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[Jake]

I don't think you're necessarily out to steal people's games and money; I just think that all we've seen you do is blow hot air without any proof that you can back your claims up with something real. Every time I or anyone else has asked you what your engine actually does, you've ignored or avoided the question, and that means I'm increasingly drawing the conclusion that you don't really know what you're talking about.

Several posts back, you and others became rude, arrogant, and INCREDIBLY demanding

You're offering a technological service to people in exchange for a cut of the profits. It's not at all unreasonable to want to know what the service you're offering actually does. I wasn't totally uninterested in your service when you first posted, but you've managed to turn me off it completely with your attitude and your complete inability to demonstrate something that a competent web developer couldn't have knocked up in a week.

You're been overly defensive, and apparently just lumping everyone who's asking you questions instead of lauding you as a visionary into the same bucket. For example: I said that if you're talking about re-writing lots of game-specific custom coding for each game then your profit split starts to look more reasonable; you apparently lumped me in with Fortaat and KinouGames as thinking your offer is "no good", which is pretty much the opposite of what I actually said. At least, I presume we're who you meant when you referred to Fortaat's "two compatriots", as if we had forged some kind of alliance to take you down for no good reason.

I use .doc because it is the universal standard pretty much.

For your information: it's not a universal standard at all. It's almost a de-facto standard within the English-language world of business, but this is not the world of business. Even people who run Windows can't necessarily open .doc files, Office is expensive.

No, my crappy tech demo is not impressive. I am aware of this.

One post you're telling me that 99% of my questions will be answered by looking at your tech demo; a few hours later, you're telling me that your tech demo is 'crappy' and trying to excuse it as being old code. Make your mind up! It did answer all of my questions, though: with "no, the engine does not have this feature".

The only conclusion I can reasonably draw from this is that you don't have an engine that does all the things you've claimed, and you're trying to get by on bluster.

Moving on, I'm not answering you questions about pre-caching because I have no idea how we did it.

Well, I played through your tech demo on a reasonably fast internet connection, so I'll tell you: I don't think it does it at all. I was watching the sprite load when the guy changed positions, and it was very slow.

as far as I know, it pre-loads every asset as a game is started.

As it goes, I would advise against this, as well: the number of assets you'd need for a decent-length VN would mean you'd be pre-loading tens of megabytes of image and audio data, which will firstly cause problems on mobile devices and secondly mean your games take several minutes to load. Which in turn will mean nobody will play them.

The reason I asked the question was because it's one of the few parts of web-delivery of VNs which is actually difficult and requires some serious thought and skill to come up with a decent solution. From what I've seen and what you've said, it doesn't seem like you've come up with a good solution, so I'll give you some more free advice: you need to solve this problem before you go live with something that takes more than five minutes to play through.

To be ANY help to you about your mobile phone woes I need to know which one it is. If it's not a newer smartphone it probably would be buggy as crap because even pared down the engine is resource intensive-ish.

Why is it resource-intensive? Surely, for web-delivery, it shouldn't be? Isn't half the point of web delivery reaching a wider audience? Take a leaf from casual gaming's book, you need to cater for low-spec machines.

Anyway, I tried it on my mobile phone because you told me that to equal your engine, my hypothetical programmed-in-a-month engine would have to run - and I quote -

on EVERY modern browser including mobile ones

I bought my phone November of last year, so it's a modern mobile browser. Your engine doesn't run on it. Leaving aside the parts which just don't work, it doesn't even attempt to scale itself for the size of the display!

an html5 media

And this is going to run on EVERY modern browser including mobile ones? I don't know exactly how wide the uptake is of HTML5, but I do know that the standard itself is only a working draft at the moment. I highly doubt that all mobiles sold today come with browsers on which that element works.

The mobile phones we're targeting have well above average latency to play our game.

It's entirely dependent on their signal strength and the network usage and so on, you just can't make a statement like this. Unless "the mobile phones you're targetting" are "the mobile phones within ten metres of the mast".

You're not a potential customer Jake.

Yeah, you're right here. But I was when you started talking. The reason I'm not a potential customer any more is that you've had entirely the wrong attitude for this whole conversation, and I'm knowledgable enough to see that your product as it stands right now isn't worth my time (or, in my opinion, anyone else's).

Even leaving aside the lack of any evidence that your engine is remotely as good as you claim, you've mentioned several times that you're too lazy to accomodate your potential customers, and you seem to have the attitude that it's OK to just arbitrarily discard half the potential userbase because it's a little bit difficult to write an engine that works for them.

Web delivery of VNs is not a bad idea, but you seem to be relying pretty heavily on being the only product in the market. You might be the only product delivered by web to a very small section of the audience (since everyone who isn't running an Apple mobile can run Flash and probably has the plugin installed), but I think you'll find that unless you have content that just isn't available anywhere else, most people will prefer a desktop version of whatever you're selling.


