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KickStarter Rebecca Heineman's Dragons of the Rip (formerly Dragon Wars 2)

SniperHF

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On Battle Chess remake:
- After it went on Steam Early Access, Interplay earned some money but Olde Skuul didn't get any of it. They couldn't finish the game without paying someone. But when you see comments and forums people blame Olde Skuul for it. So they're now trying to finish the game anyway just to untarnish their reputation.

I would be shouting that from the rooftops rather than waste resources I'm not being paid for, developing a game no one is gonna buy anyway.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
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V_K

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But what does the game have to offer without the original's decidedly nonstandard mythology? That's a major selling point, gone.
Well, the original also had alternative quest solutions and C&Cs in spades, and what's more important, unlike newer games, none of them were spoon-fed to you via dilog choices but had to be found through exploration and skill use. If DotR is anything like that I' buy it even if it were set in the most generic high fantasy world possible. Though I remember Heineman saying that there are several world in DotR, each with its own setting - which, frankly, sounds suspiciously overambitious, but we'll see how it turns out.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
TalkShoe podcast interview (again): http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-130336/TS-1027138.mp3

It's mostly about her post-Interplay career: Half-Life for Mac, that Bard's Tale IV (she didn't say much about this), console ports, how she realized that Interplay management was fucked up compared to EA, Kinect, Sony etc..

And bashing 2004 Bard's Tale for being sexist, movie wannabe games and Star Citizen.

They'll announce their "next game" (DotR? Or not?) at next year's GDC.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
Suddenly Battle Chess released out of Early Access, and the price has tripled. o_O http://store.steampowered.com/app/200150

"We're ready for Christmas Sale!"

eAlB0mT.jpg
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
Heineman did a don't die interview: http://www.nodontdie.com/rebecca-heineman/

I think the interview was done months ago.

She talk about why do games get canceled, bad project management practices in games (Broken Age as a "perfect example"), past and present of porting business, saturated and cheapened game market, look back at the failure of 3DO.

And a long (and "digested") version of the 3DO DOOM story:

There was a company called Art Data Interactive. The CEO was a guy who was just a member of a church somewhere in Southern California. Somehow he was able to convince his friends at the church and other friends that 3DO is the wave of the future and that he needs their money to go ahead and form a game company. "Get in on this."

He raises $100,000. He then starts making this game. A Battle Chess ripoff.

And he feels the way he wants to do it is he wants to film all the people dressed up as chess pieces and that's what he's going to put on the game board.

The guy has no clue at all of game development. Nothing.

So he films all these scenes with money and then runs out of money and then he finds a programmer who makes a really crappy game because he just slaps everything together. And then he puts it out in the stores and thinks he's going to make all this money.

Well, the sales weren't really much and he got notified from all the vendors, all the stores saying, "Who the hell are you? Who is Art Data Interactive? I don't know. This chess game? Interplay's got Battle Chess. Why would we want your chess game?"

Well, at the time id was doing Doom and it was the big thing, and he thought, "Hey, if I license Doom and put it on the 3DO, it will put my company on the map."

So he went over to id, and at this point and time, id really wasn't sold on doing anything on consoles. At that time. And so they said, "You know what? If you want Doom? $250,000 and you'll get the rights."

Which at that time, everybody who saw this said, "Nope! Too expensive. Too expensive."

And really, id was just telling everybody to get lost. Randy, on the other hand, the CEO, said, "It's $250,000?"

And he raised it.

And he went to id and said, "Here's a check for $250,000. Give me the rights toDoom."

And id's like, "Okay? Here's the source code to Doom and thank you for the check, have a nice day."

And of course, you know, the royalties. Standard contract.

Well, Randy, because he did not know anything about game development, said, "Okay, we're gonna make the best game of Doom ever! We're gonna have new levels, new weapons, new everything."

As soon as he signed the contract -- the ink wasn't even dry yet. And he went onto a press tour telling everybody he has the rights to Doom, Art Data Interactive is gonna kick ass, they're gonna have new levels, new weapons, and everything.

He even had a friend of his draw mock-up weapons. Just draw them on Photoshop and so forth and give him these screenshots. And he was saying, "These is actual game screenshots."

Of course the press is going, "Oh my God! This looks great! This is awesome!"

Well, he then went to a developer and said, "Hey, can you just do a version for me?"

And they said, "Sure. What you want is gonna take two years and a budget of, like, $3 million."

He said, "Oh no, no, no. You're lying to me."

He went to another developer who, in turn, somehow he finagled them to start on the project but he actually was intending not to pay them.

