Murdoc

Yeah I read that and still haven't been able to form a thought in words, just a sort of "blah" kind of spitting motion. In school we were told never work for free, they realize there are tons of talented people out there and I know when I was just starting out I'd do whatever it took to get some experience or to be part of a project. So the guy writing the article mentioned in the comments that once he had some money from a big deal he paid his employees back pay; that nice of him, though it brings up more questions as to what he will pay his employees to get finish the project he got the money from... a lot of this sounds like an unsustainable business model. Working for free/revenue share is a luxury most people can't afford and if you can afford it, then good on them, I guess? And even if the dude writing the article seems smart and a stand up fellow, there are a million people out there doing/trying the same thing as him that aren't. So to further the idea that it's OK to get a bunch of young, talented students together and convince them not to take salary is really the wrong direction for the industry, even if you happen to be the one guy that makes good on the offer. I'm not making my opinion because I fear young, hardworking, talent taking my job for lower wages or for free, just the same as I don't fear my job being shipped off to China or whatever; which is a very real fear for some people in this industry. I want the standards of the industry to rise, much like the comments of the writer, meaning little to no crunch time, flexible work space, creative freedom or at least space to work in, etc... and above all of these tenants, which I'm surprised he has missed out on, a fair wage for the work. He is paying his employees in the end or at some point, but a lot of it seems like a horse and pony show until that happens and relies heavily on some pretty specific circumstances (The employee can work for free, the game will eventually make money, he will make good on his word) and if he is making it work, great, but as I mentioned there are a million others that try the same thing and are taken advantage. So yeah, still haven't formed a coherent opinion or argument, but I still don't think it's right. Even if it is working for him, for now, I don't think it's sustainable and I don't think it should become an accepted practice in the industry because for every one of him there are a dozen of snake oil salesmen out there and that is bad for the industry.

Yeah, from my long game, the religion system seemed to be a mini game that gave your civilization the equivalent of perks. The perk system is cool, and how I tried to boost my religion with social policies, there seems to be something interesting going on, but it doesn't seem to do anything in terms of politics. The way the AI acts seems to be different on separate difficulties, as it should, but it's a bit perplexing. Like dibs just mentioned there was religious pressure, I had the same scenario as him and it did nothing to my relations. In another game, on a higher difficulty the only time I received pressure from another civ is when I neglected my military, as soon as boosted it up, everyone quieted down. @TurboPux ; Yeah that was probably it, the other civilizations had nothing else to trade, so they valued it more. I still love the series, to me civ 1 was more of a war game. By civ 3 and 4 the other features boosted the game to be something more, but I think at this point in the series and my life, I want to see those other features, politics, religion, culture fleshed out more. War will always be present in civilization and it's cool, but I really want to see a serious upgrade on the features I'd mention. Maybe I'm ready for a different series, but the only thing that comes to mind on the level of Civilization is something like Crusader Kings which is going a little too far in a direction I don't want. Maybe there is a gap in the 4x genre that could use a game like that, which would be neat to design out, or there is one and I'm totally oblivious of it.

As far as I know only Walgreens isn't in Canada, the rest are, albeit scattered, but the same can be said about them in America.

I'd be really curious to know the general break down of that, I imagine it includes marketing, since that usually costs more or equal to the development. With GTA they have characters to scan, voice actors to pay, scouting locations, and other general development fees, so I can see that getting up there. But for a fantasy scifi world that, at least in my perception, isn't a massive amount of content, can only imagine it all went to high level contracts and marketing.

I can't tell if this is real or not. They are so ugly, I want to say fake, but then so tacky, I want to say real. @Feelthedarkness I doubt you're the one carrying it if you can afford it.

I wonder if they factor in advertising budget or if they were talking about purely development costs. As far as I know GTA's usually are the most expensive video game produced, but their sales warrant a cost. To put so much money into development for a new IP is a bit crazy(as in interesting).

All of this stuff is super cool, but the biggest problem coming from a developer stand point is who is going to have all this crap to take advantage of it for a game? A VR game, cool! Ok, what about a controller? No guarantees even for something as basic as that. Peripherals like Leap? No one is going to have that and the only reason anyone would is an awesome product that took advantage of it, but the probability of an awesome product that warrants to cost of VR and a Leap before a user base is low. That's the most disappointing thought about all of this cool stuff, we're still years and years off from ever seeing any of these cool ideas adopted by any significant amount of developers, if it ever does. It'd take the initiative of a Sony or MS to release their next console with all the bells and whistles any sort of headway can happen with this stuff in games. I'm sure there will be neat experiments along the way for those that's want to buy all these odds and ends to get the experience; I'll probably be watching them through youtube.

