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Project Godus: Don't believe his lies

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Well you could change it... :)

Can a mod change the thread title to 'Project Godus: Don't believe his tears'

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Molyneus is one of my favorite designers. He constantly under-delivers on him promises, but he also constantly delivers quality games! Some better than others, but none are ever outright bad.

Although I always forget this cube thing does bring me to tears with how stupid it is. Interesting, but also completely stupid. I guess, to be fair, aside from technical issues, it is exactly what he promised. X:

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The RPS interview just really is fantastic. I mean, stuff like this:

RPS: Back before Curiosity launched, you talked a lot about the technology underlying it and the fact that you were trying to make something that could bear the load of so many people simultaneously tapping away at it. Why didn’t that work?

Molyneux: The main reason? It was my fault completely. The server guys here said, “How many people do you think you’re going to have coming online?” This is the reality of it. I’ve done three talks. I did a talk at Rezzed, I did a talk at Unite, and I did a talk at MIT. There was the Wired article, but that was back in mid-October. So I said, “Look, it’s going to be a slow ramp up. We’re not going to go out to the press, we’re not going to start talking about it until we’ve proved our tech in the marketplace. The only way to do that with this is to get people to start using it.”

So those poor guys, instead of implementing 15 servers as there are now, they implemented a solution which was only one server, because they thought that they would have at least a couple of weeks before that one server was being pushed. The reality was [very different]. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. I wasn’t even online when it launched. I was in Israeli security because I’d just given a talk in Israel and I was fighting my way back. I had done one tweet saying, “Oh my God, I don’t believe Curiosity is out.”

But by the time I landed and got back to England, it had had 200,000 downloads. And all those people hitting our server, a single server, and trying to get on and trying to register and trying to go through Facebook and trying to tap at once… We were totally taken by surprise. Those poor guys, they turned around to me and looked at me with hatred as they said, “Look. As quick as we can, we have to implement our cluster-based solution, which we didn’t really want to implement.” They got this load-balancing solution out as quick as they could, and a mistake was made, which was a schoolboy mistake, but it was impossble to unravel. We lost the gold.

RPS: That puts you, with the Kickstarter I think, in a bit of a precarious position. You being you, a lot of people look at your work and say, “OK, he’s a guy who promises a whole lot and then it doesn’t always work out that way.” And now they have a very fresh reminder of that in how Curiosity turned out. Do you think that will make people a little more hesitant to donate to Kickstarter, because they’re not sure if you can actually pull off GODUS as you promise it?

Molyneux: Probably, yeah. What that means is that we would have to go down a more traditional publishing route. Whilst I’ve got lots of friends in publishing, it would be a shame. But you’re right. It just wasn’t good enough. We should have… I shouldn’t have been… Well, I don’t know how I could have predicted this. It’s just a cube in a corner of a white room. I don’t know what we did that made two million people download it, and download it in such a short time. I wish I had some time machine and could go back two weeks. You live by your mistakes, for sure.

I just love how his main failing here was the opposite of what everyone dings him for - it's a complete lack of hubris that makes him think his stupid cube thing won't be popular, but instead everyone on Earth downloads it twice and melts the servers.

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Haha, man. I said in the Curiosity thread I thought the issues were all probably down to a poorly-configured web server infrastructure, but I couldn't have imagined it was only the one server they had taking on all that load. Holy shit, no wonder it pretty much exploded for days on end. With that much traffic hitting a single server it can be hard for admins to even access it, never mind set up a different configuration while being hammered. Not where you ever, ever want to be.

But yeah, the interview just further reminds me why I love Molyneux. He seems to just think of himself as the same bedroom programmer he was years ago, and when he discusses his projects it's just like how me and my creative buddies at college would roll ideas around and get excited about them (and never make them of course). It doesn't seem to occur to him he's setting alight the imaginations of billions of people.

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Yeah, that interview is golden. I backed Godus (5£, not enough for a copy) just to reward that spirit.

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They're gonna smash it surely, they are about 1/4 funded in two days? is that good going... i never followed a kickstarters progress before

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They're gonna smash it surely, they are about 1/4 funded in two days? is that good going... i never followed a kickstarters progress before

Solid but not a record certainly. Project Eternity hit it's million dollar goal (> than the GODUS goal) in less than 24 hours. Can't imagine what the current record holder, Star Citizen, managed.

It's honestly a bit unpredictable. Some hit very fast and hard the first couple of days, and then drop off until another surge at the end. Some just keep going alright throughout. I certainly hope this makes it, if only because

"I believe in Peter Molyneux"

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I really hope it gets funded.

