Incline Colony Ship RELEASE THREAD

[Abu Antar]

Exactly, I think they didn’t know how to run a business (or make compelling game mechanics either, tbh)

If any aspiring game developer needs a business consultant and has the budget to pay one, PM me.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

If we want another comparison, Space Wreck seems to have 0 current players.

id blame loading times

Which is a pity since I've found moment to moment gameplay of Space Wreck to be more enjoyable than CS.
It might be something to do with their differing approaches of rules-based vs tightly scripted game designs.
Former gives much more freedom to fuck around.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Exactly, I think they didn’t know how to run a business (or make compelling game mechanics either, tbh)

If any aspiring game developer needs a business consultant and has the budget to pay one, PM me.

Yeah, the portrait probably doesn't do me any favours at times.

It's my curse to bear to be this beautiful.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Comparison to AoD and Dungeon Rats regarding All time peak of number of players:
AoD: 703
DR: 278
CS: 1431

The numbers may be small, but at least they were trending in the right direction for their "main" games.

It's interesting that the comparisons picked by Tyranicon were Encased and Black Geyser though.

My mind went more towards Caves of Lore and KotC2. Not that I gave it any great deal of thought and those are both fantasy games made by single developers rather than small teams.

 

[Hellraiser]

Exactly, I think they didn’t know how to run a business (or make compelling game mechanics either, tbh)

If any aspiring game developer needs a business consultant and has the budget to pay one, PM me.

First piece of advice you will give will be "don't hire a consultant, they cost too much money for a basement game developer" won't it?

 

[Egosphere]

Caves of Lore peaked at 103.

Also, those numbers killed the Encased studio.

For me, Encased's numbers would've paid for all of my future projects and then some, but that's the thing about studio size and budget.

According to their website Dark Crystal had 40 employees + an unknown number of contractors at some point. That's AA territory, and not some dude in a basement.

Yeah, with that size, you need to sell 375k copies, not 3,75k copies.

They're at 3.5k reviews, which are usually something like 3% of the overall purchases. So they maybe broke 100k in sales, but that would still be short of where they'd need to be

 

[Abu Antar]

I think that both Caves of Lore (posted number earlier) and KotC2 are both more niche games. Knights peaked at 51 players, and have 0 active players.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Exactly, I think they didn’t know how to run a business (or make compelling game mechanics either, tbh)

If any aspiring game developer needs a business consultant and has the budget to pay one, PM me.

First piece of advice you will give will be "don't hire a consultant, they cost too much money for a basement game developer" won't it?

If it's a single guy in his basement, then yeah probably. Fwiw, I wouldn't charge him for that.

 

[Abu Antar]

Caves of Lore peaked at 103.

Also, those numbers killed the Encased studio.

For me, Encased's numbers would've paid for all of my future projects and then some, but that's the thing about studio size and budget.

According to their website Dark Crystal had 40 employees + an unknown number of contractors at some point. That's AA territory, and not some dude in a basement.

Yeah, with that size, you need to sell 375k copies, not 3,75k copies.

They're at 3.5k reviews, which are usually something like 3% of the overall purchases. So they maybe broke 100k in sales, but that would still be short of where they'd need to be

Yes, my mind played tricks on me. Of course it didn't sell only 3,75k copies. Brain fart.

 

[Abu Antar]

I just checked Nox Archaist and Realms of Antiquity just fro fun. The first peaked at 10 players, the other peaked at 11 players. Those can't have sold too well.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I just checked Nox Archaist and Realms of Antiquity just fro fun. The first peaked at 10 players, the other peaked at 11 players. Those can't have sold too well.

Well, those are ultra niche titles imo. When you start developing things that emulate ancient hardware despite making a modern development, you're really going for a ride and I hope it's more of a hobby than a business enterprise at that point.

 

[Sòren]

i think it's still a great game, i love the mechanics, but it doesn't offer as much exploration and content as AoD did. you can progress in the game no matter how good or bad your build is, and everyone will most probably get access to the same, all, areas. that was a conscious design choice, certainly.

TBH while it has been almost 6 years to the day since I last played AoD according to steam, I have the impression that AoD technically allowed you to get to all these areas but lack of specific skills didn't allow you to loot/explore them fully, so you missed out on gear and skill points. A bigger obstacle to accessing the same areas was needing specific metagaming knowledge on where and how you can learn about some location to have it marked on your map. Both my suboptimal thievan archer (with random points in lore and some other crap, very messy and generalist build) and Optimized Legionaire Murderhobo Terminator aspiring (and eventually succesful) god-slayer, could get to all of them, just not very deep in some cases.

But CS does seem to have more forgiving failure states and no CYOA rollercoaster sequences where you can suddenly end up in a fight or click on a "you died" choice, plus IIRC AoD did not have visible skill difficulty in dialogs. Usually you have full freedom where to go and if a fight or stealth section comes up you have a very clear warning from the game and option to fuck off and come back later. You also get plenty of non-lethal but sub-optimal outcomes if you can't deal with something, such as being able to betray and switch sides before some of the tough end game fights and "easy" fights rather than frontal assaults as an alternatives via a "I'm not much of a fighter" options.