Really impressed by the execution of the art, it looks really solid and TF2-esq, so that's super cool. Jealous that this their day job now, super cool.

Ah crap, that ski lift sounds really familiar... I have no idea what game that was, but math problems sparks something to. Unless I am taking every apple 2 game I played and vaguely combining them together to create what ever that description is.

Does anyone know if they tuned the difficulty in Gods and Kings? Because I just had the most bizarre civilization game of my entire life. I'm playing on the difficulty I always do(which is super low, but it was always a challenge to me) and I just trounced everything. Near the end even the second super power was fighting my giant death robots with men on horseback, I don't remember ever seeing that large of a gap between civ eras in any of my games before, it was really weird. Yeah, I think I'll try Brave New World as some of the features seem to be cool for the late game, but am a bit disappointing with the pricing structure of these. I want Brave New World for the game-play additions that seem like it could very much be a mod/dlc/ or something that would have been in the base game, but it seems like the pricing on this is more for the additional content they added like civs, which is something I don't necessarily care about. Trading might only be crippled, but I find it totally broken. The AI is completely unreasonable, they want a 10:1 value on any trades it seems. Also, and this seems just a bit picky, but Mongolia was asking for Uranium when they were two eras behind and had no idea what Uranium even was. I'm not entirely sure if the religion system ended up being all that cool. It really didn't factor in at all on the surface and as far as I can tell, it basically boils down to perks for your civ, which helped me greatly in terms of money and such, but didn't seem to do anything politically. Most of the world was predominately one religion, except for Germany, who was trying to advance their own, but it didn't seem to do anything in terms of the other civs perception of Germany or their alliances. So it really left me to wonder what it's all used for, I've been playing civ since the beginning and is one of my favorite series, but I think maybe my expectations or a bit high after 4 or I am looking for something a bit different and more robust in terms of politics in a game like this. Maybe BNW will help on the politics side with the world congress thing.

Maybe they have tuned it a bit better for the consoles, but when I stuck it on expert, the enemies became sponges and while there was a risk in dying, it was utterly boring to watch my dude bash an enemy for 30 hits until it went down. I put it down after my post above and never picked it up again, with all the recent console talk, maybe it's time to give it a shot again.

So apparently TurboPubx-16 take away of Civ 5 is the same as mine. I just bought Gods and Kings, I did't get Brave New World, I might check it out if the world congress thing seems interesting, but I didn't feel like I needed more civs. My thoughts revisiting Civ 5 and Gods&Kings are here, rather than duplicating posts; but it seems like Turbo hit the nail on the head so may not be worth reading. I'll update when I get further into my game to see if any of this religion stuff matters int he end or its just a system to distract me from the stuff I don't like. *My comments read negative about the game, mostly because I'm pretty ambivalent on the changes from 4, but I'm still putting hours into it, so I think it's done something that I like, I just can't put my finger on it like I can the issues. https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/6616-civilization-5/?p=311117

Man, finding this thread again was a little difficult, but it seems to be the main IT Civ 5 thread... though I recall commenting about it more when it came out, so maybe there is another hidden one out there somewhere... Either way, I felt like playing Civ again this weekend and with the 2K sale picked up Gods and Kings as the exclusion of religion from Civ 5 was really disappointing. Since I don't see my comments that I was pretty sure I made at some point about the game, I never really got "into" Civ 5. The hexes were interesting, but not that much of a change, the politics didn't seem that good compared to Civ 4, the trading was broken, and even with mods, it just didn't capture me like Civ 4 did. I understood it was starting to change things up, but it felt bare bones and not fun like the previous civ games. With that said, I still have played nearly 30 hours of the damn thing, so something is here. Anyway, Gods and Kings. I really can't tell what they've added and haven't added other than religion. I'm dealing with spys now, that I don't remember doing before, so there is some extra intrigue here and there, the religion stuff is neat, but I haven't quite figured out if this will determine anything. It wasn't a very involved system in Civ and the fact you can only found one religion(I think) in Civ 5 does make it much more important, so I'm having a pretty fun time trying to spread my faith and there are some qualifiers that of "pressure" to each city, but I'm not sure what that actually is effecting. I don't see a change in rulers attitudes to me and I'm not sure if a holy war can exist if someone isn't following the rest of the world, like it could in Civ 4. The system seems more sophisticated than Civ 4, but it still feels oddly disconnected from the rest of the game. I don't know it well enough, so I'm just not getting the sense it's effecting anything of meaning, it's just another way to compete or "battle". I'll keep with it to see how this shakes up as it is interesting. Trading is still totally broken, the politics/rulers are still weird, I dunno, I'm not getting the sense of consistency and history(as in my relationship with a ruler over a period of time) like I did in Civ 4 and my long standing complaint about the series as a whole is that it's still not very involved or as sophisticated as Alpha Centuri or Test of Time. Granted that might not be where their focus is. But it still feels "Gamey"; the leaders are irrational, one day they love me, the next day they don't, then they are afraid, and all I have to do is give them money or a spell book and they'll have sex with me or whatever. But with that, it would be interesting to see a more consistent history of a factions relationship over time, an involved system of discussion would be neat to, instead of determining compatible views based solely on actions, you could discuss policies and such that would could potentially sway their opinion. Maybe I have a poor memory, but Alpha Centauris UN stuff was a little like that and a step in the right direction. The best feature is renaming a religion and it's probably the only reason I"m still playing, I like the idea that the my faction, Japan, founded Scientology in 530 BC and is the predominate religion in a struggle against Christianity, so I'm pretty much making up my own fun at this point, yet still playing; I think it does a lot of these right, but an equal amount of things I have gripes with. It's hard to go back to Civ 4, but at the same time I think I'd be better off spending my time with that.

