Endrosz

Do you know how I knew about State of Decay, and followed its development? Do you care to know? It has nothing to do with advertising. I forgot the most important venue of getting your game known for smaller entities: video streamers. They don't cost you any money, because they have their own ways of making money, and give you a huge awareness boost. Here's another one to read: A Wizard's Lizard by the numbers: our HTML5 game on Steam This one gives hard numbers on how beneficial it is to be featured on a well-known streamer's channel. Also, if you run a crowd-funding campaign for the game, that in and itself raises awareness. --- These are simple cost-benefit assessments, and traditional marketing is clearly a waste of money for smaller companies. Can give you a link to a Brad Wardell article (of Stardock, they make GalCiv and Sins and Fallen Enchantress), where he shows the numbers on magazine advertising etc. being ineffectual compared to word of mouth. The alternative ways, as you called it, is in full swing (and was in the past two years!) for Pillars of Eternity. Dozens of interviews and podcasts, game demos at select tradeshows, close engagement with backers (PoE has had the most frequent updates out of all the crowd-funded games I've seen, and the forum presence is also strong). Streams are encouraged too, though no high-profile streamers featured PoE so far, which is understandable, since the beta is just a small slice of the game. So marketing-wise all boxes checked that are worth checking at all. You can rest comfortably.

Advertising is useful because it gives work to advertising agencies. What you write applies to a big studio spending buckets of money on advertising the next Franchise X+1. It doesn't apply to smaller entities. In fact, I would advise you to read, say on GamaSutra, about how small studios do their advertising nowadays. Hint: Besides maybe Google AdSense, they spend 0 dollars on advertising directly. Going to developer-friendly tradeshows like PAX or GDC and doing interviews, engaging early adopters on social media are much, much better investments for smaller entities (remember, time is money, if you're responding to forum posts or tweets, you're not developing the game). A sample: With zero marketing spend, State of Decay hits 2M copies sold

You misunderstood the OP. He's not talking about the lack of hand-holding, he's talking about the lack of interesting stuff. And I agree with him, the beginning of WL2 doesn't really entice you to play the rest of it. The very early setup -- Ace's funeral and Angie's joining -- worked for me, but after that, meh.

? If anything Feargus was the one that got convinced. After all the non-compete Argument is from him. Um, I think I missed some newspiece? Non-compete argument -- where, what, how? Are you referring to something Feargie said in the 4-part Matt Chat interview or something else?

I was browsing the latest Humble Mobile Bundle, and it contains a large surprise, at least for me: Little Big Adventure, a classic action-adventure game from the '90s. I didn't expect such a large, complex, difficult and also gritty game to be ported to mobile devices, the revived classics are usually simple arcadey games. Even better, the port revamps the controls and interface (the original was quite clunky) to touch screens, and adds new features like zoom. If you've never played LBA back in the day, now's a good time to do so! Only about $4 to unlock it within the bundle.

Based on what Lychnidos wrote, the game stores the total number of skill points spent on the skill. 12 is enough for lvl 4 (total 10), not enough for lvl 5 (total 14), so it gives you a 4.

I have no idea how "normalized damage" became synonymous with MMOs in this thread. Clueless much? Here's a character sheet from Guild Wars 2. This is a character using Berserker gear, which is geared towards critical hit % (first red border) and critical hit damage % (second red border). Its damage output is anything but normalized, roughly every second hit is a critical hit, so it matters a whole lot when unloading your initial burst whether you get criticals or not. Three hits can be all critical with an 1/8 chance, and zero criticals with another 1/8 chance. The critical hits themselves are more than 2.5 times the normal damage (the basic crit damage is 150%, the 111% is on top of that = 261% of normal hit damage), and that's not counting the damage range of the weapon itself. So 3 hits results in 1/8 chance of about 8x normal damage, 1/8 chance of 3x normal damage, with all other results in between. That's a bigger spread than ADnD! To the topic at hand, I fully agree with Matt: it's a matter of preference mostly. At low level, you watch a string of misses with the occasional hit, at high level, you watch a flurry of hits with an occasional miss. Not less boring than having graze in the mix.

Dammit, would someone bother to test the new, more complex stealth system, instead of fixating on attributes? Thanks.