Well, after a few weeks of working on the project, this company then said, "Hey, we need our milestone payment."

And Randy after a while hemmed and hawed and hemmed and hawed and then this company stopped working on the game.

Well, now this is around July of 1996 I believe. And because of all the press tour, the 3DO company was actually hearing all the positive press that Doom was coming out for the 3DO and people were getting excited about it.

And then they come to find that after they went over and actually inspected Art Data Interactive and realized that this guy has no clue about what he's doing, they're like, "Oh my God. We are screwed."

At this particular time, I had just shipped Wolfenstein 3D for Interplay. I took the Mac code, which I did -- because I did the Mac port of Wolf 3D, ported it over to the 3DO, enhanced everything, and the game was running 60 frames a second. It was a phenomenal version of the game.

I was already known to 3DO, so they contact me. 3DO said, "Hey, we've got this project. Doom. We really want this game out by Christmas. Is there any way you can go ahead and do it because you know id?" I said, "Sure. Put me in touch with Art Data."

Well, of course, I talk to Art Data and they say, "Sure." We negotiate a price. They said, "Sure." And then I said, "Great."

Then what Art Data told me was the game was 90 percent complete. All I needed to do was finish up some bugs and get the game ready for shipping and get it out in about a month or two. And for me it's like, "Oh yeah. I've been doing projects where I just fix bugs and get games out the door. Nothing new to me." So I say, "Sure."

So then, of course, I ask them, "Give me the source code and the assets for Doomthat you've got."

Two weeks go by and I keep getting excuses after excuses.

Randy says, "Well, why can't you just start it right now?"

I said, "Because I need this."

So I then called id and they sent me all the assets and everything for the Jaguar version of Doom as well as all the PC version stuff, too. I look at the code and I say, "Yeah, the Jaguar version, I can just do a straight port."

I said, "Well, I'll start working on it because I'm running out of time."

Well, then, I had a friend of mine who was working at Art Data come and privately take me aside and say, "Uh, we don't have anything. The developer that was working on it? They only got to it, like, the code to compile and nothing -- everything Randy was saying was lies."

I'm like, "Oh."

And that point, I was gonna say, "Okay. I'm canceling this project. We're done."

But then I had my friend at 3DO begging me, "Please. We really need this game out by Christmas. People are expecting it."

So I then told 3DO, "Sure. I will do it for you as a favor to you at 3DO. To help you with your platform."

Because they've helped me and helped build my company at the time. So, I did it more as a favor to them. And at that point, I then realized that because of all these delays and everything, it is now August. They need to ship this for Christmas, which means the drop-dead date for the disc would be November.

So that gives me October -- let's see. I started around August and I released the final disc on November 1st. That was 10 weeks.

I just said, "This is just going to be a straight Jaguar port."

I spent 10 weeks producing the source code that you saw up on Github and of course, when I was submitting builds to Randy over at Art Data, the frame rate wasn't that great because I just got the game prototype.

I didn't have time to optimize it.

And he was saying, "Why isn't this game running at 60 frames a second? Where is my new weapons? Where is my new stuff?"

And I'm like, "Do you have any idea how game development is done?"

Because he truly believed all you had to do to put a weapon in a game is to draw it.

He did believe that if you drew a weapon -- you just gave me the art file -- I would put it in the game and it would magically fire bullets. It would do all the effects animations and switch and -- he thought that was just me putting the art in there, hit "compile," and I'm done.

And so he was really pissed off at me during the development of the game because he was saying, "Where's new levels? I promised people new levels."

And then of course I turned around and said, "Well, you promised me a source-code drop and you said this game was 90 percent done and here it is I have to start from scratch."

And there were several times where I wanted to quit that project.

But every time, I was talked out of it by my friend at 3DO.

And so eventually I got the game basically shippable. I don't call it "finished." I call it shippable.

At that point, I sent the discs off to 3DO. 3DO fast-tracked it and had it approved, like, within a few days.

And then Randy at Art Data did the stupidest thing -- even more stupider than everything up to this point. He pressed 250,000 copies, as I understand it, of Doomfor the 3DO.

To put it in perspective, there were only 250,000 3DOs in existence. It was a blunder of the same proportions of ET, where Atari printed out as much cartridges as there were consoles. Which is -- mathematically, you're never gonna sell them all.

Randy was so hard up for money because his investors were saying, "Hey, we invested all this money. Where are your profits?"

He thought, "All I have to press is 250,000 copies of the game, ship it to the stores, and then I will get the money for 250,000 copies."

Not understanding that you have to advertise it. There has to be a market base. It really shows how little he knew of the industry.