Ah that's it, thank you! Capsule; Chamber; knew it was something like that.

Okay, have another one. I don't think a mockup will be necessary as it was a game discussed on Idle Thumbs at some point. I believe it was a web game, possibly rogue like. You are a little chamber(I call it a chamber because I thought thats what the game was called, but I can't find it on google) and I think there were heavy screen effects that made it look like you were going looking at a really shitty CRT or something. Top down view , you move your chamber around collecting...things(?) and possibly encountering enemies. Air might have been a resource, as I remember there was either a very specific sound design of you running out of air. The discussion on IT was what the intention of the game was, I think they thought it was underwater, where as I figured it was space. I'm pretty sure Sean thought it was underwater and had some pretty good evidence to back that up. It was also black and white or something close to. I'll create a mock up later if I can remember enough of it, Im sure it was just simple shapes, like an apple IIe game.

Yeah I remember him saying that at GDC, before I even knew who Phil Fish was. I remember I agreed with him, and while a statement like that can be taken out of context, he wasn't necessarily wrong when he further explained it. Is that what really caused it? That's just absurd. My guess is its more the engagement of trolls than anything, though why those people exist to antagonize him is another mystery. Anyway, didn't mean to derail the thread about an amazing game, just such a weird situation on both sides of whatever you'd call this.

Ah, I never did watch that movie. Maybe I should... or shouldn't from the sounds of it.

I don't really follow twitter or personal stuff about developers; but what exactly makes people upset at him? I saw him on a GB thing and he seemed like a fine, quirky guy and his game speaks enough to me that maybe I'm giving him a pass for stuff I don't notice, I dunno.

Yeah I saw the quicklook of this and it felt a little too inspired by Proteus but with similiar mechanics from the rest of the genre it's going for. It all seems alright, but not my jam. I did buy the soundtrack though because it's pretty nice. http://icewatergames.bandcamp.com/releases

Not to get into the discussion as to why, because it's absolutely maddening. But do you know if his reactionary tweet is serious? Because, seriously, I love, love, love FEZ. I don't have a million dollars or whatever it would take to do this. Is there a way we could set up a crowdfunding thing to to purchase any of this to curate it. I worry who would actually end up owning it.

Yeah I finally picked it up on the sale, I really should have bought it earlier. Though to be fair, I've watched enough footage of the game where I don't feel like I need to play it, but I did appreciate what it was doing. Still not in love with the character art. I'm going to fire it up at noon to see what might have changed or what have you. I remember talking with a friend about the game as he was helping Pittman with some feedback before release, so I'd be curious to see if some of the design suggestions were ever implemented. edit: Yeah... don't play the asylum expansion if you haven't played for awhile. It seems like a cool new area and a bit more of a challenge than some of the other areas. I do like the game and there is a certain charm to the visuals and atmosphere, I think the sound design by far does the best job to reinforce that though. I have no idea how these levels are created, but, and the obvious comparison here, is looking at it compared to minecrafts random seed(or whatever) for generation could be improved to be a bit more interesting. The lighting and atmosphere really could be bumped up too. So whether its just an update or in the sequel, it would be cool to see some improvement in this area. Like I said, it has its charm and is cool, but the possibilities of what it could be would suck me in a lot more.

