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LumberingTroll posted:Echoing that Stonehearth looks great, I backed at $30. I am sure they will hit goal within the next couple days. Neat article on Stonehearth up at Kotaku. http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/05/they-changed-fighting-games-now-theyre-making-something-new/
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May 3, 2013 03:21
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Kepa posted:I've actually been surprised to not see more "LIKE MINECRAFT, BUT BETTER" Kickstarters. I mean, think about the number of kickstarters or games in development that are "LIKE DWARF FORTRESS, BUT BETTER". It's about time people cashed in on vaguely promising a direct competitor. Well, Minecraft is already pretty good, from everything I understand. I mean, I haven't played it, but like little kids can play it and enjoy it, it has graphics, etc. It's a commercial success already. Dwarf Fortress on the other hand . . . well, "obviously flawed" is a charitable way of phrasing it. I love the game and I've played it for months on end, but it doesn't take a mad scientist genius to look at DF and go "holy hell, this thing needs graphics, a working UI, and easier modability. Let's got a professional programming team in here and make a zillion dollars." DF is almost a perfect "diamond in the rough" -- it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to "cut" the core concepts into a game with immense commercial value. Right now my guess is that that someone will be the Stonehearth guys but we'll see.
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May 5, 2013 20:58
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SuicideSnowman posted:There already exists a DF with an interace called Gnomoria. Obviously, it's not nearly as advanced because DF has been in development for roughly 10 years but it's obvious that's the direction that Gnomoria is going. Yeah, there are a few different DF clones with varying degrees of improvement. All the ones I've seen have been similar amateur-in-their-garage-level games though -- nobody's taken the DF idea and given it a truly professional, feature-rich, bug-free treament with slick graphics and a quality UI. The "genre" (if Dwarflikes are a genre) seems to be about where MMO's were before World of Warcraft came along -- there are a few different not-bad, playable games out there, but they're kinda niche products, and nobody has yet developed a "killer app" that does everything important all the others do, does it all well, and does it in a way that has mass market appeal. If Stonehearth lives up to their promo videos they could be that game. I don't mean to knock on Gnomoria, Timber & Stone, etc. I just don't think any of them have quite connected all the dots yet. DF has been in development for 10 years, true, but he's a self-taught amateur and it shows; a team of ten professionals could match and probably surpass DF in most of the important ways in a year or two of dev time. I doubt anyone will ever come out with a game that has quite DF's insane depth -- "let's spend a half-hour making your computer generate a personal history for each of the goblins in each invading goblin's thousand-year genealogy" -- but most people would probably have a useable UI instead anyway. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 01:20 on May 6, 2013 |
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May 6, 2013 01:13
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Install Gentoo posted:Before World of Warcraft, MMOs were a global industry with over $400 million a year of revenue, tens of millions of players and nearly 10 years of history to them. Yeah, but you get the analogy. Ultima Online had all sorts of bizarre features that nobody ever really saw -- the initial release had working ecology calculations, etc. -- and was buggy as hell, etc. Everquest released with half its quest lines or more bugged to the point that they could not be completed. Anarchy Online was essentially nonfunctional for the first week or two after "release" due to server problems. So on, so forth. Then WoW came along and, for lack of a better term, professionalized everything. The "dwarflike" genre is a lot smaller of course but is in a similar state of waiting for a professional treatment. Maybe not "mass market," but bug-free, useable UI, complete feature set, etc.
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May 6, 2013 01:24
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One of the guys from Stonehearth did a two and a half hour demo/ Q&A / "this is how we animate a baby mammoth" talk just now on twitch and it's archived here if you want to watch it: http://www.twitch.tv/radiantentertainment/b/400154125
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May 7, 2013 00:42
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Why is anyone buying into the PA kickstarter? I don't get it, and I thought I had made some dumb internet purchases in my time.
