Reddit QA on Feb 2014

Anything related to Wolfire Games and/or its products
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Endoperez
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Reddit QA on Feb 2014

Post by Endoperez » Sun Feb 02, 2014 4:01 am

Feel free to copy-paste answers from the Reddit thread here, so it's easier to look up down the line.

Oh, and here's the link to the Reddit proper
http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/ ... vergrowth/

I'll start with the big one:

when Overgrowth might be done?
[+] 1
Hoodoo456 wrote:Sorry if this is a common question, but do have any idea when Overgrowth might be done? Or just an idea of when the story will be done? It's killing me waiting for the final product.
WolfireDavid Wolfire Games wrote:We are hoping to have the game more or less content complete within a year or so, and then we can focus on polish, optimization and bug fixes for a while. That's not a guarantee or anything, just what we are aiming for now!

Do you still think that having such an open development process for the whole time was a good idea for the game, or is it starting to hurt people's perceptions of it?
[+] 2
Jaggerlink wrote:As someone who has been following Overgrowth pretty much from the beginning I really appreciate the totally open development process you have used. However, as the game has started to really come together more people preorder expecting something of a finished product. I see people get frustrated because of how long the game has been in development.

Do you still think that having such an open development process for the whole time was a good idea for the game, or is it starting to hurt people's perceptions of it?
WolfireDavid Wolfire Games wrote:I think people have unrealistic expectations for the release cycle of this kind of game because of how AAA games are announced. Most big games are only announced after several years of development! E.g. Assassin's Creed seems to have yearly releases, but it is actually several teams working in parallel -- each one takes multiple years to make. Or if you look at Naughty Dog, they started on Last Of Us right after completing Uncharted 2, but a different internal team released Uncharted 3 in the meantime.
WolfireAubrey Wolfire Games wrote:I think being open about the development process has been a great way of allowing people to see that game development is often a slow and steady process.

Now people who are interested can look back a year or two, and see exactly the things we have done, and that can help them with their expectations.

Of course I think everybody wishes that we could make Overgrowth faster :) As you point out though, it is mostly the people newest to the community that have some unrealistic assumptions about how easy it is to make a game like the one we are making.
[snip]
WolfireDavid Wolfire Games wrote:Yeah, I don't blame players at all; from an external point of view games are usually released a year or so after announcement, so it looks like games only take a year or so to make. Just wanted to clarify the actual process for anyone reading this AMA.

It was definitely worth it for us though to announce early -- if we weren't doing open development, nobody would have heard of Overgrowth! We might not even have announced it yet.
Last edited by Endoperez on Sun Feb 02, 2014 7:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Endoperez
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Re: Reddit QA on Feb 2014

Post by Endoperez » Sun Feb 02, 2014 4:14 am

Online? also Early access and racial fighting styles.
[+] 3
thegreatself wrote:How important do you think the "early access" model of funding is to success of independent games and developers?

David, are you still interesting in adding online/network multiplayer to Overgrowth, and if so how do you envision it playing out with the extremely quick nature of the combat?

What kind of things can we expect to see in terms of really making each species fighting style distinct?
WolfireDavid Wolfire Games wrote:The early access model is great for developers with a really good game, with a really bad pitch. For example, the idea for Minecraft sounds terrible on paper. A really low-res blocky game with no story or objectives? Why would anyone pay for that? But it's immediately appealing if you try it. That is the ideal case for early access.

I am still thinking about online. The Overgrowth combat system would actually be more lag-tolerant than most, because there is less timing required for attacks -- just for blocks. It might be possible to use some tricks with that to make it pretty resilient. The biggest issue is not theoretical, really, it would just take a lot of development time to refactor the engine to make it appropriate for online multiplayer, so I don't want to spend much time on that until the single-player is done.

My current thought about fighting styles is to push the differences as far as possible, so e.g. a wolf will just kill a rabbit if the rabbit stays in range too long. They are just so much stronger that if they get a good grip on a rabbit, there is nothing they can do about it, unless another rabbit jump-kicks the wolf from behind or something. I want to have patterns like that, so maybe unarmed rabbits could only have a chance against a wolf if there are a lot of them, and even then they will probably mostly die. That's just what I am thinking right now though, these designs always change over time.
"The Overgrowth combat system would actually be more lag-tolerant than most, because there is less timing required for attacks -- just for blocks. It might be possible to use some tricks with that to make it pretty resilient. " :lol: Okay, that settles that. Seems the community's guesses, mine included, missed the mark! :mrgreen:

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Ylvali
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Re: Reddit QA on Feb 2014

Post by Ylvali » Sun Feb 02, 2014 7:27 am

Endoperez wrote:"The Overgrowth combat system would actually be more lag-tolerant than most, because there is less timing required for attacks -- just for blocks. It might be possible to use some tricks with that to make it pretty resilient. " :lol: Okay, that settles that. Seems the community's guesses, mine included, missed the mark! :mrgreen:
You bastard, I was gonna post that!! :lol:

Though while being good news, the next paragraph seems to confirm that multiplayer will not be in the game at release, but can be added eventually. Not dependent on technical obstacles as some has suggested in the past, but rather on demand and resources. That's perfectly fair and fine with me, I'll remain one of those hopeful to eventually see a competitive PvP scene for overgrowth. If that becomes possible one day I'm bringing a lot of people with me who are in other gaming scenes and only care for competitive gaming, but who still are extremely interested in the Overgrowth fighting system.

Very happy to finally have a somewhat substantial answer to this question.

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Re: Reddit QA on Feb 2014

Post by Endoperez » Sun Feb 02, 2014 7:43 am

I found another question about online multiplayer:
There is local multiplayer (like multiple players on one computer), but we are still not sure about online yet.

It would be really fun to play online, and could have some kind of dueling community arise around it like for Jedi Knight or War of the Roses. The downside is that it could take significant development time away from the single player, and other features.

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Re: Reddit QA on Feb 2014

Post by Endoperez » Fri Feb 07, 2014 2:25 pm

Hiring more people so the game's finished faster.
[+] 4
AccusationsGW wrote:I've seen a couple of your dev videos, and it seems like there's a huge amount of modeling and animation work that just seems very grinding from an outsider perspective.

Not to be argumentative but genuinely curious, why you don't think that stuff would work in paralleled development?
WolfireDavid wrote: The problem with scaling up is that we either need to scale up a lot, or not at all. That is, I would have to become an engineering lead, and Aubrey would have to become an art director, and then we could coordinate multiple programmers and artists efficiently. However, it would be really hard to just add one more programmer or one more artist, because then we would probably have to spend half our time coordinating, and there would be no net win.

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