Universal Nimian Legends : BrightRidge HD (by Robert Kabwe)

Speak of the devil i was just reading your site and looking into when i saw your post lol weird stuff and the quest ideas sound awesome ! i totally agree to it ! the amount of ideas in your world you could pull from are interesting and i like the " meaningful violence approach " like meaning it feels natural and goes with the game and consequences sounds interesting as well do we have an idea how long quests will be roughly? sorry for all the questions

 

I've been jumping back and forth between this forum and the one for Godus. This one is all praise for doing things right and meaningful discussions, and the other one filled with bile and disgust about how a good idea was ruined by corporate greed. It seems independent is the way to go. at least your ideas make it into the game and don't have to go through a committee of idiots who know nothing about gaming. These two are polar opposites in how to get it right and how to get it wrong.

 

I absolutely adore everything you're doing with this game. It's truly a unique experience on my iPad. Hearing that you draw inspiration from SotC just has me even more excited of the future. SotC is also probably my favorite game ever, and I loved its world and how you were kind of able to piece together a grander story by exploring. Just aces on this game, all around.

 

Skyrim is my fav game if all time too and I have played it for over a 1000 hours.I've seen it for a long time and I can say that your game is quite similar to it in terms of the basic look.The snow effects,God rays,Reflections,DD,Lod is all great and is actually on par with oblivion.The quality of foilage is simply superb the trees not only look lush but it looks like a genuine forest not just one or two barren trees,the plants look and feel different and varied.Also the art style when looking from any one place is quite brilliant,I will post some screens to elaborate this when I get the opportunity but it really is golden in terms of graphics and with further optimizations and refinements in areas like Higher res water reflections,Fade in,Framerate,Wildlife it can in reality be a great demo for unity engine and apple's metal,Assuming the game will take advantage of it when it releases.

 

Would you not need to start from scratch using Metal I'm not sure if you can just implement it anytime.
It's amazing you got this game to fit In only 87mb. I'd have thought something this good would take up more memory.

 

Lol - things move fast at internet speed don't they?

The quests are going to be on the shorter, bite sized size, but some might string together multiple objectives. Part of my long term design plan for the App and the HTML5 RPG version that's on the website http://nimianlegends.com is to increasingly make them 'object oriented' so that they are a collection of independent agents working together, along with a dose of procedural design (for example, the vegetation in brightridge is 'grown' by a procedural algorithm) , to make something bigger than they would be on their own.

Since Im a one man team im trying to put a lot of atmosphere and color into small bite sized elements. So while the quests themselves may not be epic each one, together they will hopefully present an interesting progression, some good moral questions, and an engaging, over arching story

 

I just tried Godus yesterday and I think it was the corporate intervention that causes the problems here - im a big Peter Molyneux fan and Fable is my third favorite game, after Shadow of the Colossus and Skyrim. I liked the little people and the art direction, and the controls were pretty intuitive. I kind of prefer things a bit more 'get to it' fast paced (i guess thats one of the complaints, along with the in app purchases), but it was pretty cool to have this small world in my pocket (something i try to offer with BrightRidge, just in a different wrapper).

Godus made me think that as our cpus increase, eventually simulations and reality will be almost indistinguishable from each other. And if a character i a digital world has enough cpu power, im talking like the equivalent to a human, does that make them conscious and eventually what are the ethics of treating in game characters inhumanely? I think Peter Molyneux likes to think outside the box (the bird pooping in Fable 2 intro is a fav moment that shows us Fable has a wacky side to it) and I can appreciate and learn from what he's doing here

 

Thanks a_apple

Yeah, Wasn't Shadow of the Colossus great? I totally get what you mean about inferring a larger world from a few simple pieces. Im continually trying to simplify my game world into less pieces that are richer in detail, so that I can communicate a larger world with a few elements. I'm still learning how to do that and SOTC is a great example of that. Probably my favorite single moment in a videogame was running across the back of that desert serpent flying half a kilometer in the sky. I think it's great when games can offer you a momentary experience you cant get in the real world.

 

I think Unity will just create a Metal version when I export to IOS - they mentioned it briefly in a blog post somewhere. So if your device can handle Metal it will just have the benefits. What they really need is 2gb of ram minimum - thats where all the texture detail comes from. Ive found in my tests that its the CPU that handles the logic of the game and objects (thats why the A5 can handle the open world because the logic is optimized and the objects are reduced) and its the RAM that handles the textures - which is why A5 devices with 512mb of ram need to have the textures lowered.

Yeah i was actually shocked that its only 87mb too. I guess there's some good texture compression going on there Im glad its under the 100mb limit because people can download it over cellular as well as wifi.

 

Cringe no more I do believe in myself, and you are right - I think it's not believing in ourselves and doubt that's the biggest barrier to success, so thanks for calling me out on that.

You have great market insight about what people want. Hearing you talk about these things is helping me see things in a more, i guess. analytical light, which is really helpful because as ive learned, creativity and heart is essential but unless you're very lucky its not all you need to make sales.

