The Next Patch

[Momotaca]

No posts in three days? I' know I'm waiting to see how the next patch runs on my system, but is everyone else doing the same? Soooo, what's the latest word on the next patch?

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

That's a good question. I'm kind of curious about what the next patch will be and what bugs will be squashed. Hopefully the Anti-Flame Bandits Bug is on the list.

 

[Azael]

That's a good question. I'm kind of curious about what the next patch will be and what bugs will be squashed. Hopefully the Anti-Flame Bandits Bug is on the list.

Hopefully, the Speed penalty issue isn't. :wink:

 

[Jed]

Has Zero Sum given a hint as to the time frame for the next patch?

 

[crpgnut]

Why most shareware games don't make it.

You guys are touching on the main reason shareware games don't make it. Word of mouth only lasts for a VERY short amount of time unless the developers constantly
try to keep it going. When Jeff first released Exile, he was on the usenet and the various Mac forums constantly. He promoted his product to every single person he could reach.
He answered all emails and took the time to personally troubleshoot any issues that arose. This takes an extreme amount of time and effort. At that time I think Jeff had a
40-hour type job also. I'm not sure. CP and Mat both are working full-time I believe. For Prelude to "make it" they'll have to make major time sacrifices to keep the interest alive.
Registrations will only trickle in a few at a time unless there's an ongoing campaign by the developers to promote the game. Jeff's trick was to jump in any conversations that said things like, "I'm looking for something new/different to play." Anyone who complained about short games, lack of turn-based combat, lack of a party got his immediate attention. He'd tell the complainer what his game offered. He got a lot of people who loved either the Gold Box games by SSI or the earlier Ultima games. If Mat and CP put in this type of effort Prelude might make it, but there's no guarantee. The game will need to be almost completely bug free and I think Flame Magic will have to become much more powerful for the game to go much farther. As of right now, the game is only for a very small niche of hardcore crpgers. I count myself lucky to be in that group because Prelude is a very worthy game. I'm not really sure if Zero Sum is wanting to continue making crpgs. They may have made this just as a one-time type of thing before moving on.....

 

[Vault Dweller]

I suggested in one of my posts to make a topic where shareware game designers can share their experience, good and bad for those who might be thinking of following their footsteps. The other side of that coin is that if we actually might be able to help with a word or a deed if we know about actual difficulties they are experiencing.

There is nothing wrong with asking for help or facing the community and saying 'guys, we have this problem, what can we do' Asking for advice even from the most unlikely source is not the same as begging for money.

I am not saying that ZS has ANY problems, may be they are busy rolling in all the money they made somewhere warm with good looking chicks who dig computer geeks

 

[thathmew]

Sorry folks, the patch is still at least a week away, probably a week and a half. One of my computer's hard drives has failed and I'm having to deal with that and job and what not.
There's been a lot of discussion of the next patch, here's my currently list
1) buying item/bartering crashes
2) skill improvements (attribute issues, improvement rates)
3) powerlevel synced combats
4) Spinning camera issues
5) spell issues
6) speed and armo

I _may_ be able to get some more interface improvements in.
Anyway, I'll definitely keep you all appraised.
-mat

I am not saying that ZS has ANY problems, may be they are busy rolling in all the money they made somewhere warm with good looking chicks who dig computer geeks

believe me I'll be the first to let you know when that happens!

 

[Fantasm]

Re: Why most shareware games don't make it.

You guys are touching on the main reason shareware games don't make it. Word of mouth only lasts for a VERY short amount of time unless the developers constantly try to keep it going. When Jeff first released Exile, he was on the usenet and the various Mac forums constantly. He promoted his product to every single person he could reach. He answered all emails and took the time to personally troubleshoot any issues that arose. This takes an extreme amount of time and effort.

In matters related to gameplay, fun factor, etc, I would rank Prelude right up there with Exile. The devs are to be commended on their work so far.

However, in talking about the initial quality and bugginess upon initial release, there is no contest...Exile was light years ahead of where Prelude is right now. I would classify the current Prelude version as a solid beta release, but no more. When I can play for a mere 12 hours over the course of a weekend and find over 10 obvious bugs related to quest scripting, crashes, and technical issues, this is simply not code that is worthy of charging money for.

THIS, more than anything, is why this game likely won't go anywhere (besides the fact that the devs seem to putting their energy into other endeavors). Shareware or not, the window of opportunity for a new release to make an impact is very small, and you'd better hope you make the best of it. By starting to charge money on beta code, you essentially stifle any word-of-mouth that you might otherwise generate. Instead of a big splash, Prelude's release is reduced to a trickle as people wait for the list of bugs to get fixed.

In case it sounds like I'm slamming the devs, I want to make it clear that I'm not harping on their coding skills at ALL...every complex endeavor will have bugs in it, but where I will find fault here is what steps are taken to ferret out and fix as many bugs as possible before you go "live". I know they are dealing with extremely limited resources, but there are still ways you can expand your testing base. IMO, the crucial mistake they made is thinking that once they had finished all the in-house testing they could do or thought was necessary, they thought the game was done and could be released to the general public. What should have happened at that point is that the game gets released to the Q&A department to finish the polishing and ensure that there are no gameplay bugs that can be quite common in non-linear games with new engines like this.

Who is their Q&A department? We are, of course!

Jeff Vogel has the luxury of developing for the Mac first, which is a stroke of genius, because Mac fanatics are starved for any kind of computer game, and will pay money for anything. =) So he can release games to the Mac crowd first, get feedback, polish it up, and fix bugs, all while getting paid, and then release a high-quality game to the PC crowd.

