So... What's up? [obligatory topic to extract information from Chris]

[Cyborg]

1. The game is now... first person instead of third person!  This sounds crazy, but actually works suuuper well.

Arcen, #1 in "throw design through the window" contest.

That choice might be the good one, and I'm sure you are doing it only for the game's well-being; however I have a couple of concerns about that.

1) I was growing attached to that 3rd person thing. And you have three trailers featuring 3rd person gameplay. I'm not even talking about the technical effort you're throwing away, because this is a cost for a better; I'm talking about the hype you built around your upcoming game. I'm thinking I would have preferred not knowing anything about the game before its launch and not have grown attached to that kind of details. Sad.

2) Trust. While I personally trust you, because I believe in your way of doing things (quality before all else), I bet there are people out there whose faith is more recent and less strong. The SBR affair didn't let you in a strong position on the trust topic. Hopefully you did things right and there is only trust at stake; nobody paid (yet) for SBR or RR. Yet, for a community member, trust is a thing.

I hope you won't take that for more than it is: one community member's (slight) unrest.

I still trust you, and if you say 1st person is better, I'll deal with it. But... please... please do soften the emotional rollercoaster you're putting your community members in.

Game design changes all the time. Chris just happens to be more transparent than most developers about the design process.

Save the gnashing of teeth for beta.

[Cyborg]

Yeah gotta admit "3d 3rd person dinosaur hackn'slash" is not what I think when I think "Arcen" Steamspy data on 3rd person indy games (very few good ones of those by the way) does not exactly convince me that this is a good financial idea....

What I wanted Arcen to do was a AI War 2 with some more abstracted higher concepts and a clean slick stylized 3d look, a proper meta-progression, maybe even with VR support. But hey.. at least Arcen starts with 3D somewhere.. that it is with one of the most difficult areas you can imagine is maybe not such a great thing though. 3rd person games require immense polish and that drives cost up.... while historically they have never been very popular. (Yeah yeah, exceptions like Mount and Blade..)

To be fair, so far I haven't really understood what the gameplay goals are so maybe it is far more fun than it sounds.

I don't get it either, but it reminds me of this game so far:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/252150/

And by the way, that game wasn't fun. It was just weird.

I don't really care about VR, but I understand that we have some hardcore, slightly wealthy people on this forum with money to blow on first-generation VR wars.

But the part I do agree with you on, Arcen doing third-person hack and slash just doesn't seem wise. I see a dinosaur theme, but I just don't get the fantasy that is being sold here. It's clearly not aimed at me. I'm used to Arcen selling smart games, so it's a little bit bizarre to see a game like this coming out from this developer.

Well, it's not my company, so for me this is just as an observer. Just watching what happens and hoping for the best, but 100% of the time so far I have been able to spot a mistake with these releases, and I have to say, this one looks like a mistake.

3-D games are very difficult to pull off, very expensive, and you have to have a design and a vision that's targeting a gamer's fantasy. And with 3-D games, you are either targeting the ultra fussy people who complain about graphics and are nearly never pleased, or you need a mechanic that requires 3-D for the aforementioned fantasy.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what the fantasy is here is, dinosaur goes berserk in a science-fiction installation, and you rack up points by breaking things. That's what I have gleaned so far. Does that sound like a good idea?

Sometimes I feel like these games and releases Chris comes up with are targeting one of his fantasies that is not necessarily fleshed out or even acknowledging that it's a business where you try to sell games to other people. Sort of like the artist that's a little bit off in their own world, something similar to that. And he has some folks from this forum that are extremely nice to him (okay, sycophants) to the point that it's a disservice. You know who you are.

But in regards to AI war and where that's going, I think Keith is handling that. It won't be 3-D (although, long ago I was told there is a z direction in Unity, even if the game looks 2-D, so that makes me curious and hopeful for innovation). Obviously, that will be a day one purchase for most of us nerds who originally came here for the smart games.

There's a little bit of luck to scoring big on steam, so I hope that I'm wrong, and somebody can quote this thread later and by all means rub it in my face that I'm wrong. But as an observer who does care about what happens here and doesn't have it in him to kiss ass, that's my observations.

[crazyroosterman]

I'm glad to hear about the switch to first person.  I can see how it would fit the type of game better.  I'm sure it's much more immersive now.

Speaking of immersion, have you considered adding VR support?  I don't have a headset myself, but they seem to be all the rage these days.  Might be good for sales.

neat idea but it would probably cause awful motion sickness as vr tends to do in things were your moving by feet
at least if you sources are to be trusted there that is.

[x4000]

Various responses:

1. Yeah, I've considered VR quite a bit, mostly because I want to get the headsets myself haha.  And now that it's first-person that's definitely more of a possibility.  That said, from talking to other developers and reading about things, it seems to be a _huge_ undertaking at the moment to do it right.  Oculus seems to be far easier since you don't have to have a completely different motion-controller-based scheme for things.  That said, I _like_ the motion controller stuff of the Vive (at least from what I've seen/heard).  Then again having VR while I sit in my chair is a cool thought.  So... it's something I'm still considering, basically.  I'd have to have a few months free at minimum, it seems clear.  And the market is by no means huge, though it is hungry and also growing.  So I really want to do it, but I'm not sure on feasibility yet.

2. FOV slider has been a thing since the start, don't worry.   Anywhere from 60 all the way up to 120.  The game defaults to 70.  The view of the raptor is in an fov-independent second overlay camera and everything.  And in terms of aspect ratios people can choose whatever.  For once in Arcen's history we have a game that is truly resolution-independent in every sense, too.  It uses the new UGUI and all that jazz.

3. The fantasy of getting to be a dinosaur is something that is resonating with a lot of people.  We're getting enthusiastic responses from a lot of folks in the youtuber arena and so forth, with a lot of "what a clever concept" and so on.  Our response rate has been about 6%, which is abnormally high, so that's pretty cool.

4. The move to 3D is not costing us more, it's actually costing us less.  A lot of this has to do with the art creation pipeline, which is a complicated subject.  But basically 3D art is more modular, is the core of it.  Versus 2D art has to be painted or drawn from whole cloth.  The 3D art has lots of inputs, from modeling to texturing to lighting to post processing, and any and all of those can be tuned in really cool ways.  A number of those things I'm technically and artistically proficient at, which is useful, whereas I can't do 2D art to save my life.

[Draco18s]

One of the things I heard/learned about VR recently was that if the camera doesn't move you get around 90% of the nausea related issues.  So while tooling around in an FPS with VR sounds great, that whole "tooling around" part is what causes the nausea.  Fixed place camera and almost no one has an issue.

[crazyroosterman]

One of the things I heard/learned about VR recently was that if the camera doesn't move you get around 90% of the nausea related issues.  So while tooling around in an FPS with VR sounds great, that whole "tooling around" part is what causes the nausea.  Fixed place camera and almost no one has an issue.

yea pretty much what I've heard I don't think vr will work very well in this game but if Chris thinks he can make it work without people ill then he can go ahead.

[Draco18s]

"Making it work" is the easy part.
It's just that a lot of people won't use it for more than a few minutes.  Which is fine, too.