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This is moving too fast on here and Twitter for me, but it seems like most people are starting to see this for what it is. I've omitted a lot of details and information because I wanted to stick to the most obvious stuff that really can't be disputed. I want people to make their own conclusions. I'm extremely grateful for the support on here. I think the backers and all fans were treated like garbage on this game and I only learned of this thread when someone linked to a game me and Lazrool made about 10 pages ago. I quit this project 3 months ago and did not say anything at the time because I didn't feel like I had any platform to speak out on where I would be heard. I was also not aware there were pockets of people who still cared about this game because I just wanted to move on. P.S. I saw your post before it was edited Star Guarded, and what you said means a lot to me. I hope the both of you are doing great.
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Jun 2, 2019 23:37
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Bongo Bill posted:Breaking character temporarily in order to share some sincere thoughts; sorry. Although it's disappointing to learn that I'll never get to read all of Pump's DWARFNet posts, I'm glad that someone came forward to talk about what's been going on. Recently I've been thinking about how game developers - or software developers in general, really - can foster a healthier and more receptive community by being open and communicative about the development process. Kind, patient, and forgiving responses from eager fans - as opposed to toxic and entitled ones - are surprisingly common if you're open about the difficulties involved in bringing the project to fruition. Let people see you're just doing your best to accomplish something difficulty with finite resources and they'll understand. Eventually, whether you succeed, fail, or even just release something unfinished, you'll be in a position to handle it in the way that's best for everyone, without being paralyzed by guilt or fearing that you'll just be seen as making excuses. You want to get it finished at least as much as anybody watching, after all! This should be in Barkley 2.
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Jun 2, 2019 23:38
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uncurable mlady posted:it’s always meltdown May somewhere missed it by one day, shucks
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Jun 2, 2019 23:39
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Hiratio posted:The game was pitched to companies / people for funding from what I was told, no one was interested. I'm not surprised. Thank the lord. As someone who spent 3 years in almost the exact same situation (it's eerie how similar it is actually) I'm so sorry this happened and I'm glad you got out. By the time I did I was so disillusioned and depressed I quit the industry for 2 years. I met Frankie briefly when Starbound was starting out. He was trying out but left when he realised he wasn't getting paid upfront - he seemed like a really nice dude and had nothing but nice things to say about Chef. I hoped B2 would be a huge success for them.
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Jun 2, 2019 23:39
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lol at the inexplicable resurrection of all this
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Jun 2, 2019 23:42
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Does the Twitter response mean that this thread was being watched all along? Or did word just spread really quickly?
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Jun 2, 2019 23:46
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I have just one more thing to say. Semper Games.
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Jun 2, 2019 23:47
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looks like one company isn't getting a holiday card this year. but i will still send one to charles barkley
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Jun 2, 2019 23:53
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Glad to hear concrete news of what happened. (Not glad at all about the content of it, but glad to hear something.)
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Jun 2, 2019 23:54
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Charles posted:Does the Twitter response mean that this thread was being watched all along? Or did word just spread really quickly? https://twitter.com/whoisjoshbossie/status/1135253417146822658?s=21
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Jun 2, 2019 23:56
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This is all just a plot by B.L.O.O.D.M.O.S.E.S. and shadow Barkley.
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Jun 3, 2019 00:02
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Glad that you're trying for more transparency and looking forward to the not-quite-postmortem. Hope you're not letting the people on Twitter getting mad about the project's status get you too down!
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Jun 3, 2019 00:04
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I've been aware of this conflict for about half a year, I was really hoping it could be resolved, but yeah, apparently not. There was a time it seemed like it might resolve back in january, but then I stopped hearing anything about it, and here we are now. I've been seeing updates in our source control pretty regularly since, so Ive been having high hopes that the project is still progressing at a reasonable pace (considering the lack of funds, anyway) but Hiratio seems to think these are like, minor bullshit tweaks or something, so idk. I know Hiratio is being honest about the concerns hes raising, but I don't believe our producer is acting in bad faith. I know there is a significant issue of distrust here, but I don't feel like I can weigh in on it, I wasn't there. On our source control in the past six months, I see work on the quick menu, the main menu, the saving system , fixes on some quests, additions to some maps, and I think work on migrating project sections that used to be separate from the main project into the main branch, like character creation. I haven't really been involved in any design and planning for a long while though, so I'm not sure how to judge this progress, but the project doesn't look like its been lying fallow. My involvement with the project had been winding down and then was basically put on hold at the start of 2019, shortly after Hiratio and Laz left. I know the project has a large amount of still-unused assets. Work on my own main project was picking up with having a publisher and some deadlines and everything, so I thought, lets wait for them to at least catch up a bit before I continue spending hours and hours of unpaid work every week on this. And art assets are not a bottleneck, they can use placeholders in the meantime if they cant find what they need. I disagree that the kickstarter campaign was unnecessary. I am probably the one who was paid the most, receiving a monthly salary for the first year and a half or so for my pixel artwork, and this money meant I could quit my day job and work on this project full time for the first two years or so, making a huge amount of animated assets, monsters, character portraits and weapons. As the money dried up, I reduced the hours per week that I worked on it, leaving up more time for commissions and personal projects, and this is where my current main project was born, something I could never have started without this. I am immensely grateful for this project, and have learned a lot from it, from both what went well and what has been going poorly. If I see some real progress in the project and they ask me to make some more assets to take this home, I'll be happy to do it.
