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Wadjet Eye Primordia - A Point and Click Adventure - Now Available

Diablo169

Arcane
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Oct 20, 2012
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Grim Midlands
I started playing it today as well strangely enough. I bought it ages ago but haven't installed it till now. The art style, music, voice acting, the writing hell even the puzzles are great.
 

suejak

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Honestly, if you think this game is well-written, your intellectual development likely halted in high school.
 

Diablo169

Arcane
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Grim Midlands
I.....I don't know what to say. I've always thought my intellectual development started AFTER high school to be honest. Just entered Metropol and saved. Kinda wish i'd started this friday since i want to carry on playing.
 

suejak

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Aww, I feel bad. It's ok; I find the Serious Robot Things in Primordia to be very pretentious, half-baked, and ultimately juvenile, but famous people like Isaac Asimov spent their entire lives writing trashy and intellectually empty masturbatory novels that took fake things very seriously. Nobody says Isaac Asimov is a loser.

So I take it back. Primordia is bad, but I'm sure you're a talented guy with lots of potential in life.
 

agentorange

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rpghq (cant read codex pms cuz of fag 2fa)
Codex 2012
So the person talking about the intellectual content of a sci-fi adventure game, and calling others "intellectual development" into question, is calling the story pretentious? I'm sorry but the intellectual depth of a work of a fiction and the quality of the writing are wholly separate, and one doesn't guarantee the other; if you can't differentiate between the two then I'd say you suffered some false enlightenment in your freshman level college literature courses.


Also you're a faggot.
 

suejak

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So the person talking about the intellectual content of a sci-fi adventure game, and calling others "intellectual development" into question, is calling the story pretentious? I'm sorry but the intellectual depth of a work of a fiction and the quality of the writing are wholly separate, and one doesn't guarantee the other; if you can't differentiate between the two then I'd say you suffered some false enlightenment in your freshman level college literature courses.

Also you're a faggot.
"Well-written" is an all-encompassing vague turn of phrase. It can mean both well-expressed and well-conceived. Incidentally, the writing in this game is neither.

I was a jerk in this thread, so I'll take the abuse. :mhd: Everybody's smart, everybody's special.

Jaesun is a useless mobthink vulture and coward, though. :cool:
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
Suejak, sorry you didn't enjoy the game. Depending on what you measure the game against, I think your criticism of the game is perfectly valid, though attacking people for liking it seems a little silly. For what it's worth, I don't particularly like Asimov's writing, either.

[EDIT: Incidentally, if you bought the game, shoot me a PM and I'll see if I can scrounge you up a Steam or GOG key to something you might enjoy more. Refunds are too complicated to make happen, alas.]

@ asper & diablo: Glad you guys enjoyed / are enjoying it!
 

asper

Arcane
Joined
Nov 14, 2007
Messages
2,207
Project: Eternity
Thanks MRY, I'm enjoying the game a lot. I hope it made you guys enough money to warrant the development time, and to let you guys develop a new project in relative comfort. I'm thinking of buying the game a second time on Steam, to boost your Steam sales/playing time stats a bit...
 

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
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Terra da Garoa
Aww, I feel bad. It's ok; I find the Serious Robot Things in Primordia to be very pretentious, half-baked, and ultimately juvenile, but famous people like Isaac Asimov spent their entire lives writing trashy and intellectually empty masturbatory novels that took fake things very seriously. Nobody says Isaac Asimov is a loser.

So I take it back. Primordia is bad, but I'm sure you're a talented guy with lots of potential in life.
suejak said:
People keep calling it [Broken Age] a kiddy game, but I don’t agree. Maybe some people are really obsessed with seeming mature and adult. I’m not sure. This game is no less of a kiddy game than Monkey or DOTT. It is the same twisted-cartoon approach that existed in all the classic Lucas games.

