An Observation on "Teams" in Off Topic

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ID:121451
 
Nov 30 2011, 12:27 pm
Disclaimer: The following is my observation in general. There are always exceptions.

Here's a fun drinking game! Every time you see fancy in this blogpost after this sentence, you take a drink!

You know that guy. He's the one with a fancy website, fancy (empty) forums, makes fancy blogposts about the icons in this fancy new game that they are making with their fancy team. Sometimes they even call themselves a company. You can see em on the dev forums talking about things they don't know, but they add fancy words to make it look like they know something. You know who they are.

You also know about their "company." Looking at their fancy website, you note that it hasn't been updated in 8 months. The forums haven't had any posts by anyone NOT on the development team. They often make fancy fangames. But you know what the most striking thing about their company is? They always want to be taken as a serious business.

Here are my observations about these teams:

1. Know-it-All: Granted, I myself have quite an ego, and I do have my own faults. Sometimes I am misunderstood, sometimes I'm genuinely wrong. But these people take it to a whole new level. Example? There have been many complaints that pixel-movement "lags" their server to hell and back (it shouldn't).

2. Criticism: They respond to criticism very poorly. Instead of backing up arguments, they ban you from their fancy page. And it's genuine criticism such as, "This game function seems poor, I suggest you make it more like this." I'll admit, I do love seeing the trolls come out to play, but the trolls often bring up good points within their obvious insulting.

3. Anime Games: Dear god, why must they all make anime games? This is obviously just personal belief, but if you can make an anime game, you should be able to make an original game with the same theme as the anime game without actually making the anime game.

Essentially, it boils down to this.

Appearance. My observation is that all of these "companies" want to look serious. There are probably many sources for this, but I feel the main source is the anime game they make before forming these teams. They're ridiculed because of the anime game, and they feel that if they are a company, they can dodge this bullet. If they form a team before making anime games, then they're probably new guys who want to be bigshots and feel that an anime game would be a perfect way to ride to the top.

No matter what the case is, time after time, I have seen these teams fall. They stop making games. There is infighting because someone got more GM powers than the other. They reduce themselves to "my job is more fancy than yours." They form these fancy companies to make games, but they don't make anything lasting.

There's no fancy point to this post, so if you're looking for a conclusion you will be disappointed. After all, it is merely an observation.
#1 Nov 30 2011, 12:42 pm
Imo, People make anime games so they can make a full game themselfs. The reason they can't do this themself is due to them having no creativity. Thus they use rhe anime game as a basis for its ideas and such. I have no problems with anime games themselfs, just the community it revolves around.
#2 Nov 30 2011, 12:48 pm
Forming groups, teams, or companies is just one of the many things that people to do make themselves look like busy game developers without having to do any actual game development. Making a decent game is a very difficult way to show you're an actual game developer. Forming a team (with a fancy name) is much easier.

Lugia319 wrote:
He's the one with a fancy website, fancy (empty) forums, makes fancy blogposts about the icons in this fancy new game that they are making with their fancy team. Sometimes they even call themselves a company. You can see em on the dev forums talking about things they don't know, but they add fancy words to make it look like they know something.

Until reading that paragraph, I never realized how many similarities there were between the BYOND staff and the people you were trying to describe there.
#3 Nov 30 2011, 12:49 pm
At #3:

People like anime, and enjoy to play anime games, and want their own. A thing I don't get is why anime is bashed so much. If a person wants to make an anime game, let them? If people don't like anime games, then simply don't play them? To me it sounds like mere jealousy that anime is getting the popularity, but it's been proved that other genre's get popular if they're good enough.

I think instead of people complaining about anime, they should get making their own game and then get the other genre's popular themselves. Complaining isn't going to change anything.

This comment isn't directed at you, Lugia. It's directed at everyone who's bashing anime. Instead of bashing, just make your own game and get other genre's more popular and stop hoping for someone else to do it.

That is all I have to say on that.


As for the GM thing, I actually agree with that. I also think most of the teams fail because most of the time the team aren't ready to start a game and just try anyways even though they need to study the language, or drawing more first. My advice to them would be, make libraries and demo's and only release them for C&C purposes only, so they can get help on what they are doing without their code being "ripped" as it's just practicing and they wont care if anyone uses it.
#4 Nov 30 2011, 12:54 pm
There are *very* few BYOND users who have developed an anime-themed game. Most people who try to make anime games aren't actually making games. They don't ever think about gameplay or the user interface, they just do what they've seen other BYOND anime games do.

If everyone started copying Casual Quest and only made games exactly like it, it'd be just as much of a problem. The problem with the anime games is not that they're anime games, it's that most of them are terrible games that had zero thought put into them.
#5 Nov 30 2011, 12:57 pm
Forum_account wrote:
There are *very* few BYOND users who have developed an anime-themed game. Most people who try to make anime games aren't actually making games. They don't ever think about gameplay or the user interface, they just do what they've seen other BYOND anime games do.