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Jun 3, 2019 00:04
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Just to throw in my two cents into this barkley toilet... I can't with 100% certainty confirm every bit of what GZ (Hiratio) has said because I wasn't in the ToG inner circles until there was like 4 people left in 2016 or whatever, but I have ZERO reason to doubt anything that he has said here from my experiences working on this wretched game, and from just talking to him about all the weird things going on and shady back-alley attitude. I peaced out from the project the same time as him for many of the same reasons he did. This is such a complicated mess, and from a span of 6 years, that I might be misremembering stuff here and there, but I'm trying to write all of this to the best of my recollection: For me, it all started back in fall of 2012 when they were looking for some help for B2 and since I sort of knew some of them and I liked Barkley1 I said sure, count me in. I did various systems they asked me to do, like the Character Creation system and the various minigames like the Booty Bass, a Diving minigame and a DwarfNET prototype that me and GZ later worked into a functional framework for some juicy DwarfNET content that never came. There are more than that but I picked these examples because they are probably the ones most people might have actually seen of this game via conventions or streams. Back in those early days it was the Ideas Guy bonanza out there. Everyone had ideas and quests they wanted to bring into the game, good or bad, and everyone was hyped to the gills about making some barkley. It's in good portion because of those whacky ideas and the refusal to let go of them that sunk this ship and I too at the time contributed to that, although I don't think they gave two shits about my ideas beyond briefly entertaining them. It was their baby and I was just some Joe Shmuck that was helping them out, and I was perfectly fine with that. I wasn't involved in the writing at all, until I thought that maybe I could help these guys script some off the NPC's. Their writing was good, and I knew mine was not, so I just tried to make the NPC's with their writing on them work as well as I could, testing them out for logic errors and stuff like that. The NPC/Event scripting system at the time was not user-friendly in the slightest but somehow work was getting done, or so I thought. Chef and Bort were still onboard at this point and all seemed good, or as good as one would expect anyway. The compile times slowly got unacceptable and we thought there wasn't much we could do about it, the game was just so big (not true as evidenced by the superior scripting system GZ devised much later and discovering the "Dark Drakers", which I will explain later). This is about the time when it all began to sour, and I want to say this was like 2015 to 2016. Chef disappeared in a poof of smoke and Bort became a family man. I sensed that there was some beefs going on in ToG, but it seemed like something that could have been resolved, so I didn't pay it too much attention to it like a total fool. Because of these departures I found myself in a much more central role and was suddenly in the mysterious inner circle. At this time I had also learned the tips and tricks of the mapmaking racket and had unofficially become the map maker. People would give me blueprints of game areas, and I would map them out to the best of my ability, and later on I would become obsessed with making the maps seamlessly weaving into each other. This was extremely dumb because it was basically just an artificial limitation, even if I liked the end result. I did also change a bunch of maps on my own accord because I thought they sucked, which lead into some beef, but those beefs were usually resolved within hours/days. This is also about the time when I discovered the Dark Drakers, which soured the whole thing further. Dark Draker is a filler character in B2 who talks about being faster than the snapping maw of a drake. I discovered that an entire areas worth of NPC's were just carbon copies of Dark Draker with a different name given to each, AKA the illusion of work being done. Just these 10% finished NPC's basically littering the project to make it seem like it was all good. I suppose the plan was to eventually make them into distinct NPC's but the problem was that the whole game was plagued by the Dark Drakers, and they GREATLY attributed to the poo poo compile times. I also discovered/was told about some of the more hidden mechanics of the game which can only be described as the concoction of a lunatic. For example, two separate ingame time system both dictating quests and NPC behavior (with NPC's also being dictated by quest variables, items the player has etc.), leading to impossible to fix content. Thank the lord one of these system was later discarded. There was many schemes on how to move forward on many occasions. Every now and then there would be a burst of gumption, and