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Things that GOG Galaxy uses as components:
Boost C++
Chromium Embedded Framework
libcurl
JsonCpp
OpenSSL
zlib Data Compression Library
POCO C++ Libraries
QT Libraries
Lato (font)
wonder if I should try for the rest
*rolls up newspaper*
BAD IDEA FACTORY! BAD!
> visit neighborhood names Artesia
> forget name
> remember it as Asteria or Aselia
I had to look up INVETERATE because of you
how to be an invertebrate weeb gamer
But in the end, between having a big backlog and feeling tight on cash, I bought none of them.
My streak of spending more in GOG's summer (i.e. mid-year) sale than Steam's summer (i.e. mid-year) sale has continued for another year. This has happened for like three or four years already. In 2017's summer sales, after spending just $3.48 on GOG, buying two games, I spent $1.99 on Steam, buying one game.
And that's one of the better ones.
(I wonder why they don't use pipes rather than those criss-cross things.)
Also I just beat the first dungeon in Wind Waker. I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would.
If you don't recognize that name, or don't remember, it intends to produce a JRPG with RTS elements, and is intended to be made by a number of famous names in the videogame industry, among them the project's own director Hiroaki Yura, a violinist and a well-known professional musician in the game industry, as well as composer Nobuo Uematsu (who's best known for writing the music to many Final Fantasy games). It went on Kickstarter in 2013 and made a pretty darn big splash.
It currently has an expected release date of 2018, well behind their original estimated release in "mid-2015", despite raising over $1M, which was some ten times of their funding goal. Of course, some people complained about delays in the production, declaring it a failure, and wanting their money back, to the point where you had an opinion-piece saying that Kickstarter should actually start helping people force refunds in response to the devs saying that they intend to finish it and that's why they're not giving the money back.
More details about what's going on, straight from the horses' mouths: http://projectphoenix.info/news/ NOTE: includes in-depth details about budget amounts.
[NOTE: The rest of this post is my opinion. I will be flaming some people. Foul language will be used.]
Now you could say, "well, the devs promised a game two years ago and they still haven't done it! And instead their budget ran into problems and now it's going nowhere! And they won't give us back our money! Fuck them! Failure!"
And if you did that I would on one hand say you have some reason to opine that way, and it does kinda make sense. After all, they didn't deliver on promises either made explicitly or suggested implicitly, at least time-wise.
But on the other hand I would suggest that you are an ignorant, impatient little shit who is used to taking things for granted, who is having a good first lesson on the basics of just how fucking difficult it is to manage and produce a large-scale creative project like this.
Yes there was feature creep from the stretch goals and the backer rewards. Yes there are delays. But hell, they're actually being more transparent about this than you would get from a standard "AAA" game company. All this drama would have been under wraps.
Large-scale games like these take several years of development, and there's a reason they don't announce them early and that reason is because people get hyped and then they get impatient and antsy and whiny when stuff doesn't go their way.
Now to be fair to these fans, it's also partly the industry's fault to have indulged and attempted to ride consumers' hype in order to drive sales and stuff. So yeah you industry folks are at least partly responsible for spoiling gamers and letting them get to this state in the first place.
For full disclosure: I did not back Project Phoenix. However, I did back the following projects and these are their statuses:
* Legend of Iya - still in development. Two side projects were released to try to make some money to help fund it.
* Mighty No. 9 - released amidst controversy (which I do not necessarily agree with but it certainly exists) and was not well-received.
* Ryuutama (translation project for existing tabletop RPG system) - released.
* La-Mulana 2 - still in development; regular updates from what I've seen.
* Dysfunctional Systems (episodes 0, 2, and 3) - cancelled. Refunds were offered; I refused it.
* Midora - cancelled. Refunds were offered; I refused it.
* Under the Dog - a single half-hour episode was released. I think some people may have been disappointed that there wasn't more, but it gradually did become clear that this was just intended to be a pilot project to try to get funding from other sources.**
* Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night - still in development; regular updates from what I've seen.
