Starforge was developed in my home town, which I never knew until years after this went down. Considering the timeline, and my brief [I bailed] experience at our local tech schools digital media program, it is entirely possible I've met the person that denied my refund and banned me from their steam. Weird world.
@@czarnakoza9697 Sometimes it really feels like there could only be 70-80 people in the entire world lol It's bizarre when you have a stretch of time where you just keep running into the same people over and over and over again, which only makes me wonder how much weirder it is for people with ANY shred of fame.
So they hired a respected member of the community to act as their voice for sharing upcoming features and development progress with said community, but she wasn't allowed to mention any upcoming features or development progress. I see absolutely nothing wrong here.
I am guessing they were hoping she would calm down the community with word salads but then quickly noticed that she is a professional who is doing a proper job. In a sense, they basically ghosted her because they didn't want to deal with real life.
Realizing a feature of your game is “too hard” specifically with it being to do with terrain customization immediately makes me think of early phases of Subnautica. They eventually realized that mechanic was just too much for the game and so they decided to remove it entirely and still ended up making a fantastic game. It’s okay to ditch something if it doesn’t work anymore, not just ditch the game entirely. 🤦🏻♂️
@@saintjames1995 it was also terraforming of sand, right? I didn't get to play it at that stage, but it seems smart. My poor computer fans go psycho as is 🤣💗
This is what happens when developers don't pay attention during Project Management class, believing that "if they just keep coding, it'll get done". They do what all junior devs do - get into a project, make all the "fun bits", then get frustrated at the hard issues and do something else instead. If they had stuck to a small scope and saw their projects through from start to finish, they could have made a name for themselves. Instead, they lived in future land, where "Imagine a game..." was all they needed.
hehe I just started development on my first game. I'm making a point to do all the boring hard/hard database and structural crap first. Hopefully it pays off.
@@fiqri1999 "put in a ticket" in the same sense as u put in a ticket for a refund: click some buttons and if u meet the conditions it'll be automatically fulfilled
I was obsessed with getting this game when I was a child. I eventually convinced my parents to get it for me and, well, it barely ran on my computer. It was like a consistent and intense lag spike that never ended.
when it dropped was biggg news, that being said afterwards was bigger news in the survival community, was a good warning shot to show us the garbage type of products that were to be released over the next 2-3 years.
Based on what they were saying about the voxel terrain being too expensive, I'm guessing they never considered doing what the industry standard is and separating the world into chunks? I mean, the whole _reason_ Minecraft has chunks is so it can save/load/regenerate the world in bite-size pieces that the CPU can easily take care of.
oh god that's probably it, they tried to load every single voxel at once at all times, or at least an ungodly amount of it. who did they think they were lmao. and they had the audacity to say they can't optimize it any further.
I'm one of the people who got banned from the steam forums for bringing attention to how they censor anyone who speaks negative about the game. They even banned my steam review too which had hundreds of thumbs up's. This video about their mismanagement and incompetence was satisfying to watch. Fuck code hatch.
All games on steam like that Most of it I have been banned in many games for fact critics Move to epic for weekly free games so i cant complaint of the game is shit
@@Aaronlcyrus yeah there's good examples, I used to play a bunch of kerbal space program in early access, after these guys I just thought nah I'll wait for it to be good
Tbh I absolutely hate crowdfunding or anything like making games on Patreon. Half the time these developers get hundreds or thousands of dollars never hire anybody and keep making slow pace at making their game sometimes only having one or two updates per year.
Whenever I see a game that "borrow" element from many games, and try to become all of them at the same time... the first thing come to mind is, "It's going to flop, isn't it?" and like you said, identity crisis. Simply because, a game is good because they focus on one thing and improved them to the point you can add other thing that doesn't ruin the identity of the game. You can't just frankenstein'd everything and hope for the best.
Feature creep is a really large issue with projects like these. Things seem easy at first and you start talking about more features you want to add, then you hit a snag and suddenly you have way too much that needs done.
@@prohunter717 it means they are valuing ambition and picking bits from things they like, without really understanding what those bits contribute to the thing they like, how they interact and what the final thing they want to make should be.
@@CAMSLAYER13 The development team I work with use project management boards like Pivotal to help us stay focused on what the next steps are. I’d recommend something like it for any massive project that needs to be broken up into small manageable pieces
As a person who play 7 days to die for years now and follow its Development i can say that making any type of even remotely serious full 3d game with a funcioning Voxel world is a serious challenge.
The game and team are great. They seem to want to keep working on this game forever, and it's still in EA. But what they call Early Access would be a fully completed game to any other developer.
Watching this video looking at 7 Days 2 Die. The last few updates are what separate 7d2d from the rest of these projects. A15 onwards really pushed the right changes, and made the game a hell of a lot better. The last few really gave it a solid identity. 7D2D and Project Zomboid can be EA for forever, I got my ten bucks worth.
@@DamienDarkside Even if they never progressed past the point they are now I'd recommend them. I have over 200 hours in Zomboid, it was a good purchase.
I bought starforge when it first came out on Steam and one of the updates (with ZERO forewarning) changed the requirements from 32bit OS to 64bit OS. This was during the time when 32bit CPUs were common (That's what I had) and 64bit were rather expensive. The game was changed on patch day to not allow a 32bit system to even TRY to load it. When I got on the forums, there were many of us that complained about the fact that the game we paid for is now 100% inaccessible without buying a whole new computer. Their response was essentially "Too bad. Sucks to be you." (and no refund, thanks) So now, I am satisfied to see that they failed so miserably.
The only devs I've ever met that said they've been coding since they were 10, were people who were absolutely shit at coding. Most of these folks have lived in their own bubble for years, and simply have no idea what they don't know. These are the kind of people who often think they're done learning by the time someone is actually trying to teach them something. When I read "coding since I was 10" on someone's resume, all I read is "I have far too many bad habits that are incredibly difficult to get rid of."
As somebody that has been coding since... like 14-15, this is completely true. When you start out as a little kid modifying some script you found until you can finally make it do something, sure, you get better over time - but better than terrible is still pretty bad. Just as you said, when you're in your own bubble you have no idea if you're actually any good, and most people assume they're great. It doesn't help that little kids dabbling in code are surrounded by people that know nothing about it and thus constantly fawn over them and how amazingly talented they are. From 15 to like 19 I was on a browser-based game with a community of around 100,000 and was pretty well known, and later I started making small contributions. Everybody in the community talked about what a "coding genius" I was and even to this day I bump into people from back then that think the same shit. When I first got a "real" job later in life, I was floored by how little I knew. People think that because they can have a goal and then write code that does what they wanted, no matter how messy or horrifically unoptimized, that they're good - it's not that simple. So many of these "coded from age 12" people focus entirely on that, that they made it work. It's not hard to write code that functions when you aren't worried about optimization or scaling or even something as simple as keeping it clean and properly commented so somebody else can understand it. I remember one guy was going on and on about his "custom caching engine" that was "amazing". He had just discovered memcached and apparently thought he was a genius for wrapping queries inside a function that then compared to cached results and then updated the cache if needed. He genuinely thought he had, like, invented something new, that I would be like "WOW I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS!" - all because within his own little bubble it *was* new. This is a long way to say that as one of those people, it took a long time for me to burst my own bubble. I think the best thing to know as a programmer is that you are never as good as you think you are, there are always people far better than you, and there is always a TREMENDOUS amount you can improve on. I see immediate red flags any time somebody talks to me about what a "coding god" they are because they taught themselves as a kid; that's not to say it isn't possible for a good developer to have those beginnings, but nine times out of ten it spells trouble. end rant
@@ApothercyCold all that said. I’ve found that the best programmers are the ones that self taught in their teens, then went on to get a year or two of software training. Then they have the drive, and the expertise.
@@ApothercyCold I'm a self-taught dev but I always knew that I wasn't as good as real life programmers even though LITERALLY ALMOST EVERYONE thinks I'm some kind of talented genius, does this make me actually a good programmer? 🤔
@@SrIgort the people constantly saying how amazing you are is definitely part of the problem. Before I knew 20% of what I know today people online were fawning over me saying I was a master programmer and could do anything. A bad programmer can have a goal and make it work, however inefficiently, so it seems like they can do "anything" to somebody looking at just the output. I think that first time you work with somebody "real" and realize the gap it's a shock to all of us.
Starforge, as far as I know, is the ONLY game that actually lost features instead of gained features between versions. Like, no joke. There had been a somewhat buggy but still functional parkour system with wall jumping and whatnot. Then the game updated, and that functionality was gone. At one point there was a base building / defense mode, but it was removed. There was a physics system with structural integrity systems, but that got removed. There were the procedural weapons which again, buggy mess, but it was hilarious shooting a minigun that had 9 different barrels and launching into space from the recoil. Guess what happened? Straight up removed. I remember playing the game on release being just absolutely confused, because I couldn't find any of the features I wanted. There were plenty of videos, screenshots and forum posts of things that *literally didn't even exist anymore*. Starforge is the game that taught me to never buy into early access again. I still do from time to time, but not to the extent that I used to.
My best guess is that in their attempts to optimize the terrible performance, they were removing features to save on hardware resources. Just a guess though
I met codehatch at RTX 2013. Some of the most socially awkward people I've ever seen. In hindsight I can say that they were not malicious, they are incompetent. That said, this game is why I no longer get invested in any crowd funded games.
Did you know that Will and Steve used to be lumberjacks before they decided to try being game developers? Also neither of them has any sort of college degree.
This I actually believe. Just look at their profile pictures. These are two guys who like coding but are pretty bad at it, want to sell games and overhype but realize developing is much harder
@@MaggotAddict21 I mean, this was in the early 2010s, when the barrier to entry was a bit higher than it is today. However, I don't think that being good at coding or having a college degree is a pre-requesite to making or at least designing a good game. Codehatch just sucks
I almost jumped on this, but right before I pulled the trigger the whole collapse with Juno happened. I feel bad for her, but I'm glad we all got that warning.
At first I was wondering how the hell anyone could have fallen for this until I saw it happened in the early 2010s, a happier time where we still thought Kickstarter was going to be the holy grail of the indie game revolution. Also if you want Halo + Minecraft there's always Space Engineers ...
Keen isn't much better on their buisness practices. Sure, a good game can be argued, but it really hasn't improved much at all in the last few years other then a total of 9+ DLC. I'm not even going to mention the whole Medieval Engineers fiasco going on right now...
One thing to add would be the fact that they basically didn't create any of the models for their games. Pretty much every model you see in the game is from the Unity Store, with pre-made models that anyone can just buy and put into their game.
@@riplix20 you can still find those on the Asset Store to this day tbh. Like, as a game dev myself, I don't see anything wrong with using third-party sources like the Asset Store to make up for the missing resources your team might not have (be it time or money), but doing so and expecting it to work out by itself, without spending the time to actually optimize the models, the code, etc is beyond dumb. Even the procedural generation code was outsourced from a 3rd party developer (it was called Marching Cubes for Unity I think). Some games do it well (Genshin Impact, Phasmophobia, Among US), but many developers think it's as easy as downloading a few assets and simply sewing those together that it's hurting the whole Unity community - or it at least has for several years.
There was a time when Asset-Flip games ran rampant on the Steam store. I don’t see them quite as much as I used to, but that could be because we as a customer base have grown wary of poorly produced indie games.
I remember playing this game... I was active in their forum and diligently reported bugs. Then within a week after reporting on bugs that wiped your base, they released the game. I stopped playing after that. The bugs weren't fixed.
lol, I had a similar run-in with 7 Days to Die that got my review, bombed: Literally everytime I'd join my friends server, through like 10 updates, I had to delete my character and restart because it would only load the chunk I was on, and spam the console with errors.
Ah yes, game developers who see themselves as gods and view their consumers as scums that are supposed to worship their heavenly developer overlords. They'd fit right in with EA's PR team.
I've always been interested in what happened to this project. One of the founders (Will) used to come into the restaurant I worked at and I'd talk games with him. He even gave me a few codes for the game that I gave out to friends but we never got into it because we were waiting for it to be more developed. Sad to hear this is how it all ended
Reading through the comments, you may know ForceTrekkie from above? Citation "ForceTrekkie ForceTrekkie vor 11 Monaten Starforge was developed in my home town, which I never knew until years after this went down. Considering the timeline, and my brief [I bailed] experience at our local tech schools digital media program, it is entirely possible I've met the person that denied my refund and banned me from their steam. Weird world. " Citation end.
