Spectral Pontifex
Educated
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2022
- Messages
- 343
Well, since Paul spontaneously revealed to me that he is reading this thread as we speak.
Paul Wang said:Thanks for the catch!
I'm honestly a little surprised this bug made it all the way through testing, but I'm pushing an update today which should resolve it.
-Paul Wang
Spectral Pontifex said:I was quite surprised to see such an oversight 4 months after launch as well. I am glad I could help to fix it, however!
I've just read the post-mortem report and I would like to make a short comment, so as not to waste too much of your time:
1. Faction imbalance
While the factions are morally ambiguous from the standpoint of the story, they certainly are not from the point of the main character. This really did disappoint me as the Wulframite path felt more like a path for deliberate contrarians. There wasn't a proper set-up and the MC is essentially betraying his friends or even lovers.
2. Too much branching
I do think that it would have been better to tell a more concise story, to cut off a few branches to make sure that the other ones can grow a bit taller. I greatly enjoyed managing the estate. However, the game overall felt too short.
These were the main issues in my opinion.
Farewell and good luck with other works!
Spectral Pontifex
Paul Wang said:I'm not going to lie, the Wulframite path was actually something of an afterthought in the grand scheme of the series. The original plan (as of when I started the series in 2012) was to have Lords just be the Royalist Path and maybe do a game for the Wulframite one later on. That changed sometime in the leadup to doing Lords of Infinity, which meant that I didn't really have the lead-time to properly "distribute" the characters already introduced. That makes up for most of the imbalance imo.
As for the branching issue, I think that has a lot to do with a degree of feature creep which led me to thinking I should create something like a vertical slice of all of Tierran aristocratic society in a single game. Unfortunately, a lot of those aspects ended up being mutually exclusive or difficult to access, which leads to the current state of affairs.
But this is all stuff I'm keeping in mind for Wars of Infinity, which will probably be more constrained - even with two initial narrative paths - now that the protagonist is once again under military discipline, with fixed objectives and clearly defined areas of operation.
-Paul Wang
Spectral Pontifex said:Indeed. You would have had to spend a considerable amount of time introducing Wulframite characters at the beginning of Lords to make them known to every MC and even then it would be very hard to rival characters established from two previous titles.
In hindsight, I think the best option would have been to introduce some kind of rivalry within the royalist faction itself, among known characters, and introduce Wulfram as an outside force and antagonist.
No worries though, at least we know these issues won't happen again in your future work. Sometimes it's better to consciously learn and avoid mistakes than to rely on the fortune of fate alone. For all you know, you would make such a mistake in Wars or Masters instead. In the grand scheme of things, it's only the intermediary game after all.
Spectral Pontifex
Paul Wang said:The funny thing is, every time I finish a project and do a post-mortem, I think to myself how next time I'll avoid all the mistakes I've made this time around. By the time I finish that next project, it feels like I've only managed to fix half the things I wanted, while creating a whole bunch of new problems further down the line.
It's an iterative process, I guess. Wars of Infinity will be better than Lords of Infinity, and so on.
fyi, you don't need to tell me about the RPGCodex LP. I've been lurking that forum intermittently for years.