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Rise To Ruins

thesheeep

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Since a lot of people talk about They Are Billions right now, I was wondering how there is no topic about Rise To Ruins here.
There are pretty big similarities between those titles IMO.



While TAB offers direct control, RtR is more of a Settlers-like game with you as a god figure (including godly powers).
It is in EA since 2014 ( :lol: ), but really absolutely playable. Full of features and if there are bugs, I didn't find any.

Here's my Steam review:
tl;dr: A great and hard survival strategy/simulation lacking some rudimentary save feature.

Raise your settlement by building housings, lumberjacks, mines, fletchers, carpenters and loads of other utility buildings for any issue from feeding to healing to building roads.
Make sure you don't build too much or spread your villagers too thin or collapse is sure to follow.
There is a very strong Settler-like atmosphere here - but with a great UI that really helps to find your bearings.

Dangers? What dangers!

Of course, that alone would be far too easy. At the same time you will be attacked by monsters of varying danger levels - from the lowly headless zombies to ghostly spectres and fire-slinging elementals.
So you better raise walls and defenses (there are various towers, golem creators and guard recruitment stations) soon. While the first 2-3 days will see very little attacks, later on you will see large masses of mobs marching towards you, especially at night.
Any player of tower defense games will feel right at home in this aspect - the better your wall maze, the better off your town.

Of course, that would STILL be too easy. Have a meteor shower, or a lightning storm, or a blood moon (creating bloody slimes right in your base), or an eclipse (causing mobs to attack at daytime, too) or an earthquake...
All of these increase in intensity as you play longer and longer.

Of course, all of that would still be a bit easy. So you need to take the four seasons into account and prepare for them. Spring is just dandy. Summer is HOT, so your villagers will "overheat" and work slower (and your crops will grow slower). Autumn seems to have an increased catastrophe rate (earthquakes, etc.) but I may be wrong. Winter freezes over lakes and nothing will grow - if you didn't stock up water and food, you're done with.

Thankfully, to deal with all of that you are given some godly powers like throwing meteors, grabbing/dropping anything, summoning emergency golems, etc.

The graphics are charming, as is the music and the sound effects. More music tracks would be welcome, though. Good as they are, after a while they start becoming repetitive.

I can see only one real downside here:

The current rhythm of "play for a long time, then lose everything in the later stages" leads to you having to play the first year over and over again. Which is extremely annoying as it is very easy once you get the hang of it and have a working build order/strategy for the early game. After a while, it just feels like a waste of time, really.
This could be improved via save games.
Or create an automatic restore point of some kind, maybe at the beginning of the second year.

The longer you play, the less attractive is the prospect of doing the baby steps all over again each time.
 

HeatEXTEND

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Blows billions straight out the water tbh. More charm, more gameplay, more fun. Sure it's been in development a lot longer but looking at billions I don't think that's going to matter much in the long run.
 

Beowulf

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It has its charm, I admit, but as I mentioned in the other thread, I was rather disappointed by it.
I admit that I played it some time ago, so things might have changed for the better, as thesheep already mentioned.

Nevertheless the game felt pretty shallow for me and I couldn't find enough interesting things to keep playing more, after I "maxed-out" my village.
As far as I remember, you coudn't even turn your buildings around before placement (?). The AI was also not that good in prioritizing jobs and dealing with multiple assignments.
It also suffers from FPS drops the more people you have.

But I feel I got my money's worth. It's just not a title that I'll go back to. Not with Gnomoria, Ingnomia available. Not even mentioning Dwarf Fortress, which is always a comparison benchmark in that genre.
 
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thesheeep

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Nevertheless the game felt pretty shallow for me and I couldn't find enough interesting things to keep playing more, after I "maxed-out" my village.
This is true, of course. Once you brought your village to a state that you can consider safe, there isn't much reason to continue.
However, different starting areas really come with their own challenges, so starting over somewhere else spices things up.

