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Vapourware Barkley 2 - the new Codex vaporware champion

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
The unexpected takeaway here is that in addition to having a thousand crazy, fun, brilliant ideas, the team also expected to make a solid, well-balanced game. To me that is authentically surprising.
iseewhatyoudid.png
I mean of course half the gun's are going to break the game! That's what I wanted!
 

Infinitron

I post news
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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
I think the problem is that their combat wasn't fun, even if you used the most regular sort of guns. And the reason it wasn't fun is that they invested all their time into this insane gun customization system instead of starting out by nailing down the fundamentals of a good combat engine.
 

Grauken

Gourd vibes only
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The real takeaway is, like with so many other kickstarters, that the boring stuff, like project management, scope management, milestones, actually exist for a reason
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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At some point, it would be fun to go see how many of the 300 or so projects I backed during my exuberant "pay Primordia royalties forward" scheme actually panned out. (At least the school robotics clubs that I supported built their robots!)
 

thesheeep

Arcane
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Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
So... with the money they got, they didn't even hire a programmer for a fulltime position?
What.

Art, you can commission. Same for audio.
But design and programming are so vital that you simply need dedicated people for that, in all phases of the project.
 

Galdred

Studio Draconis
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
So... with the money they got, they didn't even hire a programmer for a fulltime position?
What.

Art, you can commission. Same for audio.
But design and programming are so vital that you simply need dedicated people for that, in all phases of the project.
Indeed, I think it would be very difficult to outsource programming, because you are competing against people who can usually pay more to hire talents (and if the programmer is charging less for passion, it means you could probably have onboarded him on the project).
But I think Xenonauts showed it could be well done.

Hiring a full tile programmer over several years is unfortunately beyond what you can reasonably ask for on KS (I'd say 50k/year minimum, from the company side if you are located in firstworldia).
 

thesheeep

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Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Hiring a full tile programmer over several years is unfortunately beyond what you can reasonably ask for on KS (I'd say 50k/year minimum, from the company side if you are located in firstworldia).
If you want a higher profile one, maybe. 50k/year is a lot of cash for a programmer working in the games industry.
And I don't think anyone would expect full salary on a KS project which they work on for passion.
Besides, there are so many places around the world with capable programmers that can afford asking for way less...

Still, programmers are the most expensive team members in general.

But I think Xenonauts showed it could be well done.
Never heard of that. Xenonauts outsourced their programming? Got any links for that?
 

Higher Game

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SA faggotry is the worst kind of faggotry. Since nobody is going to see any recompense from this, just nuke all the SA faggots from the codex back to their stinkhole of a forum

I thought they were relatively cool and edgy during the Bush years, when cuckservatives had gone full retard and boomers finally started to get on the internet and water it down it for the normie mainstream. When you think about it, SA itself is just a complete abortion in that they had so many things going in their favor, yet they handed over their cultural influence to furries and otaku freaks, and they have never recovered. I'm not sure if they were deliberately infiltrated or not, or if they're just the long term final consequence of edginess without substance. :decline:
 

Galdred

Studio Draconis
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Hiring a full tile programmer over several years is unfortunately beyond what you can reasonably ask for on KS (I'd say 50k/year minimum, from the company side if you are located in firstworldia).
If you want a higher profile one, maybe. 50k/year is a lot of cash for a programmer working in the games industry.
And I don't think anyone would expect full salary on a KS project which they work on for passion.
Besides, there are so many places around the world with capable programmers that can afford asking for way less...

50K is not what the programmer gets, but what the company pays (many countries have taxes, social insurance, to be deducted from that sum). In France, 50K/year means the programmer would get 25.
But yes, even 25K after tax may be a bit high when it comes to Indie development


But I think Xenonauts showed it could be well done.
Never heard of that. Xenonauts outsourced their programming? Got any links for that?[/QUOTE]

I had read it on the codex iirc(maybe it was not outsourced, but the main developer changed during the development of the game).
 

LeStryfe79

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Anyways, Barkley 2 was never supposed to come out until 2023, so I'm not sure where these vaporware rumors are coming from. I'm calling fake news on this bullshit thread!

 

eric__s

ass hater
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Thread title should be changed to "Barkley, Shut Up and Scam: Gaiden."
Ahaha, ugh, Jesus, just put this on my fucking headstone.

