Vapourware That Which Sleeps - Vaporware Strategy RP

[Brotherman Bill]

I still believe

Idk, maybe they can pitch it to Paradox or something?

 

[Excidium II]

Idk, maybe they can pitch it to Paradox or something?

Better start writing the long-term DLC plan right away.

 

[MuscleSpark]

I still believe and trust him even if he is an asshole that can't get his shit together.

Oh, so that's what Stockholm Syndrome is. Now I get it!

 

[Space Satan]

Don't trust the Swede.
Edit: Also, advice him to hire some pajeets for a can of curry a day.

 

[Lightsinthesky]

The Court of King Dunel randomly spells Danel with a u when every other use of his name is spelled correctly, even on the same screenshot. Since getting a character's name should be trivial this requires either a really baroque name storage scheme or that Josh just got lazy when fabricating these screenshots.

 

[BrickManslab]

I hope someone steals this idea. I can think of a couple boardgames that are kind of in the ballpark at least

 

[Jimmious]

I wonder at which point will this guy understand that the developer is ridiculing him and probably got money for almost no work at all.
I mean you hire another developer when you can't even find the one who supposedly has all the source code (if even such a thing exists)?? What is the point??
I would understand the game failing due to feature creeping after the stretch goals (even though it sucks that that happens) but to fail because TWO GUYS can't even communicate enough to get a grip of what's up.... Seriously, there is no way anyone would trust these two in any form of business

 

[MRY]

Two frivolous thoughts:

(1) Shouldn't he hire a PI rather than another coder?

(2) I think it would be awesome to start a quasi-debt-collection business where you go to Kickstarter backers from some project that's failed, get them to assign you their claims against the defaulted project, sue the defaulter, then settle for all the IP rights in whatever assets the project has, then sell those assets on the Unity store. I'm pretty sure it would be a relatively profitable mill. Maybe I should do a Kickstarter for it. . . .

 

[BrickManslab]

The two devs were longtime friends, which I think is why the one guy ignored subtle warning signs like "missing every due date" and "barely communicating even after weeks of begging"

 

[Norfleet]

Not sure if it's Photoshop, though. I wouldn't be surprised if it's an actual mockup in Unity.

Yeah, man, I dunno if you grasp this, but when people say "Photoshop", they do not literally mean the Photoshop program specifically, but that the thing is faked and not an actual real thing.

 

[Space Satan]

Any examples of successful games, which suffered total developement team change?

 

[ThisNameIsFree]

Any examples of successful games, which suffered total developement team change?

Fallout3

Never checking programmer progress and paying upfront... He must be new at this.

 

[Archibald]

Anyone knows for sure that programmer, who keeps avoiding him, actually exists and he is not basically bullshitting everyone with these updates?

 

[MRY]

I spoke with both of them on the phone during the Kickstarter campaign. Unless he had someone posing as the coder on that call -- which was basically asking me for guidance about lore development -- the coder did, at one point, exist.

 

[Space Satan]

Never underestimate the powers of Ventriloquism

 

[Galdred]

Any examples of successful games, which suffered total developement team change?

Fallout3

Never checking programmer progress and paying upfront... He must be new at this.

Weren't they partners? That would make things much more complicated. I don't know of any employment agreement where the employee doesn't have to provide whatever he did at regular time intervals.

 

[Lightsinthesky]

I didn't say the reason for cancellation because it was personal and I would not cross that line and share another person's reason.

We DID however meet today for a couple of hours. I would say that generally the meeting was nice but I don't feel that we are at all or any means close to a release.

I did see a working map, working POIs, agents and combat, character creation, menus, UI - stuff like that.

I did NOT see working AI, turns passing, etc - many of these elements are threadbare or torn apart as Josh is trying to make them work.

We did agree to work more closely and have a weekly meeting to discuss what's going on and next steps.

We are also trying to have a more modular focus where we work on getting this all together piece by piece so we can get a little closer to getting something anything in people's hands.

I stressed everyone's frustration with the way communication and stuff is handled, he acknowledges it, is very focussed on working on this and getting it released, but unfortunately, he has no idea on how long it will take.

So I don't know - we're going to keep meeting weekly - he's going to keep working, hopefully we'll have something super pre alpha to show soon. I stressed that we need to show SOMETHING as proof that it's not "vapor"

Well so that's what I thought was probably the case, Josh has a lovely map to look at with lots of people and things stuck to it but there's no fucking game

 

[ThisNameIsFree]

Any examples of successful games, which suffered total developement team change?

Fallout3

Never checking programmer progress and paying upfront... He must be new at this.

Weren't they partners? That would make things much more complicated. I don't know of any employment agreement where the employee doesn't have to provide whatever he did at regular time intervals.

