As far as I'm aware, the yogscast promoted it, and were to be characters in it, but the funds themselves were went to the developer. I don't like the yogscast either, but it was the studio that were the villain in that case
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Frontiers - Daggerfall-inspired exploration-focused indie RPG
- Thread starter villain of the story
- Start date
As far as I'm aware, the yogscast promoted it, and were to be characters in it, but the funds themselves were went to the developer. I don't like the yogscast either, but it was the studio that were the villain in that case
Burning Bridges
Enviado de meu SM-G3502T usando Tapatalk
This guy is going insane. One day they will devote a chapter in psychiatric literature to him.
LESS T_T
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2012
- Messages
- 13,582
PrettyDeadman
Guest
Is this game GUT?
PrettyDeadman
Guest
The game looks VERY promising!
Skdursh
Savant
The game has been in early-access for nearly 5 years and currently holds a 54% approval rating on Steam and all of the other games from AAD Productions look like shovelware trash.
LESS T_T
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2012
- Messages
- 13,582
And this is... out of early access?:
That... looks pretty different from what I remember.
Well yeah, it's not the game he dreamed and promised. According to him, it's finished in the sense that you can play it from start to finish, it's "janky, ugly, compromised, buggy, missing tons of promised features... and done." The final KS update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/railboy/frontiers-explore-discover-survive/posts/2710388
That... looks pretty different from what I remember.
Well yeah, it's not the game he dreamed and promised. According to him, it's finished in the sense that you can play it from start to finish, it's "janky, ugly, compromised, buggy, missing tons of promised features... and done." The final KS update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/railboy/frontiers-explore-discover-survive/posts/2710388
The Final Update
FRONTIERS is Finished
A new build - the final build - has been pushed to Steam. The game has exited early access. It's not perfect - not even close to what we'd hoped for - but it's done. Janky, ugly, compromised, buggy, missing tons of promised features... and done. You can install it, launch it and play it from start to finish. I've done so dozens of times. (And never will again, knock on wood.)
Thought You'd Heard The Last From Me, Eh?
Can't say I blame you. It's been almost two years since the last big update. Unless you're one of the backers who contacted me directly you'd have no way to know I was still hard at work. Raising a kid while working full-time doesn't leave much time for development, but I've averaged a few hours of work a night with occasional full-time sprints during weekends & vacations.
Repo activity for 2019. The blob around April marks the beginning of the final refactor.
In all my project-filled years I've never sustained this kind of day-to-day commitment for such a long period and regardless of the final product I'm proud I stuck with it.
That's The Good News
There's no way to sugar-coat the bad news: many features and rewards were cut to make final delivery possible. If you're someone who pledged for a reward you won't ultimately get, I'm sorry. I won't bore you with technical justifications. I promised too much and I can't deliver.
The features that made it in are distributed in ways that are sure to seem frustratingly unfair and arbitrary. The principle behind every cut was this: if we keep this feature or reward can I still finish the game? If the answer was no then I cut it. It wasn't possible to give you all everything, but at least I can give you all something. Less than what you all deserve, but something.
I'll stick around to answer questions about individual features & rewards in the comments.
What Happened After The Last Update?
In the December 2017 update I was optimistic about a new code refactor. I was posting smaller updates to Twitter as well, and I was even gearing up to do some twitch dev logs. Then I went abruptly and totally dark in 2018. Why?
Because gridlock - the old enemy I discussed at length in the November 2015 update, and the primary motivation behind the refactor - was wrapping its cold, bony, strangling fingers around the project's neck again. AGAIN. The refactor was making the code prettier, smaller and faster, yes. But it wasn't fixing the one problem that mattered. In another few months it was obvious I'd be stuck. AGAIN.
Fallen Comrades
The reality that the game might never be finished set in. That was an actual thing that could happen. Not because I'd given up, or because I couldn't handle it emotionally, or because the heat-death of the universe had finally set in. It might never be finished because I was incapable of finishing it for reasons beyond my understanding or control. Just... kill me already. I could barely process this impending failure privately, let alone publicly.
A lot of other ambitious Kickstarter indies were being cancelled or suffering catastrophic setbacks around the same time. The effect of these failures on my morale was not great given that many were helmed by veteran designers with impressive pedigrees. The cancellation of Limit Theory in particularsent a chill down my spine. Jim Rossignol is unequivocally a more talented developer and programmer than I am, and from what I gather similar issues killed his 6-year project. What hope did I have?
