FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Battle for El Dorado is not a good look.
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
gee whiz that looks fraught
+10
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Der Waffle MousBlame this on the misfortune of your birth.New Yark, New Yark.Registered Userregular
edited July 2019
nnnnoooot even gonna open the video
edit: also did I already say the thing about always getting a bad feeling whenever central/eastern europeans try to tackle anything with indigenous people?
I wasn't playing on PC, but I opened up Dead Cells yesterday morning on my Switch to find a game in progress that I'd apparently left from quite a while ago - so long ago that I don't remember. Turns out I had some incredible equipment and had paused in the castle. Went on to kill the king for the first time with very little effort.
Then I started a new game right away and got rehooked cause dang, that game is pretty fun.
We need to apologize for the silence on the development side of UnDungeon, and transparently explain what has been happening for the past few months.
As you know, about a year ago we announced that we've signed with tinyBuild to help bring the game to more people and platforms. tinyBuild is known for being a developer-publisher hybrid with dozens of games under their belt. They've provided much needed additional funding and development expertise we were missing in the project.
standard kickstarter "sorry I didn't call more often" apology
Original plan - January 2019
The original development plan was to be Gold Master (ready for console ports) in January of this year. However, by this time the game was only in Alpha stage. UnDungeon was showcased and extensively playtested leading up to that moment, with several red flags becoming apparent. One of the builds was also shared with you all last November in the previous update.
First issue was combat "didn't feel good" - when you take the controller, and something just felt off, wrong.
The second was a poorly organized codebase which made feature development apparently very tedious.
Third is that development was always behind schedule. The development was structured around the project manager trying to do both management and game design. Both disciplines suffered because of it.
that's a little troubling...
Issues with team structure, delays, churning through coders
Turned out the main reason the codebase wasn’t in good shape was because the team churned through 3 lead coders in under a year. This goes hand in hand with game design issues and the combat not being great, it all came down to a single bottleneck not being able to delegate or effectively manage a team. As a result of these issues, timelines constantly slipped.
This surfaced when tinyBuild took a deep dive into development. Here's a timeline of events that followed:
On December 15th 2018 we all agreed on a new list of milestones that added 50% more to the game's budget. tinyBuild has funded this on top of what they already put in
The new structure assumed an Early Access launch on the 25th of July 2019
Out of the new milestone schedule, the first two were conditionally approved (they were approved so that the team has money to continue development while we workout development issues). Conditions being to catchup to the dev schedule, which was missed. Again.
During this period the team started churning through more people due to “conflicts with the project manager”.
The third milestone (delivery date March 25 2019) was not accepted, after the team wasn't able to catchup with the previous two missed milestones or deliver on the third one. At this point we had to take action, however, the project manager bargained for 2 more months to fix the issues.
The issues revolved mostly around gameplay, balance, and tech. There was no "flow" to the game itself, which was made worse by constantly changing team members.
On June 24th 2019, we had the third milestone build - late by 3 months - which still had the same issues with gameplay, balance, broken boss fights, and so on.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting things to change. At this point the project was about 400% over budget without a clear process to finish it. Had we had good project management in place from the get go, we wouldn’t be in an over-budget situation. There also wasn’t enough room for iteration in original planning, the plan had assumed everything would “hit” the first time around - with combat feel being the main paint point.
okay that's... bad, but at least -
Reorganizing development
A logical change that both we & tinyBuild felt would solve the problems is reorganizing the development team to have an experienced producer / project manager in the lead. Get game designers and great engineers on board to speed things up, and have the original project manager be on a consulting basis.
However the initial project manager didn’t take this idea lightly. He felt like he was getting kicked off the project, and had a very aggressively defensive reaction - causing all constructive dialogue to go out the window.
Flash forward almost a month later, and the dialogue went into a stalemate with the original project manager trying to get the team to run off and do another project, trying to get everyone to "buy him out" under the blackmail pretense to go public claiming he got scammed, and hiding the source code. The latter is especially worrying, because he cut off access to the source without telling anyone. Fortunately we do have all backups.
