Vapourware That Which Sleeps - Vaporware Strategy RP

[BrotherFrank]

Beta forum is still up, but keep in mind not many people can even post on it. Whilst the proletariat got kicked out, bourgeois backers like myself (50£) get to stay and watch but can't post, which limits the visible butt hurt to just the high spending aristos alas but thread got derailed with some us politic stuff which improved overall mood it seems.
Here are Fenick's most recent posts:


by Fenicks » Fri Jul 01, 2016 6:14 pm

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"

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by Fenicks » Fri Jul 01, 2016 6:50 pm
I did mention that I would be willing to invest to get another dev to help us but Josh think it won't really be helpful as his AI / backend stuff is a mashup of his own creation - and we are stuck with it until he figures out how to make it work or until we peel back enough layers (dumb it down) until it works on a less developed level.

We talked about other levels of acceptable finish / release - and he is aware that at some point we just may need to 'dumb it down' so it works - but he doesn't want to make that sacrifice just yet.

I think the important takeaways are he's still very committed and only working on this project and nothing else

and that we're going to try to take a more modular or piecemeal approach just so we can show something that runs.
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by Fenicks » Fri Jul 01, 2016 11:06 pm

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.
______________________________________________________________

Overall I'd say those able to post are taking it well and still think something might come out of it. I wished I shared that optimism but guess I'm just pissed everything the devs ever told us in the forums and all them topics about game mechanics turned out to be nothing but fiction.

 

[BrotherFrank]

by Fenicks » Thu Jul 07, 2016 12:02 am

I'm checking in from time to time but I don't really have anything to add - we met last Friday and plan to meet again this Friday. I don't really have any recourse or date, if I don't see any tangible progress within about 4 weeks I will have some tough life choices to make. None of which get you a game unfortunately.

 

[thesheeep]

How bad can a programmer be if he does not manage to get a TB gameplay going?
It's probably like... THE easiest thing to do.

Nah, I call scam on at least the programmers part. Or seriously delusional.
It is simply impossible that someone is so incapable by accident.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

I did mention that I would be willing to invest to get another dev to help us but Josh think it won't really be helpful as his AI / backend stuff is a mashup of his own creation - and we are stuck with it until he figures out how to make it work

 

[Malakal]

It makes sense if we consider what was posted before in this thread - that a programmer entering to finish a work done by another often prefers to redo it from the scratch.

Of course he could also be avoiding responsibility for only making a 'fake' game.

 

[Archibald]

Well its meaningless speculation. We have no idea at what state "game" is, its entirely possible that another programmer starting from the scratch would actually finish it sooner since it doesn't seam that anything is really working now.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

Either immense credit of trust is being spent between these two or they're intenionally obscure

 

[Beowulf]

I like Fenicks peaceful resignation. It's like he was indeed possessed by otherworldly beings. Those calm ones in cheap horror movies would go now into killing spree.

 

[MRY]

I think the real question is how much is actually designed. While I think the game has a fantastic concept and very good aesthetics, the real challenge was not assembling artwork but figuring out how the concepts could actually be translated to compelling gameplay. Some of that would happen in iteration after the code was in place, some of that would happen in the process of coding itself, but the real heavy lifting, I think, is design that would come (as a logical matter) before coding. There are hints in the KS updates of some design logic in place, but it's not realy clear.

Also, I just reread the quotes from Josh about gameplay from the prior page, which I had previously only skimmed. o.O I can't see how, if your coder was describing such sublime awesomeness, you would not buy a plane ticket and fly to wherever he was to play the game. Those quote remind me of the "bug testing" reports that Cleve would post re: Grimoire. In fact, I was so moved by the idea of this kind of Borgesian game creation (i.e., where rather than creating the game, you create a story about what the game would be if it existed) that I wrote such a work of fiction and pitched it to The Escapist, which initially thought it to be a work of fact (!) and was going to publish it if they could confirm the existence of Eugene Kovitz, the fictitious character it profiled. For self-aggrandizing reasons, here is a snippet:

Spoiler

Eugene’s games, like his computers, are iterative affairs, and each one could create its own March of Progress. Leonardo da Vinci remarked that a work of art is never finished, only abandoned; for most artists, the moment of abandonment is the point of sale. But for the Artist (or Genius) who refuses to sell, working in an infinitely revisable medium such as computer programming, a work of art will never be finished, period. Eugene’s games asymptotically approach 1.0, but never reach it. Star-Lion is at version .9997.

Star-Lion was actually one of Eugene’s first games. “I remember in 1983 when I saw an early build of The Ancient Art of War.” It’s a game that makes me wistful, too. “What a f----g game. So simple, so perfect. Dave [Murry] could make a helluva game. Anyway, as soon as I played that, I thought to myself that doing a wargame set in history, set on one of these little maps, just wasn’t the right scale. So I had this idea for a futuristic strategy game, real-time like Ancient Art of War, but with fleets of spaceships. And you could just have these long campaigns—like weeks long, like you could with pencil and paper. The idea was that you were this futuristic Napoleon. I called him ‘Staroleon,’ originally. So, well, that’s where Star-Lion comes from.”