There is a strong, hilarious irony at the core of both Shay and Vella’s stories. They can be viewed as allegorical or they can be taken as they are, but either way, those are mature themes. Anyone who disagrees is too preoccupied with trying to feel like a grown-up.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
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Messages
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California
I'm thinking of buying the game a second time on Steam, to boost your Steam sales/playing time stats a bit...
Ah, there's so much good out there to play, I wouldn't spend any more money on Primordia. Alternatively, you could throw a couple bucks at one of the projects we're backing on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/profile/1056546836 They all seem like pretty neat games made by enthusiastic nice people.
 

Jaesun

Fabulous Ex-Moderator
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MCA
MRY just FYI suejak is one of our resident shitposters. He is not here to actually contribute too, or discuss or encourage discussions on games. He just likes to pick a thread and shitpost in it. That is all he does (just read his posting history here). You can easily use our ignore feature on him, and you will not miss a single thing at all.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
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Messages
5,703
Location
California
Well, his post history certainly doesn't suggest he's a jolly back-slapper, but if he bought the game and didn't like it, then I'd still like to do right by him. (Hell, even if he didn't buy it but played through it and didn't like it, I'd still want to throw something his way.) I certainly think I drift into pretentiousness with some regularity, so I can't get too annoyed when someone accuses me of it!
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
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California
Yes. We've been working on it for a few months, and we've just started moving from pre-production to early production, although we're in something of a mixed phase where we're still primarily doing concept work, high-level narrative/puzzle design, and engine development. The actual in-game content we've done is quite limited -- a couple scenes, a couple sprites, a single dialogue tree -- mostly just to test engine features. We keep saying "we hope to have something to share in about a month," and it still seems to me about a month away.
 

StaticSpine

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Moscow
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Yes. We've been working on it for a few months, and we've just started moving from pre-production to early production, although we're in something of a mixed phase where we're still primarily doing concept work, high-level narrative/puzzle design, and engine development. The actual in-game content we've done is quite limited -- a couple scenes, a couple sprites, a single dialogue tree -- mostly just to test engine features. We keep saying "we hope to have something to share in about a month," and it still seems to me about a month away.
Great! Looking forward to hear some news.
 

Alex

Arcane
Joined
Jun 14, 2007
Messages
8,750
Location
São Paulo - Brasil
Yes. We've been working on it for a few months, and we've just started moving from pre-production to early production, although we're in something of a mixed phase where we're still primarily doing concept work, high-level narrative/puzzle design, and engine development. The actual in-game content we've done is quite limited -- a couple scenes, a couple sprites, a single dialogue tree -- mostly just to test engine features. We keep saying "we hope to have something to share in about a month," and it still seems to me about a month away.

So... aren't you using AGS this time around? If so, can you discuss why? I am wondering because it seemed work pretty well in Primordia.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
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California
So... aren't you using AGS this time around? If so, can you discuss why? I am wondering because it seemed work pretty well in Primordia.
There are a lot of reasons to like AGS, and a fair number of reasons not to like it. Having spent the last year doing support for Primordia, and having gone through the process of making Primordia, the following reasons not to use it stand out the most for me:

(1) AGS patches horribly. For whatever bizarre reason, a patch is invariably almost as large as the game. Because AGS also compresses horribly, that means that a patch that fixing a couple of scripting errors would be, for Primordia, upwards of a gigabyte. This, however, is not the biggest AGS patch problem. The biggest problem is that aside from the most superficial fixes possible -- typos, essentially -- patches render older saves unusable. Thus, for example, adding a missing sound effect, fixing a graphical glitch, tweaking a puzzle, correcting a flaw in dialogue logic -- all of these things "break" old saves. What that meant for Primordia was a huge pressure not to do post-release bugfixes / quality improvements in a quick "hotfix" kind of way, but instead to consolidate them into one or two huge patches. That, coupled with the coder having to serve a year of compulsory military duty, meant that some bugs never got fixed and others took months to get fixed.

While I deeply believe in aspiring toward a bug-free, perfect release, Primordia made clear to me that even with a crack team of testers -- and we really did have some of the best testers I've ever seen -- you are invariably going to miss stuff, both from a glitch standpoint and from a user-friendliness standpoint. Our next project is hugely more complex in "logic" than Primordia -- it's much more open, both in terms of order and in terms of puzzle solutions* -- which means that bugs are even more likely. We really need an engine that can accommodate regular patching, and AGS ain't that.

