Vapourware Barkley 2 - the new Codex vaporware champion

[Zombra]

Wrestling is the new b-ball.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

I was hoping eric__s was just trying to be mysterious and surprise people.

Apparently, that's not the case. Wouldn't be surprised if it fucked him over so much he doesn't even want to think (and talk) about it.

 

[Infinitron]

Oh hell yeah:

 

[Morkar Left]

Wtf is happening there???

 

[Modron]

Wtf is happening there???

Nothing :D.

 

[MachineCommander]

eric__s posted on Something Awful

Hey guys, this is Chef Boyardee, one of the writers and musicians for the game, and I was one of the original Barkley 1 guys.

Barkley 2 was our dream game. When we asked for $30k and received $120k, it felt like a mandate to go absolutely bonkers and make the game far, far larger and more convoluted than it actually needed to be (and as we learned, than we were more capable of making). To talk about all of our inspirations is to basically give you a laundry list of multi-million dollar Square-Enix RPGs with teams of hundreds of guys - so who WOULDN'T believe a bunch of dudes in their dad's basement could make it?

We moved into bhroom and bort's dad's basement and got to work. We went absolutely nuts with scope, and planned out a massive game that, in reality, would have taken far more resources than we had. I'll give you an example: Barkley 2 had a 24 hour time system. As you completed quests and events in the game, the time would pass and new events would open. In reality, what this meant was that we had to make new content for each in-game hour. This is an awesome idea, but even for all the content we made, it was not feasible for our limited crew. Work was abound with stories like this - we dreamed and attempted all sorts of crazy systems, thinking that we had the experience and ability of Square's A-team.

I stopped working on the game when my mom became ill and passed away abruptly. It's hard to talk about, so I won't. I wanted to go back, but the longer I stayed away, the more difficult it became, first because it was apparent that this project was just too ambitious and that what we needed was scope control, and second, it was the hardest thing in the world to admit failure. Failure, not just to the people I was beholden to, the people who had misplaced their faith in my ability to make this massive, sprawling game, but to the people I worked with. I love, deeply, everyone who worked on Barkley. I love GZ, Laz, bort, bhroom, bisse, Konix, Frankie, Neon, everyone who ever tried to help this madcap dream a reality. And I didn't know how to say I was sorry, or that I'd failed. My regret is that I could't do that. I am sorry, everyone.

That said, I'm extremely proud of the work we did on the game, all of us. I think that everyone who worked on this project are among the best out there. The jokes, the world, the coding, the design, the art - it's awesome. I think the writing and music I did is some of my best work. There is nobody on the team who deserves more praise than GZ, who was the only voice of reason during all of this. It's to him that I'm most sorry.

As far as money goes, although I was never the money dude, it was all used to my knowledge pretty responsibly to hire contractors. At the beginning of the project, I think we all took $1000 for food and expenses and stuff, and then another $1000 for the same a while later. The company also took a $10,000 loan from my dad which I paid back with an absurd 20% interest. So at least for me, this endeavor netted me a whopping -$10,000. I'd say the only wasteful thing we did with money was take the game to PAX, which really was an amazing experience and at least people got to play the game there. It was met with an awesome reception, especially our booth, which involved bhroom dressing as a wizard and acting out our character creation - which I contend is still the best ever.

I think we were just too young and too ambitious and I want to say we tried to fly too close to the sun, but I don't think we ever took off. What we have is great, but I failed. And I'm sorry. I don't know what I can do to at least partially make things right, but I welcome suggestions.

I was really hoping this game would pop out of nowhere and be done, but... damn.

 

[Zombra]

Hey. I want that fucking soundtrack at at least. eric__s If that music was his best ever, no reason we shouldn't have it on our ipods.

 

[MRY]

There’s no reason not to release everything on a public repository for open source development (or just for backers' curiosity and gratification), but I’m sure it won’t happen. For whatever reason, all the amazing things that are hidden behind the curtain never get revealed when these Kickstarters go defunct. It's very odd.

 

[Zombra]

Well somebody with an SA account cough MachineCommander cough should post this as a reply:

I don't know what I can do to at least partially make things right, but I welcome suggestions.

I suggest you post up mp3s of that music, bro. We know you have copies and we want to hear your best work!

 

[HanoverF]

Welp, I guess this means I'm out $15, but on the bright side I get to go through this thread FAKE NEWSing all of Infinitron's posts.

 

[Parsifarka]

 

[MachineCommander]

Well somebody with an SA account cough MachineCommander cough should post this as a reply:

I don't know what I can do to at least partially make things right, but I welcome suggestions.

I suggest you post up mp3s of that music, bro. We know you have copies and we want to hear your best work!