Furthermore regarding progression regardless of how good the build is, I don't recall exactly how the path of least resistance to get to the end looked like in AoD's main quest regarding skill levels needed (and what skills), but that game was also clearly designed with the same "if you do like shit/your character sucks, the ending will suck and be beyond your control" philosophy as CS was. That was my general impression after Vince subverted my expectations with the AoD endgame, my very suboptimal Thief/Archer build had to choose to fuck off as the alternative was to become a slave to an awoken god. In CS the "bad" ending is far less bleak, but it also does boil down to "you were a pawn with no say how things should be, despite all your involvement", leaving you with the same kind of feeling of being powerless.

there are dozens...well quite a few optional locations you will never see in AoD unless you made the right choices or builds.

a

library of saross' secret chamber, the vault of the Monastery, entering the tower of zamedi, the bottom of the abyss, exploring the well in maadoran and getting to the top of the tower of the city...those i remember right now

and i am not even mentioning locations that are restricted by your background. CS doesn't have any of those. you will most probably see everything there is to see during one playthrough...even though you might not be able to succeed in every combat encounter.

 

[std::namespace]

lets just conclude and hope that ITS gonna collapse

incompetent writer
incompetent artist
incompetent dev

-> result

 

[mediocrepoet]

lets just conclude and hope that ITS gonna collapse

incompetent writer
incompetent artist
incompetent dev

-> result

Sure. I also hope that your mom gives you AIDS and you get hit by a bus. Faggot.

 

[Tyranicon]

mediocrepoet I picked those because they are probably closer to Colony Ship's competitive range than games that sell less than 10k copies. No offense intended, this niche is basically poverty-inducing and a lot of us went into it with that knowledge.

Are there even any tiny teams (5 warm bodies or less) like Iron Tower still active in the cRPG space?

Off the top of my head there's the Trese Brothers (although they may have passed 5 people), and then you get to the solodevs like Vogel and Pierre.

 

[lukaszek]

Which is a pity since I've found moment to moment gameplay of Space Wreck to be more enjoyable than CS.

space wreck is closest we will get to aod2

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Which is a pity since I've found moment to moment gameplay of Space Wreck to be more enjoyable than CS.

space wreck is closest we will get to aod2

Not enough teleporting for that.
edit.
Besides I just said that development teams have vastly different design principles.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

While we're still doing comparisons:

144
playing 28 min ago
162
24-hour peak
2,916
all-time peak

81
playing 21 min ago
86
24-hour peak
1,144
all-time peak

Kinda proves VD's claims about sequels right.

 

[std::namespace]

oooooooooh i forgot about the absolute and abject failure of the SCIence part of the supposed scifi setting in ColonShit
here are 3 parts that exist but never get touched upon
utterly ruins any verisimilitude


I. soylent
already in the pit you learn about the ntabs
the whole story of body disposal is a 1 fucking sentence while its directly tied to half of human culture because its directly tied to death and family
(children/families also dont exist, schools in the habitat? anything about organisation? no)
there are no quests about eating dead people, no writing that discusses or involved the player in it, no one fucking cares

supposedly food should be scarce if you recycle corpses but than there is automatically the question where it comes from, who controls it, water, etc
the cycle of "light+water+gas -> plant -> meat ==>> refined eating" does not exist, except
all we see are plants and frogs
how long can a dead body feed a human lel?
(the pit should be fighting for the habitat, why the fuck are they living in containers!)
i mean even theoretically, where is the biomass coming from? never mentioned
only awesome button from the monks in the end: press button -> less oxygen happens, button -> oxygen!1


II. psykers
there are frogs who can communicate with your brain! HEEELLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
thats a whole scifi book right here
never fucking discussed, not a single human being mentions that creatures are breaking the laws of physics
(random loredumps on devices dont count, thats storytelling literally on the level of doom3)
a random scavguy who uses "rAdIo" to control frogs is like magic, like fucking magnets
who cares how they work
(have you noticed that there are no scientists or engineers in the game? no one is making gear for the protectors, its spawns)
why not rear a psyker frog and carry it in a backpack for a shield? kek


III. mutants
replace the mutants in the game with normal people, like literally just normies, no masks, no antirad equip, nothing, just humies
keep quests
does ANYTHING change? nope
garbage


you see, if you pick up any decent fantasy book, in episodic parts or small events in the narrative the book will establish the rules of the supernatural
its world building 101
ColonShit is laughably bad

 

[lukaszek]

there are frogs who can communicate with your brain! HEEELLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

 

[Tigranes]

It's an interesting decision to make the cloaking sphere so powerful - that when decently upgraded, you could actually spend a turn or two killing selected enemies while the rest of the battlefield still can't quite detect you. At the moment it seems to me that for quite a few builds, especially solo ones, it becomes the most important piece of equipment - and that tagging Computers, getting it to 6 and picking up the orb fairly early makes all the difference. (And of course for sneaking missions too.)

