Looking for developers that would like to make a game on my new engine soon!

[Sadtaco]

So, today marks where I'm just two bug fixes away from getting all the bugs fixed with my engine, I believe, that'll ensure it works as described.

Now I'm looking for people to work with it, so they'll be ready to get them working with it while I tie up these few loose ends. These developers will make different games with it that allow me to figure out that it really can be used for these different sorts of games, and make sure that it makes that development easier. I need both that outside feedback, and to mature and continue adding to the engine.

Sorry that this is long, but this is quite a complex beast and I want to cover all the bases. :3

Just want to support this and not interested in working with an early version of the engine or at all?
Well, just supporting LEWD(playlewd.com) and its Patreon(patreon.com/lewd) has a round about way of supporting the engine and tools. It's going to be quite a while until I launch a kickstarter for Creightr and can make it freely available for everyone to use.
The other way to help would be if you know of some people that're really talented in some capacity, and wanted to make a game but they don't know where to start, you can share this with them to spread the word and help me get some good new games made.



creightr.com - detailed engine/tools information

Creightr is an engine I made for a number of reasons. When I was laying out the plans and figuring out the right architecture for LEWD, I both needed something where a bunch of people could work together making content, get content in game and tested rapidly, and when people had a good idea that fits the game I didn't want "engine limitations" to be a person why it can't have it and I didn't want to spend more time testing content and getting it working than actually creating it in the first place. Further, I wanted something others can use, and that I can use for a number of games that I want to make over the next few years, so it needed to have varying capabilities.
Fast, powerful, and accessible were the key goals.
Fast both in the sense of efficient and to be able to make games quickly.
Powerful in that I really want it to work for the majority of games someone might want to make. There's many games I want to make over the years, and there is only one of them that Creightr wouldn't be appropriate to use in at least some capacity.
Accessible both to have all that power it has to not make it too much more difficult than the easier to use game makers, and also to make it accessible to players so that people can easily access and play your game. I don't like downloading games off mega or whatever myself that potentially have viruses, you know? Just visiting a page is much easier and safer, and enables a game to reach much more people. Plus, they generally work on mobile devices.


The closest I can say it's similar to I guess... is Byond? But more powerful, accessible (doesn't require a desktop client like Byond), at least 100 times more efficient. Another comparison would be that it's a bit like Wordpress, but for making games instead of blogs.


You can see a small part of the tool at the LEWD writing application. Though it's a little outdated, and stripped of all the features of the tool except the scenario editing part.
There are also these blog posts I wrote a while back, but these are all quite dated and I need to write updated ones that are easier to follow:
http://www.playlewd.com/blog/?p=253 - Really old one just as I started the new engine that outlines the basic stuff.
http://www.playlewd.com/blog/?p=365 - Basically how you write functions that are then accessible throughout the tool for "scripting". These can be core engine functions, ones included with extensions, or ones you write yourself.
http://www.playlewd.com/blog/?p=336 - How the object lookup syntax works, which is really the only "languagy" thing, but it's similar to JS hashes with a type casting.

---


I don't have the capacity to just release it to the wild right now as I'm going to be burning both time and money for each team/individual I bring into this early adoption program.
Instead I'm just looking for a few developers that I can help with making good games, in exchange for getting some nice game examples on my engine and figuring out new things that I need to add and improve with it.
You'll still own your IP and all that. This is supposed to be a mutually beneficial relationship for us both.


What I'm looking for

• It's probably best if you have a team already that can cover all the bases need for game development. But if you're an accomplished jack-of-all already, that's probably fine.
  
• You need to be clearly talented and driven
  
• You pretty much need either past game experience using another engine or homebrew, or other experience that indicates you can handle learning an engine and finishing a game.
  

Key engine features that separate it from other engines and game makers

• A real language. Creightr does not use some limited, made up language. It's a Javascript abstraction layer that you write new server functions in to use in your content scripting and such. There's all sort of learning resources for JS out there, and it's a language that's pretty much as simple as can be while still being fully featured.
  
• A clean, powerful API. But at the moment, yeah, you do have the write the client by hand with JS. The core API can be seen here: http://www.creightr.com/js/creightr.js (I'll write docs for this and other things in the coming months) Like I said, I can help here.
  
• Client agnostic. It's generally compatible with HTML5 game engines, allowing you to just write a few hundred lines of code for client hooks that feed into that engine to turn the data from the tool into something rendered to the player, allowing you to leverage the tools that make creating, adding, and streaming content easily. You can make it work with Unity, UE, or whatever else just by rewriting the JS API onto there, and alternate connection methods like normal sockets are available.
  
• Core server API is all accessible. Most of the core engine is accessible by an API in the tool, so you can drastically change it for different games.
  
