Vapourware That Which Sleeps - Vaporware Strategy RP

[Josh Sawyer Was Right]

I think it's sad to see such a large and organized campaign against this game. Please do not listen to people saying the game doesn't exist. They are just butthurt PC gaming shills that can't get over the fact that the lead dev moved the game primarily to VR.

I've just had an amazing gaming session with my Oculus Rift and I can only recommend this game. Nothing quite like being able to speak to the dark ones while the Abyss envelops all of your senses. Truly next-gen both in design and in technology.

 

[Ismaul]

I think it's sad to see such a large and organized campaign against this game. Please do not listen to people saying the game doesn't exist. They are just butthurt PC gaming shills that can't get over the fact that the lead dev moved the game primarily to VR.

I've just had an amazing gaming session with my Oculus Rift and I can only recommend this game. Nothing quite like being able to speak to the dark ones while the Abyss envelops all of your senses. Truly next-gen both in design and in technology.

People like you are the worst. Trolling with that obvious VR bullshit man. Just stop. You're destroying all the credibility us backers who own the game in its current state have.

 

[almondblight]

To drop the RP for a second - looking back on everything has always made me wonder how much of this shit was just the dev straight up fantasizing about made up features and how much of it was actually implemented at some point.

I would almost be impressed by the idea of a dev so infatuated with his own dream game idea that he is fully capable of publicly serving up his thoughts as tangible, if WIP, reality for months on end. Playing make-belief and imagining your very own "best game ever" is so intuitive and cathartic that I almost empathize with the dev, but given that many people's actual money was at stake, this is still highly irresponsible and scummy behavior.

And the guy wasn't simply fantasizing about features in the game, he was making hundreds of posts with feedback from alpha testers who were giving detailed descriptions of the games they were playing. It's a shame the forums were closed, because they really were a trip. Even better, during this time that he was posting all of the alpha tester feedback, his partner (the two of them did the Kickstarter together) had never received a playable build.

It was amusing to see the other forum users think this guy was a legit but ultra shy developer, and were trying to find ways to get his partner to coddle him so they could get the awesome alpha.

 

[thesheeep]

To drop the RP for a second -

That's actually something I find fascinating about this game:
It lets you RP really freely, without it becoming much of a hindrance of playing "most optimally".

Sure, you're an evil entity, and you can't really be "lawful good", but there's so much space between the vile evil that you can do and some of the more "isn't this actually a good thing?".

Then again, maybe I'm just a psychopath and don't know good from bad...

 

[An Actual Englishman]

The prerelease, super-duper, all the skills demo is finally public guys! You can find all the info on it here - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1741640/Shadows_of_Forbidden_Gods/

 

[Galdred]

Believe it or not, but once every few years I give in to nostalgia and re-read this whole thread as well as re-watch the dev log videos. Here, have a little treat I dug out from the distant past of 2015. Gotta love how many interlocking systems and emergent mechanics were already developed back then.

To drop the RP for a second - looking back on everything has always made me wonder how much of this shit was just the dev straight up fantasizing about made up features and how much of it was actually implemented at some point.

I would almost be impressed by the idea of a dev so infatuated with his own dream game idea that he is fully capable of publicly serving up his thoughts as tangible, if WIP, reality for months on end. Playing make-belief and imagining your very own "best game ever" is so intuitive and cathartic that I almost empathize with the dev, but given that many people's actual money was at stake, this is still highly irresponsible and scummy behavior.

It is very hard to tell. I think the guy was confident in his abilities to deliver the game he envisioned, and he thought the little shortcuts he took to make the videos would soon be replaced by actual gameplay, but there is no way to tell. But that would be in line with MRY impressions.

 

[MRY]

To drop the RP for a second - looking back on everything has always made me wonder how much of this shit was just the dev straight up fantasizing about made up features and how much of it was actually implemented at some point.

I would almost be impressed by the idea of a dev so infatuated with his own dream game idea that he is fully capable of publicly serving up his thoughts as tangible, if WIP, reality for months on end. Playing make-belief and imagining your very own "best game ever" is so intuitive and cathartic that I almost empathize with the dev

Years ago, I assumed that was what Cleve was doing on Grimoire. There was a post he had about testing the game that described various crazy things happening, including an NPC party interfering with his team, and the whole thing sounded so fantastical that I assumed the game was wholly an imaginary/meme thing. But then it turned out to be real, so who knows these days?