We tried to have a conversation, where instead of trying to figure out a solution, the project manager simply demanded money only to drop the phone in anger when prompted for justification. He then proceeded to threaten to “tank the project”.
Upon seeing some inappropriate messages on Facebook sent by him from the official game page, we've decided to cut off all access to UnDungeon social media. This came with an immediate reaction consisting of aggressive threats and cursing.
Needless to say we put too much faith into the project manager being able to pull off a production of such size, and he simply collapsed under pressure. We did our utmost to reason and come to a peaceful solution to actually make the game happen. What we can’t accept is someone actively trying to kill off something we worked so hard on, and that you -- our fans -- put your faith in. We’re not backing down, we won’t allow the project to be sabotaged, and we’re making UnDungeon into what fans deserve
hahahaha wowwww shit
The Plan Moving Forward
Between Laughing Machines and tinyBuild we have a solid plan moving forward.
The original vision of the project remains the same, and it's what you've all put your faith into. The initial project manager will not be involved due to destructive behavior that cost everyone too much time and money.
The original team is being brought back together under new leadership.
tinyBuild is getting a game designer and producer on board -- and funding the homestretch of development.
We will make development transparent with 2 week “sprint reports”. These reports will digest what’s been done in the last 2 weeks with all the information we can make public. It will give you all an idea of where we are and what kind of progress/issues we have.
It will take us a little bit of time to get the sprint reports started, and we will keep you all posted.
so good on them for keeping going, I guess
I wonder what it's like going back to work on this after all that mess
Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
Well... Holy shit
+22
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
It's always unfortunate to hear about people tanking or trying to tank something out of spite or selfishness. I hope the team is able to successfully move forward and put out the game they seem interested in making and people seemed interested in playing.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
man this preview screen for this trailer had me excited but then things quickly took a turn
you can "be a colonist / invader and trample / burn the savages", which is literally stomping native people into a bloody pulp and gunning them down with lasers
or
you can "be a savior/leader and destroy the traitors/fight for freedom", where you gun down your own people who are gunning down the natives and then the natives literally fall on the ground worshipping you
This looks very much like someone's wish-fulfillment of taking an AT-ST and trampling Ewoks, but they couldn't get the license for obvious reasons. So they decided to go with "just legally distinct enough", without realizing(or caring?) how some of it actually looks when translated to another style.
Holy moly. I'm a backer, but I'll admit that I was backing it under the assumption that there was a 10% chance that an enjoyable game would get delivered. I just thought the art was pretty, mainly.
This sounds like it's been a nightmare behind the scenes. I hope it goes better for those folks going forward. Except that manager, he can go pound sand.
Holy moly. I'm a backer, but I'll admit that I was backing it under the assumption that there was a 10% chance that an enjoyable game would get delivered. I just thought the art was pretty, mainly.
This sounds like it's been a nightmare behind the scenes. I hope it goes better for those folks going forward. Except that manager, he can go pound sand.
This whole thing makes me glad that I backed Blasphemous and that it's close to completion without major complications or delays.
(I'm pretty sure I shared this video when it was first posted a month ago and everyone made fun of the rad hat the protagonist wears, but it's still a rad fuckin game with an amazing art style (which is mostly why I backed it, because I'm a fuckin sucker for a good art style))
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Olivawgood name, isn't it?the foot of mt fujiRegistered Userregular
Holy moly. I'm a backer, but I'll admit that I was backing it under the assumption that there was a 10% chance that an enjoyable game would get delivered. I just thought the art was pretty, mainly.
This sounds like it's been a nightmare behind the scenes. I hope it goes better for those folks going forward. Except that manager, he can go pound sand.
This whole thing makes me glad that I backed Blasphemous and that it's close to completion without major complications or delays.
