Do you like Diablo 3?

[eRe4s3r]

To be honest it isn't really worth 30$ given that they stopped fixing extremely annoying bugs midway and just threw an imbalanced expansion to cash in while NOT fixing bugs.

While the mods fix the game up to playable, there are still EXTREMELY annoying issues, Like the "your villager hungers, safe him with 1cp" nonsense, you gonna see that 50 times a single game. Or the flickering target info of doom.

To be honest, the main focus of the game is the dynamic town and the dungeons, the enemies that fight each other etc. The skills aren't that well balanced in the main game, but that doesn't detract that much IMO. It's just that some skills are much better than others.

In terms of number of real bugs (ie. not balance issues), there really aren't that many. The flickering target info is annoying and I'm sure Steven will deal with it in the next patch once he finishes the Drox alpha. And you're right that the hungry NPC thing just doesn't work. I tried to fix it but didn't manage to, so I'm just going to remove it in the next version of the mod (whenever I get to it).

The main issue is that Soldak is a one-man show. Unlike Arcen, they don't have the resources to continue patching a game while developing another one. And none of Soldak's games have been successful enough to justify sticking with the same game and releasing continuous patches for it like AI War.

Hah I didn't even realize you were the same Bluddy as on the Soldak forums and the changelogs

Wasn't there a huge post of how the Soldak dev regretted making that weird Kivi's Underworld casual game that basically just a redone Din's Curse just less... good?... It boggles the mind what insanity rode him them. Instead of improving the great concept of Din's Curse (and before that, Depths of Peril) with a 2nd expansion that improved controls, physics, feel, graphics, and everything else he made off-shoot games that had nothing to do with the relatively good game he made.

It's really no wonder he didn't have a success story with his games though, by all accounts even Din's Curse is exceptionally ugly in a technical sense, lots of lightning and collision glitches, and the game engine does not use any modern features. I don't even understand why, it'd be a simple engine upgrade, art assets could even remain the same! Instead of wasting time with other games this is the 1 good game he has. And instead of fixing it (Heck, he should have hired YOU Bluddy given your great mods) he wastes more time on other games that will never be a success unless he gets 1 game to a level where steam would say, yes, we take that!

And quite honestly, he should have patched Din's Curse before Diablo 3 release and get it on Steam. That would have netted him "better than D3" recommendations and lots of sales.

Why.. why is Din's Curse not on Steam?

Edit: Added quote because of page flip ;p

Not on GOG, not on steam. How does he expect to earn money that way? (not to mention that the game should not be more than 20$ with expansion) overpriced and underadvertised. Sadness

[keith.lamothe]

Wasn't there a huge post of how the Soldak dev regretted making that weird Kivi's Underworld casual game that basically just a redone Din's Curse just less... good?

Kivi's happened after Depths of Peril, before Din's Curse.

And while I don't regret our having made it, Tidalis was a somewhat similar situation for us: not at all related gameplay wise to AIW, but we were hoping that a more casual game would reach a broader audience (i.e. more money).  Didn't work out so well

And Kivi's isn't really a bad game, it's just not as interesting as DoP or DC, which feel a lot more innovative.

that will never be a success unless he gets 1 game to a level where steam would say, yes, we take that!

Depths of Peril is on steam, though it took a while.

Why.. why is Din's Curse not on Steam?

I'm not sure how aware you are of how it works, but getting on steam is not a matter of snapping ones fingers.  I would be 100% shocked if Steven hasn't tried his best to get it on steam; getting DoP on there was probably a pretty big win for him.

As for GoG, it wasn't really into the "new indie games" part of its business when DC came out, and while we don't have anything up there I don't expect it's much more profitable than Impulse, GG, etc.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Yeah, Valve has a record of not allowing certain games on Steam for reasons that are pretty vague. Though how some awful games get on the store, I'll never know. I wish Valve would simply not allow bad games to exist on the store if they're going to be choosy. Its a slight annoyance I have, though its not one that comes up often. Valve is odd with the ones that it rejects...

King

[eRe4s3r]

I didn't even know DoP was on steam.. that is.. sad

By the way Keith... you say Tidalis was supposed to be for casual market yet it is easily the most complex game....  in it's entire genre And that is a compliment (just obviously, a bad one if you aimed at the casual market ,p)

I guess I just wish he would polish Din and DoP properly, add a BETTER graphics engine and better control feeling, butter up some of those animations and effects and release this proper + Bluddy modified balance. DoP and Din are the most exceptionally ugly games that I love. But I am an artist so yeah... I look at this stuff and get sad that so much potential is wasted. Sure good graphics don't make a bad game good, but bad unpolished graphics *can* make a good game bad.

