Bort left around the same time to be a family man.

The Kickstarter was not necessary, especially in hindsight. The majority of work on this game was unpaid. Myself, Bort, and Chef are the original Barkley 1 creators. I did not join the Kickstarter with them because I was aware of the many problems that could (and did) arise.

I was asked to join the project 3 years after the KS when the project had little money and was in shambles. I was committed to trying to finish the game but it was consistently set back by horrible management and I ended up quitting. The person who owns ToG and is running it now had nothing to do with Barkley 1 and has zero game dev experience. He is the ToG PR guy.

When I quit, Lazrool also quit. We were the only two remaining who understood the technical inner workings of this game. Laz worked on this project nearly from the start, pro bono, and was tired of the nonsense as well.

There is no incentive for "ToG" or anyone attached to the KS to talk about this debacle.
The development of Barkley 2 is extremely complicated and unnecessarily dramatic. So it's very difficult to explain things without walls of text. I'll do my best to keep things short and sweet.

quote:
where did the money go then, if everyone worked for free?

People were paid, the point that I was trying to make in the original post is that the majority of work on this project was done for "percentage" / good faith. This could have been done without a KS. I didn't have direct access to financial info, but from what I gathered in my time on the project, about 2/3rds of the money went towards wages and the other 1/3rd went to other expenses (conventions, etc.)

quote:
Aww. What about Gotarius? He was posting in here for a while but stopped.

Gortarius is Lazrool. He was too crestfallen / embarassed to post.

quote:
So what's the deal with frankie continuing to work on graphics for so long? Was he paid up front?
quote:
Very sad to hear this. What was Frankie doing them up until a few months ago? He must have just been helping out, what a great guy
smile.gif
I wonder how far done the game was?

Frankie did get paid, of all people who worked on the game he contributed the most work and was also paid the most. However, as Hentai Jihadist mentions, the money eventually dries up when split between so many people and over many years.

I can't speak for Frankie, but when I quit is around the same time Frankie stopped his work. In my mind, Frankie did more than what was expected of him and he did not need to do as much as he did. However, it seems that Frankie was told otherwise by ToG management.

quote:
I'm assuming the person who is "running" ToG now has bailed too?

Nope. Despite him admitting to me directly the game will die without me working on it, when I finally got tired and said I'll quit unless changes happen, he accepted my resignation and as far as I know is trying to keep the project alive by finding new "hires".

quote:
should have tried to pitch it to devolver or something

The game was pitched to companies / people for funding from what I was told, no one was interested. I'm not surprised. Thank the lord.

quote:
It seems to me like some of you forgot that the promise has been made...

I'm actually the one who voiced that quote, back when I had some level of hope in this project and thought that ToG wanted to see this game come out. The promise has taken a sour turn.

quote:
What were the management problems?

An entire book could be written on the problems this game had. To name a choice few:

- There was a revolving door of workers on the game. Many were lured in with "percentages". You can only promise so many points. One of the reasons I quit is because I could not see this circle being squared.

- Divide and conquer. The team was split and there were 50 back channels where everyone had their own way of understanding this game.

- Goldfish attention span. A large amount of work was only done at most half way, then abandoned to work on some other "cool" thing.

- Unwillingness to cut or simplify anything despite not having the manpower and the game dragging for years on end.

- Management dictating how work should be done despite not understanding how it actually works. Leading to needlessly complicated systems, obsolete systems, and totally broken systems.

quote:
Was it anywhere near completion? Or just a complete lost cause.

The game has perpetually been 2 years away from completion for as long as I can remember, and there has been no will to fix this.

quote:
These points are the most baffling to me. Did people there not understand the whole reason any of us are interested in the first place is because Barkley 1 was funny? Who gives a poo poo about the systems or millions of guns or whatever, all we ever wanted was a funny game.