Nearly every FPS theme is irresponsible at best if you consider the real life implications. Just because there are actual serious problems in the real world that are sort of, but not really related to a games theme (Meaning the real life problems that we are currently facing has nothing to do with one of the outcomes of those problems; militarized police) makes me just baffled at the response some people are taking to Hardline when they haven't blinked at other games in the past. I'm not trying to defend anything here or point fingers, but I feel like a back seat observer and am continually confused at how people can look at Hardline and say its appalling or irresponsible but didn't say anything for the countless war games in the middle east, Africa, or about WW2. Maybe I'm dumb, approaching this from the wrong angle, but what's the difference other than timing?

An Idle Thumbs Forum Succession Fort The Legendary Plane The Age of Myth ▪1051▪ A time where living gods and mighty beasts still held sway ▪▪▪Contents▪▪▪ Year 01 --Murdoc Stouthate--▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪ Preface ▪ Summer 1050 ▪▪▪ Friends, the situation in these ancient halls is becoming ridiculous. The Outrageous Lantern, whom founded our mountain home, Sealfrenzies, have gone overboard, into, well, the outraeous. It was nearly 60 years ago when they abolished the Hall of Lords and took he crown from newy appointed king, Zulbar Slickcrafted, whom was a large supporter of our order. By now, we can all assume that the Outrageous Lantern ploted the assassinatation in a plan to place the ostentatious Nish Drivenknife in the throne. While very young at the time, most of our senior members, including myself can remember cleary how that moment immediatly changed the dynamics of Sealfrenzies. Our esteemed hall, The Fainted Lanterns, was founded on the principles to balance the peacockery and jaunty ideals of the Outrageous Lantern with a more conservative and responsible approach. However, cutting off our political power in the Hall of Lords, we have been absolutely ineffective in curbing the grandiose and high-falutin governing in Sealfrenzies. Also, on a very personal note, the junior citizens won't get the hell off my mushroom lawn! Over the winter we have prepared with a small expedition of our most elder members to leave Sealfenzies in the spring and set out to establish our own mountain hall. It will be decades, if not centuries before our new home will equal Sealfrenzies, but be assured when the fortress has reached this status we expect our entire Hall to leave the Outrageous Latern and join us in our new home. ▪▪▪ Lungfurnace, Year 01 ▪▪▪ Spring 1051 ▪▪▪ Our perilous journey has ended! After a long trek topside that resuled in the loss of some of our more senior members will not be in vain. We arrived near the steppes of a virgin rock, The Mortal Axe. Traveling along the brook of Wisperwatch, we followed the brook for weeks when our expedition leader, a young military man of sixty spotted the ridge with two tall peaks poking into the awful blue abyss. Even in late winter, there was no snow, nor ice and the tropical vegetation has our woodsmen salivating over the possibilities. After our miners did some geological samples the site proved to be more than suitable to begin construction! The local wildlife seems docile, consisting of numerous lungfsh, a few elephants, a variety of birds, and, as we found out later, a pack of rats. We scouted around for a week to find a suitable spot to break ground for our claim and there were an abundance of spots to make the initial settlement. This caused much disagreement between the seven of us, as each area offered a different strategy for establishment. It was clear that our expedition leader, Dibsric Snorestorer, while capable of leading an expedition, military, and possibly a mountain hall, was not qualified for the initial civic planning. Extensive preperations was made for the journey, but there will always be some holes in any plan; ours first being that we had no skysodding architect! So I, Murdoc Stoutehate, a mechanic, was chosen to plan the initial settlement in hopes to create a long term foundation for growth and prosperity. The initial site was clear to me, we didn't want to take on anything too big to begin with, but wanted a spot that had enough potential to grow into legend. The twin peaks stuck out like two giant smoke stacks with Whisperwatch river cutting straight between them. We couldn't ask for a more appropriate region, Whisperwatch would be used as a water and power source, fishing, and defense. The two large peaks would be carved out into monumental military fortresses while the smoke from our fires of industry billow out from the stacks to let all those knows that dwarves reign here! We named it Lungfurnace. ▪▪▪ Lungfurnace, Year 01 ▪▪▪ Summer 1051 ▪▪▪ Summer has arrived, so I happy to announce that we have established the first level our settlement camp to cover our heads from that raging inferno of a sun. It is no Sealfrenzies, but we have beds to sleep in, a meeting room, adequate storage and a few craft shops. Our most notable craftsmen, Fatcat MacMeadjaw has been working nonstop on tables, chairs, doors, and beds. Our expedition leader, Dibsric has organized a militia of the most qualified members; unfortunately everyone is too busy with settlement tasks to actually organize and train. This may have cause some concern in the future, but at the moment, with only seven of us, we