Staying Alive: How Obsidian, Robot, and Double Fine Have Defied the Decline of Mid-size Studios

"Using RPGs to fight evil will never work, because RPGs ARE evil." How many devils can dance on one side of a D20? Dark Dungeons: The Movie, a mock-mockumentary that wants to save your soul by raising awareness of the "satanic cult" that is RPG, is available 40% off on GOG.com. That's only $2.99 for the next 48 hours! In Dark Dungeons: The Movie, college freshmen Debbie and Marcie are excited to start their new lives at a Pacific Northwest university but after being invited to a Zeta Omega Epsilon party the two suddenly find themselves in the strange and occult world of Role Playing Games. The duo are soon hooked on the highly addictive experience that is RPGing and the game quickly becomes a habit that consumes their lives. After Debbie’s intense pagan training through the RPGs lead her to accept an invitation to join a witches’ coven, her grades begin to plummet and she is in danger of flunking out of college. That's just the beginning of the downward spiral that takes young people dabbling in "role-playing" right to the Devil's doorstep! See the horrors that the contemporary college freshmen are facing daily, and educate yourself to prevent them. Witness the disturbing truth about the troubled youth and their RPG lifestyle in Dark Dungeons: The Movie, for only $2.99 on GOG.com. The 40% off release discount will last only until Friday, September 26, at 9:59AM GMT. (Yes, it's tongue-in-cheek, this one.)

Wasteland 2. Wiped in a few minutes after starting the game, and loving it.

Unity is similar to Flash in that it's easy to end up with a resource hog if you don't code carefully. nGUI, the standard UI library for Unity is being completely replaced with a new library for Version 4.6, which is now in beta after a long wait (checked the date on the email I got, Aug 21, only a few weeks ago). nGUI, while easy to use, is/was definitely a bottleneck in Unity performance. I don't know what's with the OP's situation, but what he writes is believable to me.

When I GM a pen-and-paper role-playing session, I use a green-yellow-red indicator system in combat to show how damaged the participants are. Green is okay (>66%), yellow is seriously damaged (33-66%), red is close to death (<33%). This system is in use for both the enemies and party members, players can ask me to know the "color" status of an enemy and the enemies use this information too most of the time. It is very visible whether you're okay or bleeding profusely and staggering on your feet. Animals, which are considered low intelligence, most certainly go for a damaged prey or opponent over an undamaged one. The only exceptions are mindless undead, automatons, jellies, and such, they just go for the closest. If using this info is considered ESP, then I suggest removing the stamina indicators from enemies, because player make use of this info all the time. Party members are also non-ESP, right? Imagine the butthurt if they did remove it...

Player skill and randomness are in direct opposition to another in game design. Chess has only one random part, who opens the game, and even that little piece of randomness has a huge impact on the game, everyone knows that who's familiar with chess. And that's why chess players play multiple matches with sides switched every match, to minimize that randomness and maximize skill. You can love both, no one can take that away from you, but in every game you design, you have to decide what do you want more, skill or randomness, because growing one shrinks the other. This is not an opinion, this is a fact, there have been several books on the subject before I was even born. Edit: I'm an avid board/card game fan, and I love casual games with a funny theme, strong player interaction and lots of randomness. Those are great party games, I can entertain my non-gamer family members and friends with them. Stuff like Liar's Dice and Pass the Pigs. Then, when I'm with my geek friends, we play long and complex skill games like Tigris and Euphrates and Power Grid. So I could say that I love both, too, but I also understand that you can't have both as a major factor at the same time.

Guild Wars 2, with its beautifully crafted world rewards exploration itself. - You get XP for reaching point of interest (PoI), which are kind of like the annotations on a map. "Here be dragons", "Crystal mine", "Shanty Town" etc. - You get XP for viewing every vista, which are fixed camera rides starting from the point where your character stands, showcasing some majestic sight in the world. There are also challenges (usually involving non-trash mobs) and hearts (tasks to solve to help the locals) on maps. When you visit every point of interest, view every vista, finish every challenge and heart, then the map is considered "finished", and you get a big XP boost and two rare, good quality items, plus a bag of crafting materials. These incentives work really well in motivating players to take paths less traveled. On every map, there a few hard-to-reach or hidden points of interest and/or vistas, which most players who are not obsessive-compulsive explorers like me would probably miss, but the end reward makes it so that players spend time finding them. I'm not saying that adapting the entire system is a good fit for Eternity, but I do think that adding a points of interest reward system, where many such point are beyond combat 'gates', just like in GW2, would go a long way of properly rewarding exploration and non-quest combat. When I was engaging in XP arguments, I was thinking of objective XP, not just quest XP. Which includes rewarding quest phases, not just entire quests, and also exploring certain parts of the world.