I wonder if these kickstarters plan on getting like 4x what they ask for. If has to be something you'd consider. Especially after the unexpected success of curiosity, if must be in the back of there minds. What happens if you just end up with far more money then you needed? Keep adding shit?

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They had planned to have stretch goals but they hadn't decided on them at the time of starting the Kickstarter - they earned much more money more quickly than they had anticipated so it was a matter of making up stretch goals on the fly based on what they had vaguely planned in advance.

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You can always have prettier assets, tighten up the gameplay, fix more bugs, develop for more platforms. There's no "too much money". Look at Resident Evil 6. You can always hire another dude to do more stuff.

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So, I think the title of this thread has a little more meaning now.

 

I backed Godus, but haven't been keeping up with the updates because I'll just wait for the thing to be done. But I was curious as to the reaction from the whole Curiosity Cube thing.

 

Looking on the comments page a few people are upset, which I guess is understandable, but really I like the idea how anyone can be god of gods and that guy could be topped within a week.

 

So I read further down...

 

Now I haven't found any confirmation on what exactly is going on in the project, as I need to read like a million updates that they made, but apparently it's a primarily IoS Free to Play game that now has a publisher.

 

That's where I raise an eyebrow and get a little worried. There's always a risk backing any kickstarter, so you have to take it with a grain of salt, but I'm pretty sure when I pitched in my money the idea of this game wasn't Free to Play and it was intended to be an independent production with a publisher. I don't care if they charge for the game or not, except Free to Play isn't a literal term that it may have once been, it means the very nature of the game design changes to support this model. 

 

Am I crazy in now being one of backers upset about this or am I just getting caught up in the usual internet negativity bs?

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It's only free to play on iOS.

 

Although I understand your concern about it affecting the PC version. That was my life as shooters transferred from being designed for PC first to console first.

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It's only free to play on iOS.

 

Although I understand your concern about it affecting the PC version. That was my life as shooters transferred from being designed for PC first to console first.

 

Here's this really, really great interview with Molyneux on WHY it's free to play on mobile: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/05/30/molyneux-on-godus-surprise-publisher-free-to-play/

 

Basically, after having so much trouble dealing with the backend and making any money of Curiosity, he's decided that they don't want to deal with that on Godus and so will just have someone else do it for them, which is where the publisher comes in. It's a really smart decision, and definitely the right one, but it also reveals the downside of Kickstarter Projects. You still have a stupid, uninformed boss of sorts, but now that "boss" is all the people that backed you rather than vomit spewing corporate Satan.

 

I.E. if you're doing a Kickstarter you really have to learn to check what you say and how you say it. Something Molyneux isn't good at of course. Still, if this interview had been the press release I don't think there'd have been any uproar whatsoever.

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Guys, Moleneux puts out the craziest reality distortion field when you're in the room with him. I saw the first public demo of Godus today, and it looks pretty damn cool.

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I think the trick with Molyneux is to give him a tiny budget/team and basically no real deadlines so that he actually has the space to realise what he should and shouldn't put in.

The dev videos from the kickstarter have shown their process to be pretty good.

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They were asking for play testers today on twitter, their office is only about an hour up the road from me but I'm a massive lazy twat and this game has like no guns

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Maybe if you drove out there you could give him the valuable feed back that if they don't put in god guns no one will buy this game!

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27 minutes of playing the beta and my initial thought is "Not fun."

 

Here's why; I'm pretty sure I heard Molyneux speak during a gdc talk or something about one of the main reasons Populous came about was that he was learning programming and thought moving terrain up and down was fun. Well, he must have forgotten that because the core mechanic of dragging and stretching terrain in Godus isn't fun and is kind of frustrating. 

 

It's possible it's a tuning issue, in Populous a few clicks will give you flat enough terrain that a follower can put a house down, but in Godus it seems to take a lot of clicks to even get something that will be reasonable, thus the early game is a lot of waiting and clicking... but even the functionality of it leads me to believe there will be a lot of clicking.

 

Which brings up my second reason as to why it isn't fun; clicking. Maybe the curiosity cube broke Molyneux brain, but this game is all about clicking. Clicking a thousand times on the terrain just to get one small thing accomplished, clicking on the houses to get more mana, clicking on the houses to drive your new followers out of their home to do something, clicking on cards, etc...

 

This game is super click heavy and not fun, it's starting to feel like a facebook game.

 

Initial reaction and only 27 minutes into, I'll keep playing, but my hands are tired from clicking

 

*Also you can rotate the camera, but when you start clicking it rotates back to default view... it's a choice on the developer and I'm not sure why.

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In the demonstration I was shown at PAX, there are varying levels of terrain deformation as you level up your god-hood. At one point he was able to double-click and create a pretty large outcropping with one action. But yes, that did look kinda tedious.

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