Sui Generis (Kickstarter)

[toblix]

Holy fucking shit, someone is kickstarting an RPG! Wait, let me finish!

I haven't read the details carefully, but there was something about a huge, living world in which every character has an advanced AI or something like that. Anyway, the engine looks pretty cool. Here is the link for it: here.

[Twig]

I've skimmed through that Kickstarter on multiple occasions, and... it's just too dark. I hate it.

[Lu]

The combat reminds me of QWOP in a way, in that it looks wonky as shit.

[Salacious Snake]

Yeah, I love the drunken staggering. Physics-based animation systems like that tend to have really goofy results. I'm totally into it.

[Orv]

Toblix, you really need to go over the pitch completely man.

[Frenetic Pony]

The video looks great! But I can't help think this is yet another British Kickstarter made by naive guys that have no idea or experience with how much work a large video game can actually take. There's a reason projects like Planetary Annihilation and Project Eternity set their MINIMUM at a million dollars. This wants to be those projects and more, with less than a third the budget and no mention of any actual experience.

A tech demo is far, far easier than an actual game.

[brkl]

I can think of many games not nearly as complicated to pull off as that technology.

Also, Sir, You Are Being Hunted asked for less than third of Sui Generis' goal, and that team has released a couple of games.

[Twig]

Yeah the tech is really impressive. I am a fan. CAUSTICS.

That physics.

[Frenetic Pony]

I can think of many games not nearly as complicated to pull off as that technology.

Also, Sir, You Are Being Hunted asked for less than third of Sui Generis' goal, and that team has released a couple of games.

There's a huge difference between Sir You Are Being Hunted and what they're vaguely promising in this game. Then again, maybe I'm reading too much into what they're promising. Their procedural generation stuff could help a lot, though that is quit complicated to get right. Maybe they'll just be doing something like Diablo, a just kind of straight up, procedural "here's stuff." Kind of game. If that's the case, which now that I think about it could be, they may well just accomplish it.

[Roderick]

For some reason it reminds me of Dink Smallwood (remember Dink Smallwood?). The tech stuff looks really good, though in these types of games it is the handcrafted content (writing, quests, characters), not the interlocking mechanics, that make for an excellent gaming experience. I'm also curious how they'll achieve their impressive ambitions with merely 150k. On the face of it though, barring the awful name, it looks like a neat little thing.

[toblix]

I would be metric tons more interested if they, instead of going for the typical RPG thing with a huge world and tons of shit, they used that seemingly sweet engine to maybe do a small, highly detailed location. Maybe a game taking place in a single castle (or why even a castle?) or something. You can definitely do a lot of interesting stuff with that physics and lighting engine, and that sweet, awkward animation/fighting system has potential for so much hilarity, excitement and unique interaction, and it kills me that the first instinct is to make it BIG and HUGE.

[filk]

I would be metric tons more interested if they, instead of going for the typical RPG thing with a huge world and tons of shit, they used that seemingly sweet engine to maybe do a small, highly detailed location. Maybe a game taking place in a single castle (or why even a castle?) or something. You can definitely do a lot of interesting stuff with that physics and lighting engine, and that sweet, awkward animation/fighting system has potential for so much hilarity, excitement and unique interaction, and it kills me that the first instinct is to make it BIG and HUGE.

That's a really great perspective. I think no matter what size their world is, they will have the same "scale" of content, the question is moreso what the fictional scale will be. Something like Skyrim happens on a ostensibly provincial scale, but of course all the towns are tiny, there isn't enough agriculture to support the people, and the population of monsters is higher than the population of people tenfold. Questions like these are important. My first question when seeing this was "why does it have to be a fantasy setting?" Except for the melee combat system and magic, nothing about the impressiveness of that engine demands a fantasy setting.