It is very hard to tell. I think the guy was confident in his abilities to deliver the game he envisioned, and he thought the little shortcuts he took to make the videos would soon be replaced by actual gameplay, but there is no way to tell. But that would be in line with MRY impressions.

There were two guys I spoke to (Josh and Joe, leaving their last names out). They did come across as somewhat overconfident, but fairly pragmatic. If I recall correctly (and it has been many years), one or both of them had worked extensively in modding Civ or some other game, and they felt that the modding experience would translate well to this project. I hooked them up with an artist from Fallen Gods, and they paid him for his work.

Looking back at some of our emails, I honestly don't know what to think. Like, I wrote them a short text for introducing a campaign, and they wrote back:

I wanted to let you know that had a VO actor do the North Burns thematic opening you wrote up and he said "this is the best written script I've ever done." We're thinking that we'll play it in the background after scenario selection while the map itself (we've had an artist create an inked version) burns up during as the player answers the Scenario Creation questions. I'll send you a link to a video once we've created the new Scenario Generation version though it will be a while since we continue to be bogged down with the map aesthetics.

Was there ever a voice actor?

Or

- the map changes went along quite smoothly code-wise and we managed to get a lot of the advanced functionality of a hex-map into the engine but our contracted artists just continued to under deliver and over-promise. We should be back to regular development in a week or two and if you're still interested in having some fun with fantasy writing I will definitely reach out at that point.

Was this all fake? To what end?

Or

Our artists completely failed to deliver the "drag and drop hex" solution we required, so we've taken it entirely into our own hands again. I managed to acquire the license to use the geographic feature brushes in this cartography map : http://www.cartographersguild.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=26648&d=1278359211, and I've taken the terrains out as hexes and am simply splatting them together in an overlapping hex shape - which looks as good as what the artist produced but requires 1/100th of the time. Combining these two elements is giving us a nice cartography look - I'm not sure what look you're going for with your game but you're more than welcome to our code/resources when we're done - I even have a map editor you could use.

(I declined his offer, since Fallen Gods used such a different style/system, so I have no idea whether there was any "code/resources" or "map editor" at all.)

My best guess is that they simply hit several different walls that commonly afflict game development: simply the fatigue once you're over the dreaming stage, some kind of coding challenges they couldn't fix, and perhaps realizing that the core gameplay loop wasn't that much fun. It is a sufficiently small amount of money that they raised, and I know they spent at least some of it on art (since they paid the FG artist), so it doesn't seem like an outright scam. And they didn't come across as scammers in my interactions with them./

 

[Lithium Flower]

Was there ever a voice actor?

Indeed there was. I remember stumbling onto this soundcloud (don't recall if they ever publicized it) when I was stalking the development of this game years back:

https://soundcloud.com/thatwhichsleeps/narration-sample

If that sample is your writing, perhaps you'll get a kick out of hearing a gravely-voiced man read it - hopefully he was also fairly compensated because he did a fine job.

 

[MRY]

That is my writing! Ha! I'm less taken by the VO, perhaps because I think the gravely-voice men from Primordia, Strangeland, and Fallen Gods are better, but this guy does a good job with my fairly goofy text.

 

[Aidan]

The prerelease, super-duper, all the skills demo is finally public guys! You can find all the info on it here - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1741640/Shadows_of_Forbidden_Gods/

I am exited for this

 

[Aidan]

Also any of you know alternative games to that which sleeps besides bobbytwohands games and ruinarch

 

[udm]

Just occurred to me that this thread is literally an RPG Game

 

[agris]

- the map changes went along quite smoothly code-wise and we managed to get a lot of the advanced functionality of a hex-map into the engine but our contracted artists just continued to under deliver and over-promise. We should be back to regular development in a week or two and if you're still interested in having some fun with fantasy writing I will definitely reach out at that point.

Was this all fake? To what end?