And given that most api's (not sure what Din and DoP uses, OpenGL or D3D, in any case both support far superior graphic features and have well documented /api's\ (does one say it that way? I guess I mean, features that are well documented ;P ) to implement them. And better graphics and animations are Nr.1 thing for DoP and Din imo, I mean.. just look at that DoP trailer on Steam, that is not making me want to play that game! ;p

[Castruccio]

I am a huge Soldak fan, perhaps the biggest one around other than Bluddy.  The lead designer of DoP and DC is aware of everything you are saying about patches and marketing, Eraser, but one man can only do so much and Steam has not been kind to him.  Right now he is developing a very, very promising looking game which combines all the best parts of DoP (the covenant system) and DC (the dynamic world) into a much prettier game than both of these.  The game is called Drox Operative and will be set in space (a space ARPG).  Think of it as a 4X game that is taking place around you, and you are just one of the many ships in the galaxy.  You can influence other races, help them acquire technology, improve your own ship, set them at war against each other, help them fight their wars, etc.  It should go into beta either this month or next, and it is a much more solid and professional looking product than they've ever made before.  Check out the Soldak website for more info.

One of Steven Peeler's (the lead designer at Soldak) great virtues is that he knows the game he wants to make before he makes it.  He sets out with a very precise and well thought out design idea and he is usually able to fulfill his ambitions quite gracefully given the modest resources he has to work with.  It is not always pretty or perfectly balanced, but it is always a very fleshed out idea brought from paper to screen. 

[eRe4s3r]

Yeah but how long would it take him to patch the hunger and flickering targeting issue in Din's Curse? You can't tell me that is impossible or that he doesn't know how. Having such issues (that anyone playing the game will INSTANTLY notice) left open is just not gonna do him any favors. Especially not if patching them would take him 10 minutes. While leaving them in will annoy anyone who plays, forever.

Sure you can play despite this (though you can not ignore the constantly starving population ~.~) but this is about pride in your work. Either you fix your stuff till it works right, or you don't. That is how I judge developers. If he doesn't bother patching such minuscule issues in his most recent game, then Drox will have equally annoying issues that he will never patch.

I once trusted Indy devs, that was before I bought SOTS2 and Stronghold 3. Now I judge developers how they support their games when issues crop up

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Yeah but how long would it take him to patch the hunger and flickering targeting issue in Din's Curse? You can't tell me that is impossible or that he doesn't know how. Having such issues (that anyone playing the game will INSTANTLY notice) left open is just not gonna do him any favors. Especially not if patching them would take him 10 minutes. While leaving them in will annoy anyone who plays, forever.

Sure you can play despite this (though you can not ignore the constantly starving population ~.~) but this is about pride in your work. Either you fix your stuff till it works right, or you don't. That is how I judge developers. If he doesn't bother patching such minuscule issues in his most recent game, then Drox will have equally annoying issues that he will never patch.

I once trusted Indy devs, that was before I bought SOTS2 and Stronghold 3. Now I judge developers how they support their games when issues crop up

Well, he does have to make a living. Constantly patching and fixing a "dead" game, doesn't make you any money. Pride is one thing, but some don't care/have time for pride in one's work. Maybe the fix would only take a little bit of time, idk. But that's still time and time is a rare commodity.

King

[Castruccio]

I have asked him about the time it would take to patch and he has said that the patching itself, while time consuming, isn't really the problem.  The problem is getting a new patch out to all the distributors and insuring compatibility between versions.  Since he isn't on Steam and he doesn't have the kind of setup that Arcen does, he can't just roll out patches.  Apparently it is a huge hassle and once he has actually finished a patch (which takes as much or more more than a week) he then has to spend another week haggling with 5 or six distributors, some of whom don't even respond to him.  This is why Bluddy's work on the balance mod is so valuable.   

[eRe4s3r]

But why doesn't he have an autopatcher like Arcen does? If patching is such an hassle maybe he should solve that problem first and foremost? Clearly it is not going to get ANY better with a new game added to the mix.

I just realized that Arcengames spoiled me. AI War had a nifty auto patcher for a long while and all further games had it (and it's awesome). I just can't fathom why any developer would NOT do that with priority. Pushing beta patches out quickly is extremely vital to build a community. When between report to patch and patch release is at best 2 days you have created more customer satisfaction than you ever could any other way.

Actually, this is why I loved AI War. You could be influencing a balance discussion a day ago and when you wake up the next day the patch is out doing exactly that. There is nothing better than that. Not to mention that gives you very powerful word of mouth (Support is great, he responded directly to my issue and fixed it within a day).

