Re: Malise and the Machine - Public Demo Available Now!
OK, enough is enough - this off-topic discussion is officially over, and quite frankly it should be over after my last two posts.
In case someone missed my point(s) let me try and explain it some more.
Malise and the Machine is a
game, so there's more to it than just porn, and we must give at least the same amount of attention to other aspects of the game or it will turn into a slide-show or gallery, and that's not our intention. If porn is the only thing you look for in a game and other game aspects are irrelevant to you, please look somewhere else and do not clutter the thread with walls of text with point that MATM is not what you (or other people) would like it to be.
If you don't like something about the MATM, feel free to tell us what it is and maybe even make a suggestion what would be better, but if you dislike most of the game or you prefer games with lots of porn and no game-play whatsoever, look somewhere else, cause MATM is not for you.
As I've already explained, all the progress information we post is to show people, especially those supporting or wanting to support us, that we are working on the game and we are making progress. Part of this progress is about smut content but, for the reasons I already mentioned, not all. And to rebuff the point that some of them are trivial because customer doesn't have to know how the product is made - this would be true if MATM was a released game, but it's not. After release, new customers that weren't following MATM's development will have only basic knowledge about how the game was developed, and most likely it will be limited to info that makes MATM stand out from oh so many other RPGM games. Till then, discussion about this is pointless, and if someone doesn't want to read what goes into making a game, he doesn't have to.
Also, please stop making irrelevant comparisons to stuff like coffee, food, and other stuff that has nothing in common with a computer games. And if you do compare MATM to other computer game, make sure that they have enough in common, based on the idea, game-play, execution, etc., that it warrants comparison in the first place.
And one more thing, on topic or not, please keep the discussion civil and refrain from insults and similar stuff.
Now, to address few thing that were kinda buried and not addressed earlier:
I've been observing this project since 2015. I return every couple of weeks / months and see how it has developed. After about 2 years of development (or was it 3 years already?) I have to admit, that I'm kind of worried this has become too big of an undertaking. From the info I gathered from players / patreons, the looks of the game (AAA hentai game!) and the devs I fear this may become the next Duke Nukem Forever or Star Citizen of hentai games. I very much doubt we'll get a finished version of MATM within the next 2 years (e.i. 2017 and 2018). Judging by the amount of work that has been done and is still to come, I'm expecting this project to go BETA in 2018 with maybe around 50 - 75 % completion.
What I want to say is: this game looks too good and promising to be just in development forever. At some point you have to make sacrifices and stop optimizing / recoding / redesigning / reinventing (basic) stuff and just try to get a workflow going. It doesn't help the devs and it certainly doesn't help the backers, if a game can't be finished within a reasonable amount of time. Too high or too many goals often don't do any good. Better keep certain ambitious ideas for a sequel and improve on the mistakes and flaws on the next project.
The only two publishers / devs that can get away with a development cycle longer than 2-4 years are probably Blizzard and Rockstar.
And no, I don't consider Bethesda games particularly good in relation to the dev time.
Skyrim = 5.5 years after Oblivion
Fallout 4 = 7 years after FO3!! (New Vegas was by Obsidian)
First of all, are you aware that you're comparing MATM developed by small team (< 5 members) and limited budget to games with huge teams and large budgets? You really think that's fair?
Also, I'm not really interested in Bethesda games, so I may be way off target, but aren't the games you mentioned using more or less the same engine and reusing some of the audio and visual assets? More relevant would be how long 1st game using said engine was developed and I doubt anyone that hasn't been on the team can tell you that.
True, RPGM is an engine that can be used out of the box, but only for simple and not very optimized games. If you want to make a game that stands out from the rest, you need to spend a lot of time on the engine. Sure, you could go and use readily available 3rd party scripts, but they're not the best solution for more complex game such as MATM: they do not always work well with other 3rd party scripts, they're made to be universal which adds a lot of unneeded processing that eats a lot of much needed CPU power, and last but most certainly not least, they're written to work with vanilla code, which was never properly optimized and contains bugs causing much higher than necessary CPU and memory usage. MATM started like this (vanilla with 3rd party scripts), and I can only hope that people who played earlier versions do notice and appreciate the work I've put into the engine. That said, believe it or not, we are cutting corners and making sacrifices, but not where it really matters and I don't think it's hurting workflow in the process, at least not that much.
Is there any new news? it looks like development has gone quiet unless it's all behind the patreon paywall now?
I wouldn't mind supporting but I don't like the idea or setting up a monthly subscription especially for a project that could fizzle out (breeding season) or just keep going infinitely after potentially spending (goldylocks) $1,400 (28 months x $50)
I'd love for there to be an upfront fee or just donate x amount to the project.
Development is ongoing, but lately there wasn't much of a public progress reports, hell... even $3 patrons get them only once a month. To make things clear, we're not doing this cause we're greedy assholes, Eromancer just don't have the time... and it's better spent on development itself.