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May 8, 2013 22:19
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Darkhold posted:Well I've put money down on Stonehearth now. I really think the guys behind this seem to really have good ideas. The 2 hour mammoth building video really sold me on it. For me I got sold the minute I saw the little guys in the demo video automatically constructing and deconstructing scaffolding as necessary -- and then heard the developer talk about how he needed to fix minor graphics glitches. For anyone who's spent whole weekends building tile by tile scaffolding for Dwarf Fortress constructs, that was huge, and it also said a lot about the dev's attention to detail. I mean, I've waited for like three years for Toady to fix basic bugs with the military not wearing armor or using weapons. If this guy is concerned because of minor graphics issues, I'm sold. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 21:37 on May 9, 2013 |
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May 9, 2013 21:29
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Ok, I don't understand how Kicktraq calculates its leaderboard. It's had Stonehearth consistently at the top for the past two weeks, even though other projects seem to be way out crazy ahead of them in terms of funding -- for example, Hex has garnered $100,000 more with a third as many backers in less than half the time.
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May 14, 2013 02:55
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xgalaxy posted:Call me crazy but I feel like the more people willing to pay for something, even if the amount they are willing to pay is lower, is better than a minority willing to pay larger sums. So assuming the same number of people see each project the likely hood of someone pledging for Stonehearth is higher because it appeals to a greater audience. Now obviously there is some break even point where if the amount pledged per person drops below a threshold it's no longer in Stonehearths favor. So my guess is Kicktraq is somehow calculating those break even points to derive a ranking. That makes sense. Two god-forsaken fools (presumably, Gabe and Tycho) have pledged 10k each for Hex, so I imagine that's shifting the bid averages a bit. I have to admit I don't get online card games. If I'm online I want to play a computer game. I'm not saying that as a value judgment, I just honestly don't understand -- I've still got my shoebox of Revised Edition MTG cards, but for me trading card games are like board games, they're something to play with actual flesh people, perhaps when the internet is down. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 05:37 on May 14, 2013 |
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May 14, 2013 05:34
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xgalaxy posted:I have to chuckle at this comment because on the one hand I see Stonehearth and its being made by some guys who have been in the trenches of development before and have seen things to the other side, and on the other hand there is TUG with its army of PhD folks who have probably never actually produced an honest to god product before going off on how they got these big plans. It mirrors my experience with PhDs in the workforce. Yeah, Stonehearth is the first kickstarter I've ever backed and the reason I'm monitoring this thread. What sold me on it? The devs clearly have their poo poo together. I've waited years now for Toady to fix all the various bugs in Dwarf Fortress, or for someone else to come out with a professional quality, polished alternative, and nothing I'd seen -- gnomoria, towns, etc. -- really matched up. So far at least Stonehearth has hit every note perfectly. The best example might be the time they were asked about the UI and in response, they didn't just promise a clean UI; they spoke in detail about how they tried various UI options and ultimately decided on a simple Chrome overlay because it would be easiest to mod and debug. Meanwhile every other DF clone attempt has the same or similar impenetrable morass of menus and bugs. They aren't trying to do everything themselves in their basements, they're hiring a team of professionals to get things done in a reasonable timeframe. So on, so forth.