Ah yes, the game I convinced my buddies to buy when this was "in-development". The more we played, the more we found wrong and eventually figured out it was a dead end game with no hope. This was the early days of early access games. You could get the wool pulled over your eyes pretty easily.
Yeah, if you were incredibly naive and hadn't already learned that "if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is" but hey, I bet a large portion of people who bought into failed early access games are currently losing money to crypto and NFTs as we speak because they're clearly the gullible types
@@etherealpenguin8683 That's the thing. I found it early into its development and it was fun with some promise. So of course I roped some friends into playing it. For $15 we all got our moneys worth. It became one of those "what part of the engine can we break today" games for us and we love that stuff.
This world is rapidly passing away and I hope that you repent and take time to change before all out disaster occurs! Belief in messiah alone is not enough to grant you salvation - Matthew 7:21-23, John 3:3, John 3:36 (ESV is the best translation for John 3:36) if you believed in Messiah you would be following His commands as best as you could. If you are not a follower of Messiah I would highly recommend becoming one. Call on the name of Jesus and pray for Him to intervene in your life - Revelation 3:20. Contemplate how the Roman Empire fulfilled the role of the beast from the sea in Revelation 13. Revelation 17 confirms that it is in fact Rome. From this we can conclude that A) Jesus is the Son of God and can predict the future or make it happen, B) The world leaders/nations/governments etc have been conspiring together for the last 3000+ years going back to Babylon and before, C) History as we know it is fake. You don't really need to speculate once you start a relationship with God. Can't get a response from God? Fasting can help increase your perception and prayer can help initiate events. God will ignore you if your prayer does not align with His purpose (James 4:3) or if you are approaching Him when "unclean" (Isaiah 1:15, Isaiah 59:2, Micah 3:4). Stop eating food sacrificed to idols (McDonald's, Wendy's etc) stop glorifying yourself on social media or making other images of yourself (Second Commandment), stop gossiping about other people, stop watching obscene content etc. Have a blessed day!
I was also a fan of Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, jumping onto the Reign of Kings hype. I had no idea who Codehatch was, and I bought the 4-pack for Reign of Kings to play with friends. Thankfully, none of us played over two hours, and when I noticed the issues, I started doing research on the company, seeing if there was a roadmap of some kind. I was met with several posts online claiming they abandoned Reign of Kings like Starforge. One thing I distinctly remember was a post written that said they removed the good mechanics from Starforge before releasing it and just abandoning it. That was the post I immediately checked on the Steam page for Starforge and found out who the company really was. I promptly had all my friends request a refund and explained the situation to them. I got my money back, but I wish Valve would keep an eye out for these "games" and promptly mass refund so the developers don't get any profit from scam-like games. They did it with The WarZ, why can't they do it for these kinds of games?
Part of the problem for Valve/Steam watching out for these types of games is that there are too many games. Its never easy with how many games get published but are crap. StarForge isn't on steam anymore, at least not this game. There is a game of the same name on there, but it isn't this game.
@@SlewedHydra theres also the fact that accepting to refund easily could really screw how steam is viewed, 'oh youre taking too long to update? mass refunds' wouldnt exactly be a attractive thing
@@MyNameIsNotPa nope, space engineers is still going strong to this day, in fact we only got a new update a couple of days ago (medieval engineers however was abandoned, but recently got a developer supported community edition)
When I was younger I offered to give the devs 500 CAD as a donation and they actually denied me. Probably someone on the inside trying to ward an innocent off of the scam.
@@OfficiallyOddlySatisfyingYou dodged a damn bullet! Thank God they said no since that would've just been you flushing that money down -the toliet- a black hole lmao.
I didn't buy into starforge myself, but I still remember how trolls used to market it around the minecraft community. Usually by calling minecraft a "game for toddlers", and that starforge is a "minecraft killer". LOL
A voxel game that's p much minecraft with higher fantasy and less cubey design. Not very much has been shown, but it's kinda on development hell, with a lot of delays
Its so sad Starforge was so bad. It could have been really good, and probably liked game. But sadly this happened. Also cheers, love your videos, and marvelous job on making your videos!
I remember being so hyped for it back in the day. Even Reign of Kings was a good bit of fun, but they just gave up, rushed it and ripped off all the backers as a result. Also cheers! Glad you enjoy the vids
all i want is a modern version of OG red faction aka geuinly lets you dig and build voxel wise where ever you want the closet thing to it is space engineers.
@@WickedWiz They could've been so big. The tower defense part would be fun, especially with the building parts. I'd love to make my own course I can watch the chaos as all of the towers murder them all
In my opinion statements like "I've been doing X for Y years" can always be disregarded from the get-go. There are just too many variables for it to really mean anything. Like what does "coding for 10 years" even mean? Are we talking about 8 hours a day for 10 years here? 4 hours per month? A ton of coding for 1 year and then a 2 year break with barely any coding done? Were they trying to improve in that time or just coding for fun? It's way easier to just look at their past projects and judge them by that because in the end, experience and effort don't matter much when they can't show anything for it.
Mfw my friend who started coding the same year I did, around 12-13 years ago, asked me to fix his idle incremental mobile game for him because it ran like shit.. and it was literally 98% if/else statements that each nested as deep as several layers. Fixed it for him. Just rewrote as loops and added comments to explain each step (since he obviously was still at a beginner level), and sent it back to him. He messaged me back saying he'd have to use his old version because he couldn't tell what the code was doing anymore. Time doesn't inherently mean anything.
@@Knapperoni I don't get it. Coding isn't particularly difficult in high level languages. I truly think 90% of people could do it, it's just a matter of how much someone actually wants to dedicate time to learning a new skill.
Ive been coding for 3 years now. me and a few friends made a lil game in Java for a school project that was probably better then what they did despite it being a boardgame. There is no shot these guys are coding for 10 years.
The only time I was aware of this game was years ago, when Star_ and Jerma made a video on it. First thing they see in the game was massive graphical glitches. Seems about right.
fps, sandbox, and survival are some of my favorite game genres, so learning this existed to any capacity, and wasn't good (or even bearable to play) made me kind of sad.
How detrimental would it be in this kind of setting to say "Hey, we made a mistake and misjudged how long it would take to implement the promised changes." and then release what they had ATM as a separate build on Steam basically saying "this is what we've accomplished in that time" and then keep plugging away at the promised features, incrementally improving them with frequent "test builds" updates?
It wouldn't, you're absolutely right, and were I in a situation like that' that's mostly what I would do. The only thing I'd point out is that sometimes the "release what you have so far so people can play that" Isn't always possible, because game dev isn't a linear process. Sometimes implementing a feature requires you to completely break the stability you have to the point where it may not even load properly. It's more effort and manpower to keep early builds consistently playable in some cases. But that's besides the point, transparency and honesty and an earnest attempt to make a decent game is all people want from these burgeoning developers. If they manage money like shit say "Hey we managed our money irresponsibly and we feel terrible about it" Etc People are more forgiving when they're dealing with honest mistakes and even lack of experience. It's the difference between the day one bartender that messes up your drink, but you can see they're earnestly trying, vs the bartender that's been there for years and doesn't give a shit. Holy crap this sent me off on a rant, That's a long fucking roundabout way to say "Yes, I agree"
Then there is always a risk of it becoming star citizen. They are at fault but giving away some of the control you have over to the crowd, means you will have infinite features to add. Not to mention the 135k for 5 programmers, excluding the manager (in this case it would be the feature coordinator). If the employees are not their friends and people who are basically volunteering to help, to pay them on a programmers salary, would be to end that investment in less than a year. Not to mention they themselves would need to find another source of income, in order to devote a full time job on their game. As I said in another comment sensible thing was to not hire anyone, take a reasonable 20-30k salary for each of them, rent a place together, and not get any kind of office. would have lasted them maybe 2-3 years if they were willing to live frugally for a bit. Would have also made for a much more cohesive project.
@@Privated15 Like honestly this is the biggest thing though. The need for honesty and transparency. If they had been, I'm pretty confident most everyone would have been willing to give them a second chance. But they weren't. They were shady and dodgy, and when people start recognizing the dishonesty, that's when things go downhill. Its a right shame more of these guys don't recognize this, but sadly it seems most just go in wanting a quick buck, and getting as many of them as they can, before trying to get the heck outta dodge with it. Shame. Here's my roundabout way to say "I agree" XD
God, this and Cube World are what taught me to never buy into early access for anything but an established, trustworthy company. It's not foolproof, having been burned by Worlds Adrift, but for the most part sticking with known devs has resulted in well-made properly delivered games.
Worlds Adrift was great in Alpha, aside from the lag spikes. Then they went about neutering the most enjoyable features like gliding... Bossa Studios was and is an established and acclaimed video game maker, but they dove into a genre they'd never been in before, and lost touch with the features people wanted. Private servers could have saved the game, I think.
Ya, I think the only company I've preordered from in the last decade has been Fromsoft, because they have a good track record of delivering what they promise.
Its funny, I just remembered from the two videos that I was planning on getting both of them at the time, however didnt because I was underage. The only game I actually bought into during this "early access phase" was rust which - somehow - turned out well.
I remember asking my dad for this as a kid, but he did not believe in early access games. Seems he saved me Edit: to that one guy in the comments, I'm now 20
@@anguslazy He said "I remember asking my dad for this as a kid..." implying he is now an adult. My point is that given this games age, he would either have to be lying about the memory, or about no longer being a kid. What is your point?
@@nemo1716 this doesn't make any sense. I remember asking my dad to reinstall my virus riddled windows and get certain games like prince of persia or need for speed underground. I remember that clearly because back then i was too lazy to learn what filelist is and how to properly search for cracks online.
I played Reign of Kings back in the day and did not realize it was Code Hatch until watching this video. RoK was far from perfect but it was much more playable than star forge. Have some good memories with it
@@someguy1894 An absolute joke of a game "developer" that has a known issue with using free pre built assets and the laziest methods possible to get as much money as possible before abandoning the "games" they push. They are also rather aggressive with the threats against customers and such.
I remember seeing this game when it came out on Kickstarter. My brother thought it looked cool, I said yeah but I won't buy it until they have more done. He didn't end up getting it because he wanted to game together. I think my beaver-sense saved us both some money here.
Starforge was the game that taught me to be careful with early access games. Before Starforge, I'd backed Minecraft in 2010, and when Starforge came out on steam early access in 2013, I thought "well, Minecraft launched the same way and it's great! I'll grab this one too." Lol. Man it sucked. I didn't fall for Reign of Kings though, I'd long since developed the habit of quickly googling the devs of any EA game I am tempted to buy. The first thing I saw was "Code}{atch" and immediately laughed and kept my money.
@@aoki6332 It just goes to show how naive and unaware the CodeHatch devs were. It's such a shame because they really had it going for them, they had crowdfunding, a loyal community, their beta was decent. But due to their lack of knowledge they completely bombed and didn't think anything through. And the worst part is that they never learned their lesson, they made a half assed game, ditched it before completion then went onto their next project.
@@aoki6332 Yeah Notch even crowd sourced some of the Mobs. There were some missteps here and there, like the Circle Moon but the Creeper was actually a failed Pig. Arguably the most Iconic Mob today started it's life as a Failed Pig.
Similar thing happened to me, but this was done by a big and respectable organization in my community... I was working under contract and it was going to end in several months... The thing is, they explicitly told me "not to find another job" and they even asked me to fill a preliminary contract form (not a binding/legal contract yet, but they only give this form to someone who's going to work with them). But as you can already guess, the new contract never came. And usually the organization representative will have a talk with someone who's going to end their contract (you know, the work-end interview kinda things), but not for me... my immediate supervisor told me that they are busy and that's it. And oh, I've been working for them for 13+ years... Yeah, I believe I've worked for them longer than even a full time staff... But not even a goodbye...
Honestly, if a contract worker works for you that long and works so many hours and stuff, it can get sort of legally grey. In some circumstances, you might actually technically be employed by them, which might explain why they got rid of you the way they did.
My one take away from all of this is. If you even want to TRY making a game . . . Start small and keep your ambitions modest. A lot of writers advise that you start with short stories, since you can complete them in a short amount of time without losing interest, and they teach you all the steps of writing. I imagine the same is true of game development. You need to build a little watch, where all the pieces tic over nicely, before you try and build a clock tower.
@@Bustermachine That is a very good lesson. It seems many of the studios go all out on their first title, having no or barely any experience shipping a title, and then suffer from unrealistic, wishful planning.