Adding to that, in recent versions it actually makes sense and adds challenges to have multiple villages.
I actually remembered wrong in the other thread. What happens is this (quoting dev post from September, and that was just one of many bigger changes):
  • You can now send villagers from one village to another connecting village or new region via the new migration tab on the left panel.
  • You now will only get "freebie" villagers and resources on your first region. After, you must send migrants to connecting regions to establish them.
  • When starting a new connected regions you will get up to 25 migrants as soon as you place your camp. After, you will get anywhere between 10 and 15 a day until all incoming migrants have been completely exhausted. During this time you can still receive nomads as usual.
  • New Building; The Migration Way Station. It enables access to the new migration tab so you can send villagers to nearby regions as well as increases your maximum amount you may send per day.
  • When sending migrants to new regions, the villagers will become migrants in the morning, and actually leave at midday.
  • The village will only send healthy, young and single adult villagers out of the village.
  • The world map now allows you to start anywhere you want for your first region, but blocks expanding into other regions unless you send migrants there first.
I didn't play that version myself, yet, but it sounds intriguing.

As far as I remember, you coudn't even turn your buildings around before placement (?).
I don't really see the problem here, almost all buildings are pretty quadratic and have multiple entry points. Of course, it would be a nice feature, I just doubt it was high priority (might even be in by now, no idea).

The AI was also not that good in prioritizing jobs and dealing with multiple assignments.
It also suffers from FPS drops the more people you have.
Didn't experience the FPS problems.
The way to deal with multiple assignments is manual prioritization and not having many new assignments to begin with. Only building 1-3 new things at a time.

But I feel I got my money's worth. It's just not a title that I'll go back to. Not with Gnomoria, Ignomia available. Not even mentioning Dwarf Fortress, which is always a comparison benchmark in that genre.
Didn't even know about Ingnomia, will keep an eye on that.
 

thesheeep

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Lol!

I just lost my first settlement in winter, because it seems monsters can now attack walls.
That never happened in the past, so I assumed walls are absolutely haram (except if the path is blocked) and was completely annihilated by the mobs just walking around my maze in a hole they made.

But now, as more and more monsters walk a tile, its "travel cost" increases and at some point that causes monsters to not use your maze but look for an alternate path.
The only solution to that is to have double or even triple external walls - that seems to make them less "attractive" to attack. The more you know...

But that also brings me back to my biggest gripe with the game: No saves.
The last 8 hours or so of playing were entirely for naught. I truly wish the game would create saves at least at the start of a new season...
 

Joggerino

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I've been playing this for the last few days, it's a really charming little game. Graphics are great. I love how the essence (mana) flies all over the map, feeding your defense tower complex, and the villagers just stand confused whenever i perform some miracle in front of them. Like, why is this forest growing out of nothing here? If you're gonna play this remember that corruption creeps through all terrain, including mountains.
 

thesecret1

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Is penning corruption in worth it, or not? On one hand, it lets me control the playing field, so to speak, on the other, enemy tends to be more aggressive, and usually fucks me by deciding he'll just attack someplace other than the maze
 
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i remember i loved this little game when i tried it, i've been this close to buying it, what killed my enthusiasm is the impossibility to push back the creep, each and every city you build is doomed, sooner or later. "losing is fun" to me is exactly like "fighting for peace" and "fucking for virginity".
 

kris

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i remember i loved this little game when i tried it, i've been this close to buying it, what killed my enthusiasm is the impossibility to push back the creep, each and every city you build is doomed, sooner or later. "losing is fun" to me is exactly like "fighting for peace" and "fucking for virginity".

It is not impossible to psuh back the creep, you have long been able to do that. Towers quickly push it back, in an earlier game I pushed the creep into a corner. Ballista towers are great for creating something akin a demilitarized zone to give you space and then you build new walls and new towers in a forward motion to advance.

The real problem is those nasty fire elementals, you really have to dig lakes and be around to grab them, because they can quickly crash part of your defense. Water is a great ally.
 