Well, let's see:
- he don't have access to source code even though setting up something like svn or git is most logical choice for big project. Those can be used for checking progress as well...
- he don't have any kind of working build even though screenshots supposedly made in working builds...
- they don't have any kind of wiki and/or some tracking system for completed/problematic tasks, deadlines, notes about implementations of game systems, etc which can be used for tracking progress
Basically he supposedly payed to some dude for nothing and didn't bothered to check anything except screenshots.

 

[BrickManslab]

Yeah it's gonna be a pretty sweet TBS, we got a nice map, some neat particle effects, GREAT character art, it's all coming together nicely. I mean we still gotta add in the Turns at some point but ehh I'm working on wrangling up some voice actors for character barks atm

 

[almondblight]

So, according to Fenicks Josh either makes this (hah) or it's over:

The only "nuclear" option I have, unfortunately, is to quit. I will never pursue a legal alternative. Josh has made it abundantly clear that he is not quitting or stopping this project. He spent 2 years on it, it belongs to him for good or for ill, and I don't have the right or ability to wrest it from him.

Which kind of contradicts something he said a few months ago:

You can play without infiltration but you're playing blind against a world that has a variety of means to defeat you - however people have played with "very little infiltration" with some success so it is possible to be very tactical in where you expend your time to infiltrate.

To see how far gone Josh is, here are some old quotes from him - including ones talking about alpha testers who had been playing the game:

Spoiler

I don't think it's a viable strategy but back before KS their was a tester who played Azlan who could reliably "tease out" the Chosen One early almost every time so clearly there's some methods I'm just not savvy enough to uncover.

We have an integrated bug reporting solution as well as deterministic saves to make bugs easier to replicate. All bugs go to one of the "QA Leads" who review to make sure it is a real bug and then update a beta-visible spreadsheet with the relevant information and priority. We will have dedicated threads to discuss less obvious bugs and design decisions.

There are a lot of things we could do to release and finish the product if Josh got hit by a bus tomorrow - but we aren't there yet and I am not ready to go there.

Is it possible to capture/kill/corrupt the chosen one before he was actually revealed to be the chosen one early on in the game?

Yes and this has happened to me more than a few times - considering our spawn for a normal size map is 30 heroes you end up with a decent enough chance of grabbing an early unaware chosen one with multiple playthroughs.

Oh wow what a question. I have so many great Karth stories like right after we added the ability for certain creatures (and Karth) to knock down walls but I had one epic battle with Belial on the seal that lasted for 30+ turns before a highly imbued Rake wounded the Chosen One in open combat. I had to funnel orcs in from every direction, cut off the army from its base with Deep Ones, and bring the giants back from across the sea. Belial's aura continued to trigger horror in attackers denying breakthroughs and after the Chosen One got wounded I triggered an attack, got the breakthrough I needed, and Belial managed to rip the Chosen One to pieces.

Only in games that I'm not really trying to win - however I have lost within moments of winning to an adventurer Chosen One that has NOT rallied the world but instead simply prepared in silence to battle me. As long as you put some effort into identifying and hindering the Chosen One this won't happen but even knowing that (and having played the game hundreds of times) I still sometimes fall into the trap of focusing on my schemes to the detriment of my defenses. If the Chosen One has not publicly appeared it means that he or she is preparing to defeat you by more subtle means, you NEED to react to this.

haha, well they've gone mostly overboard because Desperation isn't well balanced yet. I've seen villages sacrificed to hasten rituals by what were once upstanding and honorable men, kings sacrifice their children to demons to gain some infernal support, elves marrying dwarves to forge alliances, and a Chosen One kill his friends to gain access to their artifacts. The problem right now is that they are a little TOO eager to do these things - I think Desperation is still the perfect AI mechanism but we do need to balance out a little bit how far desperation can "bend" a player's personality. I'd like to have it "pervert" a personality trait rather than simply globally expand thresholds but we'll probably work that out during the beta.

We've had over ten thousand notables pinging properly without any noticeable performance problem, but that's because notables are REACTIVE as opposed to proactive - they mostly sit there and wait for something to occur. Heroes you can have hundreds but you'll start having issues when you get up around 500 or so. Ruler AIs tend to be a problem not so much due to their processes but because the more you add the more each other ruler needs to take into consideration, I would recommend keeping it below 100. The only time I have seen slowdowns in the AI in one of our large games is when massive multiple front wars are taking place, and profiling says it's the commander AIs causing the problem.