@@Bustermachine Exceptionally true. In the software industry in general, you can have the greatest ideas and that's great and all. But you gotta ask yourself and in all honesty asses whether you can make it or not. Do I have the resources, time, experience and knowledge to pull this off? Also in your personal projects try to make lesrning the end goal and not part of the necessary process. If you have the mindset of "I have to learn this and that or I will not complete my project" then it's like diving in the darkness and you'll just stress yourself out. If instead you choose the project around what you want to learn, then it's a practical example of what you want and you can build your skills from there. You can see this in the video, these developers clearly didn't know what they were doing. Then they tried to create this somewhat functional thing however they could. Then they tried asking for money to hire someone who knew what they are doing. But you can't just hand the ideas and a broken base to someone and hope they fix it.
truly i am touched by the contents of this video,,, i myself have been coding every single day since i was 10. Inspired, i will create a MMORPG FPS MOBA Sandbox game. Expect it to be completed in 3weeks
god i had a friend who tried to sell me so hard on this game when it first appeared and he wasted so much money on it to get his name on the backer list or something, saying how it would be so cool and you could fly to other worlds and have space battles and all that jazz.. i don't even know what to do other than laugh now, looking back on it
@@ck7993 That's like saying "I bet he trades stocks! haha" as if it's an insult. What a dumbass, making all that money because he understands a system that I obviously don't!
Bought it as it went on steam... I learned my lessons and started to watch out for all the typical red flags (survival, open world, ... blablabla). Stay crunchy.
Honestly there was a period where the game was actually decent. I made a base and drilled down getting oil shale and it had a neat survival feeling with those worms being scary enemies. They did their "release" and the final product was worse than the previous build...
Before watching: I used to enjoy this game quite a bit. First time I've heard it mentioned in years, and I forgot it existed. After watching: I played full release? I used to play this on a relative's Steam Account (I didn't make my own until a few years later when I got my own PC), and assumed it was early access but never checked. The idea that the buggy mess I played was a full release they were proud of is unfathomable. Technically I played it loads, but in two separate waves. I enjoyed it a lot not long after it came to Steam. I ignored it for a while, before coming back in 2015. This certainly explains why it felt like it was taking steps backward, what with no optimization done when added new things. Looking back, I'm glad I stopped when I did. Had I any clue that it was 1.0 the second time I played it, I probably wouldn't have bothered. This also explains why that relative refuses to buy Early Access titles, no matter how good they look.
@@rosesweetcharlotte no I've actually been involved with several crowd funded movements. Just because they get more money doesn't mean it doesn't get taxed. More comes out. And not only that the majority of these people crowd funding are not good accountants and just throw money at things without proper planning. It's very true regardless.
@@mashedpotatos3750 That's not the point that's being made here. What I think Carly is trying to say is that many of these crowd funded games get double, triple or even more than what they asked for, and the taxes certainly aren't 50% or 66% or 75% or whatever.
@@mashedpotatos3750 I think they’re point is that, even with the taxes, a lot of these games end up with far more than they were asking in the original crowdfunding. It’s not like the government takes everything over what the goal was.
I usually stay away from early access because of how often developers just abandon them like this, but occasionally there's an early access game with a concept that is so good, I just want to believe that it will be finished. Is it really that foolish to spend 30 bucks once in a while on hope?
@@thescuntfromteamfortress2993 heh it a stealth game in a school, lots of students think its cool. Its a good concept because it got a huge audience off that alone. all because you or I don't like it doesn't mean the core concept didn't work. what that game lacks is direction.
Sad thing is that you can see a decent amount of improvement from starforge to heat and they could have been genuinely successful developers if they we're upfront with their community and committed to fixing their games instead of giving up and moving on from a game that people already paid for.
We need more companies like this, but more extreme. Make some flashy trailers, promise the stars, give pre-order, then disappear with the money. After 40-50 scams people might actually stop preordering.
@@hiredfiredtired Yeah, it's not an IQ thing, it's a social education thing. Anybody, regardless of intelligence can fall for a scam. We just need to educate each other as a society until the majority can avoid getting the wool pulled over our eyes. It'll never be 100% full proof, but things are starting to look better already.
I'm also a game developer (not related so Starforge in any way). And I write games for many years. Since I was teenager. And in past I use to think that I will never make mistakes like that. That any person with unless half of brain can avoid that mistakes. And at some point I decided to quit my job and work on a game fore a year, and release it at Steam. And I did. And everything went burning down. I did all the mistakes that I use to critisize big and small copanies for. And I did even more mistakes. But there was almost 0 intrest in my game from players. And I'm glad for that. It did save me a lot of trouble. Any way, I can now understand developers like this. And I can believe that there were legitimately trying to make a good game. If you go to gamedev conference, you will often hear advice to "ban haters" from your forum, and give them back their money. That they will destroy fun for other players, and therefore it's good thing to do. I also learned that usually it's best not to show prototypes that you are working on. To not promise anything. Because some things seem like good idea, but after some testing you may find out that they are not. And if you just show some testing video, or say you are prototyping something, it feels like a promise. And I know and perfectly understand feeling when your game is not working, but it's already published, and you see it was just bad idea, and there is just no way to fix it. And you just want to abandon it, and start working on some new game.
I know one of the co-founders. Steve. They legitimately thought they could do what they claimed. But it often is easier said than done. A lot of indie games have this happen to them in fact. You explained why it failed in the best way I've seen so far. This video is also very one-sided. As the video maker admitted, there is a lot of lack of information in it. That makes some things seem worse than others. Especially in regards to the community manager stuff. The developer I know didn't even know this video existed until he spotted it on his recommendation feed. As far as he knows this youtuber did not even TRY to contact them to check about information. The other co-founder "Will" is scared of the public exactly because of what you outlined. That is the background for a lot of the NDA stuff. He is a nice and friendly guy. They just want to make games, and things went south. Projects just got too messy. And they have learned a lot from what they did wrong. Their latest game is something they are working on more passionately than ever and is going ok so far despite being released this summer. And they are no longer making promises either. They made what they knew they could make. Released it. And is instead adding more content over time as it seems fit.
@@zefnoly9147 You mean you still have faith in this game developer? After the first or second game you would expect some things to change, maybe more communication or proper expectation setting, maybe even get a concrete idea going first before releasing it. We will have to see
Oh man, I have this one. I remember loving the weird physics as a child and launching things with the spinny trap thing. That's literally all I remember about this game, pre-video watch. I still have it on steam.
I remember buying this game right around the Steam launch. Opened it up, started firing straight down, and I was able to fly into space with the recoil from spraying straight down
I was there when this game was first being developed when I was really young, like 14-15 years old and am now 22. I have really fond memories of this game too and it was amazing back in its development and had so much potential. There was this creative mode game mode during its development where you could join your friends and just drive around a really well crafted racetrack in cars similar to halo warthogs that would handle really well. I would have preferred honestly if they just left that game mode in. I also have really detailed memories of going onto their forums and reading other players stories about the planet that starforge took place on. There was this one story where the main character of the story won a lottery on a dying planet that chose him to be sent to the planet "Atlas" which is where the game takes place on. I don't know why, but as a kid and having that story to go with the game just filled me with feelings of such amazement, paired with my memories of the scenery of that game and the soundtrack of the game which was really peaceful. Now that I'm older and pretty depressed, I'm kind of sad that I won't ever get to feel that way again and this game ended up releasing the way it did. I bought it at a good price but eventually it went on steam for free then was taken off completely. The memories and stories compared to the way that this game turned out just make me sad.
As someone in this game's backer credits - there was about 3 major iterative versions. The swarm tower defence version, and a couple of changes to the multiplayer side and a few others. It you look far enough back there is some really fun gameplay videos on youtube for it on older builds. The entire games development can be summarised as follows: A small team built an interesting game with fun ideas. Some of the team coded some of the core procedural elements, but deliberately did so in a way that was virtually impossible to maintain. Released a fun alpha, with a tower defence mode then added a survival mode and a multiplayer mode Said person who coded core elements but obfiscated it so much it was unusuable to anyone else left the team. Remaining team left holding the bag had to rip out the original procedural weapons, AI and terrain code because a: it was unintelligible, and b: possibly the former coder didnt want them using his work anymore anyway Remaining team forced to basically rebeuild entire game alone, losing most of the procedural elements in the process. Game ends up being brought up to what the remaining team considered "good enough" and they had to write the entire thing off as it was unmaintaianable thanks to the earlier guy. To be fair there was some rumors of behind the scenes of personality conflicts, and issues on forums and perhaps worry about how the money was being used - the guy leaving may have been justified... but really as a programmer myself, it was a real d*ck move to obfisscate his code so that nobody else had a hope of ever being able to work on it - his leaving whatever the reason, meant the death of further game development.. it was easier to just pack it all up and start a new game at that point. It was possibly entirely not his fault he left, but the death of the game was the result. It was a loss but by that time Space Engineers, Emperion and No mans sky was out which all had elements we liked in starforges roadmap and more and we all moved on with our lives.
It was Reign of Kings that got me. My library is filled with crowdfunded and scam early-access games from this era. We used to play whatever "cheap" multiplayer indie games looked fun. Sometimes you get Rust. Sometimes you get WarZ, Starbound, RoK, The Black Death, etc.
ah yes this was my first and last taste of early access. i had the privileges of only being burned by this game at 0$ my investment was purely hope but my dreams were still crushed and i learned from others mistakes. game devs can just dissapear.
I was "part" of Subnautica since nearly the start of the game begin released to early access. I remember when i found a bug I'd see if i could replicate it and write it dowm the best i could for a bug report later. The infinite titanium bug was probably the best i found. We where informed what the devs where working on to a degree and most of the time the thing they said would come in the next patch it often did or was pushed to the next.
@@blacktemplarbrotherlucius1935 yeah the problem is Charlie Cleveland, was already an established name these guys were not. It's apples and oranges. the Castlevania guy as well. and don't say mignty number 9, that wasn't a dev he was a character designer
This game burned me too. Ever since, if I'm ever tempted by an early access project, I look at as much gameplay and content as I can and think to myself "Would I be happy paying this money for the game as is, assuming this was all it would ever be?" if no then I don't back. If yes, then maybe I do. I still also consider if the studio seems capable and updates are regular because I don't want to support the practice of launching a half assed early access game, making some money, and then vanishing leaving people with a half-baked game that is a shadow of what it was promised to be.
I remember buying this in 2013 thinking this would be a great game me and my nephews could enjoy. It ran like absolute crap, and in 2014 when the "final" version dropped, I was still underwhelmed and bummed. It was fun messing around with the jank at
I remember seeing ads for this and thinking "damn this looks amazing" but decided to buy something else with the gift card I got for my birthday. Looks like I dodged a bullet.
I love how pretty much the most interesting background footage you could get of this game was going up really high into orbit and then just falling down to the ground.
I recently created a game business and I really don't want to be the company that can't provide what the players want. The game business is hard for most game studios maybe because we're more of the creative type and not the business type. That's why I'm researching everything I can before I do Kickstarter.
Trying to make what they promised as their first game is like being able to hit a nail with a hammer most of the time and start taking jobs to build houses
I got scammed by starforge and my game experience was worse than the footage on the screen, i never found any vehicles and the builds i played sucked compared to what you see. Its actually worse than it looks
I vaguely remember seeing something about this game in the early 2010's. I think I had looked at it and thought "This looks like it might be interesting, I'll wait till it's more polished before trying it". Glad I did.
Hotel Hell, hosted by Gorgen Ramsey, actually came across something simular to this senario. There were two sisters, who own a hotel, and tried develope it into something new. Their ideas were good, but the execution was horrid. If any employees tried to improve the place without conscent from either of the two owners, they were immediately fired. Pay was withheld, no benefits were offered, and they refused to take advise from industry professionals. Come to find out, the hotel they owned was actually a gift from their parents. Their parents were keeping them solvent. Could that be whats happenning with these two? A wealthy parent paying to keep their kid employed in a career of their choice? /shrug
I almost bought their western game. Seemed like a neat concept. Like a Sims survival game or such. But, then, I researched the developer because it didn't seem...right. And ran in the opposite direction once I learned about Starforge.
These guys have a new game slated for release next month called "PlayForm", and it looks like a goofy little multiplayer physics sandbox... thing. To its credit, it *looks* better than their other games, but knowing their track record, I worry it may not be the "fourth time's a charm" they're hoping for.