* The Midnight Sanctuary (adding voicework to an existing game) - funding unsuccessful (pledges automatically cancelled).
** Which is actually how a lot of Kickstarter projects turn out to work, it seems. They're basically using Kickstarter money to produce a pilot version of something and then try to use _that_ as proof of concept (and proof of demand) to bring "angel investors" on board with much more substantial funding.
This sort of track record is...spotty at best. Even if we leave off the unsuccessful funding of that last project, we have six videogame/entertainment software projects (I am using that latter term just in case someone wants to say "Dysfunctional Systems is a visual novel, not a videogame!"), of which three are still in development, and none of them are on time based on their expected delivery dates (Bloodstained - March 2017; La-Mulana 2 - December 2015; Legend of Iya - November 2014). Of the other three, one was released amidst controversy (and late), while the other two outright failed.
So if there's anyone who should be angry, at Kickstarter projects failing, it should be me, right?
Except for some reason I'm not. I'm not saying this to try to moralize about not getting angry or something; I mean I'm getting angry at gamers, and that still counts as getting angry. Maybe I just have more wishful thinking, or maybe I'm just more patient for whatever strange reason perhaps because I already play games ten and twenty years "late" anyway. Or maybe because I've worked on lots of research papers for classes and I also am an amateur composer myself and I have experienced how annoying and difficult these things can be, and even when it's something that's totally fiction or otherwish simply engaging my artistic creativity and nothing else, it's not like the production just flows forth in the style of a movie montage and then magically a thing has been made. Lots of technical issues -- notation of music, wording of text, design of interface elements, and such, really have to be thought through carefully. And I'm not even worrying about budgets yet!
So yes I know that sometimes the best intentions in the world aren't easily translatable to results. Just because you want to do something doesn't magically make it done, and sometimes doesn't even make it any easier to do it. And when stuff doesn't get done right, or doesn't get done on time, or doesn't get done within budget, that doesn't necessarily mean that the people who did it were malicious lazy bums who stole the money and ran and spent it on booze and hookers. In fact, it generally doesn't mean that, and the more transparency and reporting there is, the more it doesn't mean that because the more you can actually check on this stuff -- despite the fact that checking it will make your hyped-up minds twist themselves further into knots because the details are BORING, UNSEXY, ANAL, and STUFF YOU CAN TAKE FOR GRANTED AND SIMPLY IGNORE BUT SOMEONE ELSE CAN'T.
(Related: If you categorically reject government reports on things while instead only ever believing baseless speculation from opinion-wankers who think everything is a conspiracy, then you're a fucking idiot.)
Also: Swamp Palace > Great Bay Temple > Angler's Tunnel > Water Temple > The water part of Tower of the Gods
Though, to be fair, we are dealing with an enthusiast press, so there actually should be less of that bias, considering that they can get positively hyped about things.
On the other hand, a Kickstarter working out right is just, like, not a story. Because at that point you have an actual game (or whatever else) and then the story is just about whether the game is or isn't good, and the Kickstarter stuff is just a footnote. The only times it'll be about the Kickstarter itself is during funding or years later when people are mad they still don't have a game yet.
I built the friggin Tower of Babel in Grand Order. It was Mordred's idea.
This has got to be one of the most strangely specific voice actor jokes.
DYSFUNCTIONAL SYSTEMS IS ACTUALLY GETTING CONTINUED!
I didn't know that about Sim City's economics.
Also of course in a thing called Assassin's Creed the only black guy who can use the Animus led a voodoo cult (he was an assassin at some point but he stopped all that).
The main character, Cal, has spent almost the entire book just sort of being pulled from one place to another and his motivations are written so clearly every time they change that there's no chance of gleaning stuff from subtext. There's also only been one scene inside the Animus so far (preceded by 10 entire pages of describing how he was going in the Animus. Seriously writer?) and I'm a third of the way through.
*device that lets people deep dive into their ancestor's memories, unrelatedly yay i finally had something to post here