New Devblog is live! Please have an open mind as to it's content and vote on which outcome you'd prefer to see happen in the next few weeks.
Divergence is at a fork in the road right now and we'd like to get your input on which road the community would prefer we followed.
We could tie together a version within just 2-3 weeks that shows off many of the more awesome features we intend to include in the finished game. This version however, as a placeholder, would require several of it's features to be re-worked later down the line in creation of the finalized systems required for live and thus it would extend the amount of time we need to get a playable version in the hands of contributors.
Or we could say screw the placeholder systems and just barrel straight ahead towards the finalized systems, not stopping to create as much "presentation pieces" as previously intended. We'd be looking at most likely 3-5 weeks on this model but the interface and features you see there would be very close to "as is" at live and it would help get a playable version out there sooner.
Thanks for your input. You are really, really, going to be surprised. And if you aren't surprised, you are a cynical prick.
After having been up for over 30 hours trying to get some stuff working that I feel very close to, I decided it was time to make a new DevBlog post, however after reading it back to myself, I was suddenly confronted with the reality that it will probably make me seem like The Unabomber.
My first response was to scrap the whole thing, then pick it back up tomorrow. Then, after weighing the consequenes, I decided to go ahead and keep it exactly as-is; A somewhat nonsensical collection of points that don't really relate to one another as much as they seemed to have in my mind at the time I wrote them down. I've decided to keep it as-is because keeping with the policy of honesty that I try to sell as the focal point of my campaign, it's best that people understand who and what they're getting involved in, for better or for worse.
And so without further ado:
----------------
Devblog: May 20th. One-Month Recap and My Adventures in Game Development
----------------
Common is the practice of game developers (especially MMORPG developers) who make broad claims about how kickass their product is going to be; How innovative and game-changing their creative vision, then once the obligatory "reality check sets in" they must recede from the original grand design of their heart's desire to something more realistic. It's called "settling".
Now imagine my surprise to find that I get to be a part of the first time, as far as I'm aware, that the opposite has actually happened. Less than one month has passed since the final day of our first financing campaign and the game is at least twice as far along as I had thought it could possibly be. We're not only on-schedule, but actually ahead of it. It might still go into testing at the same period, but it'll be better at that time than I previously figured it would be.
What's the secret?
Obviously the secret is hate. Anyone who watched either or both of my first two videos for our first campaign could probably glean with little effort how difficult it has become for me to mask my contempt for the state of MMO-gaming. As far as I'm concerned, WoW and companies like EA impregnated my once-beloved genre with the foul seed of corruption until it's belly was laid fat and bloated with millions of meme-spewing fetuses and their bad fucking English.
Yes, it's true. I am mostly ruined. However, ruined as I may very well be, I can still be useful at something.
This. I can be useful - at this, and that is enough for me.
There's an upside to trying and failing at something for seven years simply because you have no money however. The benefit is efficiency. When you have nothing for a long enough time, you slowly become the master of finding out ways to do things cheaply. Just as the human body becomes an engine of brutal efficiency if kept just above the point of starvation for long enough, so then has Stained Glass Llama gradually solidified into a lean lumberjack of game development somehow.
And then you suddenly have money. For me, it was compliments of a few hundred desperate MMOers who, if i had a people (which I don't) I would hesitate but for a moment to call them "my people". They are the closest thing that might exist.
Now the body has fuel and thus, now the money goes far. Very far in fact. Although still an expensive trade, building an mmorpg, if it isn't essential it doesn't stay.
Good family man? Good husband? Taking the family out camping on the weekend you say? Well, fuck you I'm paying the foreign guy who bleeds coffee on a Saturday night to help me get that feature working.
Why? Because that is what those 366 backers have entrusted me to do with their hard-earned money.
The more the cache in the pool rose day by day the more I began to feel an increasing sense of responsibility to those people. I think it finally hit me somewhere around the $20,000 mark; the critical mass of, "Oh shit... Now i really DO have to make this work..."
Then there was also an emotional component that I hadn't expected.
All in all, I received probably three negative "you will fail" messages and over 500 "you can do it" ones. I have spent the better part of my entire life being the adversary of my own species and here were these random humans throwing their money at me and begging me to continue. Begging.
I'll always remember one letter a guy sent me. It was a very emotional paragraph baring the trademark inconsistency and sentence structure of someone genuinely unstable. It took me two sittings to finish it only because the fellow really put you in a room with him and his troubles while he explained that the good times of his past (what i refer to as "The Golden Days of MMOs" mainly centered around EQ, AO and later, SWG) were gone and would never come around again, and somehow this was an allegory his life in general. That those good feelings derived from a silly little game, being a part of a real community where he had friends, had people waiting on him to log in and the freedom he enjoyed were over because of the new climate of the genre. It was a story of prison, suffering, loss and desperation for a chance to have back those good times.