Mid 2018 got pretty dark, and early 2019 got even darker. I drafted cancellation updates more than once, feeling that it was dishonest to string everyone along.
Third Time's The Charm
In early 2019 impending gridlock ground development to a halt as predicted. So I set programming aside and focused on the interface rebuild while I weighed my options.
With the many, many other walls I'd hit on this project I could always tell you what was wrong. (And often did, at length.) I may have lacked the experience to engineer a solution at first, but that was easily remedied with a little research & labor. Here my struggle was to identify the problem. 'Gridlock' describes the result, not the problem itself. And 'complexity' is not the problem because complexity doesn't always result in gridlock. If it did we'd all still be making Pong.
So I reasoned that I must be lacking some crucial knowledge. I needed vocabulary. I needed theory. Once I could think about and describe the problem in precise terms I could identify the skillset needed to engineer a solution, learn those skills as quickly as possible, then take one last stab at refactoring.
Pretty vague as plans go, but it was better than giving up. I chose 2020 as hard deadline because this couldn't go on forever. If it wasn't working then I would frankly admit defeat, cancel the game and accept that the project was simply beyond my capabilities.
Humorous unrelated visual to break up the text
Thank Goodness For My Day Job
Working at Microsoft has its perks. A big one is a steady stream of positive reinforcement. I was delivering quality code to discerning experts on a regular basis, and I was observing teams of talented & experienced developers struggle with the same kind of gunk that was blocking me on FRONTIERS. If I had been isolated I might have succumbed to gnawing doubts about my fundamental competence, but the job kept them at bay. I could do this.
Now, I had originally planned a much larger update - oh, irony - where I described what I learned and how I applied that knowledge to FRONTIERS. It's a fascinating subject and there's enough material for three updates. Maybe another time.
Systems, systems, systems
The short version is that I rewrote the game completely from scratch - the lines of code that survived this process are in the low hundreds - and when I finally wove all of the game's systems into a final framework, there was no gridlock. Gods be praised, I was over the wall.
Once it stopped being a question of possibility, it became a question of time - did I have the time to pull all the old game content into the new framework and deliver something that was functional by 2020? I did, just barely. And here we are.
Time to Take a Break
I'm getting old. I've been working late into the evening on something or another for my entire adult life and I'm ready to put that activity on pause and just be part of my family for a while.
Olive will be 3 years old soon and this is a very important time in her life - she's starting to pay close attention to how present I am and how often I choose to work on projects instead of play with her or to spend time together as a family.
So this is goodbye for a bit. I'll stick around to answer questions for the next day or so, and I'll probably get in touch with many of you directly. Then I will be taking a long break from FRONTIERS.
Thank You Everyone
Thank you again. For believing in me and for pitching in to make this project happen all those years ago. Even a perfectly realized game would have been a feeble reward for all the patience and encouragement and good times you've given me.
I hope the work I've done brings you some joy, and I hope that in the future we'll reflect on this insane expedition with some fondness.
V_K
Arcane
Wonder which are the features that ended up making it into the game.
Huh, never imagined this would see the light of day, stripped down as it is. Anyone wanna take the hit and see what's it like? Does anyone care anymore?
I've owned it on Steam for a few years now but haven't played it since early 2018. I just reinstalled it upon finding out about the release. I'll post some impressions soon.
Ok, so I played it briefly, and it's pretty much crap imo.
He completely overhauled the graphics and changed them to a retro pixel-art style similar to something like Minecraft. Some people might like that, but I think it looks vastly inferior to the older version.
Also, the controls are ridiculously dumb, and I wasn't able to remap them. For example, MB 1 moves you forward and MB 2 makes you jump. I'm really not sure what he was thinking there.
Overall, it's a big disappointment considering what his goals were at the beginning. I understand though that he just couldn't pull it off by himself. It's too bad he wasn't able to form a team and create something closer to his original vision.
He completely overhauled the graphics and changed them to a retro pixel-art style similar to something like Minecraft. Some people might like that, but I think it looks vastly inferior to the older version.
Also, the controls are ridiculously dumb, and I wasn't able to remap them. For example, MB 1 moves you forward and MB 2 makes you jump. I'm really not sure what he was thinking there.