So, of course, Doom 3DO comes out. They sell, I think, 10,000 copies, which is what they should have sold.

Then it was, of course, universally panned. The music was great, but, you know, I myself knew the game was gonna get rated poorly because of the frame-rate issues.

But it was like -- 3DO had been promising people either indirectly through Randy that Doom was coming out that they had to fulfill their promise. So, in that particular sense, 3DO as well as Logicware, did fulfill the promise that was given to the public that 3DO Doom was available in stores.

Now, we didn't fulfill the promise Randy was saying, which was new levels, new weapons, "the best Doom ever."

No.

And of course after that, within a few months later, Art Data Interactive went out of business.

Now trust me. That's the Reader's Digest version.

To give you an idea, the whole thing from start to finish was about 14 weeks. I got the phone call in July. Then negotiated the contract around the end of July. About two weeks later we got the contract. Then it was two weeks of them stalling of giving us what we were being told was available: a semi-finished version of Doom.

And so once it became obvious to us in the middle of August that they were not going to deliver us anything, that's when I took it upon myself to actually get the assets from id.

And that is when I began the port from the Jaguar port base.

And so I had from two weeks in August, all of September, and all of October.

Near the end of October was when I delivered the final discs of what I would consider a shippable version of Doom for the 3DO. And it went straight to 3DO. I remember we sent it to them in a FedEx overnight.

They then had their testers play it and I had to do one rev in which we made the screen smaller to get the frame-rate up. And then, at that point, they approved the golden masters, sent it off to Art Data Interactive. As far as I know, they never played the game. They just simply said, "All right! Press a whole bunch of them."

Even 3DO said, "Wait a minute. You really shouldn't be pressing this many." But he said, "No, no, no. It's going to sell gangbusters." They said, "Well, if you want to write us a check for that amount of money, we're not gonna stop you."

The rest is history. [Laughs.]

What did Randy think of the final product?

I'm certain Randy was pissed off about the final product because he was expecting it to be the best Doom ever. A game that was supposed to make him famous and his company famous and sell so many copies that it would effectively make him a millionaire.

No.

That game wasn't going to make anyone a millionaire. Not that version of the game, anyways.

And of course, within time, his company imploded around him.

What's he doing now?

I have no idea.

Also there's a brief mention of Dragons of the Rip:

Olde Sküül was founded on the whole concept of old-school fun in modern games. The thing is, though, that our games are not trying to be "how many polygons can we push and how photo-realistic we can be?" No. In fact, the game that we're doing right now, it's an RPG. It actually has a more cartoony look to it. Bright colors. Simple to draw.

Because we are not trying to spend -- first, we don't have that much money. We're an indie studio. But second of all is that we are trying to work with the medium, really focusing on how can we get the most game with the assets and resources that we have? Granted, it's not going to have the visual flash you're going to expect from Call of Duty, but then again, we're not making Call of Duty. [Laughs.]
 

pippin

Guest


Found this on youtube as well. Sorry if it was posted already.
 

Old Hans

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Olde Sküül was founded on the whole concept of old-school fun in modern games. The thing is, though, that our games are not trying to be "how many polygons can we push and how photo-realistic we can be?" No. In fact, the game that we're doing right now, it's an RPG. It actually has a more cartoony look to it. Bright colors. Simple to draw.

Because we are not trying to spend -- first, we don't have that much money. We're an indie studio. But second of all is that we are trying to work with the medium, really focusing on how can we get the most game with the assets and resources that we have? Granted, it's not going to have the visual flash you're going to expect from Call of Duty, but then again, we're not making Call of Duty. [Laughs.]

She sounds like an out of touch old fart.
 

CryptRat

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Nice reading. She attacks "interactive movies", James Cameron, Call Of Duty, Tim Schafer, free-to-play games and toxic players. She doesn't directly attack photorealism but will use a more cartonny style (and not with some no name artist). And she's working on another Dragon Wars. Massive :incline:.
I am still waiting for her Kickstarter. I want to give her my money.

And a long (and "digested") version of the 3DO DOOM story:
This is really hilarious.
He pressed 250,000 copies, as I understand it, of Doom for the 3DO. To put it in perspective, there were only 250,000 3DOs in existence.[...]They sell, I think, 10,000 copies
:hero:
 

Jack Of Owls

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I guess she's been very busy remastering the Bard's Tale trilogy for Fargo and hasn't gotten around to her Kickstarter campaign for Dragons of the Rip yet. Someday we'll hopefully get a Dragon Wars remaster too. Can't tell you of the joy I felt in figuring out the most ingenuous way to kill Namtar in that multiple solution manner in killing the end boss. I was proud of myself. It was my first blobber. My mind was sharp back then in 1989. These days I'm lucky if I can figure out how to beat the first encounter in Pokemon Rainbow (just put all of them from the entire seriers together here so I can call it that and not have to remember so many colors).
 

laclongquan

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T
On Dragons of the Rip:
- DotP has nothing to do with the lore of DW.
But what does the game have to offer without the original's decidedly nonstandard mythology? That's a major selling point, gone.
Does settings and background ever matter?