If everyone started copying Casual Quest and only made games exactly like it, it'd be just as much of a problem. The problem with the anime games is not that they're anime games, it's that most of them are terrible games that had zero thought put into them.

It doesn't seem that way to me, it seems people are bashing anime simply because it's anime lol. I do agree about the anime games currently suck. Good ones need to be made.
#6 Nov 30 2011, 1:09 pm
They are Liam. Because apparently it's the "cool" thing to do on BYOND these days.

Less bashing the anime crowd, more developing games. I know criticizing fan-game developers makes your e-peen grow on this site, but it isn't really necessary. Just develop or play games instead. I recommend SS13 because it's GOTYAY! And you can bash people in the game with toolboxes instead of bashing real people with words.
#7 Nov 30 2011, 1:22 pm
In all honesty, it's not bashing anime games. It's bashing anime game developers. These people copy the thing that inspires them rather than create something new and add their own twist.

Think of it like this. I love the Bible (lol!). I want to write my own book, and I want it to have similar concepts as the Bible. But instead of using the Bible as inspiration, I actually just create another Bible. I change words here and there, but essentially you have the same book twice. Do I seem like a good writer to you?

Another problem with anime games is that the creators are selling themselves short yet again but limiting themselves to the anime. And actually, like F_A noted, you can actually expand it to beyond anime. Any game that isn't original (that is, no new ideas have been put into it) is doomed to the same fate.

This is why I don't play MMOs for the most part. It's all, "You're a noob. Now pick a class (Generic Knight/Archer/Healer/Magician setup). Now do quests until you decide to quit. Frankly, I find that rather uninteresting. You know what fires me up about a game? The story. Anime games? Well I joined them because I like the anime. Obviously I already know the story, so they lack appeal.

There's also the case that anime games are often done poorly. They pretty much come down to "PvP. Pick a (X) and just train until you're the best. Then look cool." You know what I'd like to see? A Naruto Village vs. Village game similar to Proelium (Naturally with it's own twist). I'd like to see a DBZ game where you follow puzzle clues to find the seven dragonballs before the opponent does. In other words, I already know the story. Give me some kind of original game integrating it.

I've always said, "There's nothing wrong with anime games. There's everything made with poorly made anime games (and games in general)."

But wait! Even if someone did make the two types of games I described, why don't they do themselves true and create new content rather than rely on someone else's IP for players. If you're making a good game, you don't need someone else's IP to get players. Good games are played because they're good. Bad games are played because they have IP attached to them.

Trust me Liam. I have absolutely no problem with anime games. It's just that the people making them are immature and don't make a new game. They don't do themselves justice by limiting themselves to anime. Maybe that's what they want. That's fine with me. But in all honesty, most of my philosophy towards anime games is more geared towards getting the creator to be true to their talents and less about "popularity."
#8 Nov 30 2011, 1:24 pm
I'm not sure why people act like they are oblivious to how retarded the anime community is and how they were allowed to basically ruin the entire site to the point that rips made in half an hour get 200 players while games like NEStalgia had to be promoted outside of the site just to average over 10 players a day.

Anime games bring in nine year olds. Nine year olds typically can't develop games, so they look for faster ways to become "owners" of their favorite game, so they steal sources. They then upload the game to the hub and tell their buddies about it. Now, more nine year olds infest the site and the process repeats itself. That's why out of the 4,700 people currently online, only about a couple dozen are actual developers. Because the site went from being a website about developing games to a being a website about being GM in your favorite Zeta rip.

I'm not sure why we have to keep explaining everything wrong with that section of BYOND. You've been on BYOND long enough to know what BS goes on here. It's been going on for years and Tom should have never allowed it to happen in the first place. That's why you have to promote your game outside of BYOND - because no one here is going to give a damn about your creation unless it's based off some stupid children's cartoon.
#9 Nov 30 2011, 3:15 pm
You're awfully quick to blame the anime community ET. The anime community gets large numbers of players because they have passion and imagination with anime games. They see their little 32 pixel guy and think, "Wow, this is amazing!" They will at least give a game labelled with their favorite anime a shot. (e.g. a minecraft player's unlimited fascination with Notch and computer legos)

With original games players do not have this passion and imagination. They see their little 32 pixel guy and think, "Shitty 2D graphics. Limited engine. Wait, I have to download this shit to play? Oh hell no." These players have no reason to give the game a shot, especially when it requires a download.(e.g. someone who has never played minecraft and exclaims SHIT GRAPHICS, COMPUTER LEGOS, I HAVE TO PAY FOR THIS BUGGY PIECE OF SHIT?)