Overall, it's a big disappointment considering what his goals were at the beginning. I understand though that he just couldn't pull it off by himself. It's too bad he wasn't able to form a team and create something closer to his original vision.
Max Heap
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2011
- Messages
- 617
Heard of this the first time today.
Went into it blind. Played for about two hours
Boy oh boy... now, let me first say, the game's implementation itself seems okay. The whole thing is built on a custom engine and from what I can tell the guy who made this seems to be a competent programmer. So far so good.
What the guy ain't however is someone with a clear understanding for "pacing" in video games.
And that is so damn important - so few game designers really understand it. Both indie and AAA developers fall in that trap all the damn time.
Let me elaborate:
The way I understood it, this game wants to be "Daggerfallish", but here's the thing:
Daggerfall - and Elder Scrolls in general - throw you into the core gameplay right away. And that core gameplay is combat-focused exploration - make no mistake, Daggerfall has all kinds of nice systems going on, but in the first few hours you stick with it for the dungeoneering. Bethesda - surprisingly - has a very well developed self-understanding when it comes to their products - it is something that's taken for granted by fans, but it actually requires a proper reflection process in your company once you get feedback from your customers.
Anyway, Arena, Daggerfall and Oblivion mercilessly drop you into a dungeon at the beginning, Morrowind hands you your papers and tells you to get the fuck out. You get a tiny piece of exposition (literally two minutes in Daggerfall) and then you are "in the action" right away.
And then, on top of that, the games slowly build their grand narrative and anything that complements core gameplay, like spellweaving, guilds and what not.
Frontiers' main problem (so far) is, that I spent two hours playing it and the core gameplay I was exposed to (or what I understood as such) was
1) Walking
2) Clicking myself through expostion dialogues
Now mind you - dialogue trees can be interesting, but expostion dialogue is almost always boring. The basic idea of dialogue trees is to let the players make certain decisions or collect information on top what they already know. Naturally exposition is more of a one-way road; you don't want the players to really have any impact on it and there is no knowledge for the players to fall back on, because it's the beginning of the game - essentially giving them no incentive to inquire certain things and go down certain parts of the dialogue tree - so you either skip large parts of the dialogue, or you begrudgingly go through every single answer. In short: That shit's a test of patience. Pack it up and put it into a tiny intro at the beginning instead. There aren't that many story elements anyway.
Besides that, I couldn't trade with anyone, I couldn't really go out and have some fun on my own (despite the world and the game's pitch seeming so inviting to that), it was just two hours of walking through some nice, unlit areas, with not all that much in them.
I'm not arguing for visual bombardment, but clearly define what the players are going to do for 90% of their time and pull that into the first 20 minutes of the game. If that is what Frontiers actually did - well shit, don't mind me, but at least that ain't Daggerfall then. Which brings me back to understanding a product.
So any technical issues aside - it was a snore-fest. That was my main issue with it.
And I'd consider myself "battle-hardened" when it comes to slow RPGs. I have no problems with Wizardry, which I'd call action-packed compared to this. At least it gets to the point right away.
Went into it blind. Played for about two hours
Boy oh boy... now, let me first say, the game's implementation itself seems okay. The whole thing is built on a custom engine and from what I can tell the guy who made this seems to be a competent programmer. So far so good.
What the guy ain't however is someone with a clear understanding for "pacing" in video games.
And that is so damn important - so few game designers really understand it. Both indie and AAA developers fall in that trap all the damn time.
Let me elaborate:
The way I understood it, this game wants to be "Daggerfallish", but here's the thing:
Daggerfall - and Elder Scrolls in general - throw you into the core gameplay right away. And that core gameplay is combat-focused exploration - make no mistake, Daggerfall has all kinds of nice systems going on, but in the first few hours you stick with it for the dungeoneering. Bethesda - surprisingly - has a very well developed self-understanding when it comes to their products - it is something that's taken for granted by fans, but it actually requires a proper reflection process in your company once you get feedback from your customers.
Anyway, Arena, Daggerfall and Oblivion mercilessly drop you into a dungeon at the beginning, Morrowind hands you your papers and tells you to get the fuck out. You get a tiny piece of exposition (literally two minutes in Daggerfall) and then you are "in the action" right away.
And then, on top of that, the games slowly build their grand narrative and anything that complements core gameplay, like spellweaving, guilds and what not.