He? Two things that were NOT in any of the Infinity Engines games, as requirement for a spiritual successor? I can understand people who cling to every single little detail that was part of those games being disappointed. It is undeniable that some things were lost in transition, a few of them major. But asking for things that were never even considered in those games as features?

Almost zero sentence intonation, he's like a chanting cultist attempting to mind control you. He almost succeeded with me, I can tell you that. But I won't wrote another message on this, who cares about his voice. Video: discuss.

Ugh... This Jorge guy just drones on and on ad on. I'm not kidding, I got sleepy listening to him and lost track what he was saying and just watched the screen. Hate all you want Sawyer as a designer, but he's a much better presenter.

In NWN, you could.

If somebody were to say everyone should leave alone betas, then yes, he would be an idiot. I didn't say that, however. You missed the part that says "some people". I truly, honestly believe that some people are just unable to deal properly with a beta process and should leave it alone for their own sake and for everyone else's sake. Everyone else is welcome provide feedback, no matter how harsh it is. Based on what the OP wrote, I gave him the genuine advice of staying away from the PoE beta. I don't say this to anyone who criticizes the game.

Medical advice: Some people have been found to susceptible to "Early Access", "Backer Beta", and other pathogens. Typical symptoms include bug bite marks, hallucinations, aggressive episodes, mood swings. These people shouldn't enter any such program UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Treatment: Completely ignore the game while it is in the making, live a happy, content, successful life until the game comes out, then enjoy it.

Yeah, lack of special ammo is definitely a loss of gameplay variety. "Games are a series of interesting decisions" (Sid Meier) -- This can't be quoted enough. I have all the patience in the world to play hardcore RPGs. I finished all of the early Wizardries and Bard's Tales and Might and Magics (the latter two twice) with no save game option while adventuring, I dealt with diseases, hunger, and fatigue in the Realms of Arkania series, I dealt with dehydration in JSawyer's Fallout: NV mod, even learned Twitcher 2's combat system enough so that I can play on Dark difficulty (currently in Act 1), even though I suck at action games. But putting items from here to there because of silly limitations (i. e. one character's inventory slots are filled, even though it's carrying capacity is not exhausted, etc.) doesn't constitute meaningful gameplay for me. It is neither a challenge that I want to overcome, nor a world that I want to immerse myself in (the two main gameplay aspects of RPGs). It's monkey business, it doesn't engage my brain. It's like working at a conveyor belt, which I actually did when I was a student and still remember how mind-numbing it was. The interesting decisions (who gets this Ring of Protection?) form only a small part of inventory management, and THAT part is still present and intact in PoE. The whole notion that putting items from here to there is some kind of glorious old-school activity that is being dumped to appeal to the casual masses is laughable to me. I suggest you join the Royal Society for Putting Things of Top of Other Things. Imagine the fun they have at their weekly meetings!

Random encounter spots, you say? My question: Do those random encounter spots motivate the player to explore the map, instead of just going for the quest and then leaving? Who the hell cares about what mods can do? The map, as created and published, is rather devoid of content. The comparison would only be fair if you wait for PoE mods to take care of many things, including content density. The spider web map is separate. Yes, the spider web map is cool, and the overworld map that links to it is still as empty as shown. It's like saying the entrance to Durlag's Tower is cool, because there is a multi-level dungeon inside. Carry on.

... again Quote instead of Edit...

I like the thought and work that went into this. I worked with Unity, and rearranging UI (with the same icons) is really simple even within base Unity, without using any plugins (and there are excellent UI plugins for Unity in the Asset Store, in the ~50 dollar price range, which is trivial for a company like Obsidian). This is one area where software development has come a long way since the IE era. Those were hard-coded buttons on static resolution backgrounds, now it takes 5 minutes to put buttons elsewhere while retaining functionality. So what I'm saying is that compared to many other design aspects, UI is low-cost to shuffle around. It's definitely worth talking about and asking for.