Thus original games naturally require advertising to build up passion for the game. SS13 is the most successful original game on BYOND. Know why? Because someone made a post on a forum outside of BYOND. That one post sparked the popularity for this game. And it has maintained it's popularity (unlike other games who used advertising) because it's actually FUN. It's one claim to fame wasn't that it was ORIGINAL. It was that it was FUN and had REPLAYABILITY.

So you're right. No one on BYOND is going to care about YOUR game because they either came here to play one specific game or make a game of their own. You're going to have to find your target audience and advertise to them so that your game's popularity goes up.

You can blame the anime crowd for stuff as much as you want but it doesn't change the limited engine, poor graphics, lack of programmers and artists willing to work together for free, and basically outdated nature of BYOND itself.
#10 Nov 30 2011, 3:36 pm
BrickSquadron wrote:
The anime community gets large numbers of players because they have passion and imagination with anime games. They see their little 32 pixel guy and think, "Wow, this is amazing!"

That's *exactly* the problem. Anime fans are willing to play bad games because the games vaguely resemble TV shows they like. It doesn't help the community to have a large portion of it deliberately making no effort to produce decent games. It's not that games have to be original to be good, but that people who make anime-inspired games strongly tend to ignore game design and end up making horrible things that can barely be called "games".
#11 Nov 30 2011, 3:37 pm
@BrickSquadron
Those who are willing to play an original game, and not from the BYOND community, skip BYOND games because they suck. Period.

Majority of the games here, original or not, do have horrid graphics, are programmed horribly thus causing lag, and generally are no fun. I sure would have to use a heck of a lot of my imagination to enjoy these games.

If a BYOND game looked and played like Spelunky or Iji, rumors about those games would circulate and you would have people downloading the BYOND engine to try those games out.


BrickSquadron wrote:
You can blame the anime crowd for stuff as much as you want but it doesn't change the limited engine, poor graphics, lack of programmers and artists willing to work together for free, and basically outdated nature of BYOND itself.

While you continue to claim that the engine has it's limitation, barely anyone on BYOND has released a game that is near such a limit. NEStalgia is more complex than most games here, and it operates just fine with ~70 people. People generally complain about their games being laggy, but as mentioned previously, it's due to ones code being inefficient.

The poor graphics seen around BYOND has nothing to do with the engine. Programmers and artists should NOT have to work for free. Those jobs take time, if you are not willing to spend time and learn how to program/make art yourself, how can you expect someone do do it for free for you? It's just mind boggling that you, or anybody else, would use that as an excuse. No other indie community users have this ideology.
#12 Nov 30 2011, 4:01 pm
@Calus CoRPS
I can program just fine, but I'll never be able to create "decent" art. Art is just not something you can learn. I have embarrassed myself throughout three semesters of art classes and never improved. The only way I as a hobbyist developer will ever create a game on BYOND is if I pay a wage roughly equivalent to $14 per hour (I believe that's what AmonR charged for his art if you didn't pay per piece) for art which is just something unaffordable for a hobby. I could try a skill-trade for art with my programming skills, but those offers are left more often than not untouched and artists typically have no idea of the constraints of a language.

You wonder why people rush to make anime games? It doesn't cost them an excess of $2000 in out of pocket expenses because they either rip (like most of them) or they work together towards a common goal for free like Zane and ChrisGayle. Zane and Chris's anime partnership has even led into an original game. Even with payment your workers aren't guaranteed to complete their jobs. Just look at poor KhaosParadox.

P.S. I remember NEStalgia having SERIOUS lag problems before a BYOND update having to do with screen object efficiency I believe. Of course I haven't played it in a while and it certainly has decreased in popularity so I can no longer confirm if there are any serious lag problems left with large numbers of players.
#13 Nov 30 2011, 4:40 pm
BrickSquadron wrote:
The only way I as a hobbyist developer will ever create a game on BYOND is if I pay a wage roughly equivalent to $14 per hour (I believe that's what AmonR charged for his art if you didn't pay per piece) for art which is just something unaffordable for a hobby.

I failed to mention: it is not a requirement to have high quality art. Look at BYOND's two most popular non-anime games: SS13 and NEStalgia. When SS13 first started garnering outside attention, the graphics were an eyesore. But that did not detour users from playing the game. NEStalgia isn't going to win any retro art rewards with it's graphics. But the graphics do not contrasts and they are straightforward.

Us BYOND developers use the "I have no art, so I cannot finish my game" excuse a ton. If we are not willing to/or cannot pay an artist, lets make due with what we have and release a fun game. If an artist is looking to work for a programmer, I am sure they'd rather join a project that is playable, than read a design document.


Just look at poor KhaosParadox.

Hopefully, KhaosParadox pays based upon how much work has been completed. Else, he'll need to reevaluate some things.