cannot support a full or part time military. With this in mind, I believe it to be prudent and responsible to get some basic defenses built for the entrance, but so far we have spotted nothing hostile in the region. What is most important to me is to get our agriculture sectors up and running along with some minor commercial interests for trade. We have plenty of food and drink, but I do fear if we don't start irrigation quickly we may be in for a grizzly winter. On a personal note; This is no call for alarm, but there has been talk between a few of us about the odd noises being heard throughout the corridors at night. Some believe it to be a wild bird, others think this mountain may be haunted, but what I can personally attest to is that there is a noise moving through the halls and it is, what I can best describe, akin to a trumpeting bird. Hopefully we can solve this mystery, as it is causing some fears among the group. ▪▪▪ Lungfurnace, Year 01 ▪▪▪ Winter 1051 ▪▪▪ Pardon the lack of record keeping for an entire season, but Fall proved to be the most productive thus far. While history may find that my age is catching up with me I will remain on record to being too productive to bother with cataloging mundane civic tasks, and not some senile mossback. Fifteen workers arrived in early Fall, double the number of our current settlement! Many of them friends and members of The Fainted Lanterns back in Sealfrenzies. A much needed mason and book keeper, Boost Bindbeard among them along with some other peasents and skilled laborors. Though not a miner among them, a proffessional in high demand at the moment as expansion is slow. Immediately, Boost was set to work on building some walls around and above us, rock grates to block anything flowing in from Whisperwatch and the miners were able to channel the brook into a semi-functional moat. Much work still remains on the cliff above the entrance, with squaring them off and building walls along the edge. Irrigation efforts started in the Fall within several large rooms below on the second tier. Call it over precaution, but a permanent grate was installed, a flood gate attached to a nearby lever was also built to help in these efforts. When the flood gate is open, water will flow from Whisperwatch into the large rooms and produce the suitable mud needed for farming. One oversight that can be easily corrected, is that instead of flowing water directly into the rooms, would be to build a small hallway "tunnel" to direct water to various parts of the tier. Thankfully only one minor hiccup occurred in the irrigation effort. Some peasant stumpy decided to remove a much needed door during the flooding process which resulted in some very minor water in unwanted areas. As I write this, there is no flooding left, however the ground in the hall of the second tier is now a bit soft. With the overall success, I have switched my focus from mechanic to planting crops as we are running out of food quickly after the new arrivals. Booze is also running low, so our expedition leader and only brewer has set to work in the still...however that effort quickly ended after a lengthy search in the store rooms proved that we didn't bring the adequate plants for brewing! Absolute tragedy! How a dwarf expedition set off with no method of brewing could potentially put The Fainted Lanterns and Lungfurance in the History Book of Foolishness, which so far has only been reserved for the most stubbiest of naives. Thankfully we have the seeds, so planting should be done quickly and the liaison from Sealfrenzies is expected to arrive this season, which hopefully will prove something adequate for brewing. With the year closing and many tasks left unfinished, I feel unsatisfied with my time. The first year of Lungfurnace may have been uneventful, but without incident we have established farms, workshops, dorm rooms, a meeting hall, and some pretty O.K defenses. We won't starve and hopefully with a functioning brewery so we won't be with out booze. I have many notes for short and long term plans to propose which I will leave with my successor for civic planning. So with that, I return to my full time duties of grower and planter in hopes the next planner can expand on the foundation and maybe even give us all our own rooms, as the dormitories are getting crowded. Murdoc Stouthate's notes for future developing.

I tried to get that graphical mod working this weekend... I banged on it for a couple hours with no luck and gave up. Think I'll go back to the simple sprite mods again and actually try to play the game. There seems to be a lot of changes since I last played in setting up the world.

I get the feeling a lot of lion head people got out after fable 2. The direction of that series took a significant shift and even being a fable studio, they aren't producing anything good with it. I played some more Godus today. There is a decent God game in here, but you'll never get to play it as it is wholly wrapped in f2p, casual, mobile BS. The game starts to feel like bnw2 a bit, but less fun, less good looking, less features, and one where you get to wait 40 minutes for a house to be built, or you wait 40 minutes while playing a really boring, puzzle-ish mini game. Even if they took out the additional pay features for PA the foundation and time tuning is f2p, where you won't be sitting down for a couple hours to play straight through a solid chunk. Decent ideas, not especially new, but wrapped in a different intention that isn't appealing to me.