I take this as a lesson for myself and my team when working on our game. I've fully funded my game myself by working endless hours of overtime. No one has invested but myself, meaning no one will be disappointed or be at a loss.
This project (and company) is a case study of ,,developing for 20 years doesn't make you a project manager, nor a game developer". I honestly don't see malice from these guys. Instead, I see 2 metric tonnes of inexperience, and the inability to deal with backlash. Add all of that together, and you get this 3 year long facade.
If it were just down to one instance of them doing this, I might agree. But it wasn't just one. They did it three times. Three times they went down the exact same path here. At a certain point, it stops being an accident and starts becoming a pattern.
this game promised something ive been dying for ever since hearing it and I almost thought fortnite was going to deliver on it. Building a base during the day, defending it from attack at night in an explorable open world. I have yet to find a game that fits that bill.
never saw those responses but 7 days to die never interested me. zombies, apocalypses, rarely feed my tastes. Ironically Enshrouded is kind of has those but you still get medieval fantasy mixed it making it way more palpable.
This makes me so mad. I got it on Steam as a kid and spent 20 bucks of my pocket money and it was basically unplayable. This was a lot of money for me and I just flushed it. They scammed me, their community and even their own employees to no end. No clue how they keep going and not realize their way is not the way to go but I haven't even seen or played the game and still I knew it was dogshit. Nice to get some closure and to see what happened. Thanks for your work.
I bought in to this game as well when it was early access, it was really fun even in it's barebones form early on but it just really got worse as it went on. It was a real shame too because it really felt like it had promise too.
I have to admit that I really enjoyed Reign of Kings and had a blast with that game. If they polished it a bit more it could very well have been a widespread survival hit.
I got baited into buying a founders pack when a school mate got me hyped for it. Needless to say it single handedly stopped me ever pre-ordering a game ever again! When No Mans Sky got announced I immediately thought of this game, and what it could have been!
I know this is supposed to be a pretty serious video but the b-roll footage of spawning those pig things on the edge of the mountain and watching them roll down, flying around everywhere was killing me lmao.
This game made me think for this first time: I want to support the developers because this seems like a great foundation for a good game. Bought the Founders Edition for me and a friend and not even a few months later, the game was already left to rot and they ran with the money. What a life lesson that was :D
I actually loved Reign of Kings, it had so much potential and what they had in game was decently solid, but the game was absolutely ruined by cheaters. It was impossible to find a server that didn’t have blatant cheaters on it.
I remember seeing this, wanting to play it, but due to me not having a very good computer I decided not to get it. Years later I just kinda forgot about it, and never heard anything about it from anyone anymore. Its funny, I was acutally thinking about this game recently, wondering what happened to it. Now I know.
Worth mentioning: They are at it yet again with a game called PlayForm: Human Dynamics. It got released on steam july 27th and it doesn't seem like people caught onto it yet.
I own this game... Still sat there in my Steam library... My friend convinced me to buy it after he saw it on Steam. I very clearly remember the trailer on Steam showing off a whole load of features that weren't even in the build available on Steam. My friend went hard on getting a refund because he bought the "Founders Edition" of the game, or whatever it was called, for like at LEAST £75!
Oh my fucking god, I was dying laughing at the whole segment while talking about the benefit tiers for the campaign yet the character was spastically falling the entire time 😂😂😂😂. Made me think of the movie Hotrod where the guy is dancing in the woods, trips, and you think it's just a quick tumble, but no. The fall lasts like three damn minutes as he ragdolls down a mountain, pretty much just like the character here 😂. Seriously, they would've had a hit if they'd made the game tongue-in-cheek and the terrible graphics and physics were intentional for comedy purposes!
in fairness as a Source map dev, iv come across points where id be making a map and have so many problems that id have to tell people that the map is done, and itd be best to just scrap it and move on... BUT, i try to remake the map, not make a brand new map with different setting and point. Cutting losses is a smart move, but youre suppose to take what was saved to try and attack the problem at a different angle... not just forget the problem existed.
Source map tools are pretty good, all things considered, there is just a steep learning curve with respect for the meta - There are things that seem like they will be fine, but when you do them, they break everything. UE seems like the move these days, both from a practical and financial standpoint. Source was great when it was being written by the same people who wrote the engine, or at least someone could tap an engine dev. There are some bugs in HL2, but you really have to go looking for them.
@@nutbastard UE is a land mine. its overhype. everyone goes 'oh looky da gafix!' but idk... im still seeing games being made on Source, Unity, and even CryEngine. If i were to leave Source, id most likely move to Cry. also UE is owned by the chinese government. so. thats a big fuckin problem on square 1.
I supported starforge during its Kickstarter for whatever the lowest tier was. I love a good Skybox and that was the main thing that caught my eye when I first saw the game, I even have an in in game picture as one of the backgrounds my computer Cycles through. I liked the Aesthetics of a lot of the creatures, where they had bioluminescence during the night. I was intrigued to find out about the lore about giant trees and what happened to humanity and I thought the fully customizable automatic 8 barrelled mini guns that you could possibly get we're actually really cool. As time went on though and updates came in slower and slower they seem to work on a bunch of features that even at the time I was thinking was cool and all but they could really be putting their efforts towards something more important. Such as the physics-based movement system, nice concept, but seems to just drain your computer power and took a long time to optimize. Oddly enough I never ran into any real glitches or lag but I didn't really play the game too much. At $12 Canadian an hour (minimum wages at the time I think) 40 hours a week just to pay somebody's wage is $25,000 a year when I heard they were hiring a bunch more people I remember thinking "where the hell are they going to get the money to pay for these people? They're going to run out in half a year." When they released the full game I hundred percent saw it as "you know what, we've lost interest in this and it's a lot harder than we thought, so we're just going to move on and we don't really owe you anything" All-in-all I wasn't too disappointed though since I treat all kickstarter's and Early Access as a Gamble, I see a cool concept and want to support it. So I give a little bit of money and if it works out awesome, if not I knew the risks.
Starforge was one of the first early access games I bought on Steam, I enjoyed it at first as it looked like it had a lot of promise then forgot about it after a while. I came back to it expecting to see it had bee improved like Minecraft but found it no different then when I'd left it. Then I learned about the drama behind it. Since then I've stuck with waiting to see the reviews for a game before I purchase it, so I don't suffer wasting my money like I did for this game.
Starforge was developed in my home town, which I never knew until years after this went down.
Considering the timeline, and my brief [I bailed] experience at our local tech schools digital media program, it is entirely possible I've met the person that denied my refund and banned me from their steam.
Weird world.
The way this story went, I expected the last line to be "I know where he lives (and so does my persuasion stick)"
whoaaa 7 bil ppl and its still a small world :)
Wow weird world
@@czarnakoza9697 Sometimes it really feels like there could only be 70-80 people in the entire world lol
It's bizarre when you have a stretch of time where you just keep running into the same people over and over and over again, which only makes me wonder how much weirder it is for people with ANY shred of fame.
That's how villains are born.
All the creatures from this game,are stock models from a site that you can buy them,and surprise they were all the free ones 🤦
péricles?
@@moelester385 😳😳
@Alpheratz & Canopus its only feijoada and the caralhos a 4, its kinda funny that some famous brazilians are not so much recognized around the world
Do nada dropou um bando de br aq kkkkkkkk
@Alpheratz & Canopus 4 contando comigo
So they hired a respected member of the community to act as their voice for sharing upcoming features and development progress with said community, but she wasn't allowed to mention any upcoming features or development progress. I see absolutely nothing wrong here.
its because there werent any upcoming features or development progress
@@rrai1999 Good point. In which case it was a mind-bogglingly stupid move to hire her in the first place, wasn't it?
@@slenderminion2229 very on-brand for the development of this game, and almost all their other titles
Why are you talking like you have brain damage
I am guessing they were hoping she would calm down the community with word salads but then quickly noticed that she is a professional who is doing a proper job. In a sense, they basically ghosted her because they didn't want to deal with real life.
Realizing a feature of your game is “too hard” specifically with it being to do with terrain customization immediately makes me think of early phases of Subnautica. They eventually realized that mechanic was just too much for the game and so they decided to remove it entirely and still ended up making a fantastic game. It’s okay to ditch something if it doesn’t work anymore, not just ditch the game entirely. 🤦🏻♂️
What was the feature?
@@StealthTheFoxz the procedural generation of the total thing. So they tweaked it to the areas being in different locations but being the same
@@saintjames1995 i think Subnautica map is great
@@saintjames1995 it was also terraforming of sand, right? I didn't get to play it at that stage, but it seems smart. My poor computer fans go psycho as is 🤣💗
@@MadeOfConfusion yeah. They made a great decisions by randomizing where the locations were but leaving them relatively the same
This is what happens when developers don't pay attention during Project Management class, believing that "if they just keep coding, it'll get done". They do what all junior devs do - get into a project, make all the "fun bits", then get frustrated at the hard issues and do something else instead.
If they had stuck to a small scope and saw their projects through from start to finish, they could have made a name for themselves. Instead, they lived in future land, where "Imagine a game..." was all they needed.
they made a name for themsevles, just not the one they wanted (e.i. Scammers)
hehe I just started development on my first game. I'm making a point to do all the boring hard/hard database and structural crap first. Hopefully it pays off.
@@krugerstanwhat’s ur game called man?
@@JokersD0ll rivalRealms. You can add the correct commercial extension at the end to see its current (very crude, but "playable") state.
@@krugerstanI'm not a gamer I just like seeing all the crazy things people do, I just wanted to say I hope your game goes well & good luck.
Starforge taught me something important... it pushed me into discovering how to hide games in my Steam library
You can put in a ticket to permanently remove a game from your library.
@@RpTheHotrod you don't even have to put a ticket I think. I remembered removing 3 cheap paid games that were not worth keeping anymore.
I remember doing this. It remains the only game I ever EVER had to hide. I am glad I wasn't reminded of it until now.
@@fiqri1999 "put in a ticket" in the same sense as u put in a ticket for a refund: click some buttons and if u meet the conditions it'll be automatically fulfilled
How you do that?
I was obsessed with getting this game when I was a child. I eventually convinced my parents to get it for me and, well, it barely ran on my computer. It was like a consistent and intense lag spike that never ended.
This is so sad Alexa play Despacito
@@hexogramd8430 DESPACITO!!!!!!!!
Well, you still ARE a child.
bro whats wrong with you?
Same. Living in a broke family this was a big investment for me. And everything afterwards fked me up mentally...
I've surprisingly never even heard of this game, I think they buried themselves deep by saying that they're a fusion of Minecraft and Halo
Buried themselves deeper than bedrock you might say
Get yourself a Mustache
when it dropped was biggg news, that being said afterwards was bigger news in the survival community, was a good warning shot to show us the garbage type of products that were to be released over the next 2-3 years.
I'm suprised someone like you who seems to be everywhere hasn't heard of it.
ruclips.net/video/LI0210c1xPk/видео.html
@@deadlyvortez6207 he shaved
It's really relaxing watching the character slide down the mountain. Feels like a fever dream
Feels like Tribes
yeah
yea, fever dream without fever. win-win situation. what more can a man want ? lol, thx for sharing, have fun
haaahaha 🤦🏽♂
Ye man was about to comment about it, the dude's havin fun sliding and spawning creatures to roll with him XD
Based on what they were saying about the voxel terrain being too expensive, I'm guessing they never considered doing what the industry standard is and separating the world into chunks? I mean, the whole _reason_ Minecraft has chunks is so it can save/load/regenerate the world in bite-size pieces that the CPU can easily take care of.
oh god that's probably it, they tried to load every single voxel at once at all times, or at least an ungodly amount of it. who did they think they were lmao. and they had the audacity to say they can't optimize it any further.
At the least separate ecosystems that load in. Aside from weather ofc.
@@rigen97they thought they were dreamworld
I'm one of the people who got banned from the steam forums for bringing attention to how they censor anyone who speaks negative about the game. They even banned my steam review too which had hundreds of thumbs up's. This video about their mismanagement and incompetence was satisfying to watch. Fuck code hatch.
All games on steam like that
Most of it
I have been banned in many games for fact critics
Move to epic for weekly free games so i cant complaint of the game is shit
@@jeankristein3238 Pretty sure you can't complain at all on epic
Kinda sucks to be banned from your own platform, why not just show the devs your knife collection?