He takes me through the development of Star-Lion, which is maybe less like evolution than it is like fetal development. Crisp and slightly yellowed sheets of paper are the zygotes. An old build on a one of the computers (located about 3 o’clock as you work your way around the room) is the embryo. The graphics are so primitive, and the interface so obscure, that to be honest the game holds little appeal. I point out to Eugene that what distinguishes the classics from the has-beens is that the classics still look good (even if dated) and the interfaces still feel intuitive. He shrugs. “These were for my own use, mostly.”

I think I’ve offended him (or revealed that I am unworthy of older games) because we quickly skip forward to version .9997. And let me tell you: Star-Lion is one of the best games you will never play.

In some respects, Star-Lion is a real-time 4X space game, like Sins of a Solar Empire. But using these labels and points of comparison is misleading, because Star-Lion evolved almost wholly independently from that genre. “We share a common ancestor in Reach for the Stars,” Eugene quips. (I confess I had never heard of the game, but Wikipedia describes it as “the earliest known commercially published example of 4X games” and dates it to 1983.) “But that’s about it.”

The whole experience is different from other 4X games because with Star-Lion, as with all his projects, Eugene has engaged in his obsession with a dynamic and responsive environment. But the other thing that stands out to me is how simple and streamlined everything is, especially in comparison to the earlier versions. I ask the maestro. “What happened? Nintendo happened.” Eugene spends a good half-hour declaiming on the genius of the two-button controller and the virtue of simplicity. “At its bottom, a computer is binary. On/off. All this complexity,” he spreads his arms to embrace his laboratory, “arises from a simple binary choice. You can have complexity in a game without complexity at the point of input.”

Now let me tell you a little bit about playing Star-Lion.

* * *

I started off a mid-ranking commander in a fleet, following my Supreme Leader’s orders and making due with the supplies I was given. As I conquered a slew of planets formerly belonging to our recalcitrant, Algolian neighbors, I realized that my fleet was getting stronger, my captains more loyal, and that I had a new source of supplies: plunder from conquered worlds.

Forget the Supreme Leader! I declared a new Ohalean Principality, liberated (after a fashion) the subjected Algolians, and turned my fleet back toward the home systems. At the same time, I sent out diplomatic feelers toward the Senate of Algol, hoping to ward off a two-front war.

(As all this happened, I should add, the hulking Empire of Kreeb was spreading its red tendrils across the upper systems of the galaxy. I suspect that would have mattered if I’d lasted longer.)

Knowing I had only one shot before the superior manufacturing capabilities of the Supreme Leader swamped me, I pressed on for the capital. Twenty pixel dreadnoughts spewed their single-pixel fighters and quad-pixel bombers outward; the bleeps and bloops of an internal speaker marked my flagship’s destruction at the hands of planetary megalasers; blocky text displayed my demands for unqualified surrender; hash marks counted the millions of dead on the planet’s surface; and so on. (The game’s music, I should add, was actually quite good—a sort of synthesized MOD soundtrack reminiscent of the 90’s. Apparently Eugene’s wife Margaret dabbled in composition.)

The homeworld was mine. The Supreme Leader went, as the Jacobins would say, à la lanterne.

Sadly, the Algolians did not want peace. They did, however, want their lost planets back. Remember that two-front war I was avoiding? Well, while my grand fleet was pummeling my old friends and neighbors, the Algolians were sweeping in behind me, reconquering and then just plain conquering.

Things didn’t last long after that. When you lose the game, Star-Lion just quits straight to a command prompt.

“It’s really complicated to clear the right memory registers in order to start a fresh game,” Eugene explains. “Eventually I’ll sort that out, though.”

(As an aside, it's funny how much the themes of that work of fiction wound up in my article re: AOD.)

Anyway, aside from solipsism, the reason I mention (and quote) the story is because with some hindsight, a lot of the TWS material is uncannily similar. For example:

[R]ight 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.

or

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.

While some of this reads like the kind of after-action embellishment that any LPer can do for any complex turn-based strategy game, here and there Josh talks about things that would actually need implementation. (That's the difference between, for example, dramatically telling the story of "Super Archer" in The Ancient Art of War and the many battles he single handedly won -- which merely dresses up a basic RNG-driven combat engine in narrative -- and including details like "free trade law" and "bonus to handling city challenges" and "us[ing] his persuasion to get them appointed heads of command" etc. That's not dressing up a generic system, it's dressing up a series of distinct systems (laws, unique bonuses conferred by compansion, tracking civic positions and being able to change them, etc., etc.). That level of detail, to me, is the "tell" of a fiction. While it is true that a handful of games approach that level of simulation, that's only with huge time and resources poured into them.

In any event, to have those fetures, there'd need to be design explaining how they work. Was that all Josh's bailiwick too?