Frontiers' main problem (so far) is, that I spent two hours playing it and the core gameplay I was exposed to (or what I understood as such) was
1) Walking
2) Clicking myself through expostion dialogues
Now mind you - dialogue trees can be interesting, but expostion dialogue is almost always boring. The basic idea of dialogue trees is to let the players make certain decisions or collect information on top what they already know. Naturally exposition is more of a one-way road; you don't want the players to really have any impact on it and there is no knowledge for the players to fall back on, because it's the beginning of the game - essentially giving them no incentive to inquire certain things and go down certain parts of the dialogue tree - so you either skip large parts of the dialogue, or you begrudgingly go through every single answer. In short: That shit's a test of patience. Pack it up and put it into a tiny intro at the beginning instead. There aren't that many story elements anyway.
Besides that, I couldn't trade with anyone, I couldn't really go out and have some fun on my own (despite the world and the game's pitch seeming so inviting to that), it was just two hours of walking through some nice, unlit areas, with not all that much in them.
I'm not arguing for visual bombardment, but clearly define what the players are going to do for 90% of their time and pull that into the first 20 minutes of the game. If that is what Frontiers actually did - well shit, don't mind me, but at least that ain't Daggerfall then. Which brings me back to understanding a product.
So any technical issues aside - it was a snore-fest. That was my main issue with it.
And I'd consider myself "battle-hardened" when it comes to slow RPGs. I have no problems with Wizardry, which I'd call action-packed compared to this. At least it gets to the point right away.
Last edited:
V_K
Arcane
It wasn't supposed to have any combat from the Kickstarter pitch. Just exploration, survival (which, I assume, got cut), dialogs and minor puzzle-solving.
Max Heap
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2011
- Messages
- 617
Well if that is so don't mind me. I saw some wolves and a bear and also a blacksmith and an equipment window, so I was under the impression that there was some combat element in it at least. As I said, I willfully went into it completely blind.
However, it definitely shouldn't advertise itself through titles like Daggerfall then.
The game's store page reads:
Good that it made it to release, but these sort of desperate drop and dash releases do nothing but sour the lot and landscape---especially when presented under such negative terms as per the dev outright as they wash their hands of it. The like of it is far more deleterious to the scene than even the Perpetual Early Access problem as that at least proffers some modicum of hope inherent.
Higher Animal
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 11, 2012
- Messages
- 1,854
God bless what this guy was trying to do. I hope he focuses on what is important in life now.
Definitely. It's better to try and fail than not try at all. The game had a lot of potential, but it was too ambitious for 1 guy by himself.
I wish he had included the option to use the original graphics though. I guess it must hae been causing problems somewhere.
Sucks that this is the end but I only spent $20 on this during the Kickstarter and I'd rather see someone shoot for the moon and fail (while being there for the ride) than settle for a consistent stream mediocrity. This type of game was practically non-existent back in 2013. Now it's starting to come back and I got 15-20 hours of coop gameplay out of this. Well worth it.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
The graphical degradation from the trailer to release is pretty wild.
I feel like the disconnect on a lot of these projects is that people could get a very basic game working, and figured the rest would be equally easy. As I get older, I find myself increasingly realizing that all of these projects we're trying to recreate had pretty large teams. Daggerfall had 15 professionals working on it, building off the existing Arena engine. The idea that one person can make a Daggerfall game is a bit of a stretch.
Of course, people can and do make that stretch -- Call of Saregnar might get finished (I hope!), AOD did get finished, point-and-clicks are made now that are in the same ballpark as 90s adventures but with much smaller teams, etc. Newer engines and tools do help, as does the ability to clone design work that others did previously. But it strikes me as hubristic to assume that one person or even a small team can make a game comparable to the best games made by larger, more experienced teams.
I feel like the disconnect on a lot of these projects is that people could get a very basic game working, and figured the rest would be equally easy. As I get older, I find myself increasingly realizing that all of these projects we're trying to recreate had pretty large teams. Daggerfall had 15 professionals working on it, building off the existing Arena engine. The idea that one person can make a Daggerfall game is a bit of a stretch.
Of course, people can and do make that stretch -- Call of Saregnar might get finished (I hope!), AOD did get finished, point-and-clicks are made now that are in the same ballpark as 90s adventures but with much smaller teams, etc. Newer engines and tools do help, as does the ability to clone design work that others did previously. But it strikes me as hubristic to assume that one person or even a small team can make a game comparable to the best games made by larger, more experienced teams.
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