(I'm pretty sure I shared this video when it was first posted a month ago and everyone made fun of the rad hat the protagonist wears, but it's still a rad fuckin game with an amazing art style (which is mostly why I backed it, because I'm a fuckin sucker for a good art style))
I love it when I see a dark fantasy game use the Berserk brand with just like one extra line added or removed
I just got done playing Torment: Tides of Numenera, and holy moly that's quite a game. I feel like that's about as close to the Planescape Torment vibe that any game is going to get (both for good and bad). It feels like reading some really dense literature compared to other games I was playing, just in terms of the amount of text, but also the heavy choices it feels like the game wants you to make, all the time.
+4
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FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
man this preview screen for this trailer had me excited but then things quickly took a turn
you can "be a colonist / invader and trample / burn the savages", which is literally stomping native people into a bloody pulp and gunning them down with lasers
or
you can "be a savior/leader and destroy the traitors/fight for freedom", where you gun down your own people who are gunning down the natives and then the natives literally fall on the ground worshipping you
This looks very much like someone's wish-fulfillment of taking an AT-ST and trampling Ewoks, but they couldn't get the license for obvious reasons. So they decided to go with "just legally distinct enough", without realizing(or caring?) how some of it actually looks when translated to another style.
In 1993 a game called 'Walker' was released by a little company known as DMA Design. It featured an AT-ST style much that stomped from one side of the screen to another, shooting enemies that appeared:
DMA Design would rename themselves and continue on releasing a few more games. You might have heard of them; these days they're called Rockstar games and are responsible for a series called Grand Theft Auto. I wonder if they have any thoughts about this game.
Time to make my first purchase on the EGS. I've been waiting for Tetris Effect to come to PC since it was first announced so I can play it on my Rift. Hopefully the VR mode is included in the PC version, and I hope I can get it working with the Rift (I haven't played any VR games that didn't launch from either the Oculus store or Steam so I don't know how or if it'll work).
edit: I actually read the entire tweet and it will indeed come with VR support, nice
Darmak on
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
Holy moly. I'm a backer, but I'll admit that I was backing it under the assumption that there was a 10% chance that an enjoyable game would get delivered. I just thought the art was pretty, mainly.
This sounds like it's been a nightmare behind the scenes. I hope it goes better for those folks going forward. Except that manager, he can go pound sand.
This whole thing makes me glad that I backed Blasphemous and that it's close to completion without major complications or delays.
(I'm pretty sure I shared this video when it was first posted a month ago and everyone made fun of the rad hat the protagonist wears, but it's still a rad fuckin game with an amazing art style (which is mostly why I backed it, because I'm a fuckin sucker for a good art style))
that hat is the best hat I've ever seen, I love it so much
Holy moly. I'm a backer, but I'll admit that I was backing it under the assumption that there was a 10% chance that an enjoyable game would get delivered. I just thought the art was pretty, mainly.
This sounds like it's been a nightmare behind the scenes. I hope it goes better for those folks going forward. Except that manager, he can go pound sand.
This whole thing makes me glad that I backed Blasphemous and that it's close to completion without major complications or delays.
(I'm pretty sure I shared this video when it was first posted a month ago and everyone made fun of the rad hat the protagonist wears, but it's still a rad fuckin game with an amazing art style (which is mostly why I backed it, because I'm a fuckin sucker for a good art style))
that hat is the best hat I've ever seen, I love it so much
Here's something I posted on Facebook a few years back:
I asked online, "Say, if you jizzed inside the space station, would it propel you backwards?" to which someone replied with, "at a speed equivalent to the mass times the speed of a cumshot divided by your mass minus one cumshot, sure
source: I have a PhD in zero-gravity cumshot physics"
and it makes me giggle every time I think about it.
+9
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BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
Blazing Chrome is very good, but boy is it hard. The 5th level has you alternating between fighting waves of enemies and mini bosses on a hover bike and avoiding walls and pits like friggin Battletoads. You need some seriously flawless play to get through it in a single continue, but good news is that bosses have no RNG in their attack cycles, so it's possible to brute force everything with straight memorization.