Ultimately, while it is totally possible for me to imagine (by which I mean "remember," by which I mean, "reflect upon exactly what I am presently doing") the project lead trusting against logic that a coder is actually working and just ploughing ahead on the things that are outside the coder's scope because it's hard to do otherwise, what is impossible for me to imagine is your coder telling you about amazingly awesome things and not insisting on seeing them. See, my experience with coders runs much more like, "I promise I can and will do these awesome things within a few months" followed by a few years of a tiny fraction of those things getting done. But this is something else. It's, "I promise I have done thse awesome things, but I won't show you." That is something I can't imagine falling for.

 

[Ludovic]

Excellent thoughts, MRY, and a very astute observation on the narration. I would say that - very random systems can sometimes produce emergent game play that can make the player feel very much like a complex story is unfolding. But the stories you quote have a strong element of player interaction behind the complex chain of events, which is probably a tell that something is off. Even if the game engine can do something this complex, it's very difficult to create a user interface that makes it possible for the player to control without being completely swamped with options.

Here is a theory on what happened: I think Fenicks knew to some degree about the state of the game, but as non-developer it's hard to gauge how complete a prototype is, and he did trust Josh to bring it to beta in the agreed time frame, and that the community wouldn't get too hung up on the stories that didn't turn into actual game features. But then it turned out to take much longer than expected, Josh kept churning out stories, and the last post from Josh actually says:

It has been requested that I distance myself somewhat from the forum, definitely a sensible move. I can't help communicating about the project, it's what I live and breathe every day, but I am "overly enthusiastic and optimistic" in my passion for it. I am also just plain wrong about timelines, but we refuse to cut features, to cut corners, or underdeliver on the project itself and in the end that is what will matter the most.

I'm sure there's a better way to do it, and most likely that better way is to have me not communicate.

In hindsight, that's possibly Fenicks requesting him to get off the forums and stop digging the hole deeper. I can see how this is a reasonable course of action. There is no way to come clean and say "hey the other guy is lying, and the game can't do these things yet", since that looks pretty bad when taking pre-orders and being late with delivering stuff to the backers. On the other hand, every time Josh tells a story or misses a deadline, he's dragging Fenicks deeper into the mud. So Fenicks convinces Josh to leave the forums, and just finish the game. The rest is history.

Perhaps I am just telling stories now. But I think it's a plausible scenario, albeit a depressing and sad one.

 

[Lightsinthesky]

Good news!

Met last night after I got off work and again today. Two productive meetings - more stuff happening and we've both agreed to work on getting something that resembles some sort of technical alpha / preview something or other just to try to get a base out in people's hands that can be used as a stepping stone for progress.

So whatever, non update, but progress is being made on Joshes side and we've agreed on the path that some of you suggested to get some pre beta asset out there.

You know that map with things on you can click on? Well we'll get to click on it! I kind of hope that this comes out and it turns out that all those UI alterations Josh was showing off turn out to have been mock-ups and the actual UI is far more crude than even 2014 TWS

 

[Hobo Elf]

I'll believe it when I see it.

 

[thesheeep]

I'll believe it when I play it.

Fixed.
Seen, we already have a lot...

 

[Space Satan]

There were so many examples of games resurgence after such debacles...

 

[Viata]

Since this game is never going to release, when is someone going to still this idea and make the game themselves? I don't want such great idea to just die.

 

[Lightsinthesky]

Quarter past never probably. We don't get good clones of games that did make bank so what hope does a game that didn't come out have?

 

[xXGunsNRoses420Xx]

lol gg

 

[Hobo Elf]

Since this game is never going to release, when is someone going to still this idea and make the game themselves? I don't want such great idea to just die.

Probably the same time Dungeon Keeper or Populous get good clones.

 

[Viata]

Didn't Dungeon Keeper get a clone recently? Or is it a bad game too?

 

[Cyberarmy]

Or is it a bad game too?

Not bad but is not good either. Mediocre at best.

 

[Viata]

 

[Mortmal]

Didn't Dungeon Keeper get a clone recently? Or is it a bad game too?

No , no it was catastrophic and unplayable .If you are talking about war for the overworld.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Didn't Dungeon Keeper get a clone recently? Or is it a bad game too?

I refunded it. I'd say it's a bit below mediocre. Some of the systems are fine, but the campaign is so fucking bad. There was little freedom as to what you could do in it as they railroaded you into certain strategies each map. Not only that, but they were very deliberate with the undestructible rock, essentially forcing you into specific dungeon designs each map. Fuck that noise.

 

[Lightsinthesky]

I was traveling for work this week. You probably should not reach out to anyone else on my behalf. I already have interest from a publisher if we decided there was 1) a project that someone could help us finish 2) we wanted a publisher.

That publisher must be a complete moron or utterly fictitious

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

I was traveling for work this week. You probably should not reach out to anyone else on my behalf. I already have interest from a publisher if we decided there was 1) a project that someone could help us finish 2) we wanted a publisher.

That publisher must be a complete moron or utterly fictitious

What is highlighted text referring?