That being said, the ambitions in their latest update, plus their tech-first approach make me really want to support it (I'm a programmer). The things that bother me most about Skyrim, for example, is that it's impossible to be just a dude. Even if you mod the game to start somewhere else, everyone references your heroism and stuff. Sometimes I wish RPGs supported smaller-scale lifestyles. These guys are talking about that at least, and they're passionate. If it was only first person, I would double my donation.

[kael]

One real problem with a kickstarter like this is that it relies heavily on backers' imaginations. They dedicate a ton of time and energy to talking up the potential of their technology and the strength of their design approach. As a game developer, I can understand this and try and extrapolate from that to imagine what they can build with that technology, but I don't think the average gamer is going to be able to create remotely realistic expectations, and I think in some cases such a strong focus on technology can drive people away.

Sometimes a piece of technology has immediately obvious, cool uses - Oculus Rift being one notable example where I think pretty much anyone who saw the kickstarter pitch for it immediately understood why it might be interesting - but this is not one of those cases. A kickstarter pitch video where multiple seconds are spent dragging light sources and tables and chairs around is probably not doing a very good job of communicating a project's potential to the layman unless the project is actually about physically simulating tables and chairs. Again, as a programmer, I can look at that technology and think 'that's neat', but even so, it's not neat enough to make me want to give them money, because the kickstarter is theoretically about a game, not an engine. For a more informative example, look at CLANG - their kickstarter pitch was fundamentally about technology, but they repeatedly connected the dots and explained clearly to a layman what that cool new technology would do for them.

It's unfortunate, really. There are some tiny glimpses of great stuff in there, even though I mostly like the pitch video because it's full of hilariously bad looking janky animation - but as a whole it conveys a picture of a development team that's hopelessly obsessed with technology at the expense of things that make a game world fun to explore or make a game's mechanics interesting to interact with. The design aspirations they express on the kickstarter page are admirable but ultimately meaningless given that the game hasn't actually been designed or built yet, which makes it inevitable that some (if not all) of their design decisions will have to be reconsidered once they make contact with reality.

I hope these guys figure out how to bring their kickstarter to successful completion. They might be able to pick up momentum if they rework it to focus on the project's strengths and get people more excited - there's enough interest around it to suggest that it's possible.

P.S. It pisses me off that kickstarter shows prices in £ for users coming from countries that don't use that as a currency. Showing backer levels in price points that mean literally nothing to people is not a great way to encourage them to take a chance and back something. (And yes, I don't think the prices should be in USD for American kickstarters if you're from outside the US, either).

[Twig]

For some reason it reminds me of Dink Smallwood (remember Dink Smallwood?). The tech stuff looks really good, though in these types of games it is the handcrafted content (writing, quests, characters), not the interlocking mechanics, that make for an excellent gaming experience. I'm also curious how they'll achieve their impressive ambitions with merely 150k. On the face of it though, barring the awful name, it looks like a neat little thing.

OH MAN I REMEMBER DINK SMALLWOOD!

...Sorry, that's really all I had to say.

EDIT: I found more: Actually, I'd like a revisit to the idea of Dink Smallwood. There were a ton of user-created quests using the Dink engine. I mean, most of them were trash, but... these days, with the greater ease in sharing user-created content, whoa. U:

[ThunderPeel2001]

Shit! I want this to succeed just so I can play with that engine myself. It looks awesome! Imagine Middle Earth accurately rendered. Or Westeros. Or just some really cool place.

I'm not convinced by their skills as artists (check out their website... yikes!), but technically they've totally impressed me. Someone (maybe them?) could do amazing things with this engine.

[Twig]

Yeah, I basically backed it for the tech alone. I'm really hoping they'll release the tools to the public.

Seems like they're interested in doing so, but not fully. Understandable, I suppose, but I think the more tech-savvy could do some really cool things with a complete toolset.

Will an editor / modding tool be included with the game?

We will do whatever we can to make this possible but we're not yet comfortable with promising a complete modding solution. Some of the more advanced features currently require significant technical knowledge and providing a broad user friendly experience could prove challenging. Please consider that our resources are limited.