Kingdom of Dragon Pass' setting get used about once in game, and it's gone. Good riddance and nobody care.

Planescape Torment's setting get used about once and it's gone. I cant say nobody care because Codex care, but the strong point of Torment is the QUALITY of writings, not the setting. Sure, the idea of City of Thousand Portals, or undying immortal who drag others down with each of his death is interesting, but NOT that interesting. Change it to a medieval central port (venice etc) or a major commercial space station and does it affect much?

Ditto with BG series, and IWD series, really. you can change it to some other settings and it wont be disminished much.

Same thing with Bloodlines because face it, vampire and werewolves and shits are done to death in urban fantasy genre. WoD setting get known because it's used in VTMB, not vice versa. Strip most of WoD materials and replace it with other urban fantasy stuffs (because it's not unique to WoD) and you still got a great game.

The noise of settings and background matter generally the noise from writing departments justifying their existence in a game. They do matter, to a point, but it's nowhere as big as the hype make out to be.
 

Roqua

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I saw this on RPGWatch. She was one of the founders of interplay. This is an interesting read, for instance she states she created the algorithms for 3d maps.

http://www.nodontdie.com/rebecca-heineman/


I feel bad for the technical veterans. I know Tim Cain can code but he also creates. I always saw Ms. Heineman as more of pure technical and these guys are overlooked. My profession is as well, but I guess that is the price for being technically focused. My job, and I'm sure engineering too, requires a lot of creativity, but it is bori9ng creativity. And especially with my job, if I do it well no one will be able to figure out just how creative I am. Or that is the goal at least.
 

Charles-cgr

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I guess she's been very busy remastering the Bard's Tale trilogy for Fargo and hasn't gotten around to her Kickstarter campaign for Dragons of the Rip yet.

Olde Skuul also had their hands full with the updated Battle Chess - Game of Kings. It seems they suffered from a poor choice of engines which got them mired in technical issues they're still trying to address.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
This time, don't die guy interviewed Jennell Jaquays (apparently the interview was conducted at June last year): http://www.nodontdie.com/jennell-jaquays/

She talk about her early career as an RPG artist and writer, and then a computer game developer, the life as developer parent, her view on the culture of Id (after the Romero departure), the gamer culture at that time, the shutdown of Ensemble, the development hell of CCP's World of Darkness, classic game project management horror stories.

Here's a bit about a canceled (Final Fantasy-like o_O) RPG project she worked on at Id, and her view on the atmosphere of Carmack's Id:

The first one, midway to end, near my career with id Software -- I was at id for five years as a designer -- we had shipped Quake II, Quake III, and were finishing upQuake III Team Arena. I was going to be the lead level designer on a project that Graeme Devine, who was our lead designer -- I would have been lead level designer -- on a kind of role-playing game project. Probably similar to the Final Fantasy series at the time, like, around Final Fantasy VII. Sort of in that range.

We were a small team, and we had mostly been doing games like -- you know, theQuakeseries. John Carmack, our lead engineer and CTO -- I think he was CTO? Chairman of the board and CTO -- what he and two other employees really wanted to do wasDoom 3. So, because he had the weight in the board of directors to pull that, we changed games. And from there went forward. id was pretty much only committed to doing, like, shooters. Continuing more shooters.

That just broke me.

You know, kind of took the wind out of my sails. It kind of felt like something underhanded, to me, from a company standpoint. It just became a fait accompli: "Here, we're changing from this project that you and our lead designer were working on to this other project that you and, like, the rest of the board of directors -- me and the two other owners of id had really no interest in working on." But they were minority shareholders.

There was at least one book I can think of that was written about Doom and that company.

Oh yeah. Yeah. I was there when it was being researched.

What do you think was driving that about face? By that time, [Jon] Romero was gone, right?

Yeah. Romero was gone before I came to the company.

Do you feel like Carmack had something to prove?