Or

Our artists completely failed to deliver the "drag and drop hex" solution we required, so we've taken it entirely into our own hands again. I managed to acquire the license to use the geographic feature brushes in this cartography map : http://www.cartographersguild.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=26648&d=1278359211, and I've taken the terrains out as hexes and am simply splatting them together in an overlapping hex shape - which looks as good as what the artist produced but requires 1/100th of the time. Combining these two elements is giving us a nice cartography look - I'm not sure what look you're going for with your game but you're more than welcome to our code/resources when we're done - I even have a map editor you could use.

(I declined his offer, since Fallen Gods used such a different style/system, so I have no idea whether there was any "code/resources" or "map editor" at all.)

I don't believe the map editor was fake (see here: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...orware-strategy-rp.93379/page-48#post-4917723) and the failure of TWS likely stems from the more pedestrian root causes that you outline.

Like so many things in life, it is more fun to imagine the scheming and machinations of veiled actors behind the scenes than to coldly examine the realities of random creation and destruction.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

- the map changes went along quite smoothly code-wise and we managed to get a lot of the advanced functionality of a hex-map into the engine but our contracted artists just continued to under deliver and over-promise. We should be back to regular development in a week or two and if you're still interested in having some fun with fantasy writing I will definitely reach out at that point.

Was this all fake? To what end?

Or

Our artists completely failed to deliver the "drag and drop hex" solution we required, so we've taken it entirely into our own hands again. I managed to acquire the license to use the geographic feature brushes in this cartography map : http://www.cartographersguild.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=26648&d=1278359211, and I've taken the terrains out as hexes and am simply splatting them together in an overlapping hex shape - which looks as good as what the artist produced but requires 1/100th of the time. Combining these two elements is giving us a nice cartography look - I'm not sure what look you're going for with your game but you're more than welcome to our code/resources when we're done - I even have a map editor you could use.

(I declined his offer, since Fallen Gods used such a different style/system, so I have no idea whether there was any "code/resources" or "map editor" at all.)

I don't believe the map editor was fake (see here: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...orware-strategy-rp.93379/page-48#post-4917723) and the failure of TWS likely stems from the more pedestrian root causes that you outline.

Like so many things in life, it is more fun to imagine the scheming and machinations of veiled actors behind the scenes than to coldly examine the realities of random creation and destruction.

Except, except, except... he fucking said he had an existant working playable game and shared AAR's. He just needed some help with graphics and sprite work. But he never ever showed the existence of this supposed playable game, nor did he share it, and all the footage he shared was clearly faked (In that there wasn't game logic running things, he was controlling everything).

Yeah, sometimes people take on too much and get overwhelmed. That's not fraud, at worst it's incompetence. When you lie and claim to have a thing that you don't have, then your incompetence leads you not to be able to make the thing you lied about, it's fraud. Sure, maybe kevin thought he would make the lie come true eventually, but he still knowingly lied, for the purpose of getting money. It's the dictionary definition of fraud.

The failure of TWS stems from the false representation at the beginning of the project that TWS already existed.

People just want to simp for the people screwing them over so they don't feel as stupid, well suck it up, you got duped, try to learn from the experience, rather than deluding yourself.

Or whatever, keep falling for obvious scams, it's your money and your life. I'll be here, ready to laugh at you.

 

[agris]

you're shadow boxing Corbin Dallas Multipass; no one is saying the multitude of things you are arguing against. at least not here, now, in this thread.

 

[MRY]

Yeah, to be clear, my reaction is more one of bemusement at the sordid nature of human beings, not belief in what he was saying. The Confederate Express fraud had a clearer "logic" to it -- the perpetrators turned out to be engaged in some other scam (squatting in a VRBO or something?), their behavior on being found out was a mix of smugness and aggression, and the investment they put into the ConEx con was pretty light compared to the amount of things that KDG actually made for TWS (though I guess they ultimately released some game). So there was a big financial upside to the fraud and comparably little risk. With TWS, the oddity is that the people seemed like normal guys who faced real risk if people got mad enough (they weren't penniless mooches who had nothing to fear from a lawsuit since they had no assets, they both had real jobs if I recall), and they continued to spend money on the project after the Kickstarter closed.