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May 15, 2013 04:24
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:One thing Dwarf Fortress has going for it that no other clone does to this day is the amount of interesting emergent storytelling. This is provided by the insane level of detail. You can have dwarves build a statue of a hero who beat back an invasion using a severed arm as a weapon. The amount of detail in the damage modeling and everything else is so ridiculous, when combined with the madcap AI and randomness of everything, something ridiculous is happening every drat day. Whereas Gnormoria and Towns both just feel like kind of rote fantasy settlement sims. This is a decent point. Nothing's going to ever be as completely balls-out dwarfy as dwarf fortress is, for a lot of reasons -- Toady's massive time investment, the need for art assets, the very impenetrability of the interface, etc. I think Stonehearth has a really good shot at achieving as good a compromise as is realistically possible, however, between that kind of near-autistic complexity and a playable game. Here's my thought process: 1) Immense detail isn't the only thing that sparks emergent gameplay. You need multiple deep, complex systems that interact with each other in complex ways. While Stonehearth isn't and wont' be as granular as DF, it looks like the devs are trying to push the system interactions as far as they can while still keeping the game reasonable accessible, intelligible, and bug free -- multiple types of wood, for example, with different properties when crafted, not just universal "wood,"; multiple different types of crafting that interact with each other, including magic; a class tree system for settlers that is both "wide" and "deep,"; inter-settler relationships; settler happiness; so on, so forth. Yeah, it's going to be simpler than DF. They're using a hit point system instead of modelling every tissue layer independently. They're planning on a sort of aggregate happiness measure for the whole town instead of tracking each settler's happiness individually. They're only going to have three types of wood, not twenty. But a lot of the crazy depth in DF is actually wasted -- there's not that much difference between most wood types for example, many of the stone types are pointless in game terms, etc. Toady's never really been that focused on actual gameplay, and a lot of that extra detail is ultimately wasted fluff, and gameplay won't suffer when it's cut -- I don't need the game calculating unique, separate happiness values for each indiviual insect brain roast I craft, 2) Art's an issue. Going with voxels is a good compromise here. It's probably as close as most people these days are willing to get to the ASCII aesthetic -- perhaps because those of us who grew up playing ASCII games are few and far between relative to those who grew up playing early nintendo stuff, [erhaps because anything lower quality than that becomes difficult to discern (many of the DF tilesets are unusuable for this reason). The real benefit, though, is that a nice standard graphics convention and modability means people can just mod in anything they want, with a relatively low art threshold. Setting aside for now concerns about consistency of art style, you want more trees? Ok, draw out your trees in qubicle, import your new tree mod, now the game has more trees. And that brings us to your point -- 3) Easy modability. This is the other way to get lots of depth and content in your game. Ultimately, if the game becomes popular (and given its kickstarter success so far that seems likely) the only thing holding it back from having just as much crazy stuff in it as DF does will be people's willingness to mod it all in. Want giant eagles? Make a mod that adds 'em in. Want thirty kinds of stone? Add 'em in! So on, so forth. The limiting factor on DF has always been that it's the product of one man's genius and that one man only has so much time and is only open to certain types of design choices. The mod-ability of Stonehearth should open it up for improvement in ways that could at least potentially let it catch up to DF in terms of depth and complexity. Toady's got a ten-year head start on this kind of game, but he's only one guy. At least in theory, crowdsourcing can match it, and provide similar levels of depth in a shorter timeframe. In practice -- as opposed to theory -- there are going to be problems with low quality mods, consistency of art style, etc., but with a little luck all the above factors together should have a decent chance of getting this game close enough to provide a "dwarflike" experience without the pain of wrestling with DF's interface, bugs, etc. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 06:21 on May 15, 2013 |
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May 15, 2013 06:11
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HiggsBoson81 posted:
Isn't it also, to at least some extent, going to be a "pay to win" game, though? I mean, the whole "free to play, but $$ sure as hell gets you ahead" is a standard industry model now and everything, they gotta fund development somehow, sure -- but that probably explains part of why the average donation is so high. If you know you're going to play a game like this, are competitive, and have too much disposable income, why not lock in some long-term advantages now? Maybe I'm just a lot poorer than I thought I was, but personally, I can't understand spending *that* much at one time on one game. My interests change too much over time; what if you play for two months then the game gets boring or has weird balance problems or you decide you want to play some other game instead or who knows what? It also makes me a little reluctant to try the game -- with that crazy array of kickstarter rewards, it almost seems like free-to-play players are just going to be plankton fed to the "whales" who are plonking down $100+ each to play.