I'm in this camp as well but I can say in my experience the design simply could not be changed in any simple manner. The reason I even agreed to commit to this project was because I was told I would be able to make executive decisions if necessary. Any time I brought up any issue it was immediately turned into some hour long meeting or justification of why it's "needed".

quote:
i guess on the bright side barkley 2 isn't the worst about this (that'd be omori).

I would only give credit to B2 if one of the core people of this project would have said something earlier. From what I have seen, most were fine with the idea of this project fading into obscurity.

quote:
Also, the ToG site still offers preorders promising the game for early 2014.

Welcome to the legendary ToG work ethic, incapable of removing a single link / page.

quote:
I'm curious who this person holding the reigns of barkley 2 is, since it apparently isn't any of the obvious names, i.e. cboy, bort, lazrool.

This project was started by Chef, Bort, and Bort's brother. I don't know why things were done the way they were, but Bort's brother registered the ToG corporation and is the sole owner of it. All work done on contract is owned by ToG, which I'd say is about 35% of the total work. The remaining work was to be negotiated for percentages, etc.

It was always presented that myself, Bort, and Chef had some kind of control of the company. However, when things started going very badly on this project and I pressed Bort's brother, it was essentially admitted that we have no control and we're stuck with him. No one ever agreed to this, but on paper he does own the company.

quote:
To be fair, "needlessly complicated systems, obsolete systems, and totally broken systems" are exactly what I thought they were going for, intentionally.

When I reference such systems, I mostly refer to a totally broken scripting and cinema system (when I joined the game only had 1 cutscene), the game taking 15 minutes to compile, and massive amount of bugs. About 80% of the work I did on this game was simply fixing broken, unfinished, or thought to be functional things.

If anyone has any information to contradict what I'm saying, they have been free to post for all these years to clear the record, and can even post in this thread now.

This is moving too fast on here and Twitter for me, but it seems like most people are starting to see this for what it is. I've omitted a lot of details and information because I wanted to stick to the most obvious stuff that really can't be disputed. I want people to make their own conclusions.

I'm extremely grateful for the support on here. I think the backers and all fans were treated like garbage on this game and I only learned of this thread when someone linked to a game me and Lazrool made about 10 pages ago. I quit this project 3 months ago and did not say anything at the time because I didn't feel like I had any platform to speak out on where I would be heard. I was also not aware there were pockets of people who still cared about this game because I just wanted to move on.

P.S. I saw your post before it was edited Star Guarded, and what you said means a lot to me. I hope the both of you are doing great.

Maybe it should have been obvious long ago, but it's now clear this game is in That Which Sleeps borderline scam territory. It's going off the List of Incline. Goodnight sweet prince. :salute:
 
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CyberWhale

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Mar 26, 2013
Messages
6,058
Location
Fortress of Solitude
eric__s shame on you (guys). I understand having other obligations like a regular job and social life, but spending time posting shit on forums and watching series, playing games and reading whatever instead of working on the game is utterly fucking disgusting, especially after taking money from the fans. Should have made necessary cuts in vision, cut it in several episodes or preferably both. Instead, we got nothing.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
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
More development hell: https://forums.somethingawful.com/s...19798&pagenumber=236&perpage=40#post495599774

It feels absolutely shit to see how bad GZ, Laz and everyone else on the team feel coming out of this. Everyone involved worked to the bone to make this glorious fever dream a reality. I feel bad for those still on the project as well, it's not an enviable seat, and I sincerely hope they reach closure in some way, even if just a demo or vertical slice.

I peace'd out from Barkley 2 near end of 2017. Have not kept tabs on progress for over a year but everything said so far sounds completely on point. There is a lot of shit going management PR guy's way, some deserved, but we all fucked up together, most people on the project made mistakes and was a part of bloating it to this point, especially me. Everyone had the right intentions, we just didn't have the experience to deal with of a project of this ambition. Only GZ to his massive credit I have never seen push for anything other than fix shit, cut shit, get things done.