Joggerino

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Is penning corruption in worth it, or not? On one hand, it lets me control the playing field, so to speak, on the other, enemy tends to be more aggressive, and usually fucks me by deciding he'll just attack someplace other than the maze
I don't think it's worth it rushing to contain the corruption. What I'm doing is counter-attacking from a small but well defended position.
 

Haba

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i remember i loved this little game when i tried it, i've been this close to buying it, what killed my enthusiasm is the impossibility to push back the creep, each and every city you build is doomed, sooner or later. "losing is fun" to me is exactly like "fighting for peace" and "fucking for virginity".

It is not impossible to push back the creep, you have long been able to do that. Towers quickly push it back, in an earlier game I pushed the creep into a corner. Ballista towers are great for creating something akin a demilitarized zone to give you space and then you build new walls and new towers in a forward motion to advance.

The real problem is those nasty fire elementals, you really have to dig lakes and be around to grab them, because they can quickly crash part of your defense. Water is a great ally.

Unless they have changed the game, it is very much impossible to push back the corruption. It spawns inside of the mountains. And the intensity of the rectal activity scales inversely, so when you are just about to win, the game starts spawning shit behind your line of defense. Enemies that are practically unkillable. Shitter zombies with thousands of hitpoints.

Absolutely retarded mechanic.

I guess if I had another go on the same map, I could box the corruption in, dig out the entire mountains facing the map edge and then push the rest of it. But that was already so fucking tedious that I don't want to touch the game ever again.

The whole tower defence is just a chore. You have to micro the waves because of the supermobs that spawn randomly. And the only (late game) viable way to pick them up and toss them into ze oven. Which is a lot of fun when the mob can be a tiny tiny glowy skeleton.
 

Joggerino

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it doesn't spawn inside the mountains but it does spread through them. It's actually beneficial to you since it counts as controlling the map while posing no threat to you. If you allow it to spread into open land then it will start spawning shit.
 

thesheeep

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People who try to play a single map eternally to spread the corruption back entirely are playing it wrong to begin with.
You cannot "defeat" the corruption - you can only push it back so far.
There should always come a point where your defenses cannot keep up with the corruption growth. You have a ceiling of how strong your villagers & towers can get, but the corruption continually increases in power without limit.
For longevity of your colony, the best idea is to actually make "your" area as small as possible while still being large enough for a large town. Leave as much space as you can to the corruption to have less pressure on it (making it grow stronger slower).

Starting a new map also lowers the overall corruption strength.
That is how you manage corruption.
So, land on a map, become a stable colony. Send surplus villagers to other map.
Once you sent enough, switch to that map.
Repeat.

To actually "win" the game, you have to have a stable town on all maps - I think it was surviving for 2-3 years in each or so.
I don't think that's a very great victory condition, either.
Truly, I love the game, but even I couldn't keep playing it long enough to do that on all maps.
But I do like the mechanic of it being impossible (or supposed to be) to eternally play one map.
 

Joggerino

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I got a really big first village so i decided to try to wipe out the corruption in my second village. Started with 40 villagers and some resources and already had 20 or so golems spanking the monsters by day 3. At day 15 I'm still chasing the corruption around the map but with 100 golems I'm confident i can root it out before it starts spawning anything dangerous. I own the whole map except the NE and SE corners.
wow.jpg
 
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so it's been changed, in the old build i tried there was no way to push the creep back. i should fetch a newer build then.
 

Joggerino

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I have to sadly report that you cannot wipe out the corruption. I got to the point where i couldn't "compress" it any further. It may be possible if you have a huge mountain range to contain it indefinitely but i can't do that on my current map.
 

kris

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He would be better off not responding do these people. ignoring can work wonders.

I should be trying this again soonish. Its just a bit to intensive to play with a 1 year old around.
 

Haba

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He also secured funding for his game...

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/328080/view/5127884013766587984

Funding Secured.
Greetings fellow gamers!

Many of you have probably noted an obvious slowdown in development since Update 1c was released last year. First and foremost, I would like to absolutely reassure you that development is, in fact, continuing and Update 2 is currently in work, with Update 3 and 4 already planned out.