This seems like a fair interpretation: "maybe kevin thought he would make the lie come true eventually, but he still knowingly lied, for the purpose of getting money." (I would add "for the purpose of getting money to make the lie come true.") Even then, the best you can say is that there was a combination of incredible naivete (believing that they could deliver on these promises) and outright dishonesty.

This is what they said at the start of the "risks" section:

By waiting until we have a fully functional and working game engine we feel like we successfully mitigated the most common risks that many games on Kickstarter face. We have a working game that we will complete and deliver in a timely fashion.

It certainly seems like this was untrue, and done to induce people to give them money.

 

[mondblut]

And the guy wasn't simply fantasizing about features in the game, he was making hundreds of posts with feedback from alpha testers who were giving detailed descriptions of the games they were playing. It's a shame the forums were closed, because they really were a trip. Even better, during this time that he was posting all of the alpha tester feedback, his partner (the two of them did the Kickstarter together) had never received a playable build.

It was amusing to see the other forum users think this guy was a legit but ultra shy developer, and were trying to find ways to get his partner to coddle him so they could get the awesome alpha.

So, a mysterious entity plays with the minds of ignorant mortals, taunting and seducing them with elaborate stories, making them part with their savings, sowing anger and discord...

It seems the game does exist, after all. Just not exactly the kind you have imagined after reading ingame texts.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

And the guy wasn't simply fantasizing about features in the game, he was making hundreds of posts with feedback from alpha testers who were giving detailed descriptions of the games they were playing. It's a shame the forums were closed, because they really were a trip. Even better, during this time that he was posting all of the alpha tester feedback, his partner (the two of them did the Kickstarter together) had never received a playable build.

It was amusing to see the other forum users think this guy was a legit but ultra shy developer, and were trying to find ways to get his partner to coddle him so they could get the awesome alpha.

So, a mysterious entity plays with the minds of ignorant mortals, taunting and seducing them with elaborate stories, making them part with their savings, sowing anger and discord...

It seems the game does exist, after all. Just not exactly the kind you have imagined after reading ingame texts.

But only the people who paid for it had their minds destroyed. So... kind of a kinder, gentler unknowable horror, that you have to buy into to be negatively affected by.

That's fair. Kevin seemed nicer than Cthulu, scam or not. Cthulu would send you a non-euclidean refund that would show you all the dark horrible secrets of the grasping horrors that lurk in the shadows until your mind simply let go from the unfathomably grotesque savagery that waits for us all behind the veil.

 

[almondblight]

My best guess is that they simply hit several different walls that commonly afflict game development: simply the fatigue once you're over the dreaming stage, some kind of coding challenges they couldn't fix, and perhaps realizing that the core gameplay loop wasn't that much fun. It is a sufficiently small amount of money that they raised, and I know they spent at least some of it on art (since they paid the FG artist), so it doesn't seem like an outright scam. And they didn't come across as scammers in my interactions with them./

The main developer struck me as a guy who knew a bit about programming/development and thought he just taped enough Unity plugins together he'd have a game. So when you say he was a Civ modder, it makes sense. Guy had experience modding Civ, thought he could "mod" Unity into a full blown game.

This wasn't really too uncommon during the crazy early years of the Kickstarter craze. I think the Greed Monger thread in MMORPG follows a similar path. The main programmer kept saying to his partner that he just needed one more Unity plugin, and then his cobbled together Frankenstein's monster of a game would actually work. They even had the same incompetent programmer/oblivious business guy split that That Which Sleep had (and I believe a similar outcome, where the business guy bailed when he realized the whole thing was smoke and mirrors, and the programmer took over full responsibility convinced that he was on the verge of making things work).

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

My best guess is that they simply hit several different walls that commonly afflict game development: simply the fatigue once you're over the dreaming stage, some kind of coding challenges they couldn't fix, and perhaps realizing that the core gameplay loop wasn't that much fun. It is a sufficiently small amount of money that they raised, and I know they spent at least some of it on art (since they paid the FG artist), so it doesn't seem like an outright scam. And they didn't come across as scammers in my interactions with them./

The main developer struck me as a guy who knew a bit about programming/development and thought he just taped enough Unity plugins together he'd have a game. So when you say he was a Civ modder, it makes sense. Guy had experience modding Civ, thought he could "mod" Unity into a full blown game.