I have loved being part of B2. 90% of the experience of working on this game was amazing and a huge opportunity to experiment, learn and just have stupid fun. The team was awesome, everyone on the team were hugely creative people who loved the game. The first years there was a feeling that we were building something unique that hadn’t been done before.

Leaving was hard but at the end I just couldn’t see the road to completion. B2’s problems were so severe that adding more enemies, more bosses, more zaubers, fixing more stuff just felt like it wouldn’t bring us closer to getting something together. We had almost 30 enemies playable but as far as I knew, less than half were actually in the game. Momentary combat was sometimes fun but after five years it was still not really possible for someone not on the dev team to play the game and understand the game loop without a ToGster next to you explaining the game. I myself, as the core combat developer, had never really played through a dungeon experiencing the actual gameplay loop and advancement.

There's so much to say about this huge, wonderful, ambitious, bloated, scopecreeped, overdesigned, broken, passionate game. Could write for days. Piling onto what others have already said isn’t really helpful to anyone. But it would be cathartic to write about all the insane things that happened or didn’t happen.

okay

Let’s start with the overall Combat, because it’s a good example of how development on the game went.

I joined in 2013 just after the KS to work on combat and core engine stuff. The game was effectively divided into two parts, Quest and Combat. There was rarely more than one person working actively on combat. Praise to my lucky stars that I was not involved in the quest side of the game, looking in from the outside it looked like a fucking nightmare - near the end of 2017 the massive first area with interconnecting, multiple-path, time-based quests had been reworked from the ground up at least once and, if I recall correctly, it was still not done. To be honest though, the first area seemed to be very good, and when it was demoed at conventions it was well received. So overall B2 had a high quality for the pieces that did finally click into the puzzle.

The pitch for combat was: Hardcore RPG with guns. Basically Nuclear Throne with some heavy RPG elements and gun fusion. There was ideas for enemies hiding behind cover, flanking, being vulnerable from behind. There was already a bare-bones prototype there when I joined. My first step was to make combat feel more 'solid', with better movement, collisions, AI, and just overall a better feel. In hindsight this was a big mistake and it was my mistake completely, we should have just ran with bare bones combat and got combat done. If I had taken that path, combat would today have been simpler, closer to completion, and perhaps even more fun.

Far down the line we wanted to create a mountain area. To deal with height differences as you scale the cold, windswept mountain sides of Necron 7, I added a map height system so tile maps and characters had different elevation. Then because we later worked more on the starting area which was the Sewers, we started implementing the height maps in... the... Sewers... first. It took a huge amount of time and didn’t really add anything to the game. So that was a big waste of time on my end and was just yet another thing that slowed everyone down.

Everyone had different ideas of what combat should be. There was a healthy struggle between making it more fast-paced and action-oriented versus slower and focusing on the RPG bits. However there was a worrying trend starting where we looked less at what the game was actually playing like and more at what was written down in design docs or what the initial ideas from project start was. After two years, combat was still not fun but the push was towards implementing the original designs. The belief was that when everything was implemented according to design it would all come together. Another more direct way to put it is that feedback on design issues and legit serious problems was usually ignored. Eventually after a long time this started to loosen up a bit, but too little too late. Which brings us to the two main points of why combat was boring garbage.

One. Design wise, everything was always massively complicated. Suggesting we keep things simple was ignored, because No that's not the game we want to make. It was sometimes impossible to discuss effort vs value. That's a big part of why gun's fusion took years to get done and working right. That's why the game had at one point eight damage types and a complex elemental resistance system that never really worked well in practice meaning mostly you just considered normal damage and ignored the rest, or at least I found myself doing that when playtesting. Some systems were made way too complicated for any player to ever understand because That's The Joke. Pushing to make the game simpler was really hard, but sometimes the penny dropped, and luckily we avoided some excessive shit.