• Real time development; no compiling. New content and even code you add is JIT compiled in without require a restart or anything, and you can see those changes immediately, as well as add new debugging code where you're trying to find an issue. There's somewhat a plan to bring this to the basic web client as well in the future, but it's trickier and lots more work, potential security issues, etc, but it's on my mind.
  
• A networked tool that runs in your browser and connects developers. It allows you to collaborate together, seeing what everyone else is doing, instead of having to merge things together or work with Subversion or Github doing pulls, let alone not having to have one person on a team cobble efforts together as they're done.
  
• Easy ways to make money for your game, or deploy it for free. It includes a way to manage payments, subscriptions, user access if you want to charge for a game, have micro-transactions, or crowd fund. But you can make a fully free one, too. (Still working on the last part of payment handling.) Similarly, you can either require registration or not. (again, widely variable access controls for users)
  
• "Fork" a game that allows that to be done. This is basically like modding, but you take a game and copy it and can make whatever changes you want to it without interfering with the main version of it.
  
• Streaming content. At its core, it manages worlds that can be shared or insulated, and streams content as it needed for the player(s). This lets you have a tiny client that loads right away in the player's browser (LEWD is less than 500kb initially, for example), and makes it easy to write and manage a client.
  
• The client side code is all open source that you can learn from.
  

What can you make on it?

• VNs and Text adventures are the most straight forward, especially since you get my writing parser and it has a scenario editor, tile map editor, quests, and other stuff there out-of-the-box.
  
• Interactive webcomics, that branch rather than being linear.
  
• MUD-like games.
  
• Really anything if you can write Javascript well. If there are good 3D modelers and animators on a team looking to make something, I can help you choose a renderer to use with Creightr, or write you a new one.
  
• Server processing time is generally in microseconds, so fast paced top down or side scrolling RPGs are all fine if you just write decent interpolation. RTS, world building games, even FPS I guess? It really works for anything if you can program but just not out-of-the-box at the moment. The advantage of using it over something homebrew is that it handles a lot of efficiency things itself under what you write, and has the tools to use for content, as well as having what I think is a good workflow to build on top of. You have about 3000 hours of engine/tool programming work saved for you to work with.
  
• Single player or multiplayer. Making something multiplayer isn't any more work with Creightr. A multiplayer game is largely as simple as single player and is just a design choice rather than being more work and more difficult like most engines. Single player games will put less load on the server, though, but still require an internet connection at least at this point.
  
• It's really a client agnostic thing. What the "engine" really is is the server that streams and manages your game content, and is tools to add that content. Content is data. How your client displays that data to the player is up to you.
  
• You CAN make a non-web game, but you'd still have to write your client on whatever engine you want, say Unity, and use Creightr to stream levels for a big mmo, or user generated content, or whatever. I'm just not sure that's really apt since part of the nice thing is that people can visit a website and be playing your game instantly instead of having to download anything.
  

Needing to write/modify a client in Javascript is probably going to be the stumbling block for most. There is the intent to have client code that's automatically generated, as well as client side extensions similar to Wordpress and other CMS software so non programmers could pick things that are sort of like themes for different styles of games that change how their content set is interpreted for the player and so on. It's just not there yet.
Like I said, if what you have to offer is good enough, I can probably help with client programming as well even though that's not really "getting accustom to the engine" stuff, since it's really agnostic to that.


What else you get

• You get to get started making something with this engine early, of course.
  
• I'm hosting the server for you, so there's no costs for that and the distribution that comes with it.
  
• I'll give you consulting and help to guide you through working with the engine and getting your game going on it.
  
• A hub for games. Eventually I'll have a hub for games where people can find your game and such, which LEWD and some other games I'm making will also be on. You can still have it accessible through Kimochi(when they support web games, you use NW.js, or if you use a downloadable client), your own site, or whatever else as well.
  
• If you have some crazy talent and a good idea but need someone to program a framework for it, I MIGHT be able to do that for you. This is particularly the case for a great artist and/or modeler/animator. I've really wanted to make a Kancolle ripoff game where you can promote boats to the rank of "Cum Dumpster" and stuff, personally, if I just had the right artist and people to script the missions and story. A CYOA with webm clips that have loops and transitions would be really cool, too. Another idea was some sort of Spacestation 13 type game but 3D that I can mostly procedurally generate, with lots of player built worlds, maybe with lewd stuff too or at least forked version
  

What about updates? The future when it's released to all?

• The way content is saved, it can always be automatically refactored to work with an updated version of the engine even when if something changes with it that would otherwise break your content. This is also an important feature for version control of extensions in the future.
  
• As far as breaking API changes, well I'll notify you of them if those happen. They'll be simple refractoring fixes on your side, or you can use an older engine version.
  