But why did this happen? Well, that's a story I thought I would never find myself in a position to tell, but here we are. So strap in! There's a lot of back context needed.

In 2013 I decided to learn to program as it was the only remaining skill left I did not have to make a video game. I had no experience what so ever outside of doing mods/scripting for various games over the years. I spent 8-9 months of my life doing nothing but working at Lockheed Martin as an Avionics Technician 8-10 hours a day, and another 8-10 at home learning how to program in my language of choice, Java. After roughly a year it was time to go pro, and I started development on Retro-Pixel Castles, or eventually to be renamed, Rise to Ruins. I saved up (or have been saving up, more accurately) around $90k working at Lockheed, because I lived out of a suitcase moving from one military base to the next every 4-6 months for 5 straight years. So, I did the totally rational thing you do when you want to completely change career paths into a job with an extremely high rate of failure that you have literally zero professional experience what so ever in doing, I quit my current job at Lockheed Martin.

Yes, you read that right. My first ever attempt to "go pro" happened within a year of learning to program and I quit my very secure job to do it. Despite all odds, I was successful in the attempt. I also got an Associates Degree in Psychology at a local community college and bought a house in cash (87k, near-condemned foreclosure) while doing all this because it was necessary. Thanks to my former military service I could go to college for free. In fact, they paid me roughly $1,200/mo to go on top of paying for books/tuition, it's how I fed myself in the early days of this. I also needed a place to live during this ridiculous adventure too, and reducing costs was key to my strategy working, so what better cost reduction than removing rent/mortgages all together? Long as I was in college for free and getting paid $1,200/mo to educate myself for the next 4 years, I could survive.

Development on Rise to Ruins itself was blistering fast as a result, because this whole plan would implode within 4 years when my education benefits ran out. It's easily a whole story in of itself, but I'll gloss over that for brevity's sake because that's not the point of this already really long announcement. Basically I dedicated years to work, spending a good 10-14 hours a day usually 7 days a week at the height of it just chugging out patches during Early Access. Fast forward to Rise to Ruins officially releasing in October of 2019, right before the pandemic started. My plan was (and still is) to continue to support the game post release. Rise to Ruins has done me very well financially, supporting my and my wife's lives without either of us having to get outside jobs.

But there's a problem. While Rise to Ruins does in fact currently support my livelihood and the entire 4 year plan became irrelevant by year 2 because Rise to Ruins' income started to support me and my wife by itself, it still isn't enough to finance the next game. The next game, code named "Project Mary", is another project that will likely take me multiple years to complete with a very long Early Access cycle. I cannot guarantee I can duplicate Rise to Ruins' Early Access success again, and Rise to Ruins' sales revenue will eventually dwindle. It must, it's just the nature of how it works in this business.

So, how do I get around this problem? Money. Lots of money. Well, Rise to Ruins makes decent money, but still not enough, I can't assure it will be there forever and I am against taking money from publishers and what not.

Coronavirus has entered chat.

In 2020 one of the worst pandemics in human history began and to my disadvantage, only a few months after Rise to Ruins released. I was faced with an awkward problem as I was locked in my home. I needed to find proper funding for my second game and I absolutely abhor taking money from publishers. I'm a solo developer and it's going to stay that way. The pandemic amplified this problem because it limited what I could do to solve my funding issue.

I knew Rise to Ruins profits couldn't sustain development for the multiple years needed to complete Project Mary, and a Kickstarter also wouldn't be right as an already successful company running a Kickstarter for funding is bad optics in my opinion. Even with full continued patch support, Rise to Ruins will eventually drop under the bar its sales support me, that's just how it works unless you have a mega-ultra-hit like Stardew Valley, Rimworld, etc that generates so much cash on the front end it doesn't matter. Rise to Ruins still had done me well, at the time of making this decision I had no debts of any kind, house and car paid off in full, and over $200,000 in my savings account. That sounds great, but it still wasn't enough to accomplish my goals and as I said previously, I felt a Kickstarter would be in bad tastes (and potentially not raise enough money anyway). I had to figure out how to generate even more cash during a pandemic without relying on Rise to Ruins, so I could work on the game without any future cash flow fears.