Far away
And i am afraid going there to the white land
Who know before i back Putin launch the boom
@@nikpapado9785 yup the games can straight up remove bad reviews
I completely forgot about this game, these guys single handedly put me off ever pre ordering or crowdfunding again
This was my first burn, but didnt deter me because during that time Don't Starve was coming along great.
@@Aaronlcyrus yeah there's good examples, I used to play a bunch of kerbal space program in early access, after these guys I just thought nah I'll wait for it to be good
Same here. I even got a founder's pack so I could get my name in the credits.
Keep an eye out. They are still making games of dubious quality.
Tbh I absolutely hate crowdfunding or anything like making games on Patreon. Half the time these developers get hundreds or thousands of dollars never hire anybody and keep making slow pace at making their game sometimes only having one or two updates per year.
Whenever I see a game that "borrow" element from many games, and try to become all of them at the same time... the first thing come to mind is, "It's going to flop, isn't it?" and like you said, identity crisis. Simply because, a game is good because they focus on one thing and improved them to the point you can add other thing that doesn't ruin the identity of the game.
You can't just frankenstein'd everything and hope for the best.
Good way to put it
Not to mention, it means that they are going for quantity rather than quality of content.
Feature creep is a really large issue with projects like these. Things seem easy at first and you start talking about more features you want to add, then you hit a snag and suddenly you have way too much that needs done.
@@prohunter717 it means they are valuing ambition and picking bits from things they like, without really understanding what those bits contribute to the thing they like, how they interact and what the final thing they want to make should be.
@@CAMSLAYER13 The development team I work with use project management boards like Pivotal to help us stay focused on what the next steps are. I’d recommend something like it for any massive project that needs to be broken up into small manageable pieces
As a person who play 7 days to die for years now and follow its Development i can say that making any type of even remotely serious full 3d game with a funcioning Voxel world is a serious challenge.
The game and team are great. They seem to want to keep working on this game forever, and it's still in EA. But what they call Early Access would be a fully completed game to any other developer.
@@billlyons7024 haha what
Bruh I love 7days. I started playing years ago and still playing to this day, just got up from a session.
Watching this video looking at 7 Days 2 Die.
The last few updates are what separate 7d2d from the rest of these projects. A15 onwards really pushed the right changes, and made the game a hell of a lot better. The last few really gave it a solid identity.
7D2D and Project Zomboid can be EA for forever, I got my ten bucks worth.
@@DamienDarkside Even if they never progressed past the point they are now I'd recommend them. I have over 200 hours in Zomboid, it was a good purchase.
I bought starforge when it first came out on Steam and one of the updates (with ZERO forewarning) changed the requirements from 32bit OS to 64bit OS. This was during the time when 32bit CPUs were common (That's what I had) and 64bit were rather expensive. The game was changed on patch day to not allow a 32bit system to even TRY to load it. When I got on the forums, there were many of us that complained about the fact that the game we paid for is now 100% inaccessible without buying a whole new computer. Their response was essentially "Too bad. Sucks to be you." (and no refund, thanks)
So now, I am satisfied to see that they failed so miserably.
Good riotous riddance!
i thought it's possible if the game suddenly become unplayable for no reason to refund?
@@ArariaKAgelessTraveller Nope. Once you have played a game for 2 hours, no refund for any reason.
@@Squidbush8563 back then steam didn't even have an official refund policy so the 2 hours is irrelevant
@@SocietyIsSoFucked I honestly don't know when any policy was implemented, but I was directing my desire for a refund at the developer.
The only devs I've ever met that said they've been coding since they were 10, were people who were absolutely shit at coding. Most of these folks have lived in their own bubble for years, and simply have no idea what they don't know. These are the kind of people who often think they're done learning by the time someone is actually trying to teach them something. When I read "coding since I was 10" on someone's resume, all I read is "I have far too many bad habits that are incredibly difficult to get rid of."
Self taught programmers are so awful to work with
As somebody that has been coding since... like 14-15, this is completely true. When you start out as a little kid modifying some script you found until you can finally make it do something, sure, you get better over time - but better than terrible is still pretty bad. Just as you said, when you're in your own bubble you have no idea if you're actually any good, and most people assume they're great. It doesn't help that little kids dabbling in code are surrounded by people that know nothing about it and thus constantly fawn over them and how amazingly talented they are. From 15 to like 19 I was on a browser-based game with a community of around 100,000 and was pretty well known, and later I started making small contributions. Everybody in the community talked about what a "coding genius" I was and even to this day I bump into people from back then that think the same shit.
When I first got a "real" job later in life, I was floored by how little I knew. People think that because they can have a goal and then write code that does what they wanted, no matter how messy or horrifically unoptimized, that they're good - it's not that simple. So many of these "coded from age 12" people focus entirely on that, that they made it work. It's not hard to write code that functions when you aren't worried about optimization or scaling or even something as simple as keeping it clean and properly commented so somebody else can understand it.
I remember one guy was going on and on about his "custom caching engine" that was "amazing". He had just discovered memcached and apparently thought he was a genius for wrapping queries inside a function that then compared to cached results and then updated the cache if needed. He genuinely thought he had, like, invented something new, that I would be like "WOW I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS!" - all because within his own little bubble it *was* new.
This is a long way to say that as one of those people, it took a long time for me to burst my own bubble. I think the best thing to know as a programmer is that you are never as good as you think you are, there are always people far better than you, and there is always a TREMENDOUS amount you can improve on. I see immediate red flags any time somebody talks to me about what a "coding god" they are because they taught themselves as a kid; that's not to say it isn't possible for a good developer to have those beginnings, but nine times out of ten it spells trouble.
end rant
@@ApothercyCold all that said. I’ve found that the best programmers are the ones that self taught in their teens, then went on to get a year or two of software training. Then they have the drive, and the expertise.
@@ApothercyCold I'm a self-taught dev but I always knew that I wasn't as good as real life programmers even though LITERALLY ALMOST EVERYONE thinks I'm some kind of talented genius, does this make me actually a good programmer? 🤔
@@SrIgort the people constantly saying how amazing you are is definitely part of the problem. Before I knew 20% of what I know today people online were fawning over me saying I was a master programmer and could do anything. A bad programmer can have a goal and make it work, however inefficiently, so it seems like they can do "anything" to somebody looking at just the output. I think that first time you work with somebody "real" and realize the gap it's a shock to all of us.
Starforge, as far as I know, is the ONLY game that actually lost features instead of gained features between versions. Like, no joke. There had been a somewhat buggy but still functional parkour system with wall jumping and whatnot. Then the game updated, and that functionality was gone. At one point there was a base building / defense mode, but it was removed. There was a physics system with structural integrity systems, but that got removed. There were the procedural weapons which again, buggy mess, but it was hilarious shooting a minigun that had 9 different barrels and launching into space from the recoil. Guess what happened? Straight up removed. I remember playing the game on release being just absolutely confused, because I couldn't find any of the features I wanted. There were plenty of videos, screenshots and forum posts of things that *literally didn't even exist anymore*. Starforge is the game that taught me to never buy into early access again. I still do from time to time, but not to the extent that I used to.
There's also Cube World
Hello neighbor
Starbound. Starbound lost features with updates.
My best guess is that in their attempts to optimize the terrible performance, they were removing features to save on hardware resources. Just a guess though
Can i introduce you to 7Days to Die
I met codehatch at RTX 2013. Some of the most socially awkward people I've ever seen. In hindsight I can say that they were not malicious, they are incompetent. That said, this game is why I no longer get invested in any crowd funded games.
Did you know that Will and Steve used to be lumberjacks before they decided to try being game developers? Also neither of them has any sort of college degree.
This I actually believe. Just look at their profile pictures. These are two guys who like coding but are pretty bad at it, want to sell games and overhype but realize developing is much harder
@@gabenewell7123 Not having a college degree is a good sign of intellegence nowadays
@@MaggotAddict21 I mean, this was in the early 2010s, when the barrier to entry was a bit higher than it is today. However, I don't think that being good at coding or having a college degree is a pre-requesite to making or at least designing a good game. Codehatch just sucks
@@duckmeat4674 so they are trying to copy EA? :D
I almost jumped on this, but right before I pulled the trigger the whole collapse with Juno happened. I feel bad for her, but I'm glad we all got that warning.
Bro I feel so bad for her... She was a fan which was one of the reasons she was hired and they did her so dirty...
"we are building an everything game"
"it barely even functions"
"well, everything went wrong!"
Saying it barely functions is a bit charitable
The common fable of Icarus, whom flew too close to the sun, that happens to many *Many* over ambitious game devs.
At first I was wondering how the hell anyone could have fallen for this until I saw it happened in the early 2010s, a happier time where we still thought Kickstarter was going to be the holy grail of the indie game revolution. Also if you want Halo + Minecraft there's always Space Engineers ...
Yes, play space engineers. It’s what this game promised, but like, good.
I was gonna say, this looked like a shitty version of Space Engineers. That game has its own problems with DLC, but at least it's playable.
Yeah was gonna comment this, SE, while flawed, is basically this but actually good
With exceptional mod support, Space Engineers is virtually the best Halo + Minecraft there
Keen isn't much better on their buisness practices. Sure, a good game can be argued, but it really hasn't improved much at all in the last few years other then a total of 9+ DLC. I'm not even going to mention the whole Medieval Engineers fiasco going on right now...
One thing to add would be the fact that they basically didn't create any of the models for their games.
Pretty much every model you see in the game is from the Unity Store, with pre-made models that anyone can just buy and put into their game.
They might’ve lied but I’ve heard the assets they put in the game are actually the free ones from the unity store.
@@riplix20 They were not free.
ruclips.net/video/i3vA-EE4HwE/видео.html
Go to the 3:46 mark.
@@riplix20 you can still find those on the Asset Store to this day tbh.
Like, as a game dev myself, I don't see anything wrong with using third-party sources like the Asset Store to make up for the missing resources your team might not have (be it time or money), but doing so and expecting it to work out by itself, without spending the time to actually optimize the models, the code, etc is beyond dumb.
Even the procedural generation code was outsourced from a 3rd party developer (it was called Marching Cubes for Unity I think).
Some games do it well (Genshin Impact, Phasmophobia, Among US), but many developers think it's as easy as downloading a few assets and simply sewing those together that it's hurting the whole Unity community - or it at least has for several years.
There was a time when Asset-Flip games ran rampant on the Steam store. I don’t see them quite as much as I used to, but that could be because we as a customer base have grown wary of poorly produced indie games.
So basically Yandere simulator, Yandere dev also didn't make the models himself, instead he got them from a site
I remember playing this game... I was active in their forum and diligently reported bugs. Then within a week after reporting on bugs that wiped your base, they released the game. I stopped playing after that. The bugs weren't fixed.
lol, I had a similar run-in with 7 Days to Die that got my review, bombed: Literally everytime I'd join my friends server, through like 10 updates, I had to delete my character and restart because it would only load the chunk I was on, and spam the console with errors.
Ah yes, game developers who see themselves as gods and view their consumers as scums that are supposed to worship their heavenly developer overlords. They'd fit right in with EA's PR team.
Nah they are indie EA or else WANNABE EA.
I've always been interested in what happened to this project. One of the founders (Will) used to come into the restaurant I worked at and I'd talk games with him. He even gave me a few codes for the game that I gave out to friends but we never got into it because we were waiting for it to be more developed. Sad to hear this is how it all ended
Does he still visits the restaurant?
@@mettawatkutaninwat5411 I haven't worked there in about 8 years and they shut down completely 7 years ago, so no he definitely doesn't haha
Reading through the comments, you may know ForceTrekkie from above?
Citation
"ForceTrekkie
ForceTrekkie
vor 11 Monaten
Starforge was developed in my home town, which I never knew until years after this went down.
Considering the timeline, and my brief [I bailed] experience at our local tech schools digital media program, it is entirely possible I've met the person that denied my refund and banned me from their steam.
Weird world. "
Citation end.
i was a founder in star forge
well i bought the package lol
he probably did too
you know we didn’t make the game right ?
Ah yes, the game I convinced my buddies to buy when this was "in-development". The more we played, the more we found wrong and eventually figured out it was a dead end game with no hope. This was the early days of early access games. You could get the wool pulled over your eyes pretty easily.
