Hey ,
Thanks for checking out the site and thanks for the feedback!
I understand about the Shenmue and Castlevania guys, of course they already have a following. It’s both awesome and kind of terrible at the same time. Awesome they’ll be putting out another project but It’s probably one of the reasons those guys shouldn’t actually be on Kickstarter, it over shadows everyone else and they could legitimately get real investors and publishers on board without a significant effort. I think one of the biggest oversights on this project so far was thinking that Kickstarter was still what it was when it first launched. It is what it is though.
If you’re genuinely interested, please do participate in both the funding and the project as it develops. I do of course understand the reservations and let me try to address some of those below. Before I do though, I’ll mention from the feedback here I think perhaps the overall launch strategy presented on the Kickstarter isn’t as clear as initially thought. I put a lot of time and effort into showing and explaining through text, video and images how this game is and will differ from DayZ and H1Z1 and so on. So much so that perhaps the launch strategy and high level development plan isn’t really coming across so well. I can believe that. I’ll put together a publicly presentable higher level plan and show more of that this weekend and perhaps shine some more light on it. For a quick note though, the plan IS and always has been to start small and grow the game. Due to the lack of funds and start-up resources, the entire endeavour is to be more of an organic approach but with clear end goals set.
As you mentioned what you see in the videos is similar to open world survival games now and that is true. I could send you a build and we could connect to each other and shoot zombies as they spawn in waves, craft some bombs and weapons, kill each other and respawn, send our pet dogs to attack things, distract and stealth kill enemies and each other… and repeat that. The score counter in the top right does actually work, I just disabled it awhile back and never turned it back on so we could even keep score! We could also jump off the edge of maps and fall to oblivion as well since the only full map I made was the hospital, the rest of the pre-built ones and the others I made were just to showcase the features and I guess some of the scale and environments as well. The point here is that while there isn’t 20 years of experience and game releases behind me right now, I did produce something that is playable as is, just needs some content right now. I did that to show that if you know what you’re doing and are dedicated to it fully, you don’t HAVE to have that 20 years backing experience to make things happen. I use the Obduction guys as an example because they do have a few major releases behind them… and well… at some point someone has to say it, “making games today isn’t the same as making games 20 years ago.” As well, just because someone creates a candy crush game that sells millions of copies and makes millions of dollars, doesn’t mean they can make THIS kind of game either.
Back to the point though, the project is to be more organic in that the core systems/features are being worked on heavily up front so they don’t need to be enhanced, tweaked or fixed as much going forward, these features I can build in my sleep (and sometimes do during those long hours). The main concerns are the world itself and the network scalability. But getting the core features solidified will allow more of us to dedicate time to producing quality content. Not just environments but story, items, missions, weapons character development etc. The current framework that’s been built gives me confidence in being able to release something to the backers to hop into and play around with within the next few months. Mostly to test those core features ASAP. Definitely not promising anything massive or that anything outside of those features will work all that well. Of course not. The difference here, is we won’t be charging people to play that and help us with feedback. I want to make it available so that the community can have a say in what’s working and what isn’t. The plan has to remain flexible since we don’t have any funding and it’s impossible to test at the scale we’d like right now. But the goals in our timeline are realistic. The long term goals are to represent what will be coming throughout the year post-release.
With funding we’ll be able to get some server space and scale that out during those alpha testings phases in order to start building on that framework as well. Flash ahead to a year and a half from now, I believe we can release something around that time with solid gameplay. The overall scale won’t be “GTAV” at launch though, at least probably not. The plan is structured but is fluid since it really depends on what we have to work with but the goals are solid. The plan is to build out the world we want in sections and phases. For example the initial launch map is a section of Manhattan we’ve been scaling down that encompasses the most amount of environment variety while still being large enough for lots of players. The aim is to have the core concepts working well within this initial launch space. The physical environment will be built out with expansion in mind. So what that means is, we can build out as much as we can in x amount of time in terms of content and essentially launch when the concepts are working even if the first area is only 30% built. We’ll build out each phase in it’s completion before moving on to the next. For launch, as long as phase 1 is done and the concepts work in there, then players will have months and months of things to do in that space while we shift our focus to expanding into the other phases. As they complete, they simply become open to players to explore and populate. How we’re building it would require more detail, I’ll go into it a BIT in a separate post below. All phases of each major location will make up that city in it’s entirety as we want to present it. We’ll then start building out other major and minor locations that can be reachable by plane to players. Some major cities, like the Shibuya area in Tokyo when completed, will be another start up location for new players. Essentially when you start the game and create your character, you have to pick one of the major safe zones in the world to start your life.
Here’s a quick idea of the phase1 area (not scaled down). This area has a nice mix of city, greenery and residential areas and the Lincoln tunnel at launch will be the only way to reach the main land in this location. Gridded cities make it easier to use custom modular tools to assist in the builds. Plus keep in mind that this version of New York and our world in general is a devastated/post apocalyptic version meaning we can scale it based on how we want it to look in this particular game world. Exploration and survival are key aspects. We want to make as much “enter-able” space as possible. We’ll also have larger destroyed clearings of land and greenery, central park being a good location for players to build their own communities and hideouts etc.
I’ll paste some points I wrote up in another thread elsewhere in the next post that addresses a few of your concerns as well. This one is getting long.
Hopefully we’ll have your support! I’m extremely confident that we can get this done providing we do it efficiently and build it up the way we intend. Of course there will be set backs, but we’re ready for that.