I don't have a SA account though, sorry. Hopefully eric__s will post something here.

 

[MRY]

Kind of learning that PAX is not the place to show RPGs. In order to really get something from an RPG,you have to sit down for like an hour and do everything, wander around towns and do quests and stuff. At PAX, most people can only play for like 5 minutes, so for the most part we've got people going to this dungeon and killing stuff, which is cool but they're missing most of the actual game. Like in this demo alone, which is just one area, there's about as much text as a novel.

We don't have a release date, but the game is big. The good news is that I feel the thrust of the work is in content now, not mechanics, so we can churn stuff out at a crazy pace. But we're also still putting in and polishing mechanics at the same time. But yeah, a lot of work.

...

Also, thanks for the character creation compliment. I am really proud of it and I feel like it has the potential to be the best character creation ever. The process in the wizard booth takes about 10-20 minutes but in the full game it takes about 30 minutes per character and is semi-randomized. I really want to show more of it but I don't want to spoil it.

Would love to see the demo (or even just read a novel's worth of Barkley memes!) and the character creation system! Sounds like the game was feature complete in 2014, so maybe the community could just add the remaining content, or release as is...?

 

[Jack]

Behind every great game there's a Bobby Kotick budgeting and firing losers and a Josh Sawyer cutting down scope and planned content, getting the project done on time. This is what happens when guys like that aren't around.

 

[MaskedMan]

knew this was dead the moment chef boyardee turned into chad boyardee with gurls on okcupid, the gizka curse strikes again

 

[Infinitron]

Crazy stuff: https://forums.somethingawful.com/s...rid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=240#post495610684

The damage elements were Normal, B.I.O. , Cosmic, Cyber, Zauber and Mental. They all had some associated effects and status ailments, and also had their associated gun materials.
There were 8 at the start of the game instead, but at that point the elements were something different, the 8 were more like bullet types than just damage types, like one of them seeked enemies, one was explosive etc, thats why there were more afaik.

As we worked on the game more, the idea evolved to have guns be more modular, and have the bullet behaviors come from the gun's various pieces and affixes, like "Orbiting Assault rifle" would shoot bullets that spin around you like a shield.
This grew to be extremely complex to build, but in the end actually worked fairly well, and im very happy with what the guns are like now. But as others stated, cool guns arnt really enough if the combat and enemies are too simple to warrant them, if most combat is just kiting enemies around until they're dead.

And like many have stated, we all contributed to making the game overly complex and convoluted. "That's the joke" etc.
Im the one who pushed for having gun materials, which two years later led to me drawing 2001 fucking gun sprites. An entirely self-inflicted wound. The idea of gun materials was that it would be one of the main ways we "gate" higher level gun drops, by controlling which enemies drop what materials of weapons. It also added a lot of diversity to the weaponry you find, and made gun fusion really fun, because you could end up with really absurd-looking weapons after just a little bit of experimentation. Like a revolver made out of brains, an origami sniper rifle or leather machinegun turning into a studded leather machinegun. The gun materials affected the weapons' stats and stat growth, but also sometimes applied special effects to the shots that could then mix with the affixes and made really cool results. Like, the "SALT" material made a bunch of guns with salt shakers at the end, and they all fired shotgun-like spread shots of salt, so that material essentially turned any weapon into a bit of a shotgun. Another material (Itano) made any of its shots into enemy-seeking rockets that left behind smoke trails, so it basically turned any weapon into a heat-seeking mini rocket launcher.

Another super absurd idea I pushed for was to have the gun's type (pistol, revolver, rocket launcher, double-barelled shotgun etc) come from this absurd system that involved a procedurally-generated colored map on which there are continents and islands representing each gun type, different for every game but built with a rough internal logic (similar weapons' lands are close to one another) , and every weapon in the game "lives" somewhere in that map, and fusing two weapons made those two "meet in the middle" based on their relative power to decide what new weapon type they are. In my defense though, I then immediately built that absurd idea and as far as I know, that is still the same code working in the game now, but its definitely one of these absurd ideas that could have degenerated and added to these problems.

People here talk about bhroom like he's the "PR guy" but he's done a lot of work on making sense of all of these ideas and figuring out much of the math for balancing them, there's these big complex spreadsheets he made to organize and list all of these things and how they combine etc, like growth charts to see how many times you can fuse weapons together before they become too strong that, after tweaking, could export out a file we could import in the game to change the game's balance.
The main problem has been that these ideas are not worth much if the combat isn't fun, and we never focused enough on just making the most basic combat gameplay work better.

To be clear, the gun's being modular and gun fusion was an idea in the game at the start, thats not from me. That was in the original big design, a core idea of the game I think.
The things I "pushed for" that I mentioned above were just specifically the "materials", and the specific way to decide on "gun types" in fusions.
I dont want to make it seem like im taking credit for the general idea of having cool weapon effects combine together.

