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[Cobralad]

https://twitter.com/whoisJoshBossie/status/1135253417146822658?s=20


 
 

[ProgramGamer]

F

[Superb Joe]

never played the first one but I have a lot of thoughts about the transition of indie games from a predominantly free medium to the necessity of a paid medium and the difficulties of both joke products and true auteur stuff in facing those realities. however, I will not be articulating those thoughts at all. thanks for your understanding.

[Superb Joe]

I will say however that Frankie is really good

[ProgramGamer]

Well, the fact that games need to not be free in order to get made has fundamentally changed what this very forum is about, so it's probably worth it to talk about it at least a little bit.

[Manuel Magalhães]

F

[Cobralad]

i think steam made a great disservice to everyone by pretty much absorbing browser games and freeware.
Instead of getting stable cash from ads or donations kids put their stuff behind paywall. After it sells like 5 copies they either dont tell anyone or write posts about how market that never exised has failed them. Im not telling steam should have ads or other ways of monetisation, but it definitely should.
Also barkley 2 dev testimonies in something awful thread sound so much like projects i worked on its uncanny.

[Superb Joe]

Well, the fact that games need to not be free in order to get made has fundamentally changed what this very forum is about, so it's probably worth it to talk about it at least a little bit.

it would seem to be a valuable discussion to be had, especially in this of all forums. however i am bleeding profusely and unable to do so. apologies.

[Cobralad]

This is also about the time when I discovered the Dark Drakers, which soured the whole thing further. Dark Draker is a filler character in B2 who talks about being faster than the snapping maw of a drake. I discovered that an entire areas worth of NPC's were just carbon copies of Dark Draker with a different name given to each, AKA the illusion of work being done. Just these 10% finished NPC's basically littering the project to make it seem like it was all good. I suppose the plan was to eventually make them into distinct NPC's but the problem was that the whole game was plagued by the Dark Drakers, and they GREATLY attributed to the poo poo compile times. I also discovered/was told about some of the more hidden mechanics of the game which can only be described as the concoction of a lunatic. For example, two separate ingame time system both dictating quests and NPC behavior (with NPC's also being dictated by quest variables, items the player has etc.), leading to impossible to fix content. Thank the lord one of these system was later discarded.

[ProgramGamer]

Here's my thoughts on freeware games no longer being much of a thing, in no particular order.

We live in a world where people are more and more desperate for money because large corporations own a sizeable amount of our wealth and our long term futures are more uncertain now than ever before. This leads to people not really wanting to commit to passion projects because, well, they gotta eat.

As cobralad mentioned, steam also plays a significant part in this by being the obvious place where everyone should be publishing their finished games, which incentivizes people to tailor their games to that platform, aka only making games that sell at a fixed price no matter what. Itch goes against that somewhat, but it's not big enough right now to turn the tides.

There's also the fact that no one actively maintains hobby gamedev spaces anymore (yes, partly our fault) which leads to people not finding a niche for their little gamelets and in turn not getting technical, moral and design support on the stuff they make.

Finally, there's probably also a bit of a "shoot for the stars" attitude going on where people are too eager to get successful from their projects, and are ignorant of the fact that it takes time to make something good and successful. Even the overnight Minecraft success technically happened over several months, and was made by a moderately experienced programmer (who is now a social media transphobic asshole gremlin).

tl;dr: We're failing hard at pointing young gamedevs to good communities for them to learn to make interesting stuff again, and we're not even trying to manage expectations of success.

[Zaphos]

there are still a lot of free games being released ... I think it's not so much that they went away as it is the volume of everything else got so loud ...

anyway Frankie is really good

[Superb Joe]

Here's my thoughts on freeware games no longer being much of a thing, in no particular order.

We live in a world where people are more and more desperate for money because large corporations own a sizeable amount of our wealth and our long term futures are more uncertain now than ever before. This leads to people not really wanting to commit to passion projects because, well, they gotta eat.

this is the biggest one. the barriers to entry are lower than ever but the precariousness built into the system means that you can't just dip your toes in this stuff unless you're somehow lucky enough to actually have free time that you don't have to dedicate to professional development at your day job, you're literally a child, or you're some kind of neet zombie that checked out socially and have wonderful parents.

i think it's kind of a gamble to give any of those people kick starter money, because those situations can change very fast. i don't blame them. the system did it, ultimately.

[velocirection]

I see a lot of appreciation for Frankie, who is extremely talented. But gzstorm and cboyardee are also very talented people.

Gzstorm, iirc was the main programmer. He's pretty good at what he does, he's been making games since... well I can remember. And he has a lot of fun ideas.
https://gzstorm.com/78641/

https://gzstorm.com/vidiot-game/

EDIT: btw, you should know these are both quintessential indie games, play them now! Also check out phucker in the woods hehe...
https://gzstorm.itch.io/phucker-in-the-woods-0

EDIT EDIT: The 4th wall is legit a good and kind of spooky game too!
https://gzstorm.itch.io/the-4th-wall

Some gzstorm vidcons!! Every one is great though, you can't go wrong with gzstorm baby...

Cboyardee, the composer and iirc did much of the writing on the first Barkley(and B2 I presume) he does a lot of great music.








https://soundcloud.com/cboyardee/chup

I wish I could post stuff from the TOG music pack that came with the higher reward tiers on the KS... But I don't have permission to do so and I have not found a way to contact cboyardee himself.

B2 meant a lot to me, man... I was one of the people that did the $100 tier and got a cyber dward dakimakura.
https://twitter.com/velocirection/status/1135784909359001600

I feel so bad for the original devs- I don't know what happened behind the scenes but apparently one of the folks on the team pissed off everyone to the point where they left the team. You have to understand that... Barkley Gaiden was the effort of a few good friends working together to create a fun and enjoyable vidcon. Sure it's goofy but it's pretty well made considering it's a "joke game." They were clearly passionate about the project.

And then they got the opportunity to make vidcon history- create a masterpiece... And they had to watch it crumble before their eyes. I can't imagine how awful that must feel. Barkely Gaiden was their baby.

I might have dropped $100 on a game that probably won't come out... And ordinarily I'd feel scammed if it weren't for the fact that the team was largely working on the project for free for probably the majority of development. Long story short... even if you believe the team is capable of delivering a great finished game(which you bet your ASS that gzstorm, frankie and cboyardee are FULLY capable of! That's why I went with the $100 tier... that and that sexy cyber dwarf~) it just goes to show you that shit can happen. And the game ends up not being done, as sad as it is...

RIP Barkley 2... Semper games...

Edit: now I need a shirt that says "I kickstarted Barkley 2 and all I got was a sexy cyberdwarf pillow case!"

[Gold Cray]

tl;dr: We're failing hard at pointing young gamedevs to good communities for them to learn to make interesting stuff again, and we're not even trying to manage expectations of success.

The Celeste modding community honestly seems like a pretty good place for this. There's a tremendous volume of high quality work going on there, and there's a lot you can do with that engine. Make games not engines, right? The community have built all sorts of fantastic tools, and there's also literally any documentation. The barrier to adding custom mechanics is pretty low (except that you have to deal with c# and lua ).

[michaelplzno]

I'm the most indie because not only do my games not sell, but people also don't play them or even offer feedback.

[s0]

I remember being really hyped for Barkley 2, but after playing the alpha that got released itch.io, it's not hard to see why it was canceled. It seems to lack a real direction and suffer from a pretty bad case of feature creep. The character creator alone has more art assets, mechanics and ui elements than some entire games while essentially just being a parody of rpg systems that overstays its welcome. Not exactly sure what happened, but it seems like even barring personal drama, the game really needed a producer or at least much tighter authorial control.