• In the event that this falls through or whatever, I guess I can transfer the hosting over to you[r team]? God forbid if I die unexpectedly, there's a deadman's switch to handle that.
  

What's the downside?

• Like I said, right now, people can't just download it and play offline later. They play it through a website, or even need an internet connection if you're actually choosing to roll your own desktop client that has to connect to the server to stream the content. Some people don't like that, but there isn't an easy way around that now as it's core to a lot of how Creightr works and makes writing a game client much more streamlined, easier, and sensible with event driven programming.
  
• I'm taking a cut but it's faaaaar more generous than Steam. I'm certainly going to be heavily in the black with this financially early on. This is essentially in exchange for enabling you[r team] to make [more] money. If your game is completely free and you don't make money from it at all, there is no cut or other cost to worry about.
  

How to apply

• This is going to be a pretty informal, personal process. Just leave me some sort of message or reply somewhere with your credentials.
  
• Show me prior work for you[r team] that tells me you can handle this.
  
• What game you plan on making helps (though isn't a requirement if you want to keep it secret. You can also PM me this, and the LEWD forums are the best place to do that at)
  
• Let me know what else you may need from me!
  

 

[CatNipCode]

So is there any sort of tech demo that we can see to sort of show off what's possible? Apart from the LEWD game that is.

 

[Nephilim_Anunnaki]

I really wish you good luck.

 

[Sadtaco]

So is there any sort of tech demo that we can see to sort of show off what's possible? Apart from the LEWD game that is.

It's sort of irrelevant, really.
The engine is very extensible and can be modified to fit for most things like it says. It's hard to say what sort of game it wouldn't work for without someone telling me the requirements for it. Even for an mmofps, which I'm sure no one is really going to look to make, but just for an example, that can work even though it'd be a pain since I haven't done a network model for that sort of thing for it yet.


Like take UE4 for example. There's a studio making a game that have gutted out its renderer and replacing it with a new one. The renderer is such a small part, and not much to do with the engine.


It's a matter of people showing me what they can do, having a clear vision for a game they want to make, and if they seem like a team or person I want to give my engine to early then I'll make sure there game can be made on it like I said.
I'm not going to make a bunch of extensions for the engine/tools now when there aren't the games needing to be made that need them. That's why I said I'll help people directly if need be.


I don't really get why people think pretty graphics and such is hard. That's mostly not what engines are made for. They're made to handle content(resources, data); debugging; workflow of scripting gameplay, levels, etc.; and so on. That's what took close to 3000 hours.
Renderers are renderers, and making your 3d model render pretty is something that just takes a few days or weeks for me to program, as well as, like it says, there is lots of middleware out there already for renderering that you can use with my engine.


Creightr saves you a bunch of time in making a game and makes debugging easier. Like compare the way you add Scenarios to LEWD compared to TiTS if you've seen that. Or compare how you add something and it's there in your game client immediately without restarting so you can see if it works or not, instead of how you have to save and launch the game anew in RPG Maker.

 

[Rfpnj]

It's sort of irrelevant, really.

No, its not. You claim to have developed this new engine that's easy to use and you have used it to develop LEWD. The thing is that those of us who played the prototype of LEWD and who have seen it lately do not see a lot visually that has changed. I looked at your site for the engine and the thing that stood out is you are not launching this until Q4 2016 if not Q1 2017. So what are people to think. You say its well suited to Text based game, well so is Twine, and they use the same language base. For that matter most of what you are talking about can be done with Twine, As it only takes knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JS to mod Twine to your hearts content. Granted you can not do multi-player, but you do not need to be connected just to play a game.


You want a developer to use your engine then show what your engine can do, and i mean really do.

 

[Sadtaco]

Again, you're confusing engine with renderer.


The engine manages the pipeline that provides the models, animations, textures, shaders, and so on that goes to the renderer, and yes, my engine can do all that. The renderer actually does something with those to display it for whatever you're looking for.


They're separate things. You should really not be wanting a renderer tied to an engine to begin with.


And a developer that can use it to show what it can really do, well I think they'd understand this distinction and what I'm offering.


Like I said, it can be used for just about anything. It's just a matter of whomever letting me know what they need. If there's new things I need to add, like I said I'll add those.

it only takes knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JS to mod Twine to your hearts content

It only takes that for Creightr as well...?

 

[Ethereal Dragon]

I think the thing that's going to put developers off is the fact that it will require constant internet connection. I could understand having this in order to have multiplayer. Honestly though it makes me remember Ubisoft with a lot of their more recent game releases in which it's a requirement to have internet connection in order to play their games even in single player.

 

[Sadtaco]

Steam largely requires an internet connection as well.


I doubt that aspect would put many serious developers off, as version control is a big benefit to have. You don't have to worry about complaints about things that are already changed/fixed due to people not being diligent with manually updating their game.
Not to mention they're making their game more easily accessible this way, another big benefit to them.