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May 18, 2013 07:54
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TOOT BOOT posted:This is how pretty much every multiplayer F2P game works. Other F2P games I've played seemed to adopt a slightly different model, where you could generally get everything either by investing time or investing money, and money was just a shortcut. Alternatively, I'm used to seeing cash give cosmetic rewards (i.e., repainting your mech in Mechwarrior Online) but not actual game advantages. Hex seems like it has a lot of "kickstarter only" permanent rewards, like +10% experience for life or +1 extra card in your party's hands for life or "spectral lotus garden" or whatever, kickstarter-only cards, etc. I'm trying to avoid being judgmental, I realize the devs have to fund development somehow etc., but it's not hard to understand why people are plonking down the $$$ when doing so is going to get them a flat out permanent game advantage. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 08:22 on May 18, 2013 |
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May 18, 2013 08:02
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Mugaaz posted:
I guess I'm looking at this from a video game perspective rather than from a TCG perspective. $120 may be "cheap" for a TCG but for an online game that's crazy expensive. Beyond that, it's not that I'm "worried" the game will be P2W, it's obvious it will be -- I'm just pointing out to the people asking "holy hell, why are people dropping so much $$$ on Hex" that the answer is "because they'll get a long term game advantage that way." Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 08:37 on May 18, 2013 |
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May 18, 2013 08:31
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Jedit posted:So does the (now sold out) $250 Pro Player tier. Also they hit a stretch where all tiers that include product get three free drafts at launch. Ok, *that* makes sense. People are just planning on reselling the account on Ebay or whatever? Or is there some in-game mechanism for reselling?
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May 18, 2013 14:40
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pumpinglemma posted:A few, but not many. I think most high pledgers just see it as an investment in playing the game for several years. (That said, if Hex ends up becoming Magic-size, then Collector and Pro Player accounts will probably sell for a lot more than $250 on the grey market.) After all my bitching on the last couple pages, y'all convinced me and I've gone in Grand King, basically because: 1. I spent like $100 on magic back in the day when that was real money and still always got upstaged by those assholes who had like arabian nights etc. This is my long awaited opportunity to ground floor that poo poo and be that rear end in a top hat. 2. If I play long term, it's a wise investment. If I don't, its' an ebay gamble, and given the game's kickstartrr success so far it seems a safe bet.
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May 21, 2013 02:13
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Daeno posted:Wow. I was way wrong. That(Dreadball game)'s amazing! Yeah, in retrospect I'm not sure bookmarking this thread to keep up on Stonehearth news was a good idea :P The main thing I'm wondering about Hex is how popular it will be beyond the subset of people willing to drop ~$150 on a kickstarter. Hopefully the PvE side of things will keep a constant stream of people flowing in.
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May 21, 2013 17:04
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Stonehearth made 400k, so co-op graphical dwarf fortress is gonna be a thing.OBi posted:There are a bunch of environmental factors combining to give it a pretty good shot too. First, Magic The Gathering's online platform (MTGO) is crap, even the new UI they're supposed to be rolling out got pushed back because so many people didn't want to switch to it. Second, Cockatrice, the most widely used MTGO alternative was recently shut down by a legal challenge from Wizards. It had marketed itself as a generic online card game utility, but Magic The Gathering card sets were widely available and pretty much the only thing it was used for. Third, the patent Wizards have on their tapping mechanic are expiring right before the game comes out, allowing Hex to blatantly clone Magic in an online space. I just got really annoyed by MTG because every time I tried to get back into it, half the rules had changed, I could only recognize a quarter of the cards at most, some of my favorite cards had suddenly become illegal (Balance? Sol Ring?), and all in all the learning curve to get back into the game just seemed prohibitive, not to mention expensive. With Hex I've got a chance to start over at the ground floor with a new game.
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May 21, 2013 21:17
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Zonekeeper posted:Goddamn. Now here's a question: Will pledges keep going up at the rate they were before, or will they drop off like a rock? Yeah, the question for Hex at this point is "do we have a market outside of people willing to drop more than $250 on digital card games?". Right now the average pledge is like $150 and I doubt the game can survive on a diet of entirely big-ticket players. If nothing else, if all the people trying to get into matches all are free drafters, that's not sustainable long-term if there are any match rewards.
