[Wow][Good] america will fall before barkley 2 is real
Chef vanished from the project 2 1/2 years ago. I've tried contacting him multiple times and haven't received a response. Bort left around the same time to be a family man.
The Kickstarter was not necessary, especially in hindsight. The majority of work on this game was unpaid. Myself, Bort, and Chef are the original Barkley 1 creators. I did not join the Kickstarter with them because I was aware of the many problems that could (and did) arise.
I was asked to join the project 3 years after the KS when the project had little money and was in shambles. I was committed to trying to finish the game but it was consistently set back by horrible management and I ended up quitting. The person who owns ToG and is running it now had nothing to do with Barkley 1 and has zero game dev experience. He is the ToG PR guy.
When I quit, Lazrool also quit. We were the only two remaining who understood the technical inner workings of this game. Laz worked on this project nearly from the start, pro bono, and was tired of the nonsense as well.
There is no incentive for "ToG" or anyone attached to the KS to talk about this debacle.
It's called survival of the fittest. If you can't slam with the best, then jam with the rest.
Oh come on Bort?
Pretty sure chef saw all this shit coming though it's a shame he completely disappeared.
On the flipside, the promise was made and they've still got 4 years.
https://youtu.be/JsneVykvjlU
This was the game I was looking forward to the most.
My son is also named Bort.
was this supposed to come out like, four years ago?
was is a barkley?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Barkley
okay, this is making me even more confused
Tales of Game's Studios / Tales of Game’s Studios Presents Chef ..
Those are single line edits
also it has been seven fucking years
Says a lot that this shit is what it took for any actual dialogue from ToG to occur after all this time.
One of the other former devs responded, calling him out
https://twitter.com/GZStorm/status/1135283245329731584
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/talesofgames/barkley-2-an-rpg-sequel-to-barkley-shut-up-and-jam/posts/2525425
They actually updated the kickstarter
Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden is unironically one of the funniest games I've ever played. The RPG combat was also surprisingly fun. It was a personal favorite of mine so it really bums me out to see this.
This just sounds like a total shitshow all around. Why would they hand the reins to someone who demonstrated that he was more or less totally incompetent? Why did half of the team that was the most instrumental to it's success just vanish? Honestly it seems like nobody can be absolved of guilt here, it was dysfunction from top to bottom.
I don't understand why someone who was never involved with the first game and never actually made a video game was the boss
Cboyardee and a few other devs posted in the thread and explained their side of things
Hey guys, this is Chef Boyardee, one of the writers and musicians for the game, and I was one of the original Barkley 1 guys.
Barkley 2 was our dream game. When we asked for $30k and received $120k, it felt like a mandate to go absolutely bonkers and make the game far, far larger and more convoluted than it actually needed to be (and as we learned, than we were more capable of making). To talk about all of our inspirations is to basically give you a laundry list of multi-million dollar Square-Enix RPGs with teams of hundreds of guys - so who WOULDN'T believe a bunch of dudes in their dad's basement could make it?
We moved into bhroom and bort's dad's basement and got to work. We went absolutely nuts with scope, and planned out a massive game that, in reality, would have taken far more resources than we had. I'll give you an example: Barkley 2 had a 24 hour time system. As you completed quests and events in the game, the time would pass and new events would open. In reality, what this meant was that we had to make new content for each in-game hour. This is an awesome idea, but even for all the content we made, it was not feasible for our limited crew. Work was abound with stories like this - we dreamed and attempted all sorts of crazy systems, thinking that we had the experience and ability of Square's A-team.
I stopped working on the game when my mom became ill and passed away abruptly. It's hard to talk about, so I won't. I wanted to go back, but the longer I stayed away, the more difficult it became, first because it was apparent that this project was just too ambitious and that what we needed was scope control, and second, it was the hardest thing in the world to admit failure. Failure, not just to the people I was beholden to, the people who had misplaced their faith in my ability to make this massive, sprawling game, but to the people I worked with. I love, deeply, everyone who worked on Barkley. I love GZ, Laz, bort, bhroom, bisse, Konix, Frankie, Neon, everyone who ever tried to help this madcap dream a reality. And I didn't know how to say I was sorry, or that I'd failed. My regret is that I could't do that. I am sorry, everyone.
That said, I'm extremely proud of the work we did on the game, all of us. I think that everyone who worked on this project are among the best out there. The jokes, the world, the coding, the design, the art - it's awesome. I think the writing and music I did is some of my best work. There is nobody on the team who deserves more praise than GZ, who was the only voice of reason during all of this. It's to him that I'm most sorry.