Largely, people don't notice it. Just like people don't complain that they can't view a webcomic while offline, or use any web apps while not online. Most people stream porn instead of download it. And there are potential ways around it, similar to how Gmail lets you read archived messages while offline, but you can't get new ones or send any.


Kantai Collection is one of the most popular games out there, and it's web based and requires signup. LEWD is rising pretty nicely. I really don't think it will be a concern to developers as the accessibility of web games makes it far easier to reach an audience, but yes some people don't like it.

 

[Kei]

It's sort of irrelevant, really.

No, it's not. If you want a serious group to be interested in your service you have to give them more then your word to prove your engine is as customizable ans widely useful as you claim it to be. This is marketing 101, you cannot attract serious developers if you cannot show them multiple examples of how your engine is worth their time. You can't just develop it and expect them to come your way... this is not Noah's Ark. -___-

 

[Sadtaco]

...


I don't know, really. They should be able to tell I'm capable of delivering on my promises with all that I've done thus far. If not, it's just "oh well'.


You're acting as if I have some product already complete that I'm trying to sell to the masses, when it says I'm looking to select a few people that I'll invite into an early program so we can show all the different sorts of games that can be made on it, and get feedback to streamline the process so it is very easy to make them.

 

[art926]

LEWD is super-buggy, to be honest. I'm surprised that the developer is promoting his engine now, on which even he couldn't build a clean and stable game.

 

[Void Director]

Looks interesting, I would take a closer look if I were not in the middle of a project with a homebrew engine.


I think most of the developers here are interested in building games with a similar set of features to Fenoxo's games. While Twine and other engines exist they don't give the full set of features needed for such a game out of the box. To make a game like CoC or TiTs you need more than just an interactive novel engine. You also need combat (preferably with support for lust), leveling, transformations (and a parser to deal with them), inventories, shops and other rpg features. 


What I think would interest allot of potential devs on this forum most is an engine that could give them those features out of the box with little or no coding. If your engine could easily provide those features you should advertise it. Otherwise perhaps making a tutorial or starterkit on how to make a CoC/TiTs like game with the engine would draw attention.


Anyhow, good luck.

 

[Sadtaco]

LEWD is super-buggy, to be honest. I'm surprised that the developer is promoting his engine now, on which even he couldn't build a clean and stable game.

After 1 more bug fix on the test server that I'm working on fixing, I'll have fixed all the engine bugs that I'm aware of.
Please report bugs on the LEWD forums. I fix everything, usually promptly, once reported. It's hard to fix things I don't know exist. :/

What I think would interest allot of potential devs on this forum most is an engine that could give them those features out of the box with little or no coding. If your engine could easily provide those features you should advertise it.

I'm offering that in that I can add what's needed for their game, and then those things will be available out-of-the-box for others in the future. That's roughly the jist of what I put in the original post.
Things like you listed though are suppperrrr simple and easy to do, though.


It's a pretty big catch 22 that people are expecting a bunch of game examples to show to see all sorts of things that can be made on the engine, yet I can't show those things without people helping make some new games on the engine. lol.

 

[Kei]

It's a pretty big catch 22 that people are expecting a bunch of game examples to show to see all sorts of things that can be made on the engine, yet I can't show those things without people helping make some new games on the engine. lol.

Pretty much. That's the hardest part in most, if not all, starting businesses. Building a portfolio is tough when you're working alone and finding potential partners without one is really complicated. Your best bet is accepting people that are aiming for small projects, things that can be finished in a small amount of time if you both work together, that way they get their game and you get more products to show as examples. I wish you the best of luck on your endeavor!

 

[Sadtaco]

I don't see why I couldn't find people who are looking to build something amazing and have the artistic and other various talents for that, really.

 

[dndw]

I don't see why I couldn't find people who are looking to build something amazing and have the artistic and other various talents for that, really.

You have explained that working with developers at this early stage represents a significant investment to you, and I'm sure everyone here gets that. Of course it does. But the developers have to make an investment as well. Making an  'amazing' game takes time, as you very well know, and that, too, is an investment they have to make. So when they are looking for engines, they can take the safe option and go with an existing, mature engine, or take a risk and try to work with you and Creightr. So what you really do have to do, is convince them that it's a risk worth taking; that working with Creightr has such a potential benefit over other engines that they can risk the longer development times that will most likely ensue when working with such a young engine. Right now there is only one partial game, and that's fine; you have to start somewhere. But one partial game and documentation may not be enough. What you are doing, in essence, is trying to convince people you can sell them a car by showing them designs and a go-kart. Others have pointed this out, and your counter-argument boils down to 'maybe you can't see it, but a serious developer can'. That really isn't good enough.