And just for the record... fact is I had some crazy issues with Unity Port of AI War back in the days and several people spend weeks figuring out how to fix it and at the end of it we arrive at a point where that bug is fixed .. that is how you make people HAPPY. Other developers would say "only 1 report of this bug? Irrelevant!"

[keith.lamothe]

By the way Keith... you say Tidalis was supposed to be for casual market yet it is easily the most complex game....  in it's entire genre And that is a compliment (just obviously, a bad one if you aimed at the casual market ,p)

Oh yes, we realized that not long after it was done.  Basically: every game we ever make is going to be pretty hardcore in some way or another.  We just can't help it

Tidalis has actually made what would have been an acceptable return for the kinds of game in that sort of genre, but they typically take like... maybe 1/4 or less the man-hours we actually spent on it, or something like that.  Overkill for the win!

Anyway, yea, DoP and DC could go from fun, innovative games to some truly special things with even half the post-release support that AIW has gotten (split between them).  But Steven's got to pay bills, and this is his only job (unlike Chris's situation during the development and first several months of post-release support for AIW) and while that kind of ongoing support does have an eventual payoff if done well, the far-and-away more common (and, frankly, reliable) approach to getting more revenue is, well, making new games  

Not sure how he grew his patching method, but it's pretty common to have a very cumbersome one.  Chris had to do a lot of upfront work to make his possible, but I don't really know the details as I wasn't involved at that stage.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Not to constantly echo Keith today, but I'd say that Arcen is a rare gem among game developers as far as post-release support is concerned. I have gone through...idk...let's just  say 125 games played by now. The only games with the exception of anything tied to Arcen that actually have an auto-patcher that come to memory is Tribes: Ascend and MMOs in general. This suggests to me that patching games and giving them support is just not a popular notion in the game development community. Unless you have a freemium model then you'll get tons of "support" from the dev team...  Even on iOS, where updating an app is a lot easier to setup, most of my games tend to only get a few patches here and there and then they're done. There are some exceptions, but for the most part, development pretty much stops dead after release. (Which is a huge disappointment to me, I had hopes that this would change).

King

[Wingflier]

Even MMO developers have an excuse to constantly update, because their customers are constantly paying money.

What's Arcen's excuse?  No excuse.  We will not excuse your awesome Arcen, you must accept it.

[zespri]

The main issue is that Soldak is a one-man show. Unlike Arcen, they don't have the resources to continue patching a game while developing another one. And none of Soldak's games have been successful enough to justify sticking with the same game and releasing continuous patches for it like AI War.

That's the part I never understood. I mean the thing that the you garden variate indie would not have resources for that type of stuff is pretty understandable. How Arcen manage to do this is beyond my comprehension. It's not that their games so much more popular or that they have that much more resource. Ok two developers, not one. I don't think that another developer would do it for Soldak. So it remains a bit of mystery.

[zespri]

Wasn't there a huge post of how the Soldak dev regretted making that weird Kivi's Underworld casual game that basically just a redone Din's Curse just less... good?... It boggles the mind what insanity rode him them. Instead of improving the great concept of Din's Curse (and before that, Depths of Peril) with a 2nd expansion that improved controls, physics, feel, graphics, and everything else he made off-shoot games that had nothing to do with the relatively good game he made.

Yes, Soldak dev mentioned that he had some thought regarding this, but never actually published them. My take on Kivi Underworld is this. I personally like this game. It is much simpler than DC and much more streamlined and self contained. This simplicity is appealing. I also understand why it never took off: too simple for hardcore players who enjoy DC to nerdy to bridge the gap for the "casual" players. The reason why he regretted creating it? I can think of one only - it was a waste of time money-wise he probably spent doing it more than it sold for. Once again: the experience is nothing like DC, it's much more mindless, but I like KU for what it is.

It's really no wonder he didn't have a success story with his games though, by all accounts even Din's Curse is exceptionally ugly in a technical sense, lots of lightning and collision glitches, and the game engine does not use any modern features. I don't even understand why, it'd be a simple engine upgrade, art assets could even remain the same! Instead of wasting time with other games this is the 1 good game he has. And instead of fixing it (Heck, he should have hired YOU Bluddy given your great mods) he wastes more time on other games that will never be a success unless he gets 1 game to a level where steam would say, yes, we take that!

Yes. Yes. Yes. Could not agree more.

Not on GOG, not on steam. How does he expect to earn money that way? (not to mention that the game should not be more than 20$ with expansion) overpriced and underadvertised. Sadness

I'm probably different from most of the players in this respect, but If I like the game for me it does not matter if it costs 10$ or 80$. I do by games because they are on special or because they are cheap, but I have to stop doing that because in most cases I end up not playing them. And those that I end up playing I'd pay twice the price I paid for them easily.