Bhroom pushed for an equally absurd idea for deciding the gun material result (edit: that chef mentioned above, I just noticed!), that is also currently in the game and working fine as far as I know: that all of the gun materials are actually elements that fit onto a periodic table of elements, with atomic numbers etc (each material having an actual real world element counterpart, and a few materials ARE a real world element like Gold, Iron etc, and those have their proper place on that table) and the fusions result actually use logic inspired of chemistry, based on atom orbitals and whatever, and that this was supposed to be one of the biggest fucking secrets of the game, never to be revealed to players whatsoever, something people were supposed to realize only much later after having made charts of how materials seem to relate to one another, with the few real-world element materials being huge hints about it.

Another absurd idea, but this one I dont remember who came up with it (might be chef, bort or bhroom, or might have come from a brainstorm of several people) was to have the affixes work from genes, with recessive and dominant genes and whatnot. Again, this is all, as far as I know, in the game and working correctly right now. Like, some of these absurd ideas we actually put together and they worked.

 

[MRY]

No, TOG. You are the Chaos Dunk.

 

[Santander02]

I totally forgot this was a thing, should have remained as an obscure freeware rpgmaker game

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Wtf is happening there???

It's the same thing that happens with every other Millennial project or group: what they actually do together is irrelevant. These people are just young and reckless and want validation and praise. Inevitably, this leads to a clash of egoes and things falling apart. You can apply this to pretty much anything else that we talk about on the Codex.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Everything mentioned about this game makes it sound like it makes zero sense with the whole Barkley/b-ball angle and it was really just a masquerade for them to make some quirky RPG with guns and shit.

 

[80Maxwell08]

I feel like a doom WAD where the BFG was replaced with a chaos dunk has potential.

 

[Infinitron]

https://forums.somethingawful.com/s...rid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=240#post495613877

Here is a screenshot of the periodic table of gun materials that Bhroom made.

We came up with most of these materials together, but he figured out how to arrange them, and this all worked, as absurd as it was.
There was another chart where you could select two materials and it showed you the result.
The idea was to have the resulting materials of a fusion seem random to the player at first, but every material combination always having the same result meant people could "map" how the combinations work, and eventually maybe actually realize the full horror of what we made, this table above here.

Some of these gun materials I later worked on to make their shots have more personality, and that was a lot of fun. The Klispin (I think we renamed it Marble?) gun fired spooky ghosts that hunted down enemies and moved through them (basically the wraithverge weapon from Hexen), the pinata gun fired candy, the yggdrasil gun left behind a trail of nature, grass and flowers growing, the crystal gun shots exploded in random shrapnel, while the diamond gun exploded in shrapnel flying in specific angular directions, the fungus gun fired floating spores that spawned mushrooms when it hit the ground, the imaginary guns were all Hoopz just holding nothing in his hands, firing invisible hitscan bullets and making gun sounds with his mouth, and was supposed to be more powerful the more innocent Hoopz was (basically the less time passed I think the stronger it would get? Im not sure we ever implemented that idea though!).

https://forums.somethingawful.com/s...rid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=241#post495614977

Here are the pistols for every material!

There were also flintlocks, machine pistols, revolvers, magnums, flare guns, rifles, muskets, hunting rifles, tranq rifles, sniper rifles, assault rifles, submachine guns, heavy machinegun, gatling gun, minigun, mitrailleuse, shotgun, double-barreled shotguns, revolver shotguns, elephant guns, crossbows, flamethrowers, rocket launchers and BFGs

For the sprite of the gun in your characters' hands, I had put together a basic system so that the guns roughly look like some simplified version of those pictures. I made a white, shaded basic sprite for 16 facing directions for every gun type (pistol, shotgun etc) that we could apply a blending color to, and added an extra layer on top that highlights specific parts of the gun (like the cannon or the stock) that could have a secondary color. So for instance, the Francium guns (glowing green with yellow/black warning labels, fourth from the bottom in column 4 up there) had a green main color and a secondary yellow color. Not enough to actually look like the weapons shown above, but enough that you can differentiate them at a glance a little in your own hands at least, which was the important part so you could quickly mousewheel through your arsenal and know what you are using before firing or looking down at your HUD.