work was being done, and it all seemed good again, briefly. But you can only run away from the problems for so long. The combat in the game was always too complicated, too ambitious, and criminally ignored. It was a total disgrace, and I did bring this up a few times, but ToG didn't seem to give a hoot, or there was always some excuse why it shouldn't be worked on right now. There was too many "affixes" for the guns, there were too many types of gun, there were too many gun materials, too much everything basically. Most of the gun stuff eventually sort of worked, and Frankie really outdid himself by making those 1000000 different gun sprites. Frankie was the only person who produced a consistent and high quality stream of work, and did way more than he needed to. It's a total disgrace that all the art he did is essentially in the toilet now. With combat the crux of the issue wasn't not having enough sprites or the guns not working 100% like intended, but the enemies. They were a total loving disgrace. But again, it wasn't seen as important enough to do something about it in an RPG game. To my knowledge, to this day there are no functional bosses. 2017 seems like the year with most of the streaks of when a good amount of work was being done. Things were getting made but of course the project was already long overdue. The new scripting system was in full swing which was approximately 20000 times better/faster/easier to use than the old one. I can't stress enough how much more efficient it made content creation. Compile times had dropped down to around 45 seconds. Too bad the writers were no longer there. Instead we tried to emulate the barkley1 sort of writing ourselves, but of course it was rather mediocre. In 2018 GZ vanished for a long time and I just thought maybe he had some personal stuff to figure out, or that he had jumped off a bridge. That was not the case, he was merely crestfallen to his very core in regards to Barkley2. This was also the year when there would be times when I was the only person working on the game for weeks at a time, and at the longest, a month at a time. The whole debacle finally came to it's "climax" near the end of 2018 when it become absolutely crystal clear to even me that this is a bad joke and it's never going to work out if it just keeps going on like it had up to that point. GZ had more insight into things so he had figured out this a lot sooner, but regardless, when he quit, so did I because at that point there was no realistic way of getting this poo poo done. I was so stupid that it took me 6 years to become disillusioned. This is boring and longwinded as all hell, but this is basically the short version of my story and I hope I haven't misremembered anything. I don't want to see this piece of poo poo game ever again in my life.
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Jun 3, 2019 00:07
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all your favourite barkley team members come in with all the bballs for a HUGE party
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Jun 3, 2019 00:08
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Jun 3, 2019 00:14
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that's me and i'm extremely shocked it blew up like it did. This thread has literally been the only place on the internet that talks about B2 and yet hundreds (thousands?) of people care that it's officially dead? The depressing thing about all this is this response probably means an actual game that isn't an embarrassing failure of a project would have done really well oh well
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Jun 3, 2019 00:15
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dril follows the ToG twitter lol
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Jun 3, 2019 00:16
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It's a shame and it's sad to hear that there's drama and bad blood between the key players. I think I pledged $75, which wasn't that much in pounds back then, so I'm not feeling particularly short-changed seven years later. But the guy running ToG now should probably just give up the ghost and the assets instead of trying to pretend he'll get anything out by 2023. It's all very well saying 'I should've been open and transparent' now and 'I'm still working on it' on his twitter now that the cat is out of the bag but it sounds like competent project management and communication were major issues in this whole thing. Some of that development info posted is just crazy. I still have the songs and the ToG vidcon pack, which was neat. It's been so long, I don't even think I care any more. What was made public did look good, for what it's worth. Especially the art assets. Thanks for letting us know the score.
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Jun 3, 2019 00:17
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This thread has been a barren wasteland for years and so to all the former ToG guys: sincerely thank you for the posts.