Yeah, if you were incredibly naive and hadn't already learned that "if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is" but hey, I bet a large portion of people who bought into failed early access games are currently losing money to crypto and NFTs as we speak because they're clearly the gullible types
@@etherealpenguin8683 That's the thing. I found it early into its development and it was fun with some promise. So of course I roped some friends into playing it. For $15 we all got our moneys worth. It became one of those "what part of the engine can we break today" games for us and we love that stuff.
@@Xeil A fair point made, to be sure!
This world is rapidly passing away and I hope that you repent and take time to change before all out disaster occurs! Belief in messiah alone is not enough to grant you salvation - Matthew 7:21-23, John 3:3, John 3:36 (ESV is the best translation for John 3:36) if you believed in Messiah you would be following His commands as best as you could. If you are not a follower of Messiah I would highly recommend becoming one. Call on the name of Jesus and pray for Him to intervene in your life - Revelation 3:20.
Contemplate how the Roman Empire fulfilled the role of the beast from the sea in Revelation 13. Revelation 17 confirms that it is in fact Rome. From this we can conclude that A) Jesus is the Son of God and can predict the future or make it happen, B) The world leaders/nations/governments etc have been conspiring together for the last 3000+ years going back to Babylon and before, C) History as we know it is fake. You don't really need to speculate once you start a relationship with God.
Can't get a response from God? Fasting can help increase your perception and prayer can help initiate events. God will ignore you if your prayer does not align with His purpose (James 4:3) or if you are approaching Him when "unclean" (Isaiah 1:15, Isaiah 59:2, Micah 3:4). Stop eating food sacrificed to idols (McDonald's, Wendy's etc) stop glorifying yourself on social media or making other images of yourself (Second Commandment), stop gossiping about other people, stop watching obscene content etc. Have a blessed day!
@@isaiahc8390 begone, spambot
I was also a fan of Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, jumping onto the Reign of Kings hype. I had no idea who Codehatch was, and I bought the 4-pack for Reign of Kings to play with friends. Thankfully, none of us played over two hours, and when I noticed the issues, I started doing research on the company, seeing if there was a roadmap of some kind. I was met with several posts online claiming they abandoned Reign of Kings like Starforge. One thing I distinctly remember was a post written that said they removed the good mechanics from Starforge before releasing it and just abandoning it. That was the post I immediately checked on the Steam page for Starforge and found out who the company really was. I promptly had all my friends request a refund and explained the situation to them. I got my money back, but I wish Valve would keep an eye out for these "games" and promptly mass refund so the developers don't get any profit from scam-like games. They did it with The WarZ, why can't they do it for these kinds of games?
I had so much fun in Reign of Kings, I got like 2k hours
My brother and sister fucking LOVED reign of kings and played that shit everyday for so long haha
Part of the problem for Valve/Steam watching out for these types of games is that there are too many games. Its never easy with how many games get published but are crap. StarForge isn't on steam anymore, at least not this game. There is a game of the same name on there, but it isn't this game.
@@SlewedHydra theres also the fact that accepting to refund easily could really screw how steam is viewed, 'oh youre taking too long to update? mass refunds' wouldnt exactly be a attractive thing
its quite simple why they delist this game. the warZ garnered mainstream media attention.
It's wild how Space engineers basically has all of the promised features of this and more.
I was just thinking about this lol
yeah I thought the exact thing, like the grid spawning with vehicles is so similar
i think it looks similar to empyrion
And space engineers also got abandoned for a medieval knockoff at some point as well.
@@MyNameIsNotPa nope, space engineers is still going strong to this day, in fact we only got a new update a couple of days ago (medieval engineers however was abandoned, but recently got a developer supported community edition)
I'm a victim of Code Hatch. I was there from the beginning and it is exactly as bad as this video portrays it.
You are a victim of your own moronic choices and being easily fooled
Name checks out
@@jazz.feels. trust
this is the "game" that taught me early access is not something to buy
You are victim of your stupid decisions in life. Hope you took a lesson.
When I was younger I offered to give the devs 500 CAD as a donation and they actually denied me. Probably someone on the inside trying to ward an innocent off of the scam.
cad? like autocad?
@@russko118 Canadian $$
@@OfficiallyOddlySatisfyingYou dodged a damn bullet! Thank God they said no since that would've just been you flushing that money down -the toliet- a black hole lmao.
Can you help me be warm?
You must punch the trees to get the wood@@everythingpony
I didn't buy into starforge myself, but I still remember how trolls used to market it around the minecraft community. Usually by calling minecraft a "game for toddlers", and that starforge is a "minecraft killer". LOL
Sounds like hytale nowadays...
@@estellairon9448 never heard of it.
@@estellairon9448 What the fuck is a Hytale?
A voxel game that's p much minecraft with higher fantasy and less cubey design. Not very much has been shown, but it's kinda on development hell, with a lot of delays
@@estellairon9448 I was joking. I know it wont come out for quite a while.
Its so sad Starforge was so bad. It could have been really good, and probably liked game. But sadly this happened. Also cheers, love your videos, and marvelous job on making your videos!
I remember being so hyped for it back in the day. Even Reign of Kings was a good bit of fun, but they just gave up, rushed it and ripped off all the backers as a result. Also cheers! Glad you enjoy the vids
all i want is a modern version of OG red faction aka geuinly lets you dig and build voxel wise where ever you want the closet thing to it is space engineers.
@@wilmagregg3131 you should try No Mans Sky
@@WickedWizI feel that No Mans Sky is what starforge wanted to be
@@WickedWiz They could've been so big. The tower defense part would be fun, especially with the building parts. I'd love to make my own course I can watch the chaos as all of the towers murder them all
This goes to show that just because you've coded ever since you were 10 doesn't make you good
It just means that you've been coding for 10 years
In my opinion statements like "I've been doing X for Y years" can always be disregarded from the get-go. There are just too many variables for it to really mean anything.
Like what does "coding for 10 years" even mean? Are we talking about 8 hours a day for 10 years here? 4 hours per month? A ton of coding for 1 year and then a 2 year break with barely any coding done? Were they trying to improve in that time or just coding for fun?
It's way easier to just look at their past projects and judge them by that because in the end, experience and effort don't matter much when they can't show anything for it.
Mfw my friend who started coding the same year I did, around 12-13 years ago, asked me to fix his idle incremental mobile game for him because it ran like shit.. and it was literally 98% if/else statements that each nested as deep as several layers.
Fixed it for him. Just rewrote as loops and added comments to explain each step (since he obviously was still at a beginner level), and sent it back to him. He messaged me back saying he'd have to use his old version because he couldn't tell what the code was doing anymore.
Time doesn't inherently mean anything.
@@ossiehalvorson7702 This is word for word exactly what YandereDev did lmao
@@Knapperoni I don't get it. Coding isn't particularly difficult in high level languages. I truly think 90% of people could do it, it's just a matter of how much someone actually wants to dedicate time to learning a new skill.
Ive been coding for 3 years now. me and a few friends made a lil game in Java for a school project that was probably better then what they did despite it being a boardgame. There is no shot these guys are coding for 10 years.
best part of the game is the ragdolls going down a mountain its just sooo weirdly calming?
So glad I wasn't the only one thinking this.
The only time I was aware of this game was years ago, when Star_ and Jerma made a video on it. First thing they see in the game was massive graphical glitches. Seems about right.
fps, sandbox, and survival are some of my favorite game genres, so learning this existed to any capacity, and wasn't good (or even bearable to play) made me kind of sad.
Minecraft gun mod baby
Might be worth looking into space engineers
I recommend Block Fortress by forsaken media
Play Space Engineers.
How detrimental would it be in this kind of setting to say "Hey, we made a mistake and misjudged how long it would take to implement the promised changes." and then release what they had ATM as a separate build on Steam basically saying "this is what we've accomplished in that time" and then keep plugging away at the promised features, incrementally improving them with frequent "test builds" updates?
It wouldn't, you're absolutely right, and were I in a situation like that' that's mostly what I would do. The only thing I'd point out is that sometimes the "release what you have so far so people can play that" Isn't always possible, because game dev isn't a linear process. Sometimes implementing a feature requires you to completely break the stability you have to the point where it may not even load properly.
It's more effort and manpower to keep early builds consistently playable in some cases.
But that's besides the point, transparency and honesty and an earnest attempt to make a decent game is all people want from these burgeoning developers.
If they manage money like shit say "Hey we managed our money irresponsibly and we feel terrible about it" Etc People are more forgiving when they're dealing with honest mistakes and even lack of experience. It's the difference between the day one bartender that messes up your drink, but you can see they're earnestly trying, vs the bartender that's been there for years and doesn't give a shit.
Holy crap this sent me off on a rant, That's a long fucking roundabout way to say "Yes, I agree"
Then there is always a risk of it becoming star citizen. They are at fault but giving away some of the control you have over to the crowd, means you will have infinite features to add. Not to mention the 135k for 5 programmers, excluding the manager (in this case it would be the feature coordinator). If the employees are not their friends and people who are basically volunteering to help, to pay them on a programmers salary, would be to end that investment in less than a year. Not to mention they themselves would need to find another source of income, in order to devote a full time job on their game. As I said in another comment sensible thing was to not hire anyone, take a reasonable 20-30k salary for each of them, rent a place together, and not get any kind of office. would have lasted them maybe 2-3 years if they were willing to live frugally for a bit. Would have also made for a much more cohesive project.
I can't help but aree
@@TheRandomYoYo then it becomes like this situation again where are the middle ground when it need?
@@Privated15 Like honestly this is the biggest thing though. The need for honesty and transparency. If they had been, I'm pretty confident most everyone would have been willing to give them a second chance. But they weren't. They were shady and dodgy, and when people start recognizing the dishonesty, that's when things go downhill.
Its a right shame more of these guys don't recognize this, but sadly it seems most just go in wanting a quick buck, and getting as many of them as they can, before trying to get the heck outta dodge with it.
Shame. Here's my roundabout way to say "I agree" XD
God, this and Cube World are what taught me to never buy into early access for anything but an established, trustworthy company. It's not foolproof, having been burned by Worlds Adrift, but for the most part sticking with known devs has resulted in well-made properly delivered games.
Worlds Adrift was great in Alpha, aside from the lag spikes. Then they went about neutering the most enjoyable features like gliding...
Bossa Studios was and is an established and acclaimed video game maker, but they dove into a genre they'd never been in before, and lost touch with the features people wanted.
Private servers could have saved the game, I think.
Ya, I think the only company I've preordered from in the last decade has been Fromsoft, because they have a good track record of delivering what they promise.
Luckily Cubeworld wasnt crowdfunded atleast…
I have preordered 2 games. Diablo 2 and Colonial Marines. I learned my lesson.
Its funny, I just remembered from the two videos that I was planning on getting both of them at the time, however didnt because I was underage.
The only game I actually bought into during this "early access phase" was rust which - somehow - turned out well.
I remember asking my dad for this as a kid, but he did not believe in early access games. Seems he saved me
Edit: to that one guy in the comments, I'm now 20
Bruh if you remember that you still a kid 😂
@@nemo1716 What do you think a kid is?
@@anguslazy He said "I remember asking my dad for this as a kid..." implying he is now an adult.
My point is that given this games age, he would either have to be lying about the memory, or about no longer being a kid.
What is your point?
@@nemo1716 You didn't answer my question.
@@nemo1716 this doesn't make any sense. I remember asking my dad to reinstall my virus riddled windows and get certain games like prince of persia or need for speed underground.
I remember that clearly because back then i was too lazy to learn what filelist is and how to properly search for cracks online.
Silencing the community members/players is actually a very common way that the devs use when there're opposing voices about the game.
I played Reign of Kings back in the day and did not realize it was Code Hatch until watching this video. RoK was far from perfect but it was much more playable than star forge. Have some good memories with it
“They abandoned one project, and moved on to another-“
Ah…So basically what I do unwillingly 24/7-
ADHD is a bitch
the main difference is people aren't paying you for the project you abandon
@@jackawaka That’s true
Unless you count that as my brain just being shitty lol
But again, I don’t get payed for that
Same bro... same...
You forgot to mention the "junior developers" were none other than the brothers behind Digital Homicide.
Wait, really? The fucking Romaines?
no fuckin way
Well, fuck. No wonder the game got worse instead of better.
I could have sworn that jank looked familiar.
im sorry but whats digital homicide?
@@someguy1894
An absolute joke of a game "developer" that has a known issue with using free pre built assets and the laziest methods possible to get as much money as possible before abandoning the "games" they push.
They are also rather aggressive with the threats against customers and such.