Maybe you really do have a superb, well-featured engine that does everything you say it does and works on all the platforms you claim... but if you do, you should really show it to people; you're doing an excellent job of hiding it.

[DaFool]

@Topagae

Will it be possible for the site to change theme / layout depending on the game in the foreground, like those publisher forums which change skins and color depending on which game subforum you're viewing?

For example, a user could be playing "Wanton Death and Destruction" and the entire theme of the site is black and gray. Then he decides he wants to play "Ponies and Rainbows" and as soon as he selects that game the site layout changes to show flowers and pretty pink bubbles.

In other words, as a game maker, I don't want my game to be shoehorned into your wrapper. I want your wrapper to work itself around my game instead!

[Ren]

Having tried the "Novus Magus Academy" and the tutorial, I would suggest some things, which might not be so obvious to your team, after having worked on it for a while:

(On NMA)
- The text advances too slowly, and when I got impatient and clicked faster, I lost some lines... having the ability to set the text speed would help;
- Having read-back to go back to previous lines, in case I clicked too fast and missed some, would be helpful;
- Intuitively, I felt like I could click anywhere in the text window, but that isn't the case, if you click in the right side of it your text doesn't advance, while it does on the left;
- There should be some transitions for the sprites, the lack of effects when they appear and disappear looks really bad;
- Got the bug in the attached image after switching tabs to write another point, not sure it's related, but if switching tabs does this...

(I guess it doesn't, because I got it by clicking and dragging, this time... this time the problem affects both the sprites and the text.)

- The screen blanks out whenever I choose a new location, and the last line from the teacher is still in the text-box, I'd say this is confusing and should be considered a bug, the text-box itself should disappear while going around, as the teacher most likely isn't following you;
- Clicking on said text-box does nothing in this situation, but the cursor turns into a hand, which intuitively leads me to think I can do something with it, as all the internet sites I've visited behave that way;
- The assets on this game sometimes take way too long to load, considering that stuff like the coat of arms in the bedroom was loaded in the first scene, I'd expect it not to take a second or so, considering the claim about loading the assets before the game starts;
- The text box shouldn't always be on screen, when there are no dialogues;
- Why is it that I picked the choice "OK, let's see what's going on outside!", and then I'm still in my room? Small thing, perhaps, but added to the amount of counter-intuitive behaviour in this game, it adds to my confusion; (Edit: on a third playthrough it does what I'd expect, but once I get to my room the "sleep" option isn't there anymore, and going around hoping for a random event does nothing)
- Got stuck after the conversation with the teacher, I doubt I'm missing something, the game simply doesn't advance;

(My choices where all in the direction of being unfriendly to Fiorelli, and not to help him, in case it helps you and in case it really is a bug)

- "Passion and plunder" simply doesn't load;
- I clicked on the tutorial game icon, but there's no "Start a new game" button, which confuses me, the only way to do it was choosing "Start a new game" from a drop down menu - again, it seems to me it's counter-intuitive;


I hope not too many of these were spotted and fixed in your newer release. I'd consider fixing them if they weren't, as all these things added to others (such as the layout of the site and the too many ads) are going to alienate quite a few prospective customers, in my opinion.
To clarify, I personally believe in giving critique and feedback and pointing out those things that in my opinion are going to diminish the chance of success of a project. We had a lengthy discussion on this forum about this, and it seems to me we agreed that trying to comment on people's works as often as we can so as to lead other people by example to share their opinion as well would have been a good idea.

I shared my feedback with creators before, both via PMs and publicly, because I believe sharing my honest opinion is a form of respect, while ending a conversation just because the other party isn't agreeing is disrespectful to the them and dishonest towards the other people on this forums - as everyone can benefit from the discussion and the opinions expressed. Lastly, and I doubt I'm the only person in this thread who thinks so, I firmly believe that no one would spend a chunk of their time to give advice just to be spiteful or demanding or mean. If we want your project to be successful, we have to be honest.

I'd brag again about the story about the cow, the turd and the fox - but the post is already long as it is.

Kind regards;

Ren

Edit: forgot an important thing: I used it on Firefox 3.6.7, on a PC with Windows Vista 32bits on it.

[PyTom]

I also know a friend of mine runs a highly successful REAL-TIME MMO in flash, and has just 1 single server. I don't think latency/downtime issues can be really a big problem if you go with the right hardware/service.