I said everything I want to say publicly in the post referenced by MachineCommander here, but to summarize, we tried to make an overly ambitious game with too little management and too few resources. I left the project for family reasons, and just couldn't be dragged back into the ongoing morass of despair, even when I wanted to. There is distance between me and the project as it is now, but I am at fault for trying to make something too ambitious that was, at the time, beyond my grasp. And I'm sorry. When we started, we were very young and were very soon confronted with the limits of our abilities.

And for the record, we did not spend our money on blow, which, in hindsight, would have been a preferable pursuit.

But I am proud of everything I did on the game, especially the music, and I'd like to release it if I can get my old music computer working correctly and if I'm even allowed to with whatever contract I signed a million years ago. Here's a link to the ToG music pack. It includes a bunch of old versions of some songs. If I had to estimate, there's another good 50 songs I've written, but we'll see how that develops.

Anyway, it's an ugly matter and that's what I've got to say on it.
 

Prime Junta

Guest
This is high T drama. I consider my $15 well spent.

Software is easy, except software that does something different. Corollary: the only software worth making is software that does something different.

Don’t let this ruin your lives and revel in a glorious failure. :salute:
 

Infinitron

I post news
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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 drama: https://forums.somethingawful.com/s...rid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=246#post495635519

There's a lot of talk of salvaging Barkley 2, making it open source, releasing a build, and so on. I fought extremely hard to try and make this game happen and it did not work.

Around the time Chef and Brian left, work was going at a snails pace and the game was still in disrepair. Liam called me and told me that without me this game would be dead. I wasn't interested, it was too much to take on with little in return and I had my own projects. Then he told me that I would be "partners" with Liam in the ToG business since we were the only two remaining, that I would have authority creatively, and he would do whatever it takes to help me. I would have abandoned the game if those things were not promised.

The reason this game didn't fall apart sooner is because the majority of the time I spent on this game was fixing or making things that were not in dispute. Making this game viable was my priority. After I addressed the majority of technical problems in this game, we were moving more on to game content, systems, and focusing more on scope. It was basically a war of attrition at this point. I would argue against the game being complicated, cutting down ideas, and so on, which was met with "Hold on a second, let's talk about this..." which led to countless meetings, TRAC tickets and compromises. Having to fight against this lunacy constantly took a toll on both me and Laz (Gortarius).

There were times where Laz would do work on this game that moved it forward and Liam would throw a shit fit because "he was not informed" of it. I defended Laz every single time and told Liam he's crazy for criticizing someone for doing free work on this struggling game. He knew that Laz and me were a package deal, so Liam tried to convince me to "fire" Laz and I told him that's never going to happen.

Towards the end, Liam even told me that if he was ever a negative influence on this game, he would step away and let us continue. This was during a period where he was struggling to do any meaningful work on the game and facing a lot of personal issues.

Then design decisions on this game were made by Liam and presented as if it was some "agreed on" thing. I would point out I never consented to those features or ideas. Then it turned into more arguments and meetings.

The game was starting to fall apart again because I was aware that my "authority" was meaningless and dealing with Liam was becoming more and more taxing. That's when I took an extended break from this game. When I came back, I aired all of my grievances with the game and over the period of a month there was a very slow back and forth. I informed other ToG members (including Liam's brother, Bort / Brian) of what was going on and my plan to finish it with Laz, since we were the only ones moving the game forward. I received a vote of confidence from everyone I spoke to.

This all ended in a 3 hour call between me and Liam where I confronted him directly on everything. He admitted that he needs me to finish the game but said he will not leave the project and decisions need to be cleared by him. I even said to him, what do you think the public or backers would think if they knew about this? He didn't care. He didn't care that I was the only remaining original team member. I reminded him of his promise to leave if he became a negative influence. He didn't care. He knew that I was capable of getting it done, but it had to be with him in control. There was no way in hell I was going to continue working with this clown so I told him I quit. Laz left days later.

I don't care about the tiny amount of productive work Liam may have done on this game, because it was based on a foundation where he was the supreme ruler of this game and he pitted team members against each other to do so. I don't care if it was done in bad faith or through incompetence. I would also say no one took more advantage of the Barkley 1 legacy and the success of the Barkley 2 Kickstarter than Liam. For those in the know, they know what I'm talking about. I'm glad that even the public, with what little they have seen of him, can see how delusional he is.