P.S. I remember NEStalgia having SERIOUS lag problems before a BYOND update having to do with screen object efficiency I believe. Of course I haven't played it in a while and it certainly has decreased in popularity so I can no longer confirm if there are any serious lag problems left with large numbers of players.

The client side screen object update helped out substantially.
#14 Nov 30 2011, 5:01 pm
You've got me there. I guess what frustrates me is that my art skills aren't even comparable to those in SS13.

But the main point of my posts was to illustrate that blaming anime fans for BYOND's state is pointless. You can't just generalize a crowd of many people as 9 year old retards like ET tries to do. At some point people have to step back and say, "Wait...why am I criticizing these people for having fun which in no way affects the success or failure of my separate discrete game? I'm kinda starting to sound like an elitist asshole here." BYOND is starting to sound way to much like 4chan's videogame board in which most of the discussions are about how call of duty ruined the industry and how everyone's a casual etc instead of actually enjoying videogames. I'm going back to the ss13 corner of BYOND and am only going to post in the troll threads like those on the frog blog from now on.
#15 Nov 30 2011, 5:08 pm
Hell, look at popular games period - not just on BYOND, but anywhere. Does Minecraft have amazing visuals? Dwarf Fortress? The Binding of Isaac? There is a reason games are called games and not graphics... because the thing that matters most is not the visuals, or the music, but the game itself. Everything else is simply icing on the cake.

And Calus reiterates a good point that I made in my last blog post - make your game with placeholder sprites or something, and then get an artist. You don't need a team to start working on a game. If you can draw, then draw up a bunch of stuff and find a programmer. If you can program, then code the game with placeholders and find an artist. It's simple.

You wonder why people rush to make anime games? It doesn't cost them an excess of $2000 in out of pocket expenses

$2000 in out of pocket expenses is the price people pay for not learning to do things themselves. It's not a requirement, or something people MUST do to make their games. It's a personal decision. "I'd rather pay someone than do it myself."

If people stopped thinking game development is so difficult or needs to be highly complex, we'd see less ridiculous spending and more simple games created. It's why I think the Simple Developments Guild is a great idea. To constantly remind people your game doesn't need to be some massive thousand-dollar project that takes 3 years to create. Terraria was made in four months - and was made using languages more difficult than DM. There is no excuse.
#16 Nov 30 2011, 5:26 pm
BrickSquadron wrote:
But the main point of my posts was to illustrate that blaming anime fans for BYOND's state is pointless.

Pointless, maybe. But that doesn't change the fact that it's true. All anime did was bring in thousands of turds, and by sheer luck, a handful of potential developers.

"Wait...why am I criticizing these people for having fun which in no way affects the success or failure of my separate discrete game? I'm kinda starting to sound like an elitist asshole here."

It actually does until you realize what it took me 6 years to notice: Next to no one on BYOND cares about original games. This site simply doesn't have an audience for it. As you said, SS13 got original AFTER it was promoted outside the site. Had that never happened, it would probably have an average of five players or possibly none. When it comes to anime, it's an entirely different story. You can spend 15 minutes switching GM names around in a Zeta source, add one or two extra beams, upload it to the hub, and average 200 players a day. Why? Because that's the audience we have on BYOND - a bunch of kids who love low quality trash.

BYOND is starting to sound way to much like 4chan's videogame board

You would know what goes on in such a dumb website.

in which most of the discussions are about how call of duty ruined the industry and how everyone's a casual etc instead of actually enjoying videogames.

I don't see how you trying to shift the blame off the retards back onto people who make original games is any different. You're like Hannity from Fox News - you know the true reason why things are screwed, but you still spew BS in an attempt to convince people something else is the culprit. I think I know the toll anime has taken on a website and community I've been apart of for six years. Your "NO IT AIN'T" rant changes nothing.
#17 Nov 30 2011, 5:45 pm
So remind me again ET. How is it that anime games prevent good original games from being developed with DM?
#18 Nov 30 2011, 5:47 pm
BrickSquadron wrote:
So remind me again ET. How is it that anime games prevent good original games from being developed with DM?

LOL. I'm not sure what I said to bring about this question. Did you think that was my argument? If so, you have a reading disability.
#19 Nov 30 2011, 5:58 pm
Well, you speak with a hatred of anime games and say that it affects the success of other games and how no one on BYOND gives a shit about original games (no shit sherlock because there's no audience for an original game until you create one for it) so I just assumed you blamed anime games for a lack of original games.

You speak as if you expected to plop down an unknown original game on the BYOND game listings and instantly have people flock to it. No, it's not that easy you have to work for it. It's not Anime's fault that unknown and unadvertised games aren't instantly popular on BYOND.

And can you point me to any of those rips that you claim get 200+ players?
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