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May 21, 2013 22:41
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Yodzilla posted:Trying to look at or understand what this Hex thing you're all so excited about just makes my eyes gloss over. So it's just like a new version of Magic: The Gathering or something, right? Basically yeah. It's all digital so the cards can do weird things like gain levels or have three sides or generate multiple copies of themselves or insert themselves into your opponent's deck randomly and so forth. It's also cheaper than Magic to play and an opportunity for people to get in on the ground floor of a game that doesn't have twenty years' worth of crazy overpowered cards nobody can buy any more except the people who already have them.
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May 22, 2013 21:20
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Wow there is an immense amount of whining on the Hex kickstarter page from people who pledged for Pro Player tier and are now upset that someone else might get a good thing, even though their good thing is in no way diminished and they retain the option of changing anyway.
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May 22, 2013 21:52
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cheetah7071 posted:There is some validity to people complaining that they would have pledged as a Collector rather than as a Pro Player if they had known about this stretch goal. If the whining isn't that then it's pretty stupid, though. Thing is, there's still plenty of opportunity to switch pledges to Collector if that's what they want instead. The only part of it that seems even slightly reasonable is "I don't know whether I'll play for a year or a lot longer" but at the $250 level I'd hope you were planning on playing for longer than a single year anyway.
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May 22, 2013 22:01
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Saoshyant posted:Call me ignorant as I'm not a hardcore TCG player, but virtual cards shouldn't be worth the same as the real deal. The company vanishes there goes all of your cards -- at least with the real thing you can still find likeminded people who will play with you, not to mention collectors willing to buy your cards. To be "fair" to Hex, they're charging about half as much as M:TG Online does for cards. But yeah, back to kickstarters. I'm surprised that Son of Nor isn't getting more attention in this thread. It looks like a really neat little game project and at this rate it's almost certainly going to fail =(
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May 23, 2013 13:22
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Arnold of Soissons posted:If Stonehearth hits the $600k stretch goal, then I'll be excited enough to upgrade from the two copies tier to the two beta access passes tier, but right now it isn't looking great. They hit $400k four days ago and haven't made a full $50k since then. For Stonehearth I think you want at least one beta access account if you're interested at all. From what they've said they plan their beta to be about a year long -- they're projecting beta beginning in December of this year and release in September of next year. If you're gonna donate at all, you might as well donate at $30 and get beta access.
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May 24, 2013 13:53
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Can someone explain to me why Son of Nor isn't doing better than it is?
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May 24, 2013 19:27
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signalnoise posted:What's the over-under on Stonehearth being something I can play with my wife My wife generally hates all video games; to date the only time I've gotten her to play anything was one day's worth of Wii Fit. She likes watching Stonehearth videos because everything's cute. So that's a thing. If your wife likes city building or sim type games (Sims, Sim City, etc.) she should like Stonehearth.
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May 27, 2013 14:43
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Looks like Stonehearth made 600k with paypal factored in. So that's three playable kingdoms and all the stretch goals we know complete. Wonder if they'll add more before the auction closes in . .. 57 hours.
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May 27, 2013 20:39
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Rivensteel posted:They're doing some impressive stuff, but it's weird how quiet they've been the last few days. I'd expect them to be flogging a new set of stretch goals or talking with gaming media, spreading the word, something. Maybe it's gotten so big that it got away from them a bit? I think that's it actually yeah. When they announced the last set of stretch goals they said they were scaling things back and going from stretch goals at 50k instead of 20k just to make sure they didn't get over-stretched.