I'm being extremely kind when I talk about him and even he knows that, the reason he has no rebuttal. You cannot salvage this game without him dissolving all of his rights of the contracted work done, which by my estimate is about 35% of the game. I don't know what contract Chef signed, it's possible Liam may have exclusive game rights to the music he made during his time. In some unlikely event that Liam gives up that, then you need all of the team members to consent to their work being released for free. There were about 20 people who worked on this game at some point and it would need to be determined if they have a stake from looking at contracts, etc.

I think a lot of problems regarding the shortcomings of combat came down to this idea that the games' original plan was sacrosanct, and that as long as the game didn't first fit that exact plan, it could not be fairly "judged", and trying to improve the feel of combat was a waste of time.

Like, there is this original idea, like a holy design document, and it's fairly complex and involves all parts of the game's gameplay loop working together, and is based around the game being an RPG first, and an action game second. So the idea is that, the shooting should remain simple, because the actual game's core lies in the special effects from the shooting, and you need to think of your shooting in terms of combat actions in a turn-based RPG, and for this to work we also need gun fusion to work, because this is how you customize your loadout and end up with more options in combat.

And until the game fits that idea closely, any problems we see with the game are not yet "fair" to act on, because we are judging this incomplete execution of that underlying idea instead of the true game's core gameplay, which will still take months and months to realize, because it plugs into all of these different systems. Trying to improve enemies or combat is a waste of time, because that will all be deprecated once the game has its "proper" combat mechanics or gun fusion mechanics etc.

But yeah this approach meant no playtesting would be taken seriously until everything was in place and working to the satisfaction of the original plan. And the game's combat being just one sliver of it, while the dialogue and quests were more important, were the "real" core of the game, meant this took a very long time.

Holy shit, had no idea all this was going on behind the scenes. What the jaw-dropping fuck.

To be honest this is surprising but unfortunately it all also 100% absolutely believable knowing the people involved. I have no reason to believe this is anything other than the truth.

I want to add that bhroom (Liam) is in a really shitty seat right now and I sincerely wish him the best. It's not his fault that the game become a now-deceased overscoped nightmare. He is however a very key reason that we never could do anything to prevent what's happening now, and obviously for the animosity towards this project.

Which brings to mind the Gelatinous Cube, which I want to talk about soon.
 
Last edited:

Infinitron

I post news
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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
The aforementioned gelatinous cube affair: https://forums.somethingawful.com/s...rid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=247#post495643345

The Gelatinous Cube

In late 2017 I had just gotten over the whole Save Station Menu fiasco and was ready to help out again. This was when GZ and Laz were the only real forces left, help was sorely needed. Zaubers where the final big thing that was missing from combat. My hope was they could tie the package together.

The original Zauber designs from ~2013 needed a rework, so we set about on it. Old zaubers were rethought and new ones were added in good and tight collaboration. We cut zaubers from 25 to 15 which was great. I got to work and implemented about half of them.

The Gelatinous Cube was the BIO Level 2 Zauber. It would summon a wobbling cube of green jello, which you could enter to become ‘safe’. It sounded cool so I thought let’s keep it, and asked for more details. You were fixed in place but could take actions while inside the cube, the way I understood it you could cast zaubers and shoot. I asked how does entering/exiting work, and what does ‘safe’ mean? “So, just let the player push into the cube for a short while to enter it and the same to leave it.” “Ok sounds good.” “So ‘safe’ means ‘safe’, you are invulnerable to physical and zauber damage.” “Ah ok so it’s a shield that protects you from X hit points of damage from any source.” “No no it’s safe, it’s a safe haven.”

“I’m not sure I understand you correctly here. You’re saying that the Gelatinous Cube is a thing you can cast anywhere, any time that makes you invulnerable to everything in the game with no limitations.” Bhroom responded in the affirmative. I fell off my chair, literally.

After trying to raise the obvious game-breaking issues with this, to deaf ears, I suggested alterations to the spell. No go. I suggested alternative approaches like replacing it with two spells that protected from physical and zauber respectively. Those spells were fine to add but in addition to the Gelatinous Cube.

I had learned to tell when bhroom was attached to a design and would not budge come hell or high water, and this was it. If this made it into the game the risk is it would never, ever be changed. I said I would reflect on it for a day. That evening I decided that this was my hill to die on. With five mostly unpaid years spent on this godforsaken combat, there was just no way I would ever allow myself to be a part of puncturing it with this raging lunatic nail of an idea.