You're right about the high standards - although judging from your posts you're an intelligent person who probably does really well at what you do - anyways yeah, no one said i had to be Shigeru Miyamoto and if I compare myself to him then yes ill look not so hot So i guess advice for game developers is that its not only our skill and passion that's important. It's part skill, part passion, part marketing/pragmatism and finally like you point out part emotional determination not to sabotage ourself, because at the end of the day we're doing what we love and trying to add something positive to the world and that's a great place to start

 

Yeh! I agree with what you say and it is the corporate crap that's ruining it and it gets worse the further you get into the game. There is the makings of a really good game there but it's been ruined by all the freemium crap! I personally liked kicking chickens in Fable, especially in the first one cause as you levelled up you could kick them further! You're idea is just as good, if not better because you did it the right way and getting all the praise instead of ridicule. There's a lesson in there somewhere. Look forward to seeing more! See if you can make it an iap as this one deserves the money as long as you keep doing it the right way.
Godus is all bout sitting and waitin instead of playing! I don't mind waiting if it's meaningful but it's waiting for everything. Yours is all about spending ages exploring not sitting waiting while something gets built so you can progress.
I don't know what it is about this idea that this stuff should be free. Developers like you need to be paid just like anyother job. You've got to earn money to live like any other person. That you enjoy it is a bonus not a reason to deny you your dues.

 

Thanks for the feedback redribbon - I'd be interested to hear about that too. probably increasing the textures may have caused that. Update 1.2 is going to include a quality control panel - so you can disable reflections, lower textures etc if you'd rather have speed over details for example.

This whole process has been a real learning experience. With version 1.0 so many people were REALLY upset (some angry) that BrightRidge didn't have A5 support. It was only after so many people spoke out that I tripled my efforts to get it on those platforms. Now that its on all of them i'm hearing yours and others feedback and have realized a quality controller is important too.

Whats great about this is I'm finding this feedback really valuable - after all of this is said and done ill have experience dealing with multiple platform deployment, and you can't really replace experience. When I release my next game, i'll be more prepared for the eventualities that come with releasing a game on an increasingly fragmented (despite what Apple says) platform - im grateful for that knowledge - please keep the feedback coming

 

I was just showing my friend the top10 grossing apps section, and i realized almost all of the top 50 grossing games are free. Thats because the psychology of the in app purchase is exploiting people who have a certain mindset and reaping MILLIONS of dollars a day. It's pretty sobering.

I can appreciate in app purchases when they're reasonable, but to be honest me and my friends can tell when something is crippled purely to make a profit.

I'll bet dollars to donuts (i love that saying that if Peter Molyneux was allowed to make the game completely free from corporate influence it would be less about waiting and more about the virtual world - I mean, i was so enthralled by Godus little people walking around and if i hadnt hit the 10 minute wait for the next level huts i might have played for a few hours straight.

I think that business minds are VERY important because they are organized, and they help structure and move games forward in a realistic way. And the best business minds also understand the creative mind or are creative themselves. Where the problem comes in, I think, is that there is this current gold rush by minds who purely want to extract money from an artwork (i think games ARE artforms) and its when profit OVERRIDES the goal to make a creatively engaging product that the balance of power tips and the game becomes crappier But like I said I do admire business minds that find a balance between business and creativity very much. Im actively reading and listening and trying to understand business more so that i can move forward and make enough sales to support the creative process. (im working on my presskit now, using the very useful and graciously free presskit for games http://dopresskit.com/

Anyways now im so interested to hear what people are saying about Godus I'm gonna pop on over and check it out

 

No one has ever been excited by a product that is announced as being created by a crack team of accountants! Unless it's a business product. Yeh Godus would be a good game but it's crippled by iaps. I'd gladly pay for it but not in iap form. But as a premium title. What's worse, as you'll find the more you play, the more the game tries to stop you playing. It gets really bad!
I think this mindset has come from non gamers, because I've been used to paying 20-40 quid for a game so to me the prices are incredibly low on the App Store. And yours is about the price of a bar of chocolate. (No offence) so getting a game if this quality for that price is incredible. So the mindset you describe is completely flawed, although I think those people mostly play Angry birds or match three puzzle games. And don't understand these games like these and why they cost money! Was that too patronising?

 

thanks for the reply and i don't mind the quest being simple i love the idea of events building slowly pieces adding together so it will be interesting to see how it plays out but i do agree what people in the thread mentioned that once the optimizations and updates are done your game is worth more than 99 cents so i think it will do well with a price range increase. hopefully apple showcases it once the updates are completed so don't sell yourself short

 

Coming in version 1.2 - Camera Options

So the camera option is turning out to be really cool. You can choose between 3 preset default camera views, and i the zoomed out views i was seeing the landscape in a different light. You can also zoom out views while you're in eagle form. This is one of the mechanic updates coming in version 1.2

Here's some screenshots taken with the new camera options: (kind of reminds me of photomode in The Last of Us )

 

Whow those screens look beautiful and the clouds look amazing i stunned ! and looks good

 

Beautiful screens there,the best part is those mountains in the far far distance can all be acessed within the game.Actually everything onscreen is traversable aka skyrim.

I don't know if you have adjusted the LoD but it surely looks a lot more beautiful like a painting really in those screens.

Please allow me to increase the resolution and better dynamic shadows in the next update.

This guy is super talented and hard working,for a 'single' guy to have achieved what he has is quite mind blowing.

The sky looks pretty impeccable there tbh,A dynamic weather system and day night cycle would be even better.

 

Seconding all of that, really looking forward to each update.
Especially agree with the last sentence: sometimes I don't care if a game drains my battery in two hours, I just want all the bells and whistles I can get.