They should be able to tell I'm capable of delivering on my promises with all that I've done thus far.

Why? All we have is promises, really. Of course you've done more, but we can't see that, yet.


I would advise you to first build a tech demo, something relatively simple to show off the features you are most proud of. It doesn't need a story or strong gameplay or anything, just the mechanics that set Creightr apart from everything else. That could be LEWD, but then you have to advertise it as such.

 

[vvalpas]

A networked tool that runs in your browser and connects developers. It allows you to collaborate together, seeing what everyone else is doing, instead of having to merge things together or work with Subversion or Github doing pulls, let alone not having to have one person on a team cobble efforts together as they're done.

How do you handle collisions?

It's sort of irrelevant, really.

Not to sound like an asshole but that's some poor marketing. Saying an engine does anything you want without actually showing specifics is the same to me as saying "the engine does nothing unless you make it do something". Which is essentially what engines do. Would be nice to get an ingame feature list, or things that work out of the box.

 

[Sadtaco]

How do you handle collisions?

Collision map.
3D or voxel collisions are possible, but more expensive.

Not to sound like an asshole but that's some poor marketing

People are really misunderstanding thinking I'm trying to market this. I'm looking for a few developers that get what I'm doing here and want in.

I would advise you to first build a tech demo

Why show a  tech demo of its current state when it's fairly easy for me to add new capabilities to fit a certain game that wouldn't be shown there...?


I really don't know how to explain this, but you guys are really really really misunderstanding what I'm doing here.


I think the people that I'm looking for are going to get it fine, and are going to have the eye and experience to see what I've done and how it and I can help what they're doing. If you don't get it, that's fine, but please don't confuse that with me marketing it poorly when I'm not marketing it. I'm putting the relevant information out there for those that understand it and my offer that I think the right people will see the value of. Others that aren't those people aren't going to get that, and that's fine.

But the developers have to make an investment as well

I don't know what I said that indicates I don't get that... I said it should wind up being mutually beneficial for the both of us. I get an example of a good and different variety of game on my engine, and they get help making their game great.


With a great game, they should be able to make money off it as well. Probably way more than they otherwise would on another engine or something homebrew since it's easily available on the web and I've helped make it slick.

 

[vvalpas]

I'm looking for a few developers that get what I'm doing here and want in.

That is marketing. Albeit on a small scale.

Collision map.

I'm talking about data collision. Two person change the same "file" and you have a collision. Do you lock data when someone opens something or do you use webhooks/sockets/whatever to show changes in realtime?

I think the people that I'm looking for are going to get it fine

I'm a developer. I've made a game engine myself. I'm working on another game as I type this. Full blown engine, twine integration etc. All the good stuff. I was curious about this project but I still don't have a clue what it does for me.


Please could you answer these questions:


What kind of content can be streamed (as you put it) to the client out of the box?


Is the client UI easy to change? If so, how easy? Show an example?


Can you NOT use the editor or see the raw code it generates?


How do you handle vast player numbers? Do you instance more game servers and split players up via a load balancer? How can you find your friends? Do you have a friend list? If not, would that be easy to add?


Does your servers run on what? Node.js? Is it extensible? It's fine if you don't want to disclose this.


What kind of bandwidth does your engine use? Is it based on websockets, json-rpc, what? You mentioned that you will host it. What kind of uptime guarantee can you give?


Edit: removed some questions. Answered here http://www.playlewd.com/blog/?p=253

 

[Sadtaco]

Eh. It's not marketing for the masses. It's only for a certain sort of people who I think I've written the right things for those people even if most people don't get it.

I'm talking about data collision. Two person change the same "file" and you have a collision. Do you lock data when someone opens something or do you use webhooks/sockets/whatever to show changes in realtime?

Wot? No, there are definitely no bugs like that. Of course it's all real time. Not everyone supports websockets, but there are fallbacks.


I don't get how you're having that problem in anything regardless. Why would there be locking files? Why would you make two disk reads for the same file when two people want it instead of reading once and delivering it to both simultaneously after the read is complete? Most DB are non-locking on read, as well. That's pretty nuts for anyone to program themselves into an issue like that, tbh.

What kind of content can be streamed (as you put it) to the client out of the box?

Images, models, shaders, whatever are all just data. Why would the network care?

Is the client UI easy to change? If so, how easy? Show an example?

Like it says, client is all hand done now with a light client API provided. So it's the same as any website, which is pretty easy to most people. Much easier of course, since all you have to do is write the code that interprets data on events, rather having everything in client code. But like I said, I can do that stuff for the right project/team.


Like it says, there's some plan down the road to have some automatically generated client code for things, but I'm not doing that now. It's an engine right now and not a limited "game maker".