I don't know about anything to prove. If you basically look at the history of id product and this may sound unkind, but since the original Castle Wolfenstein, they've been making the same game over and over and over. They speed it up, they slow it down, they add better graphics. Each one has essentially been a vehicle for whatever the most recent 3D graphic game engine ideas that John had to produce, and it went that way -- Doom 3, the play of it is essentially in response to the way Carmack wrote that engine. Quake III, pretty much the same thing: We want to make a fast graphics accelerator card-only game, so that's what we made. Anything that wasn't fast came out of the game. There was no story. It was just about shooting. So, that was kind of what -- and generally speaking, because John was majority shareholder in the company and he basically got to say, "This is what I want to do. This is what we're going to do.”

This might sound like an odd question given that anecdote, but I wonder about individuals like Carmack and Hideo Kojima and whether they feel like leaders. In both cases, we're talking about people both iterating on making the same thing over and over again. I'm not asking you to comment on someone you haven't worked for, but what are the ways you feel people like that don't act like leaders? And what among that do you think is actually out of their control and can't be helped until the industry changes somehow?

The Carmack that I worked with -- I can’t say that I knew him -- we were never really what I would call friends in any way. He was the figurehead guy for id. He didn’t have to share that with Romero anymore. None of the other id people would ever be as visible again as Carmack and Romero had been. He was focused and I mean focused on his technology, and less so on his cars for awhile, and then his new rocketry hobby.

By the time that id and I parted, he was definitely near the top of his game as a technologist, but I can’t say that I saw him as a leader. He was always too deep into his own tech. What I saw then and for the next several years was a guy who wanted to do what he wanted to do and had the leverage to get others to join him in that. Sucking up to Carmack was polished to an art form back then.

Fifteen years later, I’m still surprised that he and the id management team didn’t see or realize that Doom 3’s tech was going to require several orders of magnitude in the complexity of content creation, especially in terms of employee time over what had been done for Quake games. Id was still trying to operate on the small team format where a few guys working horrific hours would reap massive rewards. That worked right up through Team Arena. Id had to grow an order of magnitude to make Doom 3 and it still took longer than expected.

My opinion, Carmack’s focus on tech that he wanted to make led to some poor choices for id that in turn led them down a narrowing product path of big tech demos for his games. Some, like Quake III,were critical successes. They had a product that other developers and publishers wanted to license in that Quake 3 engine but never managed to develop a consistent support structure for it while I was there. The Doom engine was going in a direction that would make it difficult to use for anything but a game almost exactly like Doom.

id Software could have become what Epic Games is now. Instead, they went the route of making technology demos for Carmack’s new engines and have become a house brand for another publisher.

Was there ever much discussion about branching off or away? I don't think it's unkind to say that they basically have been remaking the same game. I mean, fait accompli is Doom is coming out again.

Oh, I know.

[Laughs.]

And they reissued Quake III and Team Arena as Quake Live, which, by the way, I do approve of. It was quite good.

But was there ever talk about, like, "Let's try to shake things up a bit?"

That was what the project that Graeme Devine was creating, was supposed to be. It was not a shooter. And essentially, you know, it went off in a direction. We were developing the backstory and the play and the mechanics and then all of a sudden we weren't. So, again, I think I stayed with the company maybe another year, a year and a half, and really tried to focus on doing the Doom tech but ended up shifting more into community development for a while.

I usually don’t like to ask trivia-type questions about specific games, but I would be interested to hear if there’s anything about that sort of first non-id id game you were working on at the time. What sort of potential did you see it as having or how was it going to be really different for both the company and the landscape of games at that time?

I don't remember as much of Graeme’s game as perhaps I should. There was a lot of drama going on in the company around that time, including demoing Team Arena at E3, team members being distracted away from Team Arena by Carmack’s new tech, Paul Steed being terminated and then not long after the company moving to new offices. From what I do remember, gameplay would have been more like the Final Fantasy games of the time -- VII and VIII. Not a first-person point of view. A very dark and eclectic world. Perhaps a nexus-like meeting of worlds. Graeme Devine is a passionate storyteller and this game would have been about story and people. He essentially brought that style of game making to Ensemble Studios after id as the lead designer on the game that eventually became Halo Wars.
 
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Crooked Bee

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Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire MCA Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
https://ask.fm/burgerbecky/answers/142423733165

Will you be kickstarting Dragons of the Rip soon and if so when? Do you have screenshots of Dragons of the Rip you can share?

Kickstarter is really tough, and because of that, I'm really not that motivated to do crowdfunding. Screen shots, OMG the art we have, however, I'm really holding it until I either can commit to a ship date, or show it to an investor(s) who can help pay for all the 3d models and animations I need to complete the game. Without money, it's only a few people working on it during the off time since paying clients get priority.
 

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