You could count the number of things I believe in on one hand, but one thing that I have to believe is that given enough time even the deepest wounds can be healed, or at the very least mended. Moving on requires the brain to accrue new memories and experiences, and sometimes a shitload of them for a serious enough trauma. The more distracted you can keep your thoughts, the quicker that time will pass and in theory, the sooner you can return to the world as something like a whole person.
And so I came to realize that I'm creating a distraction; An alternate reality for people to "escape into" and in many circles, such a practice is considered a negative one.
I decided to say, "Yeah? Screw it." If it keeps a guy from murdering his ex-wife and spending the rest of his life in prison, how can that possibly be a bad thing? Not that the pursuit of vengeance is not a valid cause in my opinion, which it most certainly is, but the ideal situation is one in which you are simply able to "Get over it". If you can't, by all means,go forth and seek vengeance. If you can however, do so.
The universe will not stand in judgement of me, or anyone else for that matter. It is both the responsibility and the right of the individual creature to find or create purpose should we need it.
I've accepted that my purpose right now is to create an artificial reality for emotionally unstable weirdos.
Originally posted by polySurface Exactly, get ready guys we are about to hit you up for more money.
This is why you read everything not just a devblog. If you went to the forums you'd see a poll they gave the community, asking us if we'd like either more new videos or a playable version this summer on which we can give feedback.
Also the developer blog states clearly that no new campaign will start until the promised milestone prizes are given to the community. The playable demo is most likely going to cover everything the videos would have, so no they will not be "hitting you up for more money" until they bring forth what they promised with the initial funds.
Read before you bring negativity to the table, or that's all you will be getting back at a certain point.
Originally posted by polySurface Exactly, get ready guys we are about to hit you up for more money.
This is why you read everything not just a devblog. If you went to the forums you'd see a poll they gave the community, asking us if we'd like either more new videos or a playable version this summer on which we can give feedback.
Also the developer blog states clearly that no new campaign will start until the promised milestone prizes are given to the community. The playable demo is most likely going to cover everything the videos would have, so no they will not be "hitting you up for more money" until they bring forth what they promised with the initial funds.
Read before you bring negativity to the table, or that's all you will be getting back at a certain point.
Says the apologist who has done nothing but advertise or attempt to create sympathy. The whopping 30 people on the DO forum are truly a massive army. The sheer amount of negativity, and frankly buzzwords Ethan keeps tossing around with nothing to show for it are staggering.
Comments
Wrong again Bob.
(Taken from official forums thread)
New Devblog Post 5/20/2013 And Poll
Divergence is at a fork in the road right now and we'd like to get your input on which road the community would prefer we followed.
We could tie together a version within just 2-3 weeks that shows off many of the more awesome features we intend to include in the finished game. This version however, as a placeholder, would require several of it's features to be re-worked later down the line in creation of the finalized systems required for live and thus it would extend the amount of time we need to get a playable version in the hands of contributors.
Or we could say screw the placeholder systems and just barrel straight ahead towards the finalized systems, not stopping to create as much "presentation pieces" as previously intended. We'd be looking at most likely 3-5 weeks on this model but the interface and features you see there would be very close to "as is" at live and it would help get a playable version out there sooner.
Thanks for your input.
You are really, really, going to be surprised.
And if you aren't surprised, you are a cynical prick.
-Ethan
(Taken from Official DevBlog)
One-Month Recap and My Adventures in Game Development
After having been up for over 30 hours trying to get some stuff working that I feel very close to, I decided it was time to make a new DevBlog post, however after reading it back to myself, I was suddenly confronted with the reality that it will probably make me seem like The Unabomber.My first response was to scrap the whole thing, then pick it back up tomorrow. Then, after weighing the consequenes, I decided to go ahead and keep it exactly as-is; A somewhat nonsensical collection of points that don't really relate to one another as much as they seemed to have in my mind at the time I wrote them down. I've decided to keep it as-is because keeping with the policy of honesty that I try to sell as the focal point of my campaign, it's best that people understand who and what they're getting involved in, for better or for worse.
And so without further ado:
----------------
Devblog: May 20th.
----------------One-Month Recap and My Adventures in Game Development
Common is the practice of game developers (especially MMORPG developers) who make broad claims about how kickass their product is going to be; How innovative and game-changing their creative vision, then once the obligatory "reality check sets in" they must recede from the original grand design of their heart's desire to something more realistic. It's called "settling".
Now imagine my surprise to find that I get to be a part of the first time, as far as I'm aware, that the opposite has actually happened. Less than one month has passed since the final day of our first financing campaign and the game is at least twice as far along as I had thought it could possibly be. We're not only on-schedule, but actually ahead of it. It might still go into testing at the same period, but it'll be better at that time than I previously figured it would be.