Can you NOT use the editor or see the raw code it generates?

Can you stop that with anything running on the open web? How could it tell whether what you're sending it is coming from some version of the tool or not? It's not like you can even do anything with cryptography to prevent that and no amount of obfuscation could stop it.

How do you handle vast player numbers? Do you instance more game servers and split players up via a load balancer? How can you find your friends? Do you have a friend list? If not, would that be easy to add?

The way it's written it's designed to be fragmented between multiple cores/servers, yes. But given that you can handle thousands or tens thousands of players on a single core, that hasn't come up yet.


Friends are easy to add. You just hook a player connect even and check if they're in a player's friends list that you've added userids to. I haven't added it to LEWD yet, though. Was thinking of something more robust that could be used cross game instead of just throwing in something basic for it.

Does your servers run on what? Node.js? Is it extensible? It's fine if you don't want to disclose this.

It's Google V8 on top of the core parts so people can write server side stuff in JS, yes. It says that already in so many words.

You mentioned that you will host it. What kind of uptime guarantee can you give?

Same uptime guarantee as Amazon AWS. You don't really get much better reliability than their network.

 

[vvalpas]

I don't get how you're having that problem in anything regardless. Why would there be locking files? Why would you make two disk reads for the same file when two people want it instead of reading once and delivering it to both simultaneously after the read is complete? Most DB are non-locking on read, as well. That's pretty nuts for anyone to program themselves into an issue like that, tbh.

It was just a question. So you have, albeit highly unlikely, race condition here.

 

[HentaiWriter]

Jesus, dude. Your post over at ULMF showed a complete lack of tact enough, but this is just mindblowing. I'd make quotes to every time you alienated so many possible developers with your responses but... honestly it would be essentially quoting half the topic. You need to wipe this topic, wipe the one at ULMF, get someone to be your public speaking voice and have them respond in these topics, and also get an example out with the engine, even if you have to pay someone to do it (gotta spend money to make money, that's business).

 

[Sadtaco]

Jesus, dude. Your post over at ULMF showed a complete lack of tact enough, but this is just mindblowing. I'd make quotes to every time you alienated so many possible developers with your responses but... honestly it would be essentially quoting half the topic. You need to wipe this topic, wipe the one at ULMF, get someone to be your public speaking voice and have them respond in these topics, and also get an example out with the engine, even if you have to pay someone to do it (gotta spend money to make money, that's business).

?

 

[The Silver Bard]

Jesus, dude. Your post over at ULMF showed a complete lack of tact enough, but this is just mindblowing. I'd make quotes to every time you alienated so many possible developers with your responses but... honestly it would be essentially quoting half the topic. You need to wipe this topic, wipe the one at ULMF, get someone to be your public speaking voice and have them respond in these topics, and also get an example out with the engine, even if you have to pay someone to do it (gotta spend money to make money, that's business).

It does make for good reading, in an Ocean Marketing sort of way, which will generate some views. Maybe it's worth the negative publicity?

 

[MotoKuchoma]

Jesus, dude. Your post over at ULMF showed a complete lack of tact enough, but this is just mindblowing. I'd make quotes to every time you alienated so many possible developers with your responses but... honestly it would be essentially quoting half the topic. You need to wipe this topic, wipe the one at ULMF, get someone to be your public speaking voice and have them respond in these topics, and also get an example out with the engine, even if you have to pay someone to do it (gotta spend money to make money, that's business).

I just went over there and holy shit. This is even worse than Digital Homicide's response to Jim Sterling's review of The Slaughtering Grounds. 

 

[vvalpas]

Here are my two cents.


What you're offering is a client-server architecture.


What your engine can do is take information from the client (or admin panel, whatever), push that onto a database and serve it to other clients/run it on the server based on some arbitrary rules.


Your visual programming interface generates javascript classes that have some event methods. onClick, onThis, onThat & onWhatever.


I'm assuming these classes are loaded and run on the server and certain data flows back to the client from whatever these methods do.


You also have a 2D square grid map data for movement and to tie scenarios, NPCs and what-have-you, into.


NPCs probably work quite similarly as the scenarios. Same interface to program them.


As far as I could be arsed to read you haven't even mentioned security around these features. This is absolutely critical to at least mention this or explain how you guard against malicious users.


Your engine has a map for you to roam around in and you've taken care of the communication between the client and the server. The editor is clever but it's not necessary by any means. People who understand what it does and can use it will most likely have the knowledge to write code and push it on the server anyways.


All in all; what your product essentially is is a glorified notepad. I don't mean any disrespect with that. Every IDE can be categorized as such. Marketing it as anything but that would be a waste of everyone's time. You have repeatedly told people that you provide an engine. Saying that is good, the way you do it... isn't.


