Spoiler it was real good!!! i'm a lil sad Xefros was immediately like <3 though, and I think Joey will be too, because being nice to someone and remembering their names shouldn't be a foundation for a romantic attraction. It seems like even for trolls, Xef had a really rough go of it thanks to Dammek trying to be the next Summoner with his shitty troll anarchist posters x3
Spoiler oh god no there was footage from act 2 at least, maybe further in a trailer ages and ages ago, with tickethorn troll. My guess will be that they delayed release until they have the bulk of the game actually done, and then slowly release episodically after doing QA stuff. And since it's homestuck stuff, it wouldn't suprise me if there were tie in material between things. Dante Basco being called out specifically in the credits reminds me of when he announced he was working on a big homestuck thing with hussie fuckin ages and ages ago
Spoiler Would y'all say the portal is about the halfway point? It seems like a good non-spoilery way to give people advance notice of its length so they don't get blindsided by how short it is. Especially since the portal itself is well-known.
I mean a good part of the developement process for an episodic game needs to take place before the first episode is released. Releases should reasonably be a bit quicker now what with character models and UI things being established and the story presumably already beign plotted out. A good chunk of the environments can probably be reused as well come to think of it. Anyways, honestly, 2-3 hours is pretty standard amount of content for an episodic point and click adventure it's more or less industry standard so I'm sorry if people are disappointed but I honestly don't know why you expected twelve plus hours out of the previously announced first fourth of the game????
Spoiler probably thereabouts? i probably only spent as long as i did in Xefros' hive because i was confused about what to do
Spoiler I usually don't buy into episodic games, so this was my first time with this type of game. So I'm not accustomed to them being shorter. And I'm not disappointed; what I paid for is what I got, and I think that was $8 well spent. I was just somewhat surprised.
It helps to keep in mind that this is a serial release that's still ongoing. if all the acts are like this (and I suspect that they'll probably tend towards getting a little longer rather as things go on) then the end product will have between 8 and 12 hours of content which is genre typical I believe? though I haven't played many p+c adventures recently so it might be they're supposed to be 500+ hour behemoths now too haha
I'm curious - do you know how long it might take for future acts of this sort of length to release now that they have the basics down?
Spoiler also - there's a bit at the end where xefros is like 'you remembered my name!' Except... Joey said his name correctly before that point...
re: the length, Tales of Monkey Island is another episodic point-and-click adventure that i've played. that has 5 parts, and each of those parts is probably 2-4 hours, depending on how good you are at puzzles. so for an episodic game this seems about right.
also I AM GETTING NERD SNIPED SO HARD RIGHT NOW. there seems to be unique dialogue for EVERY POSSIBLE INTERACTION you can have between inventory and tech and the backgrounds?? so now of course i want to use EVERYTHING with EVERYTHING to read ALL THE DIALOGUE. normal adventure games, even silly ones like Monkey Island, just say "you can't do that" or something for 90% of the stuff you try. i mean what did i expect from an adventure game from Andrew Fucking Hussie though.
Well I just looked up the biggest player when it comes to episodic games right now (Telltale Games) and they usually go for five episodes per "season" and seem to try to publish one episode a month occassional hiccups and delays aside. Keeping in mind that Telltale Games is a lot bigger than WhatPumpkin (though I believe most of the ttg stuff is made in unity too), that they have way mroe experience, and how much other stuff WP has on its plate despite just being a tiny indie studio I'd assume that ideally we might see a second installment in a quarter to half a year? That's the very conservative estimate anyways! Might well be a lot sooner!
also, Spoiler did we figure out who the heiress was? because something i did notice was that the green moon was there, meaning it was post-scratch. but it wasn't Feferi. And it wasn't the Condesce, I don't think?
That's good, I was scared my hope for six months was too fast to be reasonable. Spoiler The heiress has been mentioned a few times by the devs in the lead-up to release; she's named Trizza.
Also consider that the coding side of the game had to basically be restarted from scratch (no pun inXded) due to the original team bailing. Now that they at least have the framework down, that's a lot of startup cost that won't be needed for the remaining episodes. There are also a lot of economies-of-scale issues with games. For big games and companies with history you can usually save a lot of time and resources on assets and code by clever copy-and-paste tricks, provided you first have something to copy. For a company that's putting out its first, small game, not so much.
Wait hang on hang on there's a timelines problem here Spoiler Okay so this game canonically takes place in 1994. The Beta Kids are all 13 as of 2009 when the game starts. In 1994, Ms Lalonde is still young and is the Hiveswap Kids' babysitter? So in less than three years she goes from Teen Lalonde to Mom Lalonde and gets Rose. How... does that work? Even if she's like 19 in Hiveswap, that would make her 22 tops by the time of Homestuck. I'm at work and haven't gotten the game, please correct me on any details I'm missing here.