What's the secret?
Obviously the secret is hate. Anyone who watched either or both of my first two videos for our first campaign could probably glean with little effort how difficult it has become for me to mask my contempt for the state of MMO-gaming. As far as I'm concerned, WoW and companies like EA impregnated my once-beloved genre with the foul seed of corruption until it's belly was laid fat and bloated with millions of meme-spewing fetuses and their bad fucking English.
Yes, it's true. I am mostly ruined. However, ruined as I may very well be, I can still be useful at something.
This. I can be useful - at this, and that is enough for me.
There's an upside to trying and failing at something for seven years simply because you have no money however. The benefit is efficiency. When you have nothing for a long enough time, you slowly become the master of finding out ways to do things cheaply. Just as the human body becomes an engine of brutal efficiency if kept just above the point of starvation for long enough, so then has Stained Glass Llama gradually solidified into a lean lumberjack of game development somehow.
And then you suddenly have money. For me, it was compliments of a few hundred desperate MMOers who, if i had a people (which I don't) I would hesitate but for a moment to call them "my people". They are the closest thing that might exist.
Now the body has fuel and thus, now the money goes far. Very far in fact. Although still an expensive trade, building an mmorpg, if it isn't essential it doesn't stay.
Good family man? Good husband? Taking the family out camping on the weekend you say? Well, fuck you I'm paying the foreign guy who bleeds coffee on a Saturday night to help me get that feature working.
Why? Because that is what those 366 backers have entrusted me to do with their hard-earned money.
The more the cache in the pool rose day by day the more I began to feel an increasing sense of responsibility to those people. I think it finally hit me somewhere around the $20,000 mark; the critical mass of, "Oh shit... Now i really DO have to make this work..."
Then there was also an emotional component that I hadn't expected.
All in all, I received probably three negative "you will fail" messages and over 500 "you can do it" ones. I have spent the better part of my entire life being the adversary of my own species and here were these random humans throwing their money at me and begging me to continue. Begging.
I'll always remember one letter a guy sent me. It was a very emotional paragraph baring the trademark inconsistency and sentence structure of someone genuinely unstable. It took me two sittings to finish it only because the fellow really put you in a room with him and his troubles while he explained that the good times of his past (what i refer to as "The Golden Days of MMOs" mainly centered around EQ, AO and later, SWG) were gone and would never come around again, and somehow this was an allegory his life in general. That those good feelings derived from a silly little game, being a part of a real community where he had friends, had people waiting on him to log in and the freedom he enjoyed were over because of the new climate of the genre. It was a story of prison, suffering, loss and desperation for a chance to have back those good times.
You could count the number of things I believe in on one hand, but one thing that I have to believe is that given enough time even the deepest wounds can be healed, or at the very least mended. Moving on requires the brain to accrue new memories and experiences, and sometimes a shitload of them for a serious enough trauma. The more distracted you can keep your thoughts, the quicker that time will pass and in theory, the sooner you can return to the world as something like a whole person.
And so I came to realize that I'm creating a distraction; An alternate reality for people to "escape into" and in many circles, such a practice is considered a negative one.
I decided to say, "Yeah? Screw it." If it keeps a guy from murdering his ex-wife and spending the rest of his life in prison, how can that possibly be a bad thing? Not that the pursuit of vengeance is not a valid cause in my opinion, which it most certainly is, but the ideal situation is one in which you are simply able to "Get over it". If you can't, by all means,go forth and seek vengeance. If you can however, do so.
The universe will not stand in judgement of me, or anyone else for that matter. It is both the responsibility and the right of the individual creature to find or create purpose should we need it.
I've accepted that my purpose right now is to create an artificial reality for emotionally unstable weirdos.
So be it.
Feydikan sums up Divergence Online development.
"OMG working so hard..pant pant... need sleep... pant pant.... and money... pant pant....keep faith"
This is why you read everything not just a devblog. If you went to the forums you'd see a poll they gave the community, asking us if we'd like either more new videos or a playable version this summer on which we can give feedback.
Also the developer blog states clearly that no new campaign will start until the promised milestone prizes are given to the community. The playable demo is most likely going to cover everything the videos would have, so no they will not be "hitting you up for more money" until they bring forth what they promised with the initial funds.
Read before you bring negativity to the table, or that's all you will be getting back at a certain point.
(It sucks you dont wanna see it)
Says the apologist who has done nothing but advertise or attempt to create sympathy. The whopping 30 people on the DO forum are truly a massive army. The sheer amount of negativity, and frankly buzzwords Ethan keeps tossing around with nothing to show for it are staggering.
http://chroniclesofthenerds.com/nerdfight/
Y U NO FLIP TABLE?!?!?!