There were discussions in public and private channels. There was Skype meetings, there was screaming. I asked if me working on this game was a two way street or a one way street. It was a “two way street but-”. I pointed out that if i’m working for free then I would expect some level of creative influence. In response I was told that I was expected to just implement it the way it was originally designed.

I worked on other spells for a week considering my options. Then one evening in winter 2017 I opened the game to work, paused for a moment... and just said “No”, closed the game, and have never touched it since.

I might remember the details incorrectly, but I do vividly remember the realization of how game breaking the thing would be. It had a certain life time but which was fairly long. I want to say it was something like 10 to 30 seconds depending on your stats. You could cast another cube before the current one times out and hop into that, repeating ad infinum. You would have a second of downtime in between each cube but that was it as far as downsides go. It did not have limited uses, since Barkley 2 zauber designs at that point did not use mana but rather a system where your stats decreased with each cast. This meant casting loads of zaubers had the tradeoff of making you weaker... however, gun damage was not affected by your stats, only your move speed was affected based on weight encumberance, which of course didn't matter if you were fixed in place and invulnerable. So there were some supposed downsides to it which in practice were not really relevant.

It was never implemented by me at least, and most discussions were private. I did ask for feedback in the public channel but didn't push the issue hard there because I didn't feel more conflict was what the team needed. It could be that the zauber was changed or removed after I left.

GZ did awesome progress on zaubers from what I hear but that was after I left. There was an effects demo made around 2014 by GZ which looked pretty cool.

bhroom's brother steps into the fray: https://forums.somethingawful.com/s...19798&pagenumber=248&perpage=40#post495647594

Hi everyone, this is bort. You may know me as bhroom’s brother, but down in the dank ToG Basement I had another nickname: “The Comedy Cicada” because I’m extremely funny, but only once every 17 years. I am due up in 2040.

WARNING!!! NO JOKES TO FOLLOW!!!

This has been a strange thread to follow, it's been veering between extremely heartwarming and kind of bitter and vindictive from places I hoped it wouldn’t.

A lot of people have been explaining the game’s downfall and so I will just skip to my part: I am a slow and unexceptional writer, a quintessential idea man, and got involved in the project almost despite fear and insecurity, and once I was fully invested and my ego was at stake I only had my more or less-good ideas to insist upon in order to save face. That’s me. The complimentary take is “the Mark Frost of Tales of Game’s” which is both not a compliment and sadly, aspirational.

As has been stated, I have been largely off this game for awhile due to life stuff. Weirdly, after reading this thread, jumping ship somehow only reduces your culpability! See someone’s post about being “caught holding the bag” a few pages back, which I think is mostly true. I am somehow spotless in this, which is demented, because my absolutely mediocre work and interpersonal skills are instrumental in this game’s failure, but most of all I STOPPED WORKING just like everyone else has on this project with the exception of laz until very recently, bhroom, and of course Frankie.

For everyone else, involvement has been sporadic, mostly fair-weather, or terminated early, and that has been the case for about a dozen of us since the beginning of the project. I really enjoyed reading this thread last night, but seeing that really vibe-killing last post by GZ got me writing a good bit of this post, which I was then was gonna just file away in the end. Then I saw this gelatinous cube stuff which is opportunistic and meanspirited now, and what the hell, why not make my stupid contribution:

----

Re: the stupid cube, it’s some real forest for trees stuff. Here we have a prototypical version of something (a zauber) that utilizes a host of representative functions (altering PC’s stats and collisions, casting animations, global speed changes during spell chargeup, object spawning that interacted with bullets, etc.) and instead of it being taken as an instrumental task to complete (for money), it’s an opportunity to engage in endless arguments with the game’s supposed designers about what “good design” (blech) is, what it should be instead, on and on and on.

“there was no design lead,” “there’s too many cooks in the kitchen,” “bhroom talks too much and he doesn’t listen to other opinions.” You start to wonder why.

I would rather not get into this entire subject, so I’ll suggest we cool it with the anecdotes. There are a thousand unfinished things in the game, from people who were getting paid and people who were not. This thread is enjoyable and I think for everyone’s sake, it should not be hashed out. There’s postmortems and then there’s finger pointing. I already told you what my problems were, let’s not hear anybody else’s, thanks!

