Pimgd's messages

Although sufficient funding would allow me to make the game, as I’d be able to quit my job and work on the game, I don’t think this is a course of action that’d be healthy for me to follow.

To accept money to work on TextRPG 2 would mean to put a responsibility on that which I did as a hobby, and I’m not sure I’d still find it fun. TextRPG 2 would also be a game of considerable size, and I think it’d take … perhaps a year? to make it, were I to work on it full time.

I’ve justified the decision to myself a long time ago – making TextRPG 2 is likely to end up hurting me – be it financially or emotionally. I can’t quit my job and work on it, for I’d need money to live, but to ask of others to pay this means I’d have to produce what I’d say I’d make, something I’m just not comfortable with. I also don’t trust myself with predictions regarding this game anymore – I’ve made too many promises saying “I’ll have a demo in a few weeks” or “The engine will be done in a few months”.

So I’d not like to add the promise “It’ll be made eventually” on top of that pile. I’d rather say “It won’t be done”, and then when I do get the opportunity, and do decide to work on it, I build a decent product and say “Hey, look at what I’ve made”. That way there is no endless promise breaking or hurting of feelings.

I’m sorry for stringing everyone along as I did, and refusing to go back to TextRPG 2 is my way of showing that I won’t do it again.

The thing is, I don’t have the time or the willpower to see another project like this through. I keep finding new insights in programming and to create another work on this scale in the limited spare time I have is just not feasible. I could tell you right now that I could give it a good try and I’d make some good progress, but in the end what will happen is that I’ll create some tech demo, don’t like the mechanics, create 4 different versions before settling on a specific battle system, and then see the overwhelming list of tasks before me (inventory, shops, quests, 100 pages of storyline, side quests, skills, dungeons, crafting(?), boss mechanics…). It’s very easy for me to fall into a deep hole with this, and to avoid that, I’ve decided to not go near the project anymore at all. Whether this is selfish or mean I don’t know, but at least it stops me from feeling enormously guilty all the time.

It kinda is, by virtue of managing to get the important bits right, and failing badly at the other parts. TextRPG TRoD has a funny/engaging story, a playtime not too long and not too short, a difficulty curve that’s generally on the easier side and most importantly of all it doesn’t waste your time with any sort of animations – this allows you to overlook the parts where it’s actually coded badly (it doesn’t matter it’s slow, as it doesn’t have to do much), or that the interface is wonky (once you learn how it works it’s doable) or that the actual gameplay is just a grindfest (again, because the game plays at the pace you can click, the grind doesn’t feel as heavy).

I took another look at what I have for TextRPG 2 and the reality of it is that it’s not usable for developing or publishing. It’s a massive game engine with a debug UI. A quick playthrough shows that that the old strengths are lacking: where the old game had a wonky interface, at least each screen was unique. Thus it became pattern recognition rather than actual reading of the menu options. The unified interface in the new version inhibits this pattern recognition, forcing you to actually think about what you’re doing – very confusing.

The combat system is quite unbalanced, either you own their asses or they own yours, mainly because of the speed attribute allowing you to get first turn advantage and battles being 2v3 or 2v4 instead of 1v1…

The UI itself is warped, graphical in nature and the scrollbar is broken for some reason.

And the engine itself is written in AS2, which is just plain outdated.

Not only that, it’s a huge engine. It wasn’t designed to be a huge engine but it is now, and whilst it does things that are really really cool, if one of these things break it’s nearly impossible to fix.

If I am going to make TextRPG 2 then I will have to rewrite the engine and take out some of the planned features – probably for the best, as the engine currently just tries to do too much.

It could indeed take years. I have no idea when I will continue. I want to deliver a great game, but doing so will take time. … I want to have that time available when I start making it, instead of having my development time compete with college and work and… etc.

My advice to all devs that want to make an excellent game is to make it playable and then turn it into a beta. That way, everyone can see the game improve over time and grow to enjoy it and see the hard work put into it.

http://developers.kongregate.com/docs/api-overview/client-api

Through the use of Javascript. The link contains a sample HTML page which will act as a shell as well – I think if you upload that sample HTML page with your game in the iframe, you’re halfway there.

Into Javascript, you mean? By using AJAX. Here, take a look at this sample: http://w3schools.com/ajax/tryit.asp?filename=tryajax_first – What you should do is request a specific stat from the user (“.com/getuserstat.php?id=xxxx&stat=yyy”) (have getuserstat.php print out 1 stat in plain text) and then push that through the connection. That’s how you would get highscores to work and the API (with previous example).

As for user login… There’s something about that on the developers.kongregate site. If you can’t find it, I’ll try looking again for you.

Whoa, thanks!
French huh? I thought Greek at first (“Castor” … “Hector”… hmm)…
Loving the game so far – it’s very well balanced (haven’t found any cheap tricks yet that can net you unlimited power). Even despite my best efforts, I still die sometimes, but when I retry the level I know what’s coming and can come out victorious =). Just ran into a spider trap on “The path of the peaks” – I almost died and had to make several tactical retreats in order not to fail the level XD.

We have probably received one already (all exceptions caugth in the game are sent to our server). We will look at that tomorrow, as at your other bug reports. I have to look after my kids today :-)

I changed the translations, but other issues will need a new release.