Repeating my normal methodology of throwing my whole-everything into a problem, I dedicated a ridiculous amount of time in one of the places I thought I'd never find myself; The soulless depths of the stock market. I studied, studied, and studied more. My whole life existed for one reason and one reason alone; Learn the market and use it to secure funding for Project Mary.

So uh, yeah, again in my life, against all odds, I did it.

As of writing this, I have turned $200k into $2.5 million dollars. That was actually higher before the recent tech crash in February and early March, where I broke a staggering $3 million. I am now pulling back from active investing, and transitioning to a semi-active-passive thing, so I can refocus on what's important; Rise to Ruins continued development, and starting development full time on Project Mary. I should hopefully have a minimum sustained additional income of $10k/month (that's not a typo) throughout all of Project Mary's development without actually touching the $2.5 million. That's not assured, but it seems likely.

This process impacted everything in my life, including my own mental health, that I'm still recovering from as I write this. Trust me folks, money doesn't buy happiness and while I have a lot of it now, the past 8 months have been absolutely exhausting and downright destructive to my mental health. I will simply need time to recover.

I hope you guys can forgive the lack of patches over the last year as I went through this adventure, and have gained some understanding as to why I did it at all in the first place. But, one thing is now certain for Rise to Ruins', Project Mary's and most importantly SixtyGig Games' future as a whole:

Funding Secured.


(EDIT/Update: No you ridiculously awesome goofballs, I didn't yolo into $GME. :P)

Just read it through. It is absolutely insane.

Autism, autism never changes.
 

thesheeep

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I think it should also be said that the game can be considered finished.

You don't have to wait for the guy to get around to add even more stuff or change mechanics, etc.
That's only something you are doing if you've put a huge number of hours into the game already and are waiting for a good reason to give it yet another spin.
 

Galdred

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
He also secured funding for his game...

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/328080/view/5127884013766587984

Funding Secured.
Greetings fellow gamers!

Many of you have probably noted an obvious slowdown in development since Update 1c was released last year. First and foremost, I would like to absolutely reassure you that development is, in fact, continuing and Update 2 is currently in work, with Update 3 and 4 already planned out.

But why did this happen? Well, that's a story I thought I would never find myself in a position to tell, but here we are. So strap in! There's a lot of back context needed.

In 2013 I decided to learn to program as it was the only remaining skill left I did not have to make a video game. I had no experience what so ever outside of doing mods/scripting for various games over the years. I spent 8-9 months of my life doing nothing but working at Lockheed Martin as an Avionics Technician 8-10 hours a day, and another 8-10 at home learning how to program in my language of choice, Java. After roughly a year it was time to go pro, and I started development on Retro-Pixel Castles, or eventually to be renamed, Rise to Ruins. I saved up (or have been saving up, more accurately) around $90k working at Lockheed, because I lived out of a suitcase moving from one military base to the next every 4-6 months for 5 straight years. So, I did the totally rational thing you do when you want to completely change career paths into a job with an extremely high rate of failure that you have literally zero professional experience what so ever in doing, I quit my current job at Lockheed Martin.

Yes, you read that right. My first ever attempt to "go pro" happened within a year of learning to program and I quit my very secure job to do it. Despite all odds, I was successful in the attempt. I also got an Associates Degree in Psychology at a local community college and bought a house in cash (87k, near-condemned foreclosure) while doing all this because it was necessary. Thanks to my former military service I could go to college for free. In fact, they paid me roughly $1,200/mo to go on top of paying for books/tuition, it's how I fed myself in the early days of this. I also needed a place to live during this ridiculous adventure too, and reducing costs was key to my strategy working, so what better cost reduction than removing rent/mortgages all together? Long as I was in college for free and getting paid $1,200/mo to educate myself for the next 4 years, I could survive.