I remember seeing this game when it came out on Kickstarter. My brother thought it looked cool, I said yeah but I won't buy it until they have more done. He didn't end up getting it because he wanted to game together. I think my beaver-sense saved us both some money here.
Having backed it at the Hero level...it really sucked to see it fall apart. Their infinite gun generator tech demo was actually quite a bit of fun.
Starforge was the game that taught me to be careful with early access games.
Before Starforge, I'd backed Minecraft in 2010, and when Starforge came out on steam early access in 2013, I thought "well, Minecraft launched the same way and it's great! I'll grab this one too."
Lol. Man it sucked.
I didn't fall for Reign of Kings though, I'd long since developed the habit of quickly googling the devs of any EA game I am tempted to buy. The first thing I saw was "Code}{atch" and immediately laughed and kept my money.
Yeah and the reason why Minecraft worked was that Notch was not money driven he coded a game whit people feedback and when he had enough sold it
@@aoki6332 It just goes to show how naive and unaware the CodeHatch devs were. It's such a shame because they really had it going for them, they had crowdfunding, a loyal community, their beta was decent. But due to their lack of knowledge they completely bombed and didn't think anything through. And the worst part is that they never learned their lesson, they made a half assed game, ditched it before completion then went onto their next project.
@@aoki6332 Yeah Notch even crowd sourced some of the Mobs. There were some missteps here and there, like the Circle Moon but the Creeper was actually a failed Pig. Arguably the most Iconic Mob today started it's life as a Failed Pig.
Pretty funny how the video opens with him whining about Notch, but everyone in the comments is praising the guy
Similar thing happened to me, but this was done by a big and respectable organization in my community... I was working under contract and it was going to end in several months... The thing is, they explicitly told me "not to find another job" and they even asked me to fill a preliminary contract form (not a binding/legal contract yet, but they only give this form to someone who's going to work with them).
But as you can already guess, the new contract never came. And usually the organization representative will have a talk with someone who's going to end their contract (you know, the work-end interview kinda things), but not for me... my immediate supervisor told me that they are busy and that's it.
And oh, I've been working for them for 13+ years... Yeah, I believe I've worked for them longer than even a full time staff... But not even a goodbye...
Honestly, if a contract worker works for you that long and works so many hours and stuff, it can get sort of legally grey. In some circumstances, you might actually technically be employed by them, which might explain why they got rid of you the way they did.
It depends on where you are but in US there’s a 2 year limit until you are an employee
This is the game that taught me to be weary of early access games. Now I recognize the red flags when they are present.
This was my first early access games back in the day. My skepticism of early access only grew from there.
This series is a must-watch for any aspiring indie game developers.
My one take away from all of this is. If you even want to TRY making a game . . . Start small and keep your ambitions modest.
A lot of writers advise that you start with short stories, since you can complete them in a short amount of time without losing interest, and they teach you all the steps of writing.
I imagine the same is true of game development. You need to build a little watch, where all the pieces tic over nicely, before you try and build a clock tower.
@@Bustermachine That is a very good lesson. It seems many of the studios go all out on their first title, having no or barely any experience shipping a title, and then suffer from unrealistic, wishful planning.
@@Bustermachine Exceptionally true.
In the software industry in general, you can have the greatest ideas and that's great and all.
But you gotta ask yourself and in all honesty asses whether you can make it or not.
Do I have the resources, time, experience and knowledge to pull this off?
Also in your personal projects try to make lesrning the end goal and not part of the necessary process.
If you have the mindset of "I have to learn this and that or I will not complete my project" then it's like diving in the darkness and you'll just stress yourself out.
If instead you choose the project around what you want to learn, then it's a practical example of what you want and you can build your skills from there.
You can see this in the video, these developers clearly didn't know what they were doing. Then they tried to create this somewhat functional thing however they could. Then they tried asking for money to hire someone who knew what they are doing.
But you can't just hand the ideas and a broken base to someone and hope they fix it.
truly i am touched by the contents of this video,,, i myself have been coding every single day since i was 10. Inspired, i will create a MMORPG FPS MOBA Sandbox game. Expect it to be completed in 3weeks
Ok but make sure the pay to win store is the only functioning mechanic in the game
Where is game?
gaem is where?
Yo where's the game
Where gaem
god i had a friend who tried to sell me so hard on this game when it first appeared and he wasted so much money on it to get his name on the backer list or something, saying how it would be so cool and you could fly to other worlds and have space battles and all that jazz.. i don't even know what to do other than laugh now, looking back on it
Poor dude
i bet he uses crypto now
Bet he also put money into Star Citizen.
@@ck7993 That's like saying "I bet he trades stocks! haha" as if it's an insult. What a dumbass, making all that money because he understands a system that I obviously don't!
Bought it as it went on steam... I learned my lessons and started to watch out for all the typical red flags (survival, open world, ... blablabla).
Stay crunchy.
Honestly there was a period where the game was actually decent. I made a base and drilled down getting oil shale and it had a neat survival feeling with those worms being scary enemies. They did their "release" and the final product was worse than the previous build...
Before watching: I used to enjoy this game quite a bit. First time I've heard it mentioned in years, and I forgot it existed.
After watching: I played full release? I used to play this on a relative's Steam Account (I didn't make my own until a few years later when I got my own PC), and assumed it was early access but never checked. The idea that the buggy mess I played was a full release they were proud of is unfathomable. Technically I played it loads, but in two separate waves. I enjoyed it a lot not long after it came to Steam. I ignored it for a while, before coming back in 2015. This certainly explains why it felt like it was taking steps backward, what with no optimization done when added new things. Looking back, I'm glad I stopped when I did. Had I any clue that it was 1.0 the second time I played it, I probably wouldn't have bothered. This also explains why that relative refuses to buy Early Access titles, no matter how good they look.
A problem with a lot of people crowd funding is they never plan for the taxes that have to come out of whatever you receive
That might be true if it wasn't for the fact that too many if these scams get way more than they initially planned.
@@rosesweetcharlotte no I've actually been involved with several crowd funded movements. Just because they get more money doesn't mean it doesn't get taxed. More comes out. And not only that the majority of these people crowd funding are not good accountants and just throw money at things without proper planning.
It's very true regardless.
@@mashedpotatos3750 That's not the point that's being made here. What I think Carly is trying to say is that many of these crowd funded games get double, triple or even more than what they asked for, and the taxes certainly aren't 50% or 66% or 75% or whatever.
@@mashedpotatos3750 I think they’re point is that, even with the taxes, a lot of these games end up with far more than they were asking in the original crowdfunding. It’s not like the government takes everything over what the goal was.
Ahhh okay I see now my mistake
I usually stay away from early access because of how often developers just abandon them like this, but occasionally there's an early access game with a concept that is so good, I just want to believe that it will be finished. Is it really that foolish to spend 30 bucks once in a while on hope?
If it's for Yandere Simulator, yes
@@YB-sm4we that doesnt have a good concept
@@thescuntfromteamfortress2993 heh it a stealth game in a school, lots of students think its cool. Its a good concept because it got a huge audience off that alone. all because you or I don't like it doesn't mean the core concept didn't work. what that game lacks is direction.
@@RusticRonnie nah see that’s the listed concept, the actual one is to get yandev titillated
If you like the comeupance of all the boomer shooters, I would strongly recommend HROT.
Sad thing is that you can see a decent amount of improvement from starforge to heat and they could have been genuinely successful developers if they we're upfront with their community and committed to fixing their games instead of giving up and moving on from a game that people already paid for.
floppa
We need more companies like this, but more extreme. Make some flashy trailers, promise the stars, give pre-order, then disappear with the money. After 40-50 scams people might actually stop preordering.
Imposiblle… 80% population has low iq, so even this people will still preordering.
@@jannowak3127 low iq and $1,000 pre-order does not even align...so odd
@@jannowak3127 That.. that's not how it works
@@hiredfiredtired Yeah, it's not an IQ thing, it's a social education thing. Anybody, regardless of intelligence can fall for a scam. We just need to educate each other as a society until the majority can avoid getting the wool pulled over our eyes. It'll never be 100% full proof, but things are starting to look better already.
@@asthmeresivolisk3129 what i was talking about is that at any time, 50 percent of the population is below average and 50 are above average
I'm also a game developer (not related so Starforge in any way). And I write games for many years. Since I was teenager.
And in past I use to think that I will never make mistakes like that. That any person with unless half of brain can avoid that mistakes.
And at some point I decided to quit my job and work on a game fore a year, and release it at Steam.
And I did. And everything went burning down. I did all the mistakes that I use to critisize big and small copanies for. And I did even more mistakes.
But there was almost 0 intrest in my game from players. And I'm glad for that. It did save me a lot of trouble.
Any way, I can now understand developers like this. And I can believe that there were legitimately trying to make a good game.
If you go to gamedev conference, you will often hear advice to "ban haters" from your forum, and give them back their money. That they will destroy fun for other players, and therefore it's good thing to do.
I also learned that usually it's best not to show prototypes that you are working on. To not promise anything. Because some things seem like good idea, but after some testing you may find out that they are not. And if you just show some testing video, or say you are prototyping something, it feels like a promise.
And I know and perfectly understand feeling when your game is not working, but it's already published, and you see it was just bad idea, and there is just no way to fix it. And you just want to abandon it, and start working on some new game.
I know one of the co-founders. Steve. They legitimately thought they could do what they claimed. But it often is easier said than done. A lot of indie games have this happen to them in fact. You explained why it failed in the best way I've seen so far. This video is also very one-sided. As the video maker admitted, there is a lot of lack of information in it. That makes some things seem worse than others. Especially in regards to the community manager stuff. The developer I know didn't even know this video existed until he spotted it on his recommendation feed. As far as he knows this youtuber did not even TRY to contact them to check about information. The other co-founder "Will" is scared of the public exactly because of what you outlined. That is the background for a lot of the NDA stuff.
He is a nice and friendly guy. They just want to make games, and things went south. Projects just got too messy. And they have learned a lot from what they did wrong. Their latest game is something they are working on more passionately than ever and is going ok so far despite being released this summer. And they are no longer making promises either. They made what they knew they could make. Released it. And is instead adding more content over time as it seems fit.
@@zefnoly9147 You mean you still have faith in this game developer? After the first or second game you would expect some things to change, maybe more communication or proper expectation setting, maybe even get a concrete idea going first before releasing it. We will have to see
What games did you help create??
@@zefnoly9147 Steve alt lmaooo
Oh man, I have this one. I remember loving the weird physics as a child and launching things with the spinny trap thing. That's literally all I remember about this game, pre-video watch. I still have it on steam.
I remember buying this game right around the Steam launch. Opened it up, started firing straight down, and I was able to fly into space with the recoil from spraying straight down
I guess, you were firing a...
Rocket Launcher
I was there when this game was first being developed when I was really young, like 14-15 years old and am now 22. I have really fond memories of this game too and it was amazing back in its development and had so much potential. There was this creative mode game mode during its development where you could join your friends and just drive around a really well crafted racetrack in cars similar to halo warthogs that would handle really well. I would have preferred honestly if they just left that game mode in. I also have really detailed memories of going onto their forums and reading other players stories about the planet that starforge took place on. There was this one story where the main character of the story won a lottery on a dying planet that chose him to be sent to the planet "Atlas" which is where the game takes place on. I don't know why, but as a kid and having that story to go with the game just filled me with feelings of such amazement, paired with my memories of the scenery of that game and the soundtrack of the game which was really peaceful. Now that I'm older and pretty depressed, I'm kind of sad that I won't ever get to feel that way again and this game ended up releasing the way it did. I bought it at a good price but eventually it went on steam for free then was taken off completely. The memories and stories compared to the way that this game turned out just make me sad.
As someone in this game's backer credits - there was about 3 major iterative versions. The swarm tower defence version, and a couple of changes to the multiplayer side and a few others. It you look far enough back there is some really fun gameplay videos on youtube for it on older builds. The entire games development can be summarised as follows:
A small team built an interesting game with fun ideas.
Some of the team coded some of the core procedural elements, but deliberately did so in a way that was virtually impossible to maintain.
Released a fun alpha, with a tower defence mode then added a survival mode and a multiplayer mode
Said person who coded core elements but obfiscated it so much it was unusuable to anyone else left the team.
Remaining team left holding the bag had to rip out the original procedural weapons, AI and terrain code because a: it was unintelligible, and b: possibly the former coder didnt want them using his work anymore anyway
Remaining team forced to basically rebeuild entire game alone, losing most of the procedural elements in the process.
