Jolt Country

Sorry for using the forum for intense MARKET RESEARCH, but trying to get a little potential future feedback here.

I would like to thank you all for this useful and actionable feedback.

Enceladus stands on its own as a timeless sci-fi comedy classic. Any more would be too much of a good thing.

I never finished CZK, but it sounds like a sequel to that would be even harder to make than finishing Cyberganked.

I do want you to finish Cyberganked, but it is not a genre of game I generally get very excited about.

Therefore I voted for the Western, which seems like it would be quicker/easier to finish, and a new, fun genre to explore. If you were to do a western, would it be comedic? Or would you try to play it relatively straight?

I voted for Cyberganked and a sequel to Enceladus.

I'd love to see Enceladus as a repeating series, one where we get to see the same characters in continuing adventures. I think that would be fun. I'd love to see two a year or something. This is an easy thing to want when you don't have to write or code it!

I don't think you can move on to another huge project until you finish Cyberganked. You've put so much time and effort into it. The world needs it to be released. You need it to be released!

pinback wrote: Mon Nov 30, 2020 3:32 pm Therefore I voted for the Western, which seems like it would be quicker/easier to finish, and a new, fun genre to explore. If you were to do a western, would it be comedic? Or would you try to play it relatively straight?

I'd probably shoot for wry and try to make it not silly. But it is just a concept at this point, I have nothing for it and would probably do all the other games first. But I got to thinking that a few people said they did not "like" Jay Schilling, who is a character I am very fond of. I got to thinking that I have created a good number of protagonists that are in over their head, not in command or control of their situations and trying to make the best of it. To a large degree that's because that is what life feels like to me, but then I started thinking about a few things.

1. I like action movies, and I am perfectly capable of writing from the perspective of a central character that is a gun-toting lunatic like any Schwarzenegger movie. In fact, I like those a great deal.
2. I decided that The Thing is my favorite movie a few (10?) years ago and I watch it every so often because it is a fascinating character study to me. RJ. Macready isn't in over his head. He's not a bulletproof psychopath like in a typical action movie, but competent. Wouldn't it be nice to try to write from the perspective of someone that is competent and do something different?

So that's all, just something different. Thanks for asking.

I went with Cyberganked and the Western. Cyberganked is such a huge and ambitious game that I think you should keep working on it regularly to maintain continuity and keep it manageable. If you get too distant from it, it's only going to seem more and more daunting a project to return to. The Western on the other hand could be a fun side project that would be very different from other games you've done before. It's so different a setting that I have a hard time imagining what it would even be like, but I am intrigued. That's a good place for your audience to be, I think. I actually wanted to do a Western text adventure myself at one time...in GW-BASIC. It would have had a homebrew parser, but the function keys were to be remapped to give the player easy access to important verbs like RELOAD, SHOOT, and LASSO. I need to get back to that one.

bryanb wrote: Mon Nov 30, 2020 11:12 pm I went with Cyberganked and the Western. Cyberganked is such a huge and ambitious game that I think you should keep working on it regularly to maintain continuity and keep it manageable. If you get too distant from it, it's only going to seem more and more daunting a project to return to. The Western on the other hand could be a fun side project that would be very different from other games you've done before. It's so different a setting that I have a hard time imagining what it would even be like, but I am intrigued. That's a good place for your audience to be, I think. I actually wanted to do a Western text adventure myself at one time...in GW-BASIC. It would have had a homebrew parser, but the function keys were to be remapped to give the player easy access to important verbs like RELOAD, SHOOT, and LASSO. I need to get back to that one.

Oooo, I like the addition of WESTERN VERBS! This may be a good thing for a future EctoComp, the thing Jiz was talking about. Every game, of course, is at its best when it hasn't had a single line of code written for it, but still. Promising!

You live in Colorado too and man are there some fucked up stories in history about Indian genocide you can pull from if you choose that as a setting in a Western themed game.

The only reason I went down the rabbit hole above was a book on Columbine I have been reading that picks out all of these weird date coincidences between cowboy/Indian massacres in Colorado and the school shootings.