TUG

[Sky]

I mentioned this briefly in the KS thread and was surprised it didn't attract more notice.

It's basically a crafting survival sandbox. Permadeath open pvp? Yes (but it's tough to get a permadeath and their anti-camp ideas are somewhat ok). PvE crafting on a private server? Yes! Single player? Yes. Evolving avatard? Yes. Modding? Yep.

Here are a few examples of how we'll be breaking down servers so you can play your way:

Official Servers

Survival = There are no artificial rules in place to protect you or your items; this is a world at the dawn of time and its evolution is based solely on its inhabitants.
Adventure = Traditional RPG/MMO rules apply; items are safe, players are safe until they allow for combat to take place. A friendlier place for online play. Full control of your character’s appearance.

Private Servers

Can be modded, hosted on your own servers, retextured, and turned inside out. If you are not into the way the official servers are run or done, run your own!

Single-Player

Can be modded, run at home, shared with friends, or left to gather dust. No “what if” here, no “always on,” nobody telling you how to play... and it’s only as terrifying as you want it to be. Play the ultimate survival experience completely alone... or turn off the darkness and get creative!

Each server in TUG is a separate floating island (or group of floating islands). Some will be one large island, others will be an archipelago of sorts. Uncovering the lore behind this will be part of the fun!

They're pretty plugged into the Minecraft mod community, so that's somewhat the model. They've already name-checked Equivalent Exchange and Thaumcraft as some kind of involvement.

The KS blurb:

TUG sits at the crossroads where survival sandbox and multiplayer RPG’s meet, offering both elegant simplicity and a world of complex secrets for those who desire to seek them out. From freezing snow capped mountains to dark dreary caves, TUG offers a massive procedurally-generated world to explore, full of mystery and danger -- but what makes TUG truly unique is its ability to help us learn what you as players enjoy about the game, and to use your interactions to make an amazing world even better.

The project draws inspiration from fun, accessible games we love such as Minecraft, Fable, Animal Crossing, and Zelda, as well as games that feature deeply complex worlds, including Eve Online, Monster Hunter, and Dwarf Fortress.

What do we think you’ll like about TUG? Some of the things we’re most excited about include:

Integrated modding support: we won’t just have support for modding tools hooked in from the beginning -- we’ll be sharing our tools with modders.
Pets and Companions will join you in your travels and help along the way.
Entire Civilizations lie hidden for you to uncover... or create new ones to conquer the world!
Day, Night, and Seasonal Cycles with perils and opportunities unique to each.
Exotic Wild Beasts to tame, hunt, breed, or ride!
Logic Engineering, from simple trap triggers to reprogramming your golem!
Dark Mysteries to unearth, and ancient powers to unleash!
DRM-Free. That includes the servers, which we’ll also be sharing with you.

Some of the social science work sounds pretty interesting. There's definitely an element of naive Raph era UO, but that could also be a lot of fun. They said they're aware of that era, but we'll see. I'm tempted to bring my own lessons along >:)

Anyway, it's a $10 buy-in and could be really cool. It's already funded, so I'm not shilling for the KS. I just think this sounds like a cool nexus of old-school UO (if you want it) and Minecrafting with a bit more lore. Hit up the KS page, read the updates and see what you think.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nerdkingdom/tug-1

[schild]

Kickstarter is going to eventually answer the question: "How many times will people pay for Minecraft?"

[Quinton]

I think for $10, the sort of people who enjoy minecraft might buy/kickstart similar games quite a few times.  I suspect most of them will not be nearly as successful as minecraft, but we'll get a few here or there that end up being massively fun.

I wonder if kickstarter will eventually create an audience capable of judging the level of fun a minecraft-alike team is likely to deliver based on their kickstarter pitch....

[Severian]

I'm not sure I buy all their premises. For example

[Sky]

I think people are focusing a lot on the minecraft part, when it really looks more like a UO sandbox.

Severian, yes. The team is completely naive and bonkers. Like the UO team was. And that was a lot of fun in a messy way. And unlike UO, you get single player and private servers and modding out of the box. I guess it's a sign of the times that nobody seems interested in the concept.

[Sky]

Kickstarter is going to eventually answer the question: "How many times will people pay for Minecraft?"

Is that like "How many times will people pay for Diablo?" or "How many times will people pay for M:tG?"

 

[Hawkbit]

It definitely looks interesting.  However, I'm scratching my head a bit at why they asked for $215k when they've got three Phds and at least five more employees that I saw in the video, yet the game isn't out for a year and a half. 

[Mrbloodworth]

Kickstarter is going to eventually answer the question: "How many times will people pay for Minecraft?"

10,694,5257

[Lucas]

yeah, the dev team (so to speak) is quite..."original" in its approach and formation :P. But anyway, I got the alpha access tier and supposedly I'll be able to give this a (alpha) try in two months.

[Quinton]

I worry that they're a little heavily academic (which doesn't always translate to able-to-ship-in-the-real-world), but they've got some neat ideas, some neat art, and some neat tech demos, and I love seeing people push the boundaries of these things.  I also got in for the alpha tier, if for nothing else but to be able to check out their tech demos up close.

[Sky]

I don't know that it will be a good game necessarily (though that would be nice).

I do think it will be a lot of fun to go all early UO wild west on a survival server.

And really, depending on how they lay out crafting and exploration, it could be fun for explorer types until everything gets wikid. So it should check explorer and killer boxes pretty well, though they were vague on achievements being tangible things rather than checklists.

[Lucas]

Paypal funding has started:

http://nerdkingdom.com/p/pledgepage.aspx

[Samprimary]

TUG is a multiplayer open-world sandbox-RPG new technology social sciences expansive next-generational casual-friendly revolutionary community-driven thought-leader momentum connectivity minecraft-killer non-linear emergent-gameplay synergy paradigm.

