KickStarter Summer Daze - light-hearted Hero-U mini-sequel

[wishbonetail]

I liked Hero-U but it was already pretty darn light-hearted. Well this shit looks more light-hearted than any light-hearted shit I ever had on my fucking mobile phone. Adventure games are in a sad state indeed if this takes front page on adventure discussion forums.

 

[shywn]

The background graphics are nice, the voice acting works (the samisen cat sounds like he needs a re-recording in a proper studio), the character graphics have exaggerated emotions but I guess that's a preference. It's weird that all you can do is talk people into running a festival though.

The game doesn't look bad overall. I just have a general distaste for any non-Japanese visual novels.

I guess it will be a decent game for the Harry Potter age bracket.

 

[Boleskine]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/transolargames/summer-daze-at-hero-u/posts/3397178

We’ll release Summer Daze at Hero-U: Tilly’s Tale by Spring.

Ifeyo's Adventure coming Spring 2023

That was December 31.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/transolargames/summer-daze-at-hero-u/posts/3428753

we've done a lot more with the game in the meantime. The critical improvement was adding Mr. Terk's angry voice. We also added a second Credits screen accessible from the main menu, listing all of the developers and voice acting talent.

Early Access launch. We're probably going to push that back to late March.

it will now likely be May or June before we do the official game launch. Support for phones, tablets, and Nintendo Switch might take even longer.

That's from about one week ago. The Coles were originally hoping to do Early Access last fall.

I liked Hero-U but it was already pretty darn light-hearted. Well this shit looks more light-hearted than any light-hearted shit I ever had on my fucking mobile phone. Adventure games are in a sad state indeed if this takes front page on adventure discussion forums.

Recent activity in this thread doesn't really say anything about the state of adventure games. Most here are just curious to see what the Coles are doing. They bet their house on Hero-U so I'm wondering if sales were good enough from that game to warrant making more games, or if the Coles are scrambling to make something low budget in the hopes of turning a small profit. It seems the latter since if Hero-U were successful enough the Coles would have gone straight to developing a sequel, but I really don't have any info on that.

Even if this visual novel spinoff doesn't interest me in the slightest, I'd certainly hope Corey and Lori achieve success. They might even find a decent audience on mobile.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

We know Hero-U didn’t sell well enough to put Wizard’s Way directly into production, which was the plan before launch.
Summer Daze was conceived as a low-budget VN with a fast dev time in order to raise production funds for WW. Doesn’t really seem like it’s turning out that way though.
Still, putting it on mobile is a smart move. If only the Coles weren’t awful at publicizing their games.

 

[Boleskine]

Summer Daze is a finalist for AT&T's "Women in Gaming" competition. The winner gets $100K.

The winner will be chosen during a livestream on Twitch.tv/ATT on Tuesday, March 8, 2022.

 

[Hellion]

With no release in sight for Summer Daze (the first chapter is listed as coming out "July 2022" on Steam), the Coles are back to adding insult to injury by discussing the QfG games.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Well this is now out as of today, and, predictably, it appears to be dead on arrival.

The few reviews there are of it all seem to agree that it's very short, even for the genre (~ 45 min, albeit with meaningful C&C), and that it suffers from technical issues. Sad for the Coles, but really curious as to why this took them so long to underdeliver so badly.

 

[Tweed]

Wow, thanks guys, this is SO much better than a QFG reboot, really gave the people what they wanted.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

it's very short, even for the genre (~ 45 min, albeit with meaningful C&C)

What? Didn't they spend like 3 years making this damn game? Japanese VNs with decent budgets (Ace Attorney, Danganronpa, Steins;Gate, etc) are usually like 40 hours minimum. My friend was telling me about this game called Full Metal Daemon Muramasa and he said it was like 80 hours. If your game isn't even a fraction of the length of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, a game that was released 20 fucking years about on a GAME BOY, and you spent 3 YEARS on it, then what the hell are you doing?

And the Quest for Glory devs made this? I still haven't finished any QFG game, but I can tell you they take longer to beat then 45 fucking minutes, and I doubt they had even 1 year to develop that game, let alone 3. And that's with gameplay mechanics besides clicking on dialogue options. QFG is also more aesthetically appealing, while this load of shit has the same uncanny, shit art as Hero-U that looks like it belongs in a hidden object game being sold at Wal-Mart for 5 bucks. Seriously, this has gotta be the steepest decline I've seen in a long time.

 

[Tweed]

Fact of the matter being that if they did make a QfG game it would be pozz'd to hell and back, just looking at their recent offerings.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

it's very short, even for the genre (~ 45 min, albeit with meaningful C&C)

I still haven't finished any QFG game, but I can tell you they take longer to beat then 45 fucking minutes

Eh... depends on which one you're playing. 1 and 2 can definitely be completed in something pretty close to that if you know what you're doing (about that for 1, probably slightly over an hour for 2), and that's including the time for grinding skills to necessary thresholds. But yeah, this isn't a QfGlike, so clearly applying that sub-genre's standards to this game is apples to oranges.

As to what they were doing... well, I suspect Occam's Razor applies here: what they were doing was mostly not working on the game. And I mostly don't fault them for that. They're septuagenarians who have always approached gamedev as a hobby that they're lucky enough to get paid for (Ken Williams they are not)... but hey, "Seinfeld's on! Oh and we have to do the crossword and compare times. Hey and why don't we just take next week off to go babysit the grandkids!" And in my book those are all perfectly reasonable things to prioritize after seven and a half decades on this planet.

Honestly the only shitty thing I think the Coles have done in this Hero-U era is be either completely duplicitous (doubtful) or completely deluded when it comes to communicating how absolutely crap they are at managing a business/devteam.