Here are the things that make me turn away from working with you:


You market '3000 hours of work'. This equates to roughly 1.7 years for one programmer working full time 6.5 hours a day (6.5 hours is an average work hours actually put into a product per day). This is not a lot. I get a sense that you're quite new to working in the gaming industry. You know quite a bit about server programming and I'm guestimating you have about 1-3 years of working experience in the field. Enough to give you a sense that you know what you're doing but not enough to understand that you don't know jack.


Your product looks... bad. It looks like it was cobbled together in a weekend. It doesn't look like something I would put my money or effort into. Now, before you lash out against this and come up with excuses that it's only a development version and it will look better in the future, please understand that people are visual beings. You'll do a hell of a better job at getting anyone interested in this if you set a standard on the looks. Define your margins and font sizes and stick to them. Minimize click count and mouse travel. Look into Fitt's law. Read a few books on UI design. Hell... even leaflets would work at this point.


These are minor things though. The main reason I don't want to even consider trying your engine out is... you.


You have a cocky attitude and you sound like a person who can't be asked questions from. Your immediate response to any question, stupid or not, is unbelievably condescending in tone. Sure you get the facts straight but at the same time you make the person asking feel dumb for just asking. This is a definite no-no in any collaborative project.


All in all; I'm not turning away from your engine (it's actually pretty cool). I'm turning away from you.

 

[HentaiWriter]

...please understand that people are visual beings. You'll do a hell of a better job at getting anyone interested in this if you set a standard on the looks. Define your margins and font sizes and stick to them. Minimize click count and mouse travel. Look into Fitt's law. Read a few books on UI design. Hell... even leaflets would work at this point.


These are minor things though. The main reason I don't want to even consider trying your engine out is... you.


You have a cocky attitude and you sound like a person who can't be asked questions from. Your immediate response to any question, stupid or not, is unbelievably condescending in tone. Sure you get the facts straight but at the same time you make the person asking feel dumb for just asking. This is a definite no-no in any collaborative project.


All in all; I'm not turning away from your engine (it's actually pretty cool). I'm turning away from you.

This is what everyone else, myself included, has been trying to tell you, Sadtaco. This is why I've been telling you to hire someone to do marketing and be your PR.


1) You need to have good aesthetics for people to care. People are visual. This includes professional programmers that you're trying to attract like vvalpas here, not just "the casuals" that are on the forum.
2) Inflexibility with collaborative projects on the part of an actual person's behavior in the collaboration is basically project suicide. I've worked on three or four projects in the past where the game was amazing, the people were talented, it would have been a great game, but one or more people on the team just had zero tact, zero ability to be flexible, and couldn't interact with other people well.


It reminds me of a story I heard once from a friend of mine that was the hiring manager at a tech company;
He said that two applicants came in to get a position that day. One of them held multiple degrees at a prestigious college, and clearly knew his shit. However, he had no real social skills or tact and just seemed distant, combative, even acerbic.
The other applicant only had a 2 or so year degree from a so-so college, but was communicative, meshed well socially with other workers he encountered on his way to the interview room, was asking questions and just overall pleasant to work with. He got the job specifically because of those qualities, regardless of the fact that he was less suited for the job in terms of actual technical skill, at a tech company.


This is how the world works. You need "hard" (knowledge) and "soft" (social) skills to succeed in it. Luckily, on the internet, you can get other people to do your PR and be your "social skills" as it were by being the face/mouth of your product while you build the project away from the public eye, which is absolutely the only way that some collaborations/projects succeed.

 

[Sadtaco]

The only thing I can really see as being condescending in my answers here is when I the answered a question with "Images, models, shaders, whatever are all just data. Why would the network care?" I guess? But I was genuinely curious why someone would think it would care and why it would have arbitrary restrictions like that. Like what leads someone to wonder that. I don't have the perspective to get where that comes from, so I asked.


If other answers came off as condescending, I don't know. All I can tell you is I didn't mean for them to be.

It reminds me of a story I heard once from a friend of mine that was the hiring manager at a tech company ...

That story doesn't work here because the so-so person wouldn't be capable of making something like this. This is probably where I'm going to be called arrogant or whatever again, but how else can I put that and put the same point across? That's just the truth. I tried putting things "tactfully" and people didn't get it. If something akin to Wordpress - something which powers 75 million sites, including major ones like Wired - but for making games was easy to create, it'd have been done already. There's lots of huge problems that I solved with the scalability, efficiency, and accessibility on both sides.


You're basically saying I should pay a PR person to write things for me. I'm not wasting money on that right now.

You market '3000 hours of work'. This equates to roughly 1.7 years for one programmer working full time 6.5 hours a day (6.5 hours is an average work hours actually put into a product per day). This is not a lot.