The worst heroes are the ones you never see because you ignored them - it still happens to me occasionally when I'm testing a particular feature that I'll forget to look for the Chosen One and he will come a knockin when I'm not ready. However, when playing better I have suffered no end of frustrations from Elven Chosen Ones - they are tough, difficult to corrupt, and they bring the weight of the elven nations behind them. I almost always fall into rallying the humans against them and trying to frustrate their diplomatic advances. I also discovered (I suppose designed?) that the best way to bypass the defenses of a hero is to get them engaged as a commander and engineer a commando breakthrough, I've successfully killed elven and dwarven chosen ones this way though we have since introduced a bodyguard companion type that will negate this at least once.

I've done what everyone knows they're going to do (you know you will, don't deny it) and killed the Chosen One's family, burned their home town, turned their wife into a lich, and turned his friends against him. Definitely worth doing at least once.

What was your best Seraph game like?

I purposefully recruited all the invader types from the North Burns and had my coalition go against the honor bound men of the west allied with the wild tribes. It certainly wasn't the most viable strategy but I wanted to thematically recreate that tension. I didn't actually finish that game because of a bug, but it was a lot of fun to see all the cultural tension triggers going off.

What I want to know is: what's the funniest set of events that's happened to you? IE, even if it was something that completely wrecked your plans, was there anything that just made you laugh?

Nothing gets me as much as the lothario hero that impregnated and married everyone but I already told that story, so it has to be the Peddlar's glorious rise to dictator over New Peddlaria (I named it after a failed previous attempt at making the perfect Peddlar utopia). I wanted to ensure that even the worst Agent could, given proper grooming, become a fixture on the global stage - so I ended up getting the Peddlar a coterie of courtesans including a unique Courtesan which gave him an unearthly bonus to handling city challenges. After his meteoric social rise he befriended and corrupted a few key commanders and then used his persuasion to get them appointed heads of command before declaring a coup. I immediately passed the free trade law because obviously New Peddlaria is pro-peddling but my noble plans were foiled when a loyalist stormed the castle, attacked me, and on his first turn performed an attack that killed every courtesan minion. It was a national day of mourning in New Peddlaria, doubly so because it was quickly rejoined with its parent nation.

That's just a small sample, there's actually a disturbing number of his posts about all the awesome stuff that happened when he and the playtesters were playing the game. And there are still people on the board who believe...

 

[thesheeep]

Maybe they should hire Cleveland Mark Blakemore , I heard he is a programmer experienced in many projects.

 

[Hobo Elf]

I didn't say the reason for cancellation because it was personal and I would not cross that line and share another person's reason.

We DID however meet today for a couple of hours. I would say that generally the meeting was nice but I don't feel that we are at all or any means close to a release.

I did see a working map, working POIs, agents and combat, character creation, menus, UI - stuff like that.

I did NOT see working AI, turns passing, etc - many of these elements are threadbare or torn apart as Josh is trying to make them work.

We did agree to work more closely and have a weekly meeting to discuss what's going on and next steps.

We are also trying to have a more modular focus where we work on getting this all together piece by piece so we can get a little closer to getting something anything in people's hands.

I stressed everyone's frustration with the way communication and stuff is handled, he acknowledges it, is very focussed on working on this and getting it released, but unfortunately, he has no idea on how long it will take.

So I don't know - we're going to keep meeting weekly - he's going to keep working, hopefully we'll have something super pre alpha to show soon. I stressed that we need to show SOMETHING as proof that it's not "vapor"

Well so that's what I thought was probably the case, Josh has a lovely map to look at with lots of people and things stuck to it but there's no fucking game

I felt that way the first time they introduced live "gameplay" without passing a single turn. That was the first and biggest red flag for me. Honestly, this whole thing was probably a scam from very beginning. I don't see any evidence of there ever being a real game being made at any point. Just a bunch of art that was cobbled together.

 

[Norfleet]

I spoke with both of them on the phone during the Kickstarter campaign. Unless he had someone posing as the coder on that call -- which was basically asking me for guidance about lore development -- the coder did, at one point, exist.

Well, no. It could be that the "coder" was posing as the coder of his own initiative, not that he MADE someone pose as the coder. At no point does this imply that a coder exists. As a tree is known by its fruits, and at the moment, I don't see any code, so I see no coder.

 

[Hobo Elf]

The whole thing could've easily been a setup from the beginning since they apparently are friends. We know Fenicks is having problems communicating with Josh but is he really? Or is it merely a ruse?

 

[Vordrak]

As a matter of law it is a fraud. This Kickstarter opened claiming that there was a 'working game' completed game, which merely needed completion and polishing.

On the present comments from the developers this has in fact never existed. Alpha testers playing through? How? What were they playing?

KDG obtained money on factual statements they knew to be untrue. They continued to make factually untrue statements for nearly two years. Even the plea of poverty is an untruth. They previously claimed Josh had a full time job.

Show us the accounts! I will do a full blog post on this later but these people should be reported to the FTC and go to prison.