----

Expected Bhroom defense:

Well, not really. I have criticisms of everyone’s contribution to this game (well, not Frankie ofc) and my brother has infuriated me, over and over. He says as much in tweets and kickstarter updates, I’ll echo it, ok cool.
I spoke with bhroom and GZ at length in January of this year, as something of a mediator between him and my brother. My synopsis:

• GZ, as someone who has been half in and half out on this project since the beginning, was willing to go all in. [cool]
• Bhroom agrees this is good, GZ is the best chance of finishing the game. [agree here too]
• GZ thought that there was no more need for conversation or additional design. [pretty much]
• Bhroom agrees, and says there is no need for conversation or additional design or re-design or changes or reinventing the wheel because these same topics have been talked and documented to death and it just requires someone to have commitment in some direction, and he would like to have input before nearly-functioning parts of the game are scrapped for new ones, which would jeopardize the “GZ is the best chance of finishing the game” part. [ymmv]
• GZ says he’s an idiot and a clown and a liar and a … etc. … and he cannot bear to have a conversation with him again, he essentially needs to fuck off and die in order for GZ to begin work [dude]

There was a lot of stuff involving contracts and promised points and money and I tried my hardest to get GZ to dial down from total vitriol and for my brother to be as compromising as he could be. Both of these were absolutely necessary for the salvaging of the project, aaaaannnnnnnnd that is why we are here today. They can dispute the accuracy of the above, but that was the gist as I understood it. From my mouth, that is my fair assessment of their relative positions and grievances.

I thought cooler heads would prevail. I floated the truly sane idea of consulting everyone on the project again, finding my long lost Boyardee, who knows… maybe there could be a ToG Renaissance???

That was January 2, and now on June 3, it’s a trip to see literally the exact same words, verbatim and undiluted, coming from GZ as if 6 months haven’t passed, like he blinked and here he is today just as angry. And I understand the motivation if it’s so the backers can hear the truth, etc. Like everyone else, my conscience was too guilty and there were too many other people involved for me to “spill the beans” about the state of the project, as obvious as it may have been already. I suck, ok! Props to GZ at least putting us out of our misery, I thought.

After the initial lament, this thread actually got pretty fun, people enjoyed the dumb stories, ancient ghosts of forums past chimed in, great! Last night, I found out after a 3 year estrangement that my literally oldest friend in the world doesn’t hate me (hi cboy). Then I check this thread again and we’re back to revengeance or whatever.

What’s crazy I distinctly recall GZ pulling cboy and I aside a couple years back and in an absolutely wrenching conversation ensuring us that his and my lack of focused output was the thing keeping this game from coming out, this massive writing hole. That it was a miracle, “just incredible bhroom has kept things together this long, any other project would be dead.” This was like year 3 when we were already deep in trouble. I didn’t think that was the correct take then. GZ certainly doesn’t think that now, because bhroom is actually a svengali who manipulated him for 7 years, ok sure, but he was positive at the time. Before that, the problem was the programming, and the dozen broken, unfinished systems, or the low hanging fruit, the absurd scope, limited money, and dubiously (maybe strangely) talented team. GZ has had severe complaints about most every aspect of this game and who has worked on this game, about how the code is madness, or someone’s workflow is madness, and I have heard every one of them. (We are friends, of course I have heard it).

I guess he has been deprogrammed from the bhroom cult and is viewing the last 7 years he partially attended (GZ refused offers to join the B2 team until well over a year into the project, and presence was intermittent (a month or two on, several more off) but regular since) but the current interpretation is insultingly simplistic, even from his perspective.

Nobody in their postmortems is mentioning 15 minute compile times we were plagued with for half of production, or busted z-height or delta time or lack of a finished boss or any single one of the systems not being ever finished by a revolving door of people who were at least paid more than zero dollars to finish them. I outlined my failures above. How can a single person be responsible when I know for a fact that I am instrumental in the game’s failure???? (Don’t take that from me, please)

GZ, I understand you are upset and understandably so. I think your current perception is inaccurate. If you seriously want to the game to thrive, please just go ahead and start working. “I quit; the game is dead; I’m the game’s only hope; I need to tell everyone how someone else ruined the game” is a strange position for the game. You have the repo. Start working. Don’t talk to bhroom. Steal it for all I care. You will never hear me say he did a great job managing this game. But please fucking chill out, unhook yourself from this same ugly conversation and distorted thinking about “secret back channels” and manipulation you’ve been having since January, and let the subject die, thanks.