For example, one legit funny joke was your Party. You only ever played as Hoopz, but on your equipment menu there were four party members. You could always see them in your menu but never in game. As I recall it, at the literal final second of the game the other 3 party members would appear out of Hoopz like in a Final Fantasy game and say "Wow, we did it!" "Hell yeah!". Kind of funny actually, but, it’s just one small joke. It would make sense, then, from a return on investment standpoint, to not actually implement your party as characters with actual stats and equipment that actually level up alongside you, available with actual status menus. But B2 ideas sometimes made very little sense. There was a serious idea that these characters should do all that so you could see them progressing as if they were with you. Explaining the effort needed to make this particular dream come true was met with That's The Joke. Thankfully this feature was cut before any serious time was spent on it. Not all similar features were cut.

But, in my humble opinion, and everything from here on is completely my personal opinion only, but which Laz also mentioned, there was a much more serious issue with gameplay.

Two. Let’s compare DOOM and Dark Souls. Doom is a fast paced game with guns. You are fast, and have long range guns. Therefore enemies are also fast, some have rapid long range attacks, and they come in huge numbers. Altogether you get a fast run-n-gun FPS. In Dark Souls, you are slow and have basically only melee attacks, and can’t move while attacking. Therefore, enemies are slow, telegraph their attacks, have mostly melee attacks, and come in very few numbers at a time. Altogether you get a slow, methodical action RPG. Both these games are awesome because everything fits together.

Now as a thought experiment, what if you put the player Character from DOOM, in Dark Souls? Well, you would have Barkley 2. Because the combat pitch for Barkley 2 is a Hardcore RPG with guns, the very fixed idea was that enemies should be slow and tactical. At the same time it’s a run-n-gun action game. So, Diablo with guns. In theory, this is actually a very cool idea! But in practice, you’re five times faster than enemies, deal a shit ton of damage, and combat is just a joke unless you intentionally let enemies gang up on you. There is no reason to bother learning about the hardcore RPG side of things if the only difference is does slow-ass mole get whacked in 3 or 5 bullets. Every tool in your toolbox that could make encounter interesting, like locked doors to create arenas, or just spawning in enemies to surround you, were a no-go because that’s classic game cliches that we don’t want to do. Okay. I pitched for and tried out faster enemies, but they were not liked, and also the game was unbalanced and buggy because it’s never really been properly played. The response was to again make all enemies slower across the board. No amount of bringing up how this is not actually fun to play could change management’s direction on combat or even have an open honest discussion about it.

Many did all they could to spice it up. Different people gave different takes on enemies. Frankie did a huge heroic effort to make guns unique and interesting. But in the end you can't fix whats broken by piling more garbage on top.

In an attempt to make the game challenging, then, you have limited bullets and when I left in 2017 there was still no way to refill bullets without returning to the save point. So the challenge was resource management. Since there was no way we could ever add weak melee attacks you could use if you run out of bullets because This Is A Game About Guns, meaning if you run out you’re actually out of ways to attacks, it made balancing the game really, really awkward. Loads and loads of time was spent on gun’s balancing to make this work. I don’t know how it turned out because of the above issue with not being able to actually play the game for real. Zaubers (magic) would help with this issue, but those are another story and are actually what I was working on and halfway through when I left.

All in all combat was, like many things in B2, wild grand ideas that were very hit and miss in practice.
 
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Murk

Arcane
Joined
Jan 17, 2008
Messages
13,459
"Mystical greetings everyone"

This is an edited cboyardee song for space station 13, but I think it is a fitting send off to this fiasco.

(also, didn't back ;D)

 
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Modron

Arcane
Joined
May 5, 2012
Messages
9,931
Can't really fault Eric for abandoning that ship of unpaid work for years to go do paid work on other games.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
No surprise.

The only thing I wish is that someone from the team would come in and confirm that it was all a lie that the game had amazing quests, or, if it was not all a lie, explain what made them so amazing. I recall eric__s having posted something about how revolutionary they were and how other RPGs would be significant influenced by the new ideas they had developed.
 

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