Unfortunately, the PC crowd is going to be quite a bit more demanding, because you have such stiff competition vying for the average gamer's playing time. So without the luxury of a group of fanatics who will pay for anything, you need to resort to the alternative and give the game away to a select group of people to do the beta testing for you.

So this is how I would have handled Prelude back when the devs thought it was ready for release: I would post a public announcement to Usenet, and various RPG message boards, announcing that a new shareware, turn-based RPG that has been in development for several years by some dedicated RPG enthusiasts is almost ready for release, but they need to expand the testing base before they can release it. To this end, they are inviting everybody to download and try the demo, and if they feel they would be interested in playing the game, to fill out a beta application. They could then select 50 people or so to give free registrations to, at no cost except for the request that people take a break from Morrowind or NWN to play the game, and file any bugs they run across through their normal gameplay. Based on the amount of bugs I found within hours of playing the latest released version, this should have generated a ton of feedback in a very short period of time. Btw, with the lull in new RPGs over the last few months, I would have jumped at this chance.

This accomplishes several things: It generates a buzz, it creates anticipation because people will play an enjoyable demo for a game that isn't available yet, and it will ensure that when you do go live, most of the bugs will have been squashed.

As somebody who is NOT a hardcore gamer (but who used to be in my youth and would like to be once again if I had the time , I am a little regretful that I paid money for this game in its current state. I didn't buy it to support shareware, I bought it because I felt like playing a new game and the demo was fun...unfortunately the bugs started appearing after the demo area. Again, I offer these suggestions as a sort of post-mortem in how a shareware release could better be handled in the future.

I'm still looking forward to the next patch release...

 

[crpgnut]

Fantasm

Fantasm, unfortunately I agree with most everything you say. The one part I kinda disagree with is the 50 user free beta test. Unless I miss my guess, Prelude probably doesn't even have 50 registrations yet. If they gave away 50 free copies of the full game, it'd be on Usenet, IRC, Direct Connect, Kazaa, Shareaza, and all their siblings
the next day. An NDA might chage this, but then how many people would sign an
NDA on a shareware game? I didn't mind paying for the game even though it was buggy.
I myself feel responsible for the 1.40 patch. Most of that patch were things that Mat and I discussed in detail. I really hope that Prelude beats the shareware killer: slow word of mouth. I did everything in my power to promote the game while playing and that is what it really takes. I know SP has tried the same tactic, so Zero-Sum got two free sources of
PR. If masses do start downloading the game, it does need to be completely bug-free
and stable. If I was Zero-Sum, I would launch a massive PR campaign once I was satisfied the game was in its final patch. We, the early purchasers, became their
QA department. I don't mind and I truly hope it leads to enough sales for there to be a Prelude 2. I'd post on all the free websites about Prelude and I'd email all my current owners and see if they could restart the word of mouth campaign. Offer them immortalization in Prelude 2 if P1 sells well. We all want to be mentioned by name inside of a game

 

[Fantasm]

Re: Fantasm

I did everything in my power to promote the game while playing and that is what it really takes. I know SP has tried the same tactic, so Zero-Sum got two free sources of PR.

Hey, no need to tell me about your efforts, it was your post on Usenet that got me to download the demo, which I found enjoyable enough to pay for. In Zero-Sum's defense, I _was_ worried about bugs that may be lurking after the demo, because I was pretty sure the demo probably got play-tested a lot more than the other areas...so if I feel any regret about paying money for the game, some of the blame definitely lies with me.

Also, as I re-read my post, it strikes me how somebody who knows nothing about the game would probably interpret my remarks as meaning that the game is completely unstable and bug-ridden. So I want to emphasize to others that that's not true at all; it has an acceptable stability level (for me anyway...a crash-to-desktop every hour or two is OK with me, given the handy auto-save feature), and none of the bugs I've found have been show-stopping. But the sheer number of minor annoyances pile up to form the conclusion that there is still work to do...and that's a disappointing feeling to have after spending any amount of money.

And although you may disagree with the mechanics of my suggestion about opening up the game for testing before charging money, I think we agree that the release could have been handled better. At least ZS is one of those rare cases that actually got this far, and can provide learning experiences for others to learn from...and for that they should again be commended.

This is a fun game, and my criticism really is meant to try and make the game better and help it achieve success. Let's hope the next patch makes it worthy of me joining your little PR campaign and talking it up more...because right now I can't do that...

 

[thathmew]

We actually tried to do pretty much exactly what you described, but had very limitted success with it. We did release a demo consisting only of Kellen and did get a couple dozen volunteers to playtest the full version.
We generally had very mixed results, some very good testers, some duds, some good testers who couldn't provide good info, it was damn hard to track down hardware issues long distance, which speaks to flaws in my coding/debugging systems, which I tried to make fairly robust. What eventually happened is that we found was we were generally getting less return and fixing less and spending more time interacting with testers than producing fixes than when various team members focussed exclusively on testing. A lot of that is procedure/system things that we didn't manage ideally, and I'll defiinitely handle the entire development process and the integration of QA in an entirely different way next time.
Also it seemed that people just weren't going to be interested in it until the actual full version was available and eventually we had to put it out there, kind of a catch-22 for us, but running out of time, money, we needed real feedback in way we weren't getting from all our efforts at beta's and demo's. Although we knew there were crashes and other issues we also felt that it had reach an "acceptable" level, i.e. that while imperfect that it was worth $25 and we lowered the price from out target of $35 in part because of all that.

Of course all of this is part of a much larger topic of the whole process of development and release. In tackling a project of this magnitude you learn at least as much about what not to do... <grin>


back to the grind,
-mat

 

[ecliptic]

I just wanted to say that I'm quite impressed by the availability and helpfulness of the crew that worked on this game in the forum.