I’m sure you’ll say “I don’t have anything against you…” but by insisting on undermining the public’s miraculously fond memories of this catastrophe, yes, you are against me. I love your work on this game, I love you like I do all ToGsters, and despite your insistence there’s still some slim possibility we are all pals again, so please stop posting in this thread. (Here is where I get to use that “you were at my wedding GZ” non-meme that actually just makes you feel like dogshit)

----

It takes me fucking hours to write things like this because I gave up the ways of the poster. I’m not gonna refresh, but the last thing was about Zaubers Draining Stats which is of course was the great Vance X Kawazu 2012 Collab other people slept on

If this topic is still Good Vibes Only in a few pages I’ll post one hundred of my notebook scans of notes and graphs and things that were never meant to be, really blow ya damn minds aka look like a tremendous amateur idiot, it will be fun

Here is my take on the general management situation.

When the project launched, nobody was quite taking the helm on a game design standpoint, but Liam (bhroom, the producer) was working as the project manager as he had experience in that, having worked in TV I think. He did the business stuff and managed peoples' time, organized meetings etc. I remember he was staying away from design decisions and mostly deferred to bort and chef, from what I could tell.

Instead of a game design lead, we had this abstract "original idea" of the game with Bort and Chef being its ambassadors, but no skilled game design leadership to deal with how to make that idea work and make decisions when it inevitably doesnt work (because game design plans always need changing as you experiment with them unless you are enormously skilled and experienced with em)

Over time, with nobody else taking that role, Liam sort of slowly became the defacto design lead, but probably had the least game design experience out of all of us, which ended up being a big mistake. I think he shoulders much of the blame but we all share part of it, he should not have been in the position where he had to take that role he was not well suited for.

Once GZ came along much later, he wanted to take control of the project, and I think this would probably be the best way forward because GZ is a very skilled developer, and he pretty much made Barkley1. But him and bhroom could not agree on terms for it. (not going to go into the details here because I dont fully understand them, it doesnt involve me directly and its a contentious issue between them)
 
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thesheeep

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Ah, the good old "Let's do nothing and just eventually say we were doing something too ambitious".
Well, they didn't exactly do nothing, but what they did, from what I read here, was probably the least productive development I have ever heard of.
Which seems fitting, giving everyone's lack of experience.
 

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Gort's testimony: https://forums.somethingawful.com/s...19798&pagenumber=233&perpage=40#post495591338

Just to throw in my two cents into this barkley toilet...

I can't with 100% certainty confirm every bit of what GZ (Hiratio) has said because I wasn't in the ToG inner circles until there was like 4 people left in 2016 or whatever, but I have ZERO reason to doubt anything that he has said here from my experiences working on this wretched game, and from just talking to him about all the weird things going on and shady back-alley attitude. I peaced out from the project the same time as him for many of the same reasons he did.

This is such a complicated mess, and from a span of 6 years, that I might be misremembering stuff here and there, but I'm trying to write all of this to the best of my recollection:

For me, it all started back in fall of 2012 when they were looking for some help for B2 and since I sort of knew some of them and I liked Barkley1 I said sure, count me in. I did various systems they asked me to do, like the Character Creation system and the various minigames like the Booty Bass, a Diving minigame and a DwarfNET prototype that me and GZ later worked into a functional framework for some juicy DwarfNET content that never came. There are more than that but I picked these examples because they are probably the ones most people might have actually seen of this game via conventions or streams.

Back in those early days it was the Ideas Guy bonanza out there. Everyone had ideas and quests they wanted to bring into the game, good or bad, and everyone was hyped to the gills about making some barkley. It's in good portion because of those whacky ideas and the refusal to let go of them that sunk this ship and I too at the time contributed to that, although I don't think they gave two shits about my ideas beyond briefly entertaining them. It was their baby and I was just some Joe Shmuck that was helping them out, and I was perfectly fine with that.

I wasn't involved in the writing at all, until I thought that maybe I could help these guys script some off the NPC's. Their writing was good, and I knew mine was not, so I just tried to make the NPC's with their writing on them work as well as I could, testing them out for logic errors and stuff like that. The NPC/Event scripting system at the time was not user-friendly in the slightest but somehow work was getting done, or so I thought. Chef and Bort were still onboard at this point and all seemed good, or as good as one would expect anyway.