Latency has little to do with server load. Latency is the time it takes from when someone clicks on the screen, to when that person gets a response back, due to the various network delays involved. That has more to do with network topology, hardware, etc. For example, my phone seems to be getting ~300ms latency when I'm using it over 3g. That means that anything I do that requires communicating with the server will require about a third of a second.

re: "potential customers"

Realize that as an engine developer, there are two constituencies that you have to keep happy. The first is the group of game-makers, and the second is the (larger) group of players. The second group is especially important in this model, as they're your paying customers.

Even when someone is unlikely to become a game-maker, their opinion as a player still matters.

[Jake]

Latency is the time it takes from when someone clicks on the screen, to when that person gets a response back, due to the various network delays involved. That has more to do with network topology, hardware, etc. For example, my phone seems to be getting ~300ms latency when I'm using it over 3g. That means that anything I do that requires communicating with the server will require about a third of a second.

Also bear in mind that there are other situational factors that have a bearing, and sometimes that bearing can be quite large.

I have an (IIRC) 20 megabit cable Internet line; at the times I make heavy use of the Internet, I generally get very low latency to major sites, and fast download speeds. All this goes to pot around six in the evening when everybody else is also using the local part of the cable network, saturating it and slowing everyone's traffic down.

My mobile phone speeds (also over 3G) vary drastically depending on whether I have a strong or weak signal. This can sometimes be the difference between sitting on one side or the other side of the room.

[Topagae]

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[Topagae]

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[kinougames]

@PyTom

Non-game makers opinions do matter in the whole context of things. But this thread isn't about players, I'm specifically asking for the former group (Game makers). The thread and it's topic was meant ONLY for them, and I wanted to address, ONLY them. I don't know why you've come down on me for this TWICE. If I don't WANT to talk to someone, or answer their questions, who the heck has any right to tell me I have to? I'm going to continue to ignore anyone who says something that has nothing to do with the purpose of this thread, and I'm not going to answer questions from people who won't advance my purposes. It's simple business, salesman don't pitch crap to you if they know you aren't going to buy it.

On that note. The purpose of this thread I made was obvious, I was trying to recruit people with finished scenarios to port into my engine. I succeeded. I have a pretty long queue at the moment, and I become tired of answering argumentative persons who were simply wasting my time because it was obvious to anyone that there was no way in heck they'd help me in any way to achieve my purpose for this endeavor. When I want to talk to players, I'll start a separate thread. But this ISN'T that thread, and if people want to talk about that, perhaps they should start another one?

Argh, if you're so enraged at even the moderator, just drop the topic. All anyone will see here is you yelling at everyone and driving away buyers and collaborators.

@Jack

I share your sentiments exactly Jack. There ISN'T a lot of data or proof that what I'm doing will work. The greatest advantage I have is that nobody is trying what I'm trying, and it's also it's greatest weakness as you've just stumbled upon. I don't have any numbers, I have loose correlations to other statistics, and there's not a great way to accurately predict how well I will do. No guts, no glory my friend.

Furthermore, the people who make new products they aren't sure will work usually put money into researching trends and seeing what sells. You picked a product for a niche market (as opposed to say, facebook, who already saw the success of myspace) that already has poor sales in America, didn't research well into the product itself, or the necessary work to make one, and in the end you came out with a product that is not only subpar compared to completely free-for-commercial products, but also hardly useful as far as the parts of it that can't be done by the already free pieces. This is likely why no one has done it before...it's not going to have a huge selling base.

[Jake]

If you want answers, be polite.

I was interested, I was polite, I asked questions, and you responded in a defensive and confrontational manner and refused to answer any of them. I probed a little further, starting to see reasons to worry about your service, but still open to the possibility that you might have answers and be worth talking to, and continued to give you professional advice on subjects which I get the impression you haven't considered; you ignored all of my questions and brusquely pointed me to your online demo telling me that it would answer 99% of my questions. I felt a bit put out that you expected me to magically have known that you had one when you hadn't bothered to tell us, hunted it down, and wasn't impressed. Despite this, I continued to offer you advice which you would do well to pay some attention to. Sure, I was a little sarcastic, but you've been treating me like the enemy from my first post, so it's hardly surprising. How do you respond? By freaking out, getting even more defensive than you previously were, and then performing a glorious U-turn and telling me that the tech demo you'd previously told me would answer "99% of my questions" wasn't actually representative at all of what you're selling. And you continue to act the arse and refuse to discuss any of this stuff.


So, I have two simple questions:
- At which point was I 'rude' enough to not have my questions answered in a civil manner?
- If you have a version of your online browser-based engine which fixes all the problems I've seen and all the problems Ren pointed out, why on Earth haven't you posted it on your website so prospective creative partners can see what you're actually offering?