Currently dodge-this lone-wolf blader getting good mileage out of it, high initiative to take first turn + cloaking field means you can take down a couple of enemies, drop a smoke grenade, before they can retaliate. Will have to see how it fares with guns, e.g. rifler

 

[Hellraiser]

there are dozens...well quite a few optional locations you will never see in AoD unless you made the right choices or builds.

On a general level sure, you can miss map locations due to your build, practically though I checked and to get certain locations marked requires a whopping 3 levels in [lore], which IIRC is pretty fucking cheap and not that build dependent, with [lore] IIRC having some other benefits, so it might not be that likely to miss it even if there is a theoretical possibility. The faction-exclusive locations like the Legionaries have (they have 2 IIRC, or is it just 1 and the pass is available also to another guild?) are of course something CS doesn't have and that's a good point to raise as it's another good example of the faction branching being worse than in AoD. The closest CS has to a map location you can miss are the lower levels of mission control, if you get into a situation where you can get there only through the very hard combat route due to lacking skills for the other 2 paths.

But for a lot of cases you mention where it's not a map location but rather a hidden room, secret path in the branching, locked out door, sub-location in a city etc. where you need to pass a skill check to enter, how besides presentation/exploration system (CYOA vs moving around in-game) are they different from a room in CS behind a forcefield tied to electronics/computer skill checks? Or one behind a high lockpick level door? Or a difficult stealth-only section where you are "soft-locked" out of looting some rooms due to lacking sufficient stealth skill/cloaking mods/stealth feats? What I mean to say is that the AoD locations would be hidden rooms like those in mission control, if AoD used the same engine as the (hacked out of UE4 IIRC) one of CS. Or maybe even they would be full-blown stealth encounters.

So CS has this kind of optional "locations" as far as gameplay mechanics are concerned, they're just less in your face due to the presentation/exploration change. Actual gameplay and in-game world interactivity just made them more mundane

There is however room for arguing that the skill checks gating those locations aren't that difficult which makes it a lot easier to get into all this optional content than in AoD, either due to having party members or due to how the character and skill system work in general. Or maybe too many people are making 10 INT characters and tagging tech skills

You also have some rooms/stealth sections where you can only enter/loot them when on a specific quest branch as a unique encounter area (ex. Jonas/Braxton branches in the Pit, Mercy's Fort) or as a consequences (the one you can get to for not being greedy regarding the heads with the implants quest). These also would fit as equivalents to the optional locations you mentioned.

 

[Egosphere]

oooooooooh i forgot about the absolute and abject failure of the SCIence part of the supposed scifi setting in ColonShit
here are 3 parts that exist but never get touched upon
utterly ruins any verisimilitude


I. soylent
already in the pit you learn about the ntabs
the whole story of body disposal is a 1 fucking sentence while its directly tied to half of human culture because its directly tied to death and family
(children/families also dont exist, schools in the habitat? anything about organisation? no)
there are no quests about eating dead people, no writing that discusses or involved the player in it, no one fucking cares

supposedly food should be scarce if you recycle corpses but than there is automatically the question where it comes from, who controls it, water, etc
the cycle of "light+water+gas -> plant -> meat ==>> refined eating" does not exist, except
all we see are plants and frogs
how long can a dead body feed a human lel?
(the pit should be fighting for the habitat, why the fuck are they living in containers!)
i mean even theoretically, where is the biomass coming from? never mentioned
only awesome button from the monks in the end: press button -> less oxygen happens, button -> oxygen!1


II. psykers
there are frogs who can communicate with your brain! HEEELLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
thats a whole scifi book right here
never fucking discussed, not a single human being mentions that creatures are breaking the laws of physics
(random loredumps on devices dont count, thats storytelling literally on the level of doom3)
a random scavguy who uses "rAdIo" to control frogs is like magic, like fucking magnets
who cares how they work
(have you noticed that there are no scientists or engineers in the game? no one is making gear for the protectors, its spawns)
why not rear a psyker frog and carry it in a backpack for a shield? kek


III. mutants
replace the mutants in the game with normal people, like literally just normies, no masks, no antirad equip, nothing, just humies
keep quests
does ANYTHING change? nope
garbage


you see, if you pick up any decent fantasy book, in episodic parts or small events in the narrative the book will establish the rules of the supernatural
its world building 101
ColonShit is laughably bad

We get it. You've made your opinion clear. Now stop shitting up the thread.

 

[Nelka]

BROOOOOOOOS

LINK

 

[Whisper]

Same for the ending itself, it was over too soon. Felt somewhat, dunno, rushed? I know Vince will soon show up with his

meme

It wasn't rushed.

Spoiler

It was down-scoped.

Spoiler

if i remember correctly, the bridge was supposed to be optional during early access and there was supposed to be a third floor of armory as well. so yeah, i believe they had to do some editing in the development process. correct me, anyone, if i am wrong.

Editing in the development process is called "cutting content".

Also, i perfectly remember we were promised Mastery Levels.



https://steamcommunity.com/app/648410/discussions/0/3131668199920310639/

From Vince:
"10 character levels, 10 skill levels (plus 2 mastery levels). I know that many players reached skill levels 8-9, but we'll slow it down."


Another cut content.