It's not a lot of man hours, that's true. You'd usually have a few people working on something, so really 3000 hours is a few months for a team. But I imagine to emulate the same thing, it'd be more than 3000 hours for others.


There are other SaaS that have different goals, are much more limited in what you can do, and yet also much much more expensive. Those are things that mobile games tend to use. So you have to wonder if any developer could make it in the same time, or heck spend more time on it, to make something better than the current SaaS offerings yet cheaper, well they'd have already done that already?

All in all; what your product essentially is is a glorified notepad. I don't mean any disrespect with that. Every IDE can be categorized as such. Marketing it as anything but that would be a waste of everyone's time. You have repeatedly told people that you provide an engine. Saying that is good, the way you do it... isn't.

The tool is somewhat a glorified IDE like Cloud IDE right now, though that's still putting it lightly and there is still an engine component to it running what you've made(which is a huge difference from being just an IDE, and would make it wrong to market it as such). But Wordpress also started out as glorified blog software that became a complete CMS and much more.


The tool is also something that non-programmers can use, and even more so makes it easier for programmers and content-creators/scripters to work together.


But you can start with something like this and turn it into something akin to a game maker like RPG Maker(or even exactly the same) with extensions and such in time, because it has that foundation that's horizontal and multipurpose like that. On the other hand, you can't take something that's like RPG Maker and make it more general purpose like Gamemaker Studio without starting from the beginning.

Your product looks... bad. It looks like it was cobbled together in a weekend. It doesn't look like something I would put my money or effort into. Now, before you lash out against this and come up with excuses that it's only a development version and it will look better in the future, please understand that people are visual beings.

Visually it looks bad? What would make it look better? How does the interface for Gamemaker Studio, or RPG Maker, or Byond look better? Well, how? I'm not really sure how a development tool is supposed to look nicer, but I've always been open to suggestions which is why I was seeking people for feedback to begin with.

These are minor things though. The main reason I don't want to even consider trying your engine out is... you.

I can get that. I've exercised little patience in that other thread for various reasons. That's a much different thing than being patient with people I've chosen and accepted to work with versus people who are trolling, intentionally being demanding, argumentative, and aggravating, is all I can say..

 

[HentaiWriter]

You're basically saying I should pay a PR person to write things for me. I'm not wasting money on that right now.

You gotta spend money to make money. #1 rule of business, and I've seen you say numerous times that this isn't a business; unless you want to provide this thing you've made for free and never make a dime for it, then you're in business from day 1 of it and you should treat it as such.


Also, PR isn't a waste, and without it, as this thread and the ULMF thread shows, it's really unlikely you're gonna find people to work with you on this.
I'm sorry, but that's just how people usually are, they want to work with flexible people, and they want to get paid for their work, usually.


You also ignored what I just posted here;

1) You need to have good aesthetics for people to care. People are visual. This includes professional programmers that you're trying to attract like vvalpas here, not just "the casuals" that are on the forum.
2) Inflexibility with collaborative projects on the part of an actual person's behavior in the collaboration is basically project suicide. I've worked on three or four projects in the past where the game was amazing, the people were talented, it would have been a great game, but one or more people on the team just had zero tact, zero ability to be flexible, and couldn't interact with other people well.

This is realllly something you should take into account, and vvalpas, a professional programmer, the kind of person you're trying to attract, has basically mirrored these statements.

That's a much different thing than being patient with people I've chosen and accepted to work with versus people who are trolling, intentionally being demanding, argumentative, and aggravating, is all I can say..

No one in this thread or the ULMF thread has been trolling you or being demanding or argumentative. We're genuinely trying to help and you're outright ignoring glaring problems that people are presenting you with. You say you want feedback, we've given it to you in droves, and since it's not what you want to hear or things *you* don't consider important, you consider them negligible, but what we're trying to get you to realize is that they ARE important to "reel in" the people that you want to work with.

 

[DaviceMathews]

Tone is hard to figure out in text format. A legitimate question someone asks can sound like a "why the hell would you think that?" kind of question very easily. The same thing goes for constructive criticism. 

Visually it looks bad? What would make it look better? How does the interface for Gamemaker Studio, or RPG Maker, or Byond look better? Well, how? I'm not really sure how a development tool is supposed to look nicer, but I've always been open to suggestions which is why I was seeking people for feedback to begin with.

Look at the "Well, how?" part. You are angry with the others for saying they do not want to work with you because of your personality, understandable. The first part of the quote, you are asking for clarification but in a very terse fashion, but that does not become important until you say "Well, how?". That makes it sound like not only do you reject what someone is saying but that it is ridiculous to say any other widely used interface for game creation has a better interface than yours. That is not to say you do not have any right to be angry about some of the responses you have gotten its just much of it looks like it is genuine advise that you should look at and evaluate.