Now I'm going to be rude, because you've been nothing but rude ever since I joined the conversation: the engine on your website is a joke. If you want to be taken seriously, stop presenting this mess to us and show people what you're actually talking about, I cannot believe that anyone sane would start to enter into a partnership agreement with you based on the mess that you've made public so far.

[Ren]

Hanging dialogue options - This was a tech demo with a rail road of choices. You had to sleep for one day, and then another 3 to pop the only 2 events we had available. Obviously this isn't the case in the real game.

I'll have you know I'm a conscientious tester, though. Unable to play games without testing them any more, but conscientious.
I did try and sleep for several days, because the teacher suggested to do so, and because I found a post in the forum saying I should, but no event popped out, no matter how much I tried going in every location.

Loading the save later on only made it so I found another problem: I can't sleep any more.

I'd then suggest putting some sort of screen saying something along the lines of "The demo ends here, ta-ta for now!"
You have to be as precise and as not-confusing as you can be, or you're not going to leave a good impression about the abilities of your engine. While it's obvious for you that the demo ended there, it's going to leave an impression of something unpolished, to someone who's trying it for the first time and needs it to know what you can do. Chances are they're going to think it's a bug. And an A class one at that.

Try also to fix the punctuation and typos in your agreement: I found a serious lack of commas, and as informal as you may want to sound, you should never ruin everything by having poor punctuation or grammar. I base my opinion on everything you show us: the more things are imprecise and/or unpolished, the more I'll be led to believe your products are unpolished as well.

I'd wait a bit more before asking people to sign up with you guys, at the moment you still seem to be developing your product, and just saying "It's an old demo, we have a new version which you can't try yet." isn't going to win you future customers. Making a start too early might seriously harm the opinion people have of your product, and I doubt you want that.


Also, I apologise to PyTom in advance for not doing what I said and actually meddling in this: please try to calm down Topagae. The people who posted here in my opinion didn't go beyond being blunt at first, and then replying bluntly to your (honestly too defensive and insulting) posts. PyTom is in his right to ask you to try and modify your behaviour as he's the one who's administrating this forums. While I will tell him if I disagree on something he decides, I will also try to abide to his rules, as long as I'm a guest here in HIS site.
Which is why I shouldn't address the matter after he's clearly asked everyone not to, but there you go.

[Topagae]

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[Jake]

I'm at a presidential debate about climate change and everyone in the audience is screaming about other campaign issues, it simply isn't appropriate, and when people ask my about off-topic stuff I believe I am well within my right not to answer or care about what those people are saying.

Sure. But if you're at a presidential debate about climate change and you're presenting evidence that looks like it supports your argument, and everyone's screaming "but you're ignoring the serious flaws in the way that data was gathered" and you respond with "you're off-topic" or "stop being rude", you're just going to look like you don't have a clue what you're talking about and you're trying to con people with an idea that doesn't have any concrete basis in reality.



Most of what I said in this topic was intended to either find out pertinent information to see whether your service was of interest to me, or to give you advice as to how to improve your engine or how to present yourself and your software if you want sane people to pay any attention to you. Personally, I think this is very on-topic in a thread about getting people to sign up with your service on a game development forum.

If you seriously have a queue of people ready to sign up with you then I can only conclude that either those people haven't seen your software, you've showed them a completely different version to the version you put on your site, or they're pretty naïve and you've essentially conned them into getting into bed with you with promises of future excellence, because what you've showed around is nothing to get excited about. I'll refrain from jumping to conclusions as to which of these is the truth, but I certainly wouldn't advise anyone to take you up on your offer with what you're showing now.

I'll look forward to seeing the excellent version of your engine that you insist actually exists.

[PyTom]

Non-game makers opinions do matter in the whole context of things. But this thread isn't about players, I'm specifically asking for the former group (Game makers). The thread and it's topic was meant ONLY for them, and I wanted to address, ONLY them. I don't know why you've come down on me for this TWICE. If I don't WANT to talk to someone, or answer their questions, who the heck has any right to tell me I have to?

Nobody.

But you don't own the thread, and the discussion has mostly been on topic. Staying silent, especially in the face of reasonable questions, is a type of answer - one that people should take into account when deciding if they should sell or license to you a complete VN scenario.

[Ren]

Fair enough, but I noticed another thing, and I have no idea if you saw it: weirdly, on Mac the text goes to a much more normal speed.
I'd also consider not having the description for the locations every time you visit them, it will get annoying to see the same text over and over again.

I gave out the information for that tech demo because I wanted people to shut up and I hoped it would appease them. I really should've known better. It is by no means meant for general public consumption, so a lot of these problems simply exist because we used it as a power-point presentation and not as a game. Sorry to waste your time about that.

You mention your site on your document, if it's not meant for public consumption you probably want to remove the link.


As for the rest, not much to say. I disagree.

[Topagae]

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