Guns Of Icarus Online
Off-Topic => The Lounge => Topic started by: Keon on January 12, 2014, 02:49:26 pm
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http://musegames.com/games/hamsterdam/
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Wait… they were serious about the hamster fighting game?
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Well, I am getting it anyway, because you know... It's Muse.
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Not gonna say it...
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I'm really curious to see how Hamster feels about this.
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I... well...
it's interesting, for sure.
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I've heard Bubbles talk about this on multiple occasions; I'll never doubt the video game mojo from the man who's mind brought us GOI.
Going to have to start practicing my hamster style now so I can be ready to dominate when it's released.
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This comes as a complete surprise to me. Fighting games are not my thing, but the micro world idea, where you experience the normal world through the eyes of something a different scale sounds interesting. There is another game in development called "Hamster Eagle Hunter" that plays with the same idea. http://hamstereaglehunter.com/ however to my knowledge that game is being produced by an individual instead of a proven team. I wish Muse the best in all things, because success couldn't happen to nicer people.
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I will ask keyvias if he knows who was the brain behind this game and then ask him to thank him kindly.
Now if you all excuse me, I need to train hamster in martial arts.
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Wait... how many members are there in the Muse team... 7? 12?
And this small team is now working on developing three separate games at the same time?
And no one else finds this at all concerning?
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Wait... how many members are there in the Muse team... 7? 12?
And this small team is now working on developing three separate games at the same time?
And no one else finds this at all concerning?
And he said it...
Course it could be they've worked on this over a longer period of time. Adding bits here and there.
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If I understood correctly understood Fireside Chats, there was a call the've won or a competition, and the development of it has been founded by that.
- Might be wrong tho.
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Wait... how many members are there in the Muse team... 7? 12?
And this small team is now working on developing three separate games at the same time?
And no one else finds this at all concerning?
No, because that's not how development teams work. The same people developing Guns of Icarus are not going to be the ones developing this game, and if they are, it's only because they were no longer needed on their portion of Guns. If you start working on a new game, you either have new members on the team, or you have existing members who can be safely transitioned over. You don't just double the existing team's work and call it a day.
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So then Muse is increasing their staff, but not putting any of the new manpower towards Adventure Mode? How can I be 100% sure that none of the money I gave them to work on Adventure Mode is being used to fund this NEW staff for this unrelated project? Cause that's pretty damn screwed up if ya ask me.
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There's no "100% sure" with Kickstarter. If you didn't trust the organization, you probably shouldn't have given them money. (And that's not directed at Muse—I'm speaking for any project you back on Kickstarter.) You take a risk when you fund something, that is the nature of funding a project. But you do it because you trust the people to deliver something awesome. I have no doubt in my mind that Muse will deliver something awesome.
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So then Muse is increasing their staff, but not putting any of the new manpower towards Adventure Mode? How can I be 100% sure that none of the money I gave them to work on Adventure Mode is being used to fund this NEW staff for this unrelated project? Cause that's pretty damn screwed up if ya ask me.
Psssssssst.
Gonna let you in on a little secret.
Developers often work on more than one title at once! Shocking, I know!
Btw, what are you actually still doing here, didn't you decide to burn your bridges last week?
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I just find it odd that the development team is so small that they haven't managed to mail out all the physical rewards for their Kickstarter, yet strong enough to simultaneously develop three games. If Tim Schafer, Peter Molyneux, or any other high-profile kickstarter campaign suddenly announced they were working on an unrelated title despite having delivered absolutely no proof in six months that the initial project is still being well developed, I'm sure there would be a considerable out lash.
The reason that this isn't happening here is because the community is so small, and incredibly complacent due to the frequent direct interaction of the developers with their user base. But if one really believes Muse is the greatest development team ever, they should hold them to a very high standard, rather than letting them get away with anything, just cause they're 'great'.
And nope, I resigned as Community Ambassador of my own volition. CA status wasn't beneficial to either me or the general community any more. I understand most of my opinions aren't very popular, but I'm still very much here. :) I hope you all can still manage to respect me despite my decision to resign.
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The reason that this isn't happening here is because the community is so small, and incredibly complacent due to the frequent direct interaction of the developers with their user base. But if one really believes Muse is the greatest development team ever, they should hold them to a very high standard, rather than letting them get away with anything, just cause they're 'great'.
No one has claimed Muse is the greatest development team ever, but they've given zero reason to believe that Adventure Mode isn't still on track. They're a capable organization, I think they'll manage.
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I just find it odd that the development team is so small that they haven't managed to mail out all the physical rewards for their Kickstarter, yet strong enough to simultaneously develop three games. If Tim Schafer, Peter Molyneux, or any other high-profile kickstarter campaign suddenly announced they were working on an unrelated title despite having delivered absolutely no proof in six months that the initial project is still being well developed, I'm sure there would be a considerable out lash.