More seriously though: TUG looks like it is now effectively an experiment in when a game's development is headed and driven by wonks. I very much so want that experiment to succeed. But we can all easily imagine how it could not. If it did succeed, though, it would be a fitting contrast and counterpoint to my initial 'idea men' experience in the game industry.

Hell, I'd work for them for minimum wage and do jester work for the PhD dukes just so I could be on site and hopefully be able to do anything in my power to at all help the project through. With my terrible, witless, charmless capacity for impenetrable cynicism to the implications of the shortcomings of the latest build. Because (a) the ideal does look awesome, and (b) i can sense that tense, prolonged, perilous timeframe coming where the castles in the sky have to test the foundation built under them.

[Sophismata]

A saw a lot of promises, but very little game.

[Bzalthek]

Not one penis.  Not very user driven if you ask me.

[Sky]

I'll be able to give this a (alpha) try in two months.

Less than a month, they said alpha login info would be sent before July. And it looks like they plan on a very long alpha cycle.

[Sky]

After 6 months of alpha with almost no tangible work done....

http://forum.nerdkingdom.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=549

So I guess that multiplayer went from soon to "soon"...

[Samprimary]

Does anyone have an idea of what percentage of full-time employees at TUG have a job title like "behavioral researcher" or "advising scientist" or 

[Sky]

On paper, they have some great ideas. And I have to admit I base my thoughts on the initial alpha. Because it was so bad I saw no reason to go back until I saw something worth wasting my time with. I've tested a lot of games, with plenty of pretty raw alphas along the way. They didn't even have an alpha really, and certainly not what anyone would call an alpha in the last decade. It was more a proof of concept, and a thin one at that. The last update I saw was before Thanksgiving and was a video of "hey, we have walking up stairs now!"

I should take one for the team and let the client update.

As much as I think it's cool they have the behavioral people onboard, what the hell are they all doing with their time while they wait for the technology to be developed (apparently all in house)?

[Sky]

Playable now. Still weird and wonky as hell. Had no idea what I was doing but managed to build a survival shack and plant a few crops so I didn't starve, all within a half hour or so.

They've turned the development goal way more in the direction of Landmark. The new voxel digging is pretty much exactly Landmark's holes (though I haven't played the latter title in months, so as it was anyway). I didn't get into any building, but it seemed a riff on Landmark as well.

I'm not sure it's a good idea taking on a mature studio head to head like that, but hey. I'm still playing minecraft with almost no interest in either of these titles at this point.

[Sky]

Now it's all crashy on me and not really worth trying to figure out. Also, apparently business is hard, lost an investor and cut the team in half.

The not so good news: A round of funding, that was to come in, to sustain us clear through the end of this year (January) was held back by an investor. The deal that would have gone through would have lost us all control and ownership and we are not huge fans of being owned by investors like this. Sadly, we need to cut off a few limbs to be able to ensure this does not happen.

With this, we are now on a path to growth to fully support a small team with no outside investor support. And this means we have to cut our team in half… its the hardest thing we have ever had to do, but it’s what we all collectively have agreed is the best move for us, and you, our community. We certainly have had people come and go from this project for many reasons, but this core group is all family… and its heartbreaking.

[Samprimary]

I would presume they're really cutting out most of the fluff academics who ultimately contribute little to the development process

[Sky]

Given their history, I'd take that bet and lay my own that they'll keep way too many academics and cut some of the critical dev skills for the 'spirit of the game'.

[Samprimary]

so, what happened to this anyway

[Kail]

From the devs:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/277930/discussions/0/523898291502735374/

What you are seeing is the natural progression of a game as it actually goes through real development and what normally people don't get to see. In the industry this is called pre-production. Most games, even those that come out in an early development have gone through a certain number of years of pre-production. This is time when the core elements of the game are worked out and decided upon before the game is greeenlit by a publisher. This development time is usually not even known to most people as usually games are not even announced in any fashion until they reach this greenlit phase. Even most other games in an early release have been taken to a more complete phase than when we started the project.

So basically, fuckall.

It's still grinding away, but nowhere near playable last I checked (which was a while ago).

[Samprimary]

... aight. wellllllp, that's disappointing.

[Sky]

Last I knew, clownshoes. Not enough tech people, too many psychologists and shit. At least before they imploded.

Not a great voxel engine, Landmark stole their cookies.

I've had access to this for years now and I've put in a few hours, but I'll stick to minecraft.

[Sky]

Update on clown footware:

Switching to OpenGL, no updates for a year while they do this.
Will be released for free with monetization.

What could go wrong?

[Gimfain]

You forgot to add that they also managed to get another $8.5M in funding.

[Quinton]

Switching to OpenGL, no updates for a year while they do this.

That struck me as insane.  I've done some DX and GL work and it just shouldn't take that long to shift APIs.

Hell, the Banished guy started reworking his game from DX9/DX11/Windows to portable-OpenGL-Windows/Linux/OSX in January.  His May 1st update was that he had his GL pipeline generating pixel-identical output to his DX9/DX11 pipeline -- and that was *one guy*, who also decided to build an abstract shader language to GLSL/HLSL converter/compiler along the way.

Obviously stabilizing and debugging adds some time too, but seriously, shifting rendering APIs simply should not take you a year during which you expect to have zero visible updates.  Especially if you've got a team of people an millions of dollars in funding (such that you can presumably pay people to get shit done).

Amazing.

[Ghambit]

If you have $8m then you stretch it out to keep you afloat for a year+.  That's sadly how a lot of funded projects work.  You don't take the $8m and then churn something out in a week.  That won't keep people employed.  Not saying I agree with that, but that's what a lot of companies do whether public or private.