As far as money goes, although I was never the money dude, it was all used to my knowledge pretty responsibly to hire contractors. At the beginning of the project, I think we all took $1000 for food and
expenses and stuff, and then another $1000 for the same a while later. The company also took a $10,000 loan from my dad which I paid back with an absurd 20% interest. So at least for me, this endeavor netted me a whopping -$10,000. I'd say the only wasteful thing we did with money was take the game to PAX, which really was an amazing experience and at least people got to play the game there. It was met with an awesome reception, especially our booth, which involved bhroom dressing as a wizard and acting out our character creation - which I contend is still the best ever.
I think we were just too young and too ambitious and I want to say we tried to fly too close to the sun, but I don't think we ever took off. What we have is great, but I failed. And I'm sorry. I don't know what I can do to at least partially make things right, but I welcome suggestions.
[Wow][Good] america will fall before barkley 2 is real
The damage elements were Normal, B.I.O. , Cosmic, Cyber, Zauber and Mental. They all had some associated effects and status ailments, and also had their associated gun materials.
There were 8 at the start of the game instead, but at that point the elements were something different, the 8 were more like bullet types than just damage types, like one of them seeked enemies, one was
explosive etc, thats why there were more afaik.
As we worked on the game more, the idea evolved to have guns be more modular, and have the bullet behaviors come from the gun's various pieces and affixes, like "Orbiting Assault rifle" would shoot bullets that spin around you like a shield.
This grew to be extremely complex to build, but in the end actually worked fairly well, and im very happy with what the guns are like now. But as others stated, cool guns arnt really enough if the combat and enemies are too simple to warrant them, if most combat is just kiting enemies around until they're dead.
And like many have stated, we all contributed to making the game overly complex and convoluted. "That's the joke" etc.
Im the one who pushed for having gun materials, which two years later led to me drawing 2001 loving gun sprites. An entirely self-inflicted wound. The idea of gun materials was that it would be one of the main ways we "gate" higher level gun drops, by controlling which enemies drop what materials of weapons. It also added a lot of diversity to the weaponry you find, and made gun fusion really fun, because you could end up with really absurd-looking weapons after just a little bit of experimentation. Like a revolver made out of brains, an origami sniper rifle or leather machinegun turning into a studded leather machinegun. The gun materials affected the weapons' stats and stat growth, but also sometimes applied special effects to the shots that could then mix with the affixes and made really cool results. Like, the "SALT" material made a bunch of guns with salt shakers at the end, and they all fired shotgun-like spread shots of salt, so that material essentially turned any weapon into a bit of a shotgun. Another material (Itano) made any of its shots into enemy-seeking rockets that left behind smoke trails, so it basically turned any weapon into a heat-seeking mini rocket launcher.
Another super absurd idea I pushed for was to have the gun's type (pistol, revolver, rocket launcher, double-barelled shotgun etc) come from this absurd system that involved a procedurally-generated colored map on which there are continents and islands representing each gun type, different for every game but built with a rough internal logic (similar weapons' lands are close to one another) , and every weapon in the game "lives" somewhere in that map, and fusing two weapons made those two "meet in the middle" based on their relative power to decide what new weapon type they are. In my defense though, I then immediately built that absurd idea and as far as I know, that is still the same code working in the game now, but its definitely one of these absurd ideas that could have degenerated and added to these problems.
People here talk about bhroom like he's the "PR guy" but he's done a lot of work on making sense of all of these ideas and figuring out much of the math for balancing them, there's these big complex spreadsheets he made to organize and list all of these things and how they combine etc, like growth charts to see how many times you can fuse weapons together before they become too strong that, after tweaking, could export out a file we could import in the game to change the game's balance.
The main problem has been that these ideas are not worth much if the combat isn't fun, and we never focused enough on just making the most basic combat gameplay work better.
[Wow][Good] america will fall before barkley 2 is real
Goddamn it, these concepts sound so fucking cool
Actual answer for anyone else that may be wondering:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barkley,_Shut_Up_and_Jam:_Gaiden
"I stopped working on the game when my mom became ill and passed away abruptly. " That sucks big time, can't really blame him for that.
A wholeheartedly recommend that anyone who likes RPGs play Barkley Gaiden. It's definitely a product of its time, channeling some real early 2000s energy - but it still holds up pretty well.
regardless of the content, this guy needs to work on his commit messages
At this point I just want to play it, regardless of whether its in a fully functional state at all. The writing, music, and what remains of those wacky gimmicks sounds too good to not experience
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