The compile times slowly got unacceptable and we thought there wasn't much we could do about it, the game was just so big (not true as evidenced by the superior scripting system GZ devised much later and discovering the "Dark Drakers", which I will explain later). This is about the time when it all began to sour, and I want to say this was like 2015 to 2016. Chef disappeared in a poof of smoke and Bort became a family man. I sensed that there was some beefs going on in ToG, but it seemed like something that could have been resolved, so I didn't pay it too much attention to it like a total fool.

Because of these departures I found myself in a much more central role and was suddenly in the mysterious inner circle. At this time I had also learned the tips and tricks of the mapmaking racket and had unofficially become the map maker. People would give me blueprints of game areas, and I would map them out to the best of my ability, and later on I would become obsessed with making the maps seamlessly weaving into each other. This was extremely dumb because it was basically just an artificial limitation, even if I liked the end result. I did also change a bunch of maps on my own accord because I thought they sucked, which lead into some beef, but those beefs were usually resolved within hours/days.

This is also about the time when I discovered the Dark Drakers, which soured the whole thing further. Dark Draker is a filler character in B2 who talks about being faster than the snapping maw of a drake. I discovered that an entire areas worth of NPC's were just carbon copies of Dark Draker with a different name given to each, AKA the illusion of work being done. Just these 10% finished NPC's basically littering the project to make it seem like it was all good. I suppose the plan was to eventually make them into distinct NPC's but the problem was that the whole game was plagued by the Dark Drakers, and they GREATLY attributed to the shit compile times. I also discovered/was told about some of the more hidden mechanics of the game which can only be described as the concoction of a lunatic. For example, two separate ingame time system both dictating quests and NPC behavior (with NPC's also being dictated by quest variables, items the player has etc.), leading to impossible to fix content. Thank the lord one of these system was later discarded.

There was many schemes on how to move forward on many occasions. Every now and then there would be a burst of gumption, and work was being done, and it all seemed good again, briefly. But you can only run away from the problems for so long. The combat in the game was always too complicated, too ambitious, and criminally ignored. It was a total disgrace, and I did bring this up a few times, but ToG didn't seem to give a hoot, or there was always some excuse why it shouldn't be worked on right now. There was too many "affixes" for the guns, there were too many types of gun, there were too many gun materials, too much everything basically.

Most of the gun stuff eventually sort of worked, and Frankie really outdid himself by making those 1000000 different gun sprites. Frankie was the only person who produced a consistent and high quality stream of work, and did way more than he needed to. It's a total disgrace that all the art he did is essentially in the toilet now.

With combat the crux of the issue wasn't not having enough sprites or the guns not working 100% like intended, but the enemies. They were a total fucking disgrace. But again, it wasn't seen as important enough to do something about it in an RPG game. To my knowledge, to this day there are no functional bosses.

2017 seems like the year with most of the streaks of when a good amount of work was being done. Things were getting made but of course the project was already long overdue. The new scripting system was in full swing which was approximately 20000 times better/faster/easier to use than the old one. I can't stress enough how much more efficient it made content creation. Compile times had dropped down to around 45 seconds. Too bad the writers were no longer there. Instead we tried to emulate the barkley1 sort of writing ourselves, but of course it was rather mediocre.

In 2018 GZ vanished for a long time and I just thought maybe he had some personal stuff to figure out, or that he had jumped off a bridge. That was not the case, he was merely crestfallen to his very core in regards to Barkley2. This was also the year when there would be times when I was the only person working on the game for weeks at a time, and at the longest, a month at a time. The whole debacle finally came to it's "climax" near the end of 2018 when it become absolutely crystal clear to even me that this is a bad joke and it's never going to work out if it just keeps going on like it had up to that point. GZ had more insight into things so he had figured out this a lot sooner, but regardless, when he quit, so did I because at that point there was no realistic way of getting this shit done. I was so stupid that it took me 6 years to become disillusioned.

This is boring and longwinded as all hell, but this is basically the short version of my story and I hope I haven't misremembered anything. I don't want to see this piece of shit game ever again in my life.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/s...rid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=245#post495629896

Enemies!