This wasn't really too uncommon during the crazy early years of the Kickstarter craze. I think the Greed Monger thread in MMORPG follows a similar path. The main programmer kept saying to his partner that he just needed one more Unity plugin, and then his cobbled together Frankenstein's monster of a game would actually work. They even had the same incompetent programmer/oblivious business guy split that That Which Sleep had (and I believe a similar outcome, where the business guy bailed when he realized the whole thing was smoke and mirrors, and the programmer took over full responsibility convinced that he was on the verge of making things work).

But he said he already had a working game that he played, not he almost had a game. By lying about that already working game to fund raise he was a scammer from the beginning by definition.

 

[Lithium Flower]

Cool.

 

[Mortmal]

And the guy wasn't simply fantasizing about features in the game, he was making hundreds of posts with feedback from alpha testers who were giving detailed descriptions of the games they were playing. It's a shame the forums were closed, because they really were a trip. Even better, during this time that he was posting all of the alpha tester feedback, his partner (the two of them did the Kickstarter together) had never received a playable build.

It was amusing to see the other forum users think this guy was a legit but ultra shy developer, and were trying to find ways to get his partner to coddle him so they could get the awesome alpha.

So, a mysterious entity plays with the minds of ignorant mortals, taunting and seducing them with elaborate stories, making them part with their savings, sowing anger and discord...

It seems the game does exist, after all. Just not exactly the kind you have imagined after reading ingame texts.

But it does exist ...
The world simulates a set of nobles, all with their own aims and interests. They existing in societies, and vote to achieve their ends. By proposing votes, and voting strategically, you can manipulate them into failing to respond to the true threat, your slowly-developing hidden forces.
You also control dark agents, from vampires to plague doctors to corrupted merchants, who can travel across the world map, committing dark crimes and escaping before the human forces discover your actions. They, too, can then assist your political goals, in their own various ways.
Set silversmiths against wine-makers, while subverting coastal villages to build an army of Deep One fish-people, waiting to storm the surface. Rally your kingdom against another, while supporting dissident nobles in the other in order to provoke civil war, weakening them such that they make easy prey. Grow horrific fields of fleshy limbs and gnashing teeth to terrify the nobles into failing to realise that your enthralled noble is slowly converting them from within into dark cultists.

 

[Aidan]

And the guy wasn't simply fantasizing about features in the game, he was making hundreds of posts with feedback from alpha testers who were giving detailed descriptions of the games they were playing. It's a shame the forums were closed, because they really were a trip. Even better, during this time that he was posting all of the alpha tester feedback, his partner (the two of them did the Kickstarter together) had never received a playable build.

It was amusing to see the other forum users think this guy was a legit but ultra shy developer, and were trying to find ways to get his partner to coddle him so they could get the awesome alpha.

So, a mysterious entity plays with the minds of ignorant mortals, taunting and seducing them with elaborate stories, making them part with their savings, sowing anger and discord...

It seems the game does exist, after all. Just not exactly the kind you have imagined after reading ingame texts.

But it does exist ...
The world simulates a set of nobles, all with their own aims and interests. They existing in societies, and vote to achieve their ends. By proposing votes, and voting strategically, you can manipulate them into failing to respond to the true threat, your slowly-developing hidden forces.
You also control dark agents, from vampires to plague doctors to corrupted merchants, who can travel across the world map, committing dark crimes and escaping before the human forces discover your actions. They, too, can then assist your political goals, in their own various ways.
Set silversmiths against wine-makers, while subverting coastal villages to build an army of Deep One fish-people, waiting to storm the surface. Rally your kingdom against another, while supporting dissident nobles in the other in order to provoke civil war, weakening them such that they make easy prey. Grow horrific fields of fleshy limbs and gnashing teeth to terrify the nobles into failing to realise that your enthralled noble is slowly converting them from within into dark cultists.

that’s shadows behind the thrones not that which sleeps

 

[mondblut]

that’s shadows behind the thrones not that which sleeps

The real that which sleeps is this thread. And the kickstarted campaign. And the promises. And...

 

[Mortmal]

that’s shadows behind the thrones not that which sleeps

The real that which sleeps is this thread. And the kickstarted campaign. And the promises. And...

And the most important : The friends you made along the way !