Game ends up being brought up to what the remaining team considered "good enough" and they had to write the entire thing off as it was unmaintaianable thanks to the earlier guy.
To be fair there was some rumors of behind the scenes of personality conflicts, and issues on forums and perhaps worry about how the money was being used - the guy leaving may have been justified... but really as a programmer myself, it was a real d*ck move to obfisscate his code so that nobody else had a hope of ever being able to work on it - his leaving whatever the reason, meant the death of further game development.. it was easier to just pack it all up and start a new game at that point. It was possibly entirely not his fault he left, but the death of the game was the result.
It was a loss but by that time Space Engineers, Emperion and No mans sky was out which all had elements we liked in starforges roadmap and more and we all moved on with our lives.
It was Reign of Kings that got me. My library is filled with crowdfunded and scam early-access games from this era. We used to play whatever "cheap" multiplayer indie games looked fun. Sometimes you get Rust. Sometimes you get WarZ, Starbound, RoK, The Black Death, etc.
At least Starbound was an actual functional game. My only gripe with it is the forced story mode crap tbh. I wouldnt lump it in with RoK at all.
ah yes this was my first and last taste of early access. i had the privileges of only being burned by this game at 0$ my investment was purely hope but my dreams were still crushed and i learned from others mistakes. game devs can just dissapear.
I was "part" of Subnautica since nearly the start of the game begin released to early access. I remember when i found a bug I'd see if i could replicate it and write it dowm the best i could for a bug report later. The infinite titanium bug was probably the best i found. We where informed what the devs where working on to a degree and most of the time the thing they said would come in the next patch it often did or was pushed to the next.
@@blacktemplarbrotherlucius1935 yeah the problem is Charlie Cleveland, was already an established name these guys were not. It's apples and oranges. the Castlevania guy as well.
and don't say mignty number 9, that wasn't a dev he was a character designer
This game burned me too. Ever since, if I'm ever tempted by an early access project, I look at as much gameplay and content as I can and think to myself "Would I be happy paying this money for the game as is, assuming this was all it would ever be?" if no then I don't back. If yes, then maybe I do. I still also consider if the studio seems capable and updates are regular because I don't want to support the practice of launching a half assed early access game, making some money, and then vanishing leaving people with a half-baked game that is a shadow of what it was promised to be.
I remember buying this in 2013 thinking this would be a great game me and my nephews could enjoy. It ran like absolute crap, and in 2014 when the "final" version dropped, I was still underwhelmed and bummed. It was fun messing around with the jank at
I remember seeing ads for this and thinking "damn this looks amazing" but decided to buy something else with the gift card I got for my birthday. Looks like I dodged a bullet.
I love how pretty much the most interesting background footage you could get of this game was going up really high into orbit and then just falling down to the ground.
All I remember about this game was registering accounts with the usernames "Moderator", "CodeHatch", and "Administrator", among some others. Wild.
I actually bought Reign of Kings in a similar fashion to the way you described! I had no idea the same people who'd made it also made this mess.
I recently created a game business and I really don't want to be the company that can't provide what the players want. The game business is hard for most game studios maybe because we're more of the creative type and not the business type. That's why I'm researching everything I can before I do Kickstarter.
Watch some video on coffee stain studio. They are very helpful to understand the proper and excelent framework.
Can you make RPG game where male and female character can have kid that new player Will take control of the kids after certain age?
@icha vionika
But online
And hd graphic
The kids controled by other player randomly
Trying to make what they promised as their first game is like being able to hit a nail with a hammer most of the time and start taking jobs to build houses
I got scammed by starforge and my game experience was worse than the footage on the screen, i never found any vehicles and the builds i played sucked compared to what you see. Its actually worse than it looks
Thankyou for your purchase 🤣🤣🤣
@@bobbyrayofthefamilysmith24 at least i didn't fall for scam citizen? and i dont buy AAA games either.
I vaguely remember seeing something about this game in the early 2010's. I think I had looked at it and thought "This looks like it might be interesting, I'll wait till it's more polished before trying it". Glad I did.
If you want a multiplayer semi realistic building game that takes place in space play Space Engineers (one of my favorite games of all time)
Hotel Hell, hosted by Gorgen Ramsey, actually came across something simular to this senario. There were two sisters, who own a hotel, and tried develope it into something new. Their ideas were good, but the execution was horrid. If any employees tried to improve the place without conscent from either of the two owners, they were immediately fired. Pay was withheld, no benefits were offered, and they refused to take advise from industry professionals. Come to find out, the hotel they owned was actually a gift from their parents. Their parents were keeping them solvent. Could that be whats happenning with these two? A wealthy parent paying to keep their kid employed in a career of their choice? /shrug
I almost bought their western game. Seemed like a neat concept. Like a Sims survival game or such. But, then, I researched the developer because it didn't seem...right. And ran in the opposite direction once I learned about Starforge.
These guys have a new game slated for release next month called "PlayForm", and it looks like a goofy little multiplayer physics sandbox... thing. To its credit, it *looks* better than their other games, but knowing their track record, I worry it may not be the "fourth time's a charm" they're hoping for.
I take this as a lesson for myself and my team when working on our game. I've fully funded my game myself by working endless hours of overtime. No one has invested but myself, meaning no one will be disappointed or be at a loss.
This project (and company) is a case study of ,,developing for 20 years doesn't make you a project manager, nor a game developer". I honestly don't see malice from these guys. Instead, I see 2 metric tonnes of inexperience, and the inability to deal with backlash. Add all of that together, and you get this 3 year long facade.
If it were just down to one instance of them doing this, I might agree. But it wasn't just one. They did it three times. Three times they went down the exact same path here. At a certain point, it stops being an accident and starts becoming a pattern.
@@trisar2146 not exactly applicable, but as they say “once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action”
this game promised something ive been dying for ever since hearing it and I almost thought fortnite was going to deliver on it.
Building a base during the day, defending it from attack at night in an explorable open world.
I have yet to find a game that fits that bill.
7 days to die?
@@Music-nn9mi Yeah it's literally 7 Days to Die. I mean... Minecraft's kinda like that too since hostile mobs mostly spawn at night.
never saw those responses but 7 days to die never interested me. zombies, apocalypses, rarely feed my tastes. Ironically Enshrouded is kind of has those but you still get medieval fantasy mixed it making it way more palpable.
This makes me so mad. I got it on Steam as a kid and spent 20 bucks of my pocket money and it was basically unplayable. This was a lot of money for me and I just flushed it. They scammed me, their community and even their own employees to no end. No clue how they keep going and not realize their way is not the way to go but I haven't even seen or played the game and still I knew it was dogshit. Nice to get some closure and to see what happened. Thanks for your work.
I bought in to this game as well when it was early access, it was really fun even in it's barebones form early on but it just really got worse as it went on.
It was a real shame too because it really felt like it had promise too.
I hope Juno was able to find another job and is doing well. Their behavior towards her is appalling
Simp 🤷♀️
I have to admit that I really enjoyed Reign of Kings and had a blast with that game.
If they polished it a bit more it could very well have been a widespread survival hit.
I got baited into buying a founders pack when a school mate got me hyped for it. Needless to say it single handedly stopped me ever pre-ordering a game ever again! When No Mans Sky got announced I immediately thought of this game, and what it could have been!
but isn't no man's sky good now?!
I know this is supposed to be a pretty serious video but the b-roll footage of spawning those pig things on the edge of the mountain and watching them roll down, flying around everywhere was killing me lmao.
This game made me think for this first time: I want to support the developers because this seems like a great foundation for a good game. Bought the Founders Edition for me and a friend and not even a few months later, the game was already left to rot and they ran with the money. What a life lesson that was :D
Ah, the "Slide Down a Hill-Simulator". I had nearly forgotten that piece of software^^
I actually loved Reign of Kings, it had so much potential and what they had in game was decently solid, but the game was absolutely ruined by cheaters. It was impossible to find a server that didn’t have blatant cheaters on it.
I remember seeing this, wanting to play it, but due to me not having a very good computer I decided not to get it. Years later I just kinda forgot about it, and never heard anything about it from anyone anymore. Its funny, I was acutally thinking about this game recently, wondering what happened to it.
Now I know.
"Ahhh, it can't be that bad-
Oh...oh it is..."
Got so bored of the game that I spawned animals to fall down a hill
Worth mentioning: They are at it yet again with a game called PlayForm: Human Dynamics.
It got released on steam july 27th and it doesn't seem like people caught onto it yet.
What is this game?
I own this game... Still sat there in my Steam library...
My friend convinced me to buy it after he saw it on Steam. I very clearly remember the trailer on Steam showing off a whole load of features that weren't even in the build available on Steam.
My friend went hard on getting a refund because he bought the "Founders Edition" of the game, or whatever it was called, for like at LEAST £75!
Oh my fucking god, I was dying laughing at the whole segment while talking about the benefit tiers for the campaign yet the character was spastically falling the entire time 😂😂😂😂. Made me think of the movie Hotrod where the guy is dancing in the woods, trips, and you think it's just a quick tumble, but no. The fall lasts like three damn minutes as he ragdolls down a mountain, pretty much just like the character here 😂. Seriously, they would've had a hit if they'd made the game tongue-in-cheek and the terrible graphics and physics were intentional for comedy purposes!
Ah, the old Goat Simulator's gambit lol
Do yourself a favor and search for "Hot Rod - Falling Scene"... you won't be disappointed haha
p.s. Deliciously 80's!
@@BoyProdigyX I love Hot Rod and the first time I saw that falling scene was probably the closest I've truly come to dying laughing 😂
in fairness as a Source map dev, iv come across points where id be making a map and have so many problems that id have to tell people that the map is done, and itd be best to just scrap it and move on... BUT, i try to remake the map, not make a brand new map with different setting and point.
Cutting losses is a smart move, but youre suppose to take what was saved to try and attack the problem at a different angle... not just forget the problem existed.
Source map tools are pretty good, all things considered, there is just a steep learning curve with respect for the meta - There are things that seem like they will be fine, but when you do them, they break everything.
UE seems like the move these days, both from a practical and financial standpoint. Source was great when it was being written by the same people who wrote the engine, or at least someone could tap an engine dev.
There are some bugs in HL2, but you really have to go looking for them.
@@nutbastard UE is a land mine. its overhype. everyone goes 'oh looky da gafix!' but idk... im still seeing games being made on Source, Unity, and even CryEngine.
If i were to leave Source, id most likely move to Cry.
also UE is owned by the chinese government. so. thats a big fuckin problem on square 1.
Damn, the game looks just like day one of the most anticipated high-budget AAA game, Cyberpunk 2077 on ps4, what a masterpiece of Kickstarter
I supported starforge during its Kickstarter for whatever the lowest tier was. I love a good Skybox and that was the main thing that caught my eye when I first saw the game, I even have an in in game picture as one of the backgrounds my computer Cycles through. I liked the Aesthetics of a lot of the creatures, where they had bioluminescence during the night. I was intrigued to find out about the lore about giant trees and what happened to humanity and I thought the fully customizable automatic 8 barrelled mini guns that you could possibly get we're actually really cool.
As time went on though and updates came in slower and slower they seem to work on a bunch of features that even at the time I was thinking was cool and all but they could really be putting their efforts towards something more important. Such as the physics-based movement system, nice concept, but seems to just drain your computer power and took a long time to optimize. Oddly enough I never ran into any real glitches or lag but I didn't really play the game too much.
At $12 Canadian an hour (minimum wages at the time I think) 40 hours a week just to pay somebody's wage is $25,000 a year when I heard they were hiring a bunch more people I remember thinking "where the hell are they going to get the money to pay for these people? They're going to run out in half a year." When they released the full game I hundred percent saw it as "you know what, we've lost interest in this and it's a lot harder than we thought, so we're just going to move on and we don't really owe you anything"
All-in-all I wasn't too disappointed though since I treat all kickstarter's and Early Access as a Gamble, I see a cool concept and want to support it. So I give a little bit of money and if it works out awesome, if not I knew the risks.
Starforge was one of the first early access games I bought on Steam, I enjoyed it at first as it looked like it had a lot of promise then forgot about it after a while. I came back to it expecting to see it had bee improved like Minecraft but found it no different then when I'd left it. Then I learned about the drama behind it. Since then I've stuck with waiting to see the reviews for a game before I purchase it, so I don't suffer wasting my money like I did for this game.