Even if most sucked, we did some cool shit! In usual ToG style there were grand ideas, but enemy ideas were a lot more realistic, nothing was too far out there.

We did Junkbots and they rocked. They roam around and pick up and equip junk pieces - arms, heads, and legs. Washing machine legs vibrated them forward slowly making a rumbling sound, tire pile legs had them bouncing in a slightly uncontrolled way, and there were more. There was a propeller head which let them fly/jump around a bit. They had poison gas arms, rocket launchers, chainsaws, and more that I forget. With the right combination of garbage they were legit threats. I think they were Barkley 2 enemies at their best. With garbagious garbage they were garbage.

Cybergremlins were our first real enemies, I think. Their looks and behaviour were randomized. Small, fast, weak, and hit you with wrenches. Ended up being the 'cookie cutter' enemies that most others were modeled off, for better or worse.

They were also symptomatic of Barkley 2 combat issues. Just run backwards and shoot. In theory they were dangerous if you got cornered, but in practice with open ended maps that could never happen unless you messed up. When we tried to make them more dangerous, they became murder machines if they could get close in group, hit stunning you until death. We could never find a good balance, they kept alternating between lame ducks and MvC2 Magneto.

At some point a walking spider tech demo turned out awesome and became the Crab-o-tron. They were Fucking Baller, would walk and jump around, with flamethrowers and also would litter the area with static fields to avoid. Legs were shields so had to hit from right angle. To this day they were the most fun Barkley 2 combat I have played.

I made a Crab-o-tron boss prototype, ten times bigger size and you would run between the legs and it would spawn minions. I'm not sure if anyone else tested it.

They taught us the lesson that enemies were best designed by just trying something out in game and seeing what works. Unfortunely we didn't really learn this lesson as a team and start working this way.

The opposite way - have an idea, write it down, create sprites, and then try to make it work in the game - led to garbage like Weresnails. By now you should be able to spot their problem instantly by just watching that clip, where I am intentionally playing bad, and repeating "Open Ended World" ten times.

By the time we made Catfish we had got better, but they and the way they were made still had all the above issues. We tried to make them work by casting nets to trap you in place. It helped a bit but all the core issues were still there. They saw a lot of polish, or in other words, time spent on something that wasn't great instead of talking about and fixing the game's issues. This was 2016/2017 and by now I was giving up hope we would ever really honestly discuss and fix combat.

Aliens were my attempt to make a faster enemy. They were strong, and faster than you when running straight, so for a first in B2 you couldn't just run away. I think they showed the way to good B2 combat. Unfortunately I could never give them enough polish to prove it to myself or others. It turns out it's really hard to focus and polish something when you're working free on late evenings an hour or two at a time.

Swamp Monsters and Kobolds also happened. That clip shows me dodging like a moron trying to make the clip looks interesting. In reality you would stand at a distance and calmly gun them down.

The swamp area had a nice mechanic to try to force combat into high gear: Mosquitoes. You got more mosquitoes surrounding you over time, fast, and would start losing health. Only getting close to a certain type of plant would make them go away. Some of those plants were Mimic monsters. It could have been really cool but was also hard to get to work well and fun in practice, because 1) 'poisonous floor' areas are rarely anyone's favourite areas and 2) swamp never really came together with fun combat because see above swamp enemies.

What could we have done differently to avoid this massive garbage void of time and work? Fucking Playtesting. We should have playtested everything from day 1. We should have had as a standard workflow to implement one thing, playtested it, and got feedback before even dreaming of doing something else. We should have playtested once a month. All our problems would have become instantly obvious. After two years when it became apparent that this was an issue, I brought this up thousands of times, to deaf ears, there was always some fucking reason why we couldn't playtest at that specific moment. Gun's breeding wasn't complete so the player couldn't see the whole experience. We needed affixes first. We needed more polish first. Everything needed to be connected first. Who cares? We need a good core gameplay before anything else matters. This is the one big learning I take away from this project into all future projects, and you should too. This was also a chicken and egg problem, we never playtested, meaning the game was never really playable by an outsider, meaning we could never playtest, meaning it was never... on and on. It was a huge effort to get demos ready for conventions, and while the game was really liked it also needed someone there to explain it (from what I hear - I never went to the conventions, sadly) When we came back from cons we had lots of feedback, but never really did anything with it combat wise.
 
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