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May 27, 2013 20:49
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Darkhold posted:Since hitting their 600k goal Stonehearth has been disappointingly silent. As Rivensteel noted it kinda feels like they were caught off guard by the final week surge. At this point 650k is a lock and 700k isn't out of the question depending on their paypal totals. They made a post earlier today in their comments section. quote:Creator Radiant Entertainment less than a minute ago
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May 28, 2013 10:43
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DancingPenguin posted:Stonehearth seems awesome, and it seems like the only way me and my girlfriend will be able to play together without waiting a year between beta and release is by buying the 45$ tier. They're on Steam Greenlight but I don't think they've been greenlit yet. I'm pretty sure that they've said they'll give steam keys to kickstarter backers who want them if Steam becomes an option, but I'm not sure where I read that. The pets are kickstarter exclusives but I suspect someone will eventually write a mod that lets anyone have them. Also keep in mind that I expect co-op play will be one of the last things to get implemented in the beta.
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May 28, 2013 15:37
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ijyt posted:
Gotta be realistic, though. They're good networking coders but that's an endstage programming challenge: you have to build the game before you can connect it. I mean, gently caress, what do I know, but it seems like it would be likely they'll make the game first, then teach it to connect to other games. The biggest challenge they have is probably going to just be creating all the art assets, but on the coding side I'd guess the networking would be the hardest. I don't think they'll go LAN-only given their background in computer networking over the internet.
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May 28, 2013 15:51
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Rivensteel posted:No argument there, they'd have to make about $10k/hr for the remainder of the campaign. Both of those goals come out of what they've already talked about pretty organically. They've talked about digging etc. already some, and hosting servers themselves is a natural outgrowth of co-op play. I suspect these were both things they had considered as post-release "sequels" or "addons" from the start.
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May 28, 2013 19:36
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Arnold of Soissons posted:Honestly I wouldn't hesitate a second to buy the dwarf content as an add on pack, assuming everything turns out the way it looks like they want it to. Yeah. I suspect they don't want to have dwarf content in the initial release. It would just look bad.
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May 28, 2013 19:44
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I can't even begin to figure out what Holdfast's various pledge levels mean. In for $5.
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May 29, 2013 19:15
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Son of Nor is down the wire, like three hours to go and 3k left to raise (out of 150k)
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May 30, 2013 05:58
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NTRabbit posted:Someone just dumped a big pledge on them, because they're now $9k to the good still with 3 hours to go Hah, looking at the comments it looks like someone's pledge was off by a decimal point. They're at $150,180 on my screen, so just BARELY funded, with two hours to go.
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May 30, 2013 07:19
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As someone relatively new to Kickstarter, has the past month been relatively crazy with Stonehearth and Hex? Or are massive funding for "shut up and take my money" level projects getting consistently common?
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May 30, 2013 19:11
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Darkhold posted:I've gone from 'Kickstarter what a stupid idea.' to 'Kickstarter is now a part of my monthly gaming budget'. How many of those have paid off yet? My gaming budget for this month is absolutely blown now already ("I'm looking at this Grand King tier as an investment, honey. I'll totally resell the cards later.") I'm not sure if bookmarking this thread was the best idea I've had all year or the worst.
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May 30, 2013 19:17
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Tinykeep is actually climbing the stretch goals now, they were pretty modest too.
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May 30, 2013 23:15
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Darkhold posted:Obviously everyone will have their own standards but there's a line between 'kinda a prick/troll' and 'crazy racist homophobe' Eh, that kind of thing is a major warning sign for me. If he were selling a finished product already, it wouldn't matter -- or, well, no more than (for example) I'm going to remember Spore and Sim City 5 whenever I think about buying a new Will Wright game. But for a kickstarter campaign? Yeeuuurgh. With kickstarter I'm basically gambling on the credibility of some random internet person that they'll do what they say after I give them my money. That's ok if it's something like Hex where they have a lot of institutional credibility and are clearly established professionals, and it's ok if it's something like Tinykeep where I'm basically throwing a dude ten bucks because his dreams are adorable, but . . yikes, that's some drama there.
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May 31, 2013 15:36
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