(* At least, at this aspirational pre-production stage it is.)

(2) AGS suffers from a variety of user-unfriendly legacy aspects, including (off the top of my head): (a) an external configuration executable that baffles everyone on Steam and, even off Steam, almost anyone who didn't grow up with DOS-era software; (b) poor portability across platforms; (c) poor interaction with Steam overlay; (d) poor interaction with a variety of OSes, graphics cards, and mouse and sound-card drivers; (e) poor interaction with various anti-virus programs; (f) poor support for non-Roman alphabets**; (g) inconsistent sprite resolution when scaling sprites on D3D mode but poor performance (or non-performance) in DDraw mode on many video cards. Some of these things just constitute annoyances for users who are still willing to buy the game (I've probably personally walked a dozen people through how to shut off Logitech software, switch graphics modes, disable anti-virus and Steam overlay, etc.), some of them cut us off totally from certain markets, but all of them were a pain to deal with.

(** Notwithstanding this, an amazing team of Russian hacker/translators did an unofficial Russian translation by hacking the EXE. :salute:)

(3) In general, AGS has a very non-modular environment that makes for difficult distribute development (jargon FTW!). Put in plain English, AGS creates a coder-level (or code-level) chokepoint. All the writing has to be manually put into the source code. All the cutscenes have to be scripted within the engine. All the dialogue trees are written in the engine. All the sprite animations are handled in the engine. This puts a lot of strain on the coder or, alternatively, runs the risk of parallel "branches" of development that then need to somehow be reconciled. As a writer, what I found very frustrating was that there was no particularly good way to spit out the text to proof and then reinsert. Which made finding typos, or doing silly things like determining the total words of writing, tough to do.


To me, AGS still feels very much like a piece of DOS-era game-making software. As someone who grew up making games in DOS -- including using things like SPX for Turbo Pascal or Logowriter or Unlimited Adventures -- there is a strong, positive nostalgia factor that makes me want to stick with AGS, but even as a non-coder, it strikes me as a pretty kludgework kind of engine. The community is amazing, and the huge corpus of games means that there are exemplars for any number of things you'd want to do. It's a great system for picking up and just making something -- as those old DOS engines were. But from the standpoint of trying to build an on-going commercial operation, I don't think it's a particularly viable option. It's telling that the only company that has been able to make an economic go of AGS is WEG, but the overwhelming majority of WEG's game comes from its publishing operations, not Dave's own development. In other words, AGS works for WEG not because it is viable for a small team to produce AGS games for a living but because it's viable for a publisher to take a cut of a large number of small teams' AGS games. And, even then, Dave has indicated that he's moving on from AGS. I think the system's built-in user-base and sturdy features make it a great jumping off point -- we benefited enormously from using it for Primordia -- but its limitations wind up outweighing its benefits.

Well, that's what I think at the moment, anyway. Could turn out we were total idiots for going this route. Wouldn't be the first time I've made a bad decision of this magnitude!
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
97,228
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
All the writing has to be manually put into the source code. All the cutscenes have to be scripted within the engine. All the dialogue trees are written in the engine. All the sprite animations are handled in the engine.

:retarded:
 

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
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Terra da Garoa
It is true, I started to make a very short CYOA kind of game on AGS studio a couple of years ago, and the on the coder was one of the reasons I never finished it... my brother started college and I couldn't abuse him anymore. :roll:
 

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
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Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
That's only because you're not using other programmer localization tools like property files (eh never mind, i read the rest about cutscenes/script files having to be compiled inside the engine for testing). You got a point with the patching, but it should be fairly easy to patch the AGS engine itself to use a compressed format that is amenable to patches.

AGS has had a very recent push for crossplatform support recently (wadget eye games pushed for it):
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/commits/master

runs on linux 'fine' (there are still sound latency issues on some games due to large pipeline of Midi emulation, pulse, alsa, pulse stuff but it works.

I feel making a new engine is a mistake at this point. Improving the current one would benefit all ags games (for instance, differential patching support for the setup files would be great)
 
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