 

[MRY]

One thought that strikes me is that Barkley was both an RPG Maker game and a spoof of an RPG Maker game-creator's creation (take, for instance, the save points that lecture you on the superiority of jRPGs and manga, in which the game's ostensible creator is breaking the fourth wall to lecture the player). Barkley II elevated that double-character by turning the development itself into a performance art satire of a Kickstarter project run amok at the hands of an OCD/megalomaniac development team. A fair amount of what they posted was clearly "in-character" in that regard -- indeed, consider the game's actual title: "The Magical Realms of Tír na nÓg: Escape from Necron 7 - Revenge of Cuchulainn: The Official Game of the Movie - Chapter 2 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa" or this claim of what they were going to make:

Barkley 2 is an open world action roleplaying game with heavy emphasis on exploration, choice, character development and discovery. It combines the focus on strong characters and narrative of Eastern RPGs with the non-linearity and openness of Western RPGs, drawing on the best ideas from titles like Realms of Arkania, Fallout, Dark Souls, Romancing SaGa, Dark Sun, Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall and Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. It is a game that combines core roleplaying ideas like character creation and development, quests and choices and consequences with fast-paced, action oriented combat (think Soldat meets Zelda) and Tales of Game's unique and erotic sense of humor. In short: this ain't your grandpa's rollenspiel.

It's not just that the claims are insane, it's that they're clearly also delivered with a wink ("rollenspiel").

The problem was that while Barkley I invented, post hoc, the crazy developer, Barkley II introduced the crazy developers early in development, so they actually had to act out the role, spending investors' money partying at PAX East, coming up with periodic tables of gun'z elements, etc., etc. A process that is both performance art and development is hard to pull off. Here, they spent their time and money on the performance rather than development. But I'm not sure that's so wrong because investors were clearly paying for the performance, which was being delivered with a wink that it was all a joke, as with Octopus City Blues. If you hand $20 to a homeless guy whose sign reads, "I'll give you change for a twenty," and all he does is say, "There, now you and I are both changed," you might be a little annoyed, but you can hardly act like you didn't get yourself into the mess to begin with.

 

[Infinitron]

https://forums.somethingawful.com/s...rid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=242#post495618127

Yeah basically. We wanted the material mixes to always give the same results, so you could remember that a rotten gun + a junk gun = a soiled gun or something, and that was the only part players were intended to realize individually. The actual underlying logic was just meant to be a bizarre secret, the kind a community might realize later down the line. So for a typical player, the materials are just a seemingly arbitrary, but repeatable, result. So if you end up on a really good gun material, you remember the gun's parents and can know what materials to combine to get this material again on another gun, which works as expected.

The more important logic for players to be reasonably expected to figure out the mechanics of was the gun geolocation, stat growth and affix genetics, which are all more self-explanatory. A machinegun parent tends to make a child with higher rate of fire than a shotgun, etc. The specifics of genetics are convoluted, but the result are kind of roughly predictable, with child guns inheriting traits from their parent guns; again the details are less important than the actual results making some kind of sense.

The guns being overly complex actually caused problems further than just making their own system function properly. I think this is an element that we definitely underestimated, and was harsh lesson;
The complexity of many of the guns' most special effects also had a splash zone onto other, less directly connected systems in less obvious ways. Its easy to underestimate the difficulty of interacting systems when you can visualize how each of the systems individually will work. I've really grown to appreciate this as I've been working on my own RPG in the past few years.

For example, some of the gun affixes applied confusion-like effects onto enemies which messed with their movement patterns or AI in various ways, which in turn forced us to make enemies in certain ways that they can be affected by these effects. I think this currently all works in the game, but this forced a certain "structure" onto our enemy designs that stifled creativity for making new enemies, forcing them into a bit of a "formula" if that makes sense. A lot of enemies feel kind of similar, they tend to just walk around, move in a kind of circle around the player and shoot.

There were many elements that contributed to stifling creativity on enemies, actually. Thinking about it with hindsight in the last few days, this might have been one of the major issues of the project, like a common thread of many of the problems that affected combat. Adding a new enemy into the game felt like a mountain of work and could not be done lightly. Not just because their scripting could be complicated and plugged into many other systems, but also because of many issues with balancing, and enemies needing a lot of animated art assets facing multiple directions etc.

As others stated, enemy and combat design always ended up feeling secondary to the systems built around combat in general. Kind of like how many RPGs have these super complicated systems to figure out like a puzzle, but then have cookie-cutter dungeons and encounters that just act as a "stress test" for the players party and the players' general understanding and exploitation of that complicated RPG system? That, it's that problem, but in an action game, which is probably a bad mix. I suppose this is just re-formulating what Bisse said earlier.

The Overloading Stone Revolver of Leper's Digest.
You can see descriptions for its affixes (which come from genes), its parent guns below, and its position in the gun world. Each color in the gun world represents a different gun type. I think I remember revolvers generate between handguns and rifles, opposite to submachine guns.

 

[Blaine]

Thread title should be changed to "Barkley, Shut Up and Scam: Gaiden."