Just wanted to throw in my 2 cents. I was a Minigore fan (played it till my fingers cramped, and recommended anyone who would listen to try it out). Super psyched to see Minigore 2 out, and was even dreaming that I was playing it. Finally got it and first impression was... Strangely underwhelmed. Yes, there were upgrades and stages and weapons and bosses, and of course, the undead but somehow it lacked the frenetic feel that earmarked Minigore as a standout. Perhaps it was the ammo running out, perhaps it was the health regen, perhaps it was the default melee weapon being quite overpowered (at least at the start), but it felt it was missing something. To be honest, all the new shiny upgrades and 150 zombies on-screen didn't really attract me. Lack of leaderboards were a major bummer as well. I stuck with it though, just to see what later stages offered, and boy, am I glad that I did! Latter stages are quite a challenge, and suddenly the upgrades and characters made sense. Strategy (for an action game) came more into play (save up on ammo boxes and risk exploding them? Melee my way to another weapon! Run away to regen health!). Compared to the first Minigore, this is much more engaging and fun (in the first Minigore, you just had to run around in laps, shoot into bushes, and avoid certain blind spots)! Really great game on its own, and a extremely worthy sequel. A few things though. I hope very much that Mountain Sheep will keep open channels of communication on the forums, and keep us in the loop for updates and plans for the game. Many people cite promises made and broken by MS as an indication not to support them, but I feel more than the broken promises (it is my opinion, that MS did break some promises, whether it is due to hardware limitations or whatever) was the radio silence of MS, despite the fact that they were active participants of the discussion before, and active on other threads but they saw fit not to respond to questions about Minigore 2. Not asking that MS reports everything to us, but a simple 'Game on hold due to *reason*' would suffice. Right now, MS staff plus the game itself has restored my faith as a consumer in MS, but another radio silence, and even the best game in the world will not win back any goodwill from me.
Thanks. Multiplayer is unlikely due to the unpredictable, fast-moving nature of the game and the sheer amount of stuff happening at the same time. Our efforts will be best focused on polishing the Minigore 2 single-player experience even further.
We could have crystal skulls! I kid, I kid... we're not very good at leeching money from people, nobody finds or buys the iAP in Bike Baron either. It's hard to make those features in-your-face when we're not fans of that kind of experience either. Glad you like it.
Game Impressions The fact that people vehemently defend the constant crashing is just mind-boggling to me. Are guys serious? There is no excuse whatsoever for this! Even if they fix it in an update its unacceptable! Imagine if a game company would have released a broken and unfinished game back in the cartridge days? Gamers would have formed angry mobs with pitchforks and torches! But now its somehow ok??? And calling the dev out for that isn't and makes you a "hater"? Also the fact that the devteam is 10 people is not an excuse. 10 people is A LOT for an indie game company. The universally acclaimed platformed Braid was made by less than 10 people (mostly one guy), Dust: An Elysian Tail, a game that I've enjoyed more by than most AAA console games this year was made by ONE person, FTL arguably the best rouge like ever made was made by a team of two people so its possibly to make awesome, finished and most importantly stable games with a small team.
The fix for the crash has been submitted to Apple already, most update reviews right now go through in 5 days so we're hopeful it'll be there soon. Also, even if the fatal crash happens right now you won't lose your progress but rather would be stuck until the update comes. When it arrives you can just update and continue playing normally, from where you left off. You *can* also back up your progress through iTunes and then sync to the backup, but that's a bit of a hassle. For me personally, games that are intense enough to have me miss my stop are doing it right. We're glad you like Minigore 2, sorry about making you late for work.
I asked you before; if you'd like to send me your contact info, I'll gladly give you your two dollars back, or you can have them back directly from Apple. Meanwhile, even the big ones have problems, the latest DLC for Assassin's Creed III can nuke player progress, and that's a game developed with 600 man-years of work. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-12-06-assassins-creed-3-dlc-bug-wiping-save-data We're not defending the bug, we tested the game extensively both internally and externally and sometime these things just slip through. We've submitted the fix to Apple already, so the best I can do at this point is suggest that you chill a bit or let us refund you and use the money to buy other games you'd rather be playing.
I didn't mean you devs were defending the crashing, I meant the users here on TA. I don't even want my money back, I just want to play this game! Most gamers here seem to enjoy it very much and maybe if I could play more I would too. Please understand I WANT this to be to good. If this game is good we all win. What do I gain from this game being bad? NOTHING (except maybe smug self satisfaction). btw I know that AAA game companies screw up too, I know about the whole ACIII thing (it didn't affect me though) I just meant that I wouldn't use "we're only 10 people" as an excuse.
The game releases and already has a serious issue which doesnt let you even start the game. Gotta love mountainsheep takes ages to develop a game and then shit like that happens.
I feel compelled to post you one more answer, then I'll go back to answering actual Minigore 2 questions. Yes, 10 people in an indie company are a lot, but we've done five games now and have spend extensive amount of time and effort in supporting each one of them. Minigore 1 & 2, Death Rally, Ice Rage and Bike Baron are plenty to keep a group this size busy, and we have several things currently in development. Dust: Elysian Tail has had players losing progress; http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/xbox_live_arcade/a_d/dust_an_elysian_tail/f/2526/p/313593/1637347.aspx FTL has had players losing progress; http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3038 Braid has had players losing progress; http://braid-game.com/news/2008/08/two-bugs-in-braid/ And I quote from the author: "Inevitably with software, problems happen." Incidentally I'm one of the people who hit this particular bug, and Braid for me reverted to the free demo version even though I spent good money on the game, losing all my progress and stopping me from saving again. I got over it, hopefully you will too one day. Cheers!
As a gamer who plays on multiple devices I personally agree it would be nice to have some kind of cloud sync in the game; this was discussed extensively but would have delayed release at this point. Barring any technical reasons in the implementation, this is a wish-list item for me too. So, no promises at this point, just saying I agree with you.
I totally understand you can't promise to add it. We've implemented iCloud into a couple of our games, we could send you our implementation if it would be of any help?
Sure, it helps to compare implementations and see we're doing things right. Our core game is in C++ rather than Objective C so that's where we may have to jump through a few hoops, but we'll have a look if you'd like to share. PM me with a link, maybe? Cheers!
Cheers, this is always the hardest thing with sequels - making something that is similar enough to be enjoyed by old users and still novel enough to offer a genuinely new experience. I think we've learned a lot of lessons along the way, about how to talk about what we're doing and how to respond to feedback. The radio silence was hard for us too, but since we didn't have a date or anything concrete to offer there was little we could have done because any posts were quickly responded to with frustration from people still waiting for the game. And so we went back into our cave and tinkered long enough to get this done, and tried to do a good enough job that people would be positively surprised when it finally comes out. In hindsight, perhaps this is what we should have explicitly stated, but in any case the channels are open for now.
We have a shared goal, then. Hopefully the update goes through quickly and you get to experience the game properly, maybe even enjoy it.
I absolutely love and enjoy Minigore 2, but I got hit by the bug on Thursday. It was hard not to play it yesterday, so now I'm thinking about reinstalling to get my fix. I don't worry about unlocking again as it was quite fun and easy to get to level 30. But can I do anything that helps to not get this bug again (like clearing the memory and the multitasking bar)? Btw, a leaderboard would really be awesome.
We have over three hundred challenges in the game but Game Center only supports 100 achievements - there are some good ideas and discussion on what's the best way to add more achievements to Minigore 2 earlier in this thread. We'll do something.