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Jun 3, 2019 00:18
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Gortarius posted:This is also about the time when I discovered the Dark Drakers, which soured the whole thing further. Dark Draker is a filler character in B2 who talks about being faster than the snapping maw of a drake. I discovered that an entire areas worth of NPC's were just carbon copies of Dark Draker with a different name given to each, AKA the illusion of work being done. Just these 10% finished NPC's basically littering the project to make it seem like it was all good. I suppose the plan was to eventually make them into distinct NPC's but the problem was that the whole game was plagued by the Dark Drakers, and they GREATLY attributed to the poo poo compile times. lmfao
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Jun 3, 2019 00:24
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Gortarius posted:This is also about the time when I discovered the Dark Drakers, which soured the whole thing further. Dark Draker is a filler character in B2 who talks about being faster than the snapping maw of a drake. I discovered that an entire areas worth of NPC's were just carbon copies of Dark Draker with a different name given to each, AKA the illusion of work being done. Just these 10% finished NPC's basically littering the project to make it seem like it was all good. I suppose the plan was to eventually make them into distinct NPC's but the problem was that the whole game was plagued by the Dark Drakers, and they GREATLY attributed to the poo poo compile times. holy poo poo
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Jun 3, 2019 00:26
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the Dark Darker thing has basically made this entire thing worth it, so thank you
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Jun 3, 2019 00:27
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Milovan Drecun posted:drat, this is heartbreaking. It was the last real tie to Gaming World I kept. Yeah, same. Being on GW was a big part of my "formative years" online, and Hundley was probably the biggest influence in me expanding my tastes in media during my teen years.
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Jun 3, 2019 00:28
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mods please rename this to Chapter 1 of the Dark Drakerz Saga
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Jun 3, 2019 00:28
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bakkles 2 shut up and dark draker
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Jun 3, 2019 00:29
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This the first time I hear about the dark drakers What sprite did they use
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Jun 3, 2019 00:30
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is this canon??
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Jun 3, 2019 00:30
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I backed this for $15 and I can't say it hasn't given me $15 of entertainment.
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Jun 3, 2019 00:31
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I am not worthy of all this Barkley content
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Jun 3, 2019 00:32
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Also a former-GW guy here, I really miss the whole gang. The candor around the project is appreciated. But if the game ever sees the light of day, please keep all the Dark Drakers.
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Jun 3, 2019 00:33
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Can you give all the people who funded the kickstarter their own dark draker?
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Jun 3, 2019 00:34
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Endorph posted:mods please rename this to Chapter 1 of the Dark Drakerz Saga i don't want barkley 2 anymore give me dark draker 1
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Jun 3, 2019 00:38
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ArmyOfMidgets posted:Can you give all the people who funded the kickstarter their own dark draker? Pledge US$ 10,000 ALL PAKS + Your fandraker will become canon and appear in Barkley 2. (Note: Game Ships in 2014)
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Jun 3, 2019 00:39
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FrankieSmileShow posted:This the first time I hear about the dark drakers Just to clarify (because I now realize my lovely wall of text can be misleading on the Dark Draker details), they all didn't share the same sprite, or at least I don't think they did. Otherwise they were 95% copy-paste jobs. The original Dark Draker that the others were copy-pasted from was like this short guy facing northeast or northwest. I think he had a sword and a helmet. It was one of the wasteland/bonfire people. The other Dark Drakers either had some other bonfire NPC sprite or no sprite at all until I fixed them, but what tied them all together was that if you talked to them they would all say how they are as fast as the snapping maw of a drake and how they could kill you seven times over before your corpse would hit the ground, or they would just crash the game.
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Jun 3, 2019 00:40
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Endorph posted:mods please rename this to Chapter 1 of the Dark Drakerz Saga
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Jun 3, 2019 00:41
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Gortarius posted:The original Dark Draker that the others were copy-pasted from was like this short guy facing northeast or northwest. I think he had a sword and a helmet. It was one of the wasteland/bonfire people. The other Dark Drakers either had some other bonfire NPC sprite or no sprite at all until I fixed them, but what tied them all together was that if you talked to them they would all say how they are as fast as the snapping maw of a drake and how they could kill you seven times over before your corpse would hit the ground, or they would just crash the game. finally, some incredible barkley 2 content
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Jun 3, 2019 00:42
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Waluigi-Soap posted:Also a former-GW guy here, I really miss the whole gang. The candor around the project is appreciated. But if the game ever sees the light of day, please keep all the Dark Drakers. GamingW was my homepage back in like 2005. I wish I wasn't a small kid back then. The community seemed cool at the time.
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Jun 3, 2019 00:44
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Gortarius posted:Just to clarify (because I now realize my lovely wall of text can be misleading on the Dark Draker details), they all didn't share the same sprite, or at least I don't think they did. Otherwise they were 95% copy-paste jobs. Endorph posted:mods please rename this to Chapter 1 of the Dark Drakerz Saga
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Jun 3, 2019 00:44
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Chas McGill posted:I backed this for $15 and I can't say it hasn't given me $15 of entertainment.
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Jun 3, 2019 00:45
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