I guess I just wish he would polish Din and DoP properly, add a BETTER graphics engine and better control feeling, butter up some of those animations and effects and release this proper + Bluddy modified balance. DoP and Din are the most exceptionally ugly games that I love. But I am an artist so yeah... I look at this stuff and get sad that so much potential is wasted. Sure good graphics don't make a bad game good, but bad unpolished graphics *can* make a good game bad.

I think that only most hardcore genre lovers can look past graphics in DoC.

Think of it as a 4X game that is taking place around you, and you are just one of the many ships in the galaxy.  You can influence other races, help them acquire technology, improve your own ship, set them at war against each other, help them fight their wars, etc.

I of course heard of this before as I'm reading his twitter, but reading these lines above... You know, usually this description would have me jump up and down in anticipation. But for this particular game I can't stop thinking: just another game that is going to look like.... DoC.

I just realized that Arcengames spoiled me. AI War had a nifty auto patcher for a long while and all further games had it (and it's awesome). I just can't fathom why any developer would NOT do that with priority. Pushing beta patches out quickly is extremely vital to build a community. When between report to patch and patch release is at best 2 days you have created more customer satisfaction than you ever could any other way.

Actually, this is why I loved AI War. You could be influencing a balance discussion a day ago and when you wake up the next day the patch is out doing exactly that. There is nothing better than that. Not to mention that gives you very powerful word of mouth (Support is great, he responded directly to my issue and fixed it within a day).

And just for the record... fact is I had some crazy issues with Unity Port of AI War back in the days and several people spend weeks figuring out how to fix it and at the end of it we arrive at a point where that bug is fixed .. that is how you make people HAPPY.

And this is a part of the mystery. For all I know this is humanly impossible. Otherwise everybody would be doing this.

Other developers would say "only 1 report of this bug? Irrelevant!"

Lol. I actually had a situation, where I reported a bug on a forum and got an annoyed response from a dev saying "why people do not read forums, it's all been discussed many times". The thing is, the particular bug I reported was never discussed (I politely asked to provide me with relevant link and was ignored in response). I do search forums before posting feedback. It's just happened so that the whole relevant area was so buggy, that they dismissed any issues about it, because there were so many. This, I find quite frustrating.

[Bluddy]

The main issue is that Soldak is a one-man show. Unlike Arcen, they don't have the resources to continue patching a game while developing another one. And none of Soldak's games have been successful enough to justify sticking with the same game and releasing continuous patches for it like AI War.

That's the part I never understood. I mean the thing that the you garden variate indie would not have resources for that type of stuff is pretty understandable. How Arcen manage to do this is beyond my comprehension. It's not that their games so much more popular or that they have that much more resource. Ok two developers, not one. I don't think that another developer would do it for Soldak. So it remains a bit of mystery.

I think a part of that is the attitude towards tools. Soldak's great, but it has an old-school attitude in some ways, and one of those ways is that they seem to like building their tools from scratch. I can understand that, being an engineer myself, but it really slows down development and limits one's options.

Infrastructure is a huge thing, especially for a small Indie dev. One small part of that has already been mentioned: by working out an automatic update scheme early on, Arcen have created a foundation that allows them to contact their player base quickly and fix their games or just provide players with the latest iterations. For Soldak, this is a huge pain, and not having that added infrastructure hurts them in the long run. The targeting bug could have been fixed a year ago if they had auto-updates.

But this extends to other realms as well. Soldak programs in C++ vs Arcen's C#. C# is not only safer to code in, it's also hugely more efficient in terms of coding time. Arcen builds their games on top of Unity, which is a well-tested engine used by hundreds of developers. This means that there is less chance for bugs, and that if they want to, they can insert into their game the latest tech used by the industry because it's already included as part of the engine. Soldak has its own custom engine, and it's one straight out of 1999. Because it has only been used for 3 games, the engine is buggy, and adding capabilities is difficult -- I'm sure there's tons of spaghetti code inside. That's why it's not trivial to add even 3d effects that were used 10 years ago -- this stuff isn't easy to do from scratch: it's a lot of math and engineering. Soldak's engine didn't even have perspective projection until Din's Curse came out!

Those are some of the things that make the difference. But truthfully, even having one more programmer on the team makes a big difference. When you're the only programmer, you tend to write cryptic code (with no comments) that only you can understand. You don't worry too much about infrastructure, because you figure you know the code inside out. But within a couple of years you start forgetting the code, and you feel the pain of not having planned out the architecture better. When you have 2 programmers working together, the communication and the breakdown in communication that results from unclear/badly engineered code forces them to write clearer code and to plan out a scalable, reusable architecture.