I really wish I had more people I could do local co-op with, though.
Posts
austin walker
edit: also did I already say the thing about always getting a bad feeling whenever central/eastern europeans try to tackle anything with indigenous people?
oh lord I didn't even see that subtitle
I guess they can't even play this off as "oh I didn't realize these native people could be seen as an allusion to a real people"
honestly I think that problem might exist for any foreigners take on cultures that don't get a lot of representation
like there are probably interesting, worthwhile stories to be told about
the Hutu and Tutsi conflicts
the Sino-Japanese conflicts
the Anglo-Irish conflicts
the Shia–Sunni conflicts
and I doubt that I'm equipped to write about any of those in way that wasn't culturally insensitive, biased, or outright offensive
even with a whole lot of research, I don't think I could find all the nuance or really understand the repercussions for modern descendants
although I guess I'm also not trying to sell my game about the Nanjing massacre on steam...
Then I started a new game right away and got rehooked cause dang, that game is pretty fun.
He got out of there in the nick of time, I must say.
it raised almost double its funding goal
and then like all kickstarters, it was late
and then some shit went down :
We need to apologize for the silence on the development side of UnDungeon, and transparently explain what has been happening for the past few months.
As you know, about a year ago we announced that we've signed with tinyBuild to help bring the game to more people and platforms. tinyBuild is known for being a developer-publisher hybrid with dozens of games under their belt. They've provided much needed additional funding and development expertise we were missing in the project.
The original development plan was to be Gold Master (ready for console ports) in January of this year. However, by this time the game was only in Alpha stage. UnDungeon was showcased and extensively playtested leading up to that moment, with several red flags becoming apparent. One of the builds was also shared with you all last November in the previous update.
First issue was combat "didn't feel good" - when you take the controller, and something just felt off, wrong.
The second was a poorly organized codebase which made feature development apparently very tedious.
Third is that development was always behind schedule. The development was structured around the project manager trying to do both management and game design. Both disciplines suffered because of it.
Turned out the main reason the codebase wasn’t in good shape was because the team churned through 3 lead coders in under a year. This goes hand in hand with game design issues and the combat not being great, it all came down to a single bottleneck not being able to delegate or effectively manage a team. As a result of these issues, timelines constantly slipped.
This surfaced when tinyBuild took a deep dive into development. Here's a timeline of events that followed:
On December 15th 2018 we all agreed on a new list of milestones that added 50% more to the game's budget. tinyBuild has funded this on top of what they already put in
The new structure assumed an Early Access launch on the 25th of July 2019
Out of the new milestone schedule, the first two were conditionally approved (they were approved so that the team has money to continue development while we workout development issues). Conditions being to catchup to the dev schedule, which was missed. Again.
During this period the team started churning through more people due to “conflicts with the project manager”.
The third milestone (delivery date March 25 2019) was not accepted, after the team wasn't able to catchup with the previous two missed milestones or deliver on the third one. At this point we had to take action, however, the project manager bargained for 2 more months to fix the issues.
The issues revolved mostly around gameplay, balance, and tech. There was no "flow" to the game itself, which was made worse by constantly changing team members.
On June 24th 2019, we had the third milestone build - late by 3 months - which still had the same issues with gameplay, balance, broken boss fights, and so on.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting things to change. At this point the project was about 400% over budget without a clear process to finish it. Had we had good project management in place from the get go, we wouldn’t be in an over-budget situation. There also wasn’t enough room for iteration in original planning, the plan had assumed everything would “hit” the first time around - with combat feel being the main paint point.
A logical change that both we & tinyBuild felt would solve the problems is reorganizing the development team to have an experienced producer / project manager in the lead. Get game designers and great engineers on board to speed things up, and have the original project manager be on a consulting basis.
However the initial project manager didn’t take this idea lightly. He felt like he was getting kicked off the project, and had a very aggressively defensive reaction - causing all constructive dialogue to go out the window.
