https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNXNdbosgRE
www.youtube.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19279018

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19279015

I wanted to share and highlight this video for others to see. This is such a thorough and amazing resource for the dev team at Frost Giant (the makers of Stormgate) that I hope they have seen. The breakdown and walk-through of the different elements of the game was such an amazing thing to watch.

I found myself sitting there watching for hours, this is exactly what game companies need in terms of experienced game tester leads that can articulate and explain everything going on in the game from the perspective of an average player. I think if every game company had someone of this caliber, to sit down with them and go over the basic mechanics of the games, we would all be a lot better off. I felt like I was sitting in on a company meeting while an outside contractor was going over his notes with the developers and trying to understand their vision while giving his unique and experienced position.

I’m definitely more excited about the game than I was previously after watching this video (as confusing as that might seem). It shows a clear path of how to fix and enhance the gameplay which has a chance to come into fruition with the game still in the testing phase.

  • regul@lemm.ee
    2·
    4 months ago

    Day9 did consult on the design of an RTS like ten years ago and it didn’t amount to anything.

    • Cataphract@lemmy.mlOP
      3·
      4 months ago

      Without knowing any details I can only speculate but 10 years is a lot of time to refine your experience and expertise in a field. Do you remember what game it was and why it didn’t amount to anything?

      • regul@lemm.ee
        2·
        4 months ago

        I had to look it up. It was called Guardian of Atlas and Sean left the company right after the beta launched and then the game got cancelled. My guess as to why it went poorly is just that it was inexperienced devs making a game at a time when SC2 was still actually relatively popular. There was no space in the already tiny genre of RTS.

        Now that Blizzard has essentially abandoned StarCraft, it might be possible for some folks to carve some of that tiny market away.

        • Cataphract@lemmy.mlOP
          2·
          4 months ago

          Holy crap that game development sounds like it had a really tough time and brought upon by the inexperience like you said. Found some conversations with the co-founder after the game was cancelled

          the game did not retain enough players to have any hope of becoming a business and it wasn’t a question of marketing - any money we spent on marketing would have been wasted…

          it was not growing organically in alpha people would come in, and play for a bit, and then quit … i’m not even saying we needed high growth like, remember when the alpha launched we had something like 500-1000 people online the first several days … but 4 weeks later we were nowhere near 500-1000 the kind of business we bet the company on requires a game like, say, tf2, where its what, 9 years old or something and there’s still hundreds of thousands of players and it probably hasn’t had a single dollar of marketing spend

          Absolutely crazy and absurd level of expectations lol. I imagine there wasn’t a single PR or marketing person in the company that could explain to them why. Seems like a lot of hubris which stopped them from finishing the development process and wanted immediate success and fandom.

          edit: words hard