Development on Rise to Ruins itself was blistering fast as a result, because this whole plan would implode within 4 years when my education benefits ran out. It's easily a whole story in of itself, but I'll gloss over that for brevity's sake because that's not the point of this already really long announcement. Basically I dedicated years to work, spending a good 10-14 hours a day usually 7 days a week at the height of it just chugging out patches during Early Access. Fast forward to Rise to Ruins officially releasing in October of 2019, right before the pandemic started. My plan was (and still is) to continue to support the game post release. Rise to Ruins has done me very well financially, supporting my and my wife's lives without either of us having to get outside jobs.

But there's a problem. While Rise to Ruins does in fact currently support my livelihood and the entire 4 year plan became irrelevant by year 2 because Rise to Ruins' income started to support me and my wife by itself, it still isn't enough to finance the next game. The next game, code named "Project Mary", is another project that will likely take me multiple years to complete with a very long Early Access cycle. I cannot guarantee I can duplicate Rise to Ruins' Early Access success again, and Rise to Ruins' sales revenue will eventually dwindle. It must, it's just the nature of how it works in this business.

So, how do I get around this problem? Money. Lots of money. Well, Rise to Ruins makes decent money, but still not enough, I can't assure it will be there forever and I am against taking money from publishers and what not.

Coronavirus has entered chat.

In 2020 one of the worst pandemics in human history began and to my disadvantage, only a few months after Rise to Ruins released. I was faced with an awkward problem as I was locked in my home. I needed to find proper funding for my second game and I absolutely abhor taking money from publishers. I'm a solo developer and it's going to stay that way. The pandemic amplified this problem because it limited what I could do to solve my funding issue.

I knew Rise to Ruins profits couldn't sustain development for the multiple years needed to complete Project Mary, and a Kickstarter also wouldn't be right as an already successful company running a Kickstarter for funding is bad optics in my opinion. Even with full continued patch support, Rise to Ruins will eventually drop under the bar its sales support me, that's just how it works unless you have a mega-ultra-hit like Stardew Valley, Rimworld, etc that generates so much cash on the front end it doesn't matter. Rise to Ruins still had done me well, at the time of making this decision I had no debts of any kind, house and car paid off in full, and over $200,000 in my savings account. That sounds great, but it still wasn't enough to accomplish my goals and as I said previously, I felt a Kickstarter would be in bad tastes (and potentially not raise enough money anyway). I had to figure out how to generate even more cash during a pandemic without relying on Rise to Ruins, so I could work on the game without any future cash flow fears.

Repeating my normal methodology of throwing my whole-everything into a problem, I dedicated a ridiculous amount of time in one of the places I thought I'd never find myself; The soulless depths of the stock market. I studied, studied, and studied more. My whole life existed for one reason and one reason alone; Learn the market and use it to secure funding for Project Mary.

So uh, yeah, again in my life, against all odds, I did it.

As of writing this, I have turned $200k into $2.5 million dollars. That was actually higher before the recent tech crash in February and early March, where I broke a staggering $3 million. I am now pulling back from active investing, and transitioning to a semi-active-passive thing, so I can refocus on what's important; Rise to Ruins continued development, and starting development full time on Project Mary. I should hopefully have a minimum sustained additional income of $10k/month (that's not a typo) throughout all of Project Mary's development without actually touching the $2.5 million. That's not assured, but it seems likely.

This process impacted everything in my life, including my own mental health, that I'm still recovering from as I write this. Trust me folks, money doesn't buy happiness and while I have a lot of it now, the past 8 months have been absolutely exhausting and downright destructive to my mental health. I will simply need time to recover.

I hope you guys can forgive the lack of patches over the last year as I went through this adventure, and have gained some understanding as to why I did it at all in the first place. But, one thing is now certain for Rise to Ruins', Project Mary's and most importantly SixtyGig Games' future as a whole:

Funding Secured.


(EDIT/Update: No you ridiculously awesome goofballs, I didn't yolo into $GME. :P)

Just read it through. It is absolutely insane.

Autism, autism never changes.
Great story!
In a way, he sounds like Pierre Begue :cool:
 

Joggerino

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