Flash forward almost a month later, and the dialogue went into a stalemate with the original project manager trying to get the team to run off and do another project, trying to get everyone to "buy him out" under the blackmail pretense to go public claiming he got scammed, and hiding the source code. The latter is especially worrying, because he cut off access to the source without telling anyone. Fortunately we do have all backups.
We tried to have a conversation, where instead of trying to figure out a solution, the project manager simply demanded money only to drop the phone in anger when prompted for justification. He then proceeded to threaten to “tank the project”.
Upon seeing some inappropriate messages on Facebook sent by him from the official game page, we've decided to cut off all access to UnDungeon social media. This came with an immediate reaction consisting of aggressive threats and cursing.
Needless to say we put too much faith into the project manager being able to pull off a production of such size, and he simply collapsed under pressure. We did our utmost to reason and come to a peaceful solution to actually make the game happen. What we can’t accept is someone actively trying to kill off something we worked so hard on, and that you -- our fans -- put your faith in. We’re not backing down, we won’t allow the project to be sabotaged, and we’re making UnDungeon into what fans deserve
Between Laughing Machines and tinyBuild we have a solid plan moving forward.
The original vision of the project remains the same, and it's what you've all put your faith into. The initial project manager will not be involved due to destructive behavior that cost everyone too much time and money.
The original team is being brought back together under new leadership.
tinyBuild is getting a game designer and producer on board -- and funding the homestretch of development.
We will make development transparent with 2 week “sprint reports”. These reports will digest what’s been done in the last 2 weeks with all the information we can make public. It will give you all an idea of where we are and what kind of progress/issues we have.
It will take us a little bit of time to get the sprint reports started, and we will keep you all posted.
I wonder what it's like going back to work on this after all that mess
This looks very much like someone's wish-fulfillment of taking an AT-ST and trampling Ewoks, but they couldn't get the license for obvious reasons. So they decided to go with "just legally distinct enough", without realizing(or caring?) how some of it actually looks when translated to another style.
This sounds like it's been a nightmare behind the scenes. I hope it goes better for those folks going forward. Except that manager, he can go pound sand.
This whole thing makes me glad that I backed Blasphemous and that it's close to completion without major complications or delays.
(I'm pretty sure I shared this video when it was first posted a month ago and everyone made fun of the rad hat the protagonist wears, but it's still a rad fuckin game with an amazing art style (which is mostly why I backed it, because I'm a fuckin sucker for a good art style))
I love it when I see a dark fantasy game use the Berserk brand with just like one extra line added or removed
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
In 1993 a game called 'Walker' was released by a little company known as DMA Design. It featured an AT-ST style much that stomped from one side of the screen to another, shooting enemies that appeared:
DMA Design would rename themselves and continue on releasing a few more games. You might have heard of them; these days they're called Rockstar games and are responsible for a series called Grand Theft Auto. I wonder if they have any thoughts about this game.
4:58
I don't know who thought of this concept but it's pretty cool of Sony I guess
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
hmm, tetris effect heading to the epic game store
hell yes Gamers we gettin SNIPPED up in here
I mean if you wanna be appropriate than Ballz is the only choice
Time to make my first purchase on the EGS. I've been waiting for Tetris Effect to come to PC since it was first announced so I can play it on my Rift. Hopefully the VR mode is included in the PC version, and I hope I can get it working with the Rift (I haven't played any VR games that didn't launch from either the Oculus store or Steam so I don't know how or if it'll work).
edit: I actually read the entire tweet and it will indeed come with VR support, nice
that hat is the best hat I've ever seen, I love it so much
sign me up
I don't think I could pull these shirts off
I would definitely rock the "Coolfest '99" shirt
i really need to spend some time with it
man
my list of unplayed games is getting embarassing
It's a good hat, Shorty
If you Fus in space it push you backwards
NO
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Here's something I posted on Facebook a few years back:
and it makes me giggle every time I think about it.
I really wish I had more people I could do local co-op with, though.