Not really. There's never been any given date for... well... anything. Really the only one of these high profile project got flak is when DoubleFine went back and asked for even more money because they overestimated what they could do with what they got in their first Kickstarter and needed more funds to finish it off. Something more apt to this situation would be more like Shadowrun, which, what, a year, year and a half later, delivered the game they said they were going to make and was fairly well received by most accounts.
As for the team itself, we don't actually know how they're organized. Who knows, maybe their art team is currently standing by and started to mock up stuff for another game. We really have no idea, for all it's transparency, how Muse is structured and organized, so don't assume anything.
The reason that this isn't happening here is because the community is so small, and incredibly complacent due to the frequent direct interaction of the developers with their user base. But if one really believes Muse is the greatest development team ever, they should hold them to a very high standard, rather than letting them get away with anything, just cause they're 'great'.
... Do you read these forums? Muse folks get much crap slung at them, often undeservedly so, BECAUSE people know they're listening. While I'm sure all of us here appreciate the rare level of interaction we have with the fine folks who make the game we love, I'm also pretty sure we've all had our disagreements with choices made and have voiced those, sometimes quite fervently.
By the way, do praytell, what exactly do you think Muse is getting away with... anything? Because they happen to put up concepts for another game? That's just... that's just plain silly and makes it look like you're just trying to pick a fight.
And nope, I resigned as Community Ambassador of my own volition. CA status wasn't beneficial to either me or the general community any more. I understand most of my opinions aren't very popular, but I'm still very much here. :) I hope you all can still manage to respect me despite my decision to resign.
And quit the game. With extreme dissatisfaction. It makes me very much question why you're still here, posting, and just how objective you can be in your posts.
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Physical rewards are shipping soon. The problem is, printing art books takes a hell of a lot of time. First off you need to have enough art done to put it in, then you have to design the book, work with the printer, get proofs, confirm the proofs are good, get them printed, get confirmation on shipping, get labels and boxes, and get them out.
It's pretty normal and healthy while a studio is growing to start putting multiple teams on multiple projects. Putting more staff on a project can even be detrimental at times. I wouldn't say a tiny bit of art and a few lines of text are going to eat up other resources. I don't imagine the co-op team needs all their concept art or story people on right now. They now have something to do though. Only the truly tiny indie studios don't have other projects going on. A lot of studios just don't show anything until they have more to show. Muse as a developer is very open about what they are working on, so they are showing the early stages.
And please do remember, you are here to discuss ideas, Muse, their games, or really anything. But you are not here to question each other's personal decisions.
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Don't forget they are hiering new developer(s) for SkirmishMode&AdventureMode.
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Hi everyone, just took note of this thread, and let me chime in to answer any questions etc. Yeah Hamsterdam is something that we're working on, so far in our spare time. So far, we've done some design, concepting, and prototype work on the core combat mechanics. Over break, Derek and Eric took some time to play with more animations and designs, and we did a bit more work prototyping it. It's something that we do when we have some spare time or want to take a mental break with Guns. We are still early in prototype and the work on it has been pretty sporadic, mostly whenever we have some downtime and want to take a break. We don't have a time when we'll release anything yet, and with Guns work ongoing, we're taking our time with this. It'll be pretty sweet I think though, and if we have more updates, I'll definitely share them with everyone. Also, with respect to Guns work, we're careful not to let anything get in the way of our progress. We do have regular game jams, we do try to block out a little bit of time regularly just to be creative. We actually have quite a few pretty neat game mechanics and ideas that are just on the back burner. We still need to be creative and just have fun with purely innovative stuff for us, to keep our ideas fresh and spirits up.
On co-op work by the way, we are getting ready to have an internally testable build, and we'll be recruiting players for super early access prototype testing. I would say this is a pretty big milestone for us. If anyone is interested, let Matt and I know!
Thanks a lot! Howard
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We do have regular game jams
I do love a good game jam. Which one did members of Muse participate in? Can we have links to the result(s)?
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We've been doing our own regularly. Maybe next time I can record what happens at one of them. We usually break into groupings. I worked with Derek last time, jamming on a mechanic based on origami. Eric and Alex jammed on this roguelike idea. I thought of another idea I dubbed "10 seconds to live" about being on the run. Another idea I was thinking of with Tim and Eric had to do with Chinese paintings. We tried stuff out with flock mechanics, and with hamster fighting of course :D So just experiment with stuff. We had quite a few interactive visualization type ideas too. Whatever we think it's cool and worthy to take further, we'll spend time to shape and sculpt it.
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As far as how everyone is multi-tasking or kept to a specific role, it's pretty fluid. Everyone has his or her general domain of expertise, but because we are small, we can bounce between different things. It's unsettling for some of us to start, but we've gotten a lot better with managing projects over the last couple of years, so that we know what we are working on for short sprints, and we know what our overall roadmap looks like. So the thing we do is to try to plan often, and work on things sprint to sprint towards milestones we set for each project. The trickier parts right now, with co-op about to have a first integrated prototype build, is to plan out how user experience is going to flow, how progression is going to work, and how anything user experience, progression, or design wise is going to affect what we do for Skirmish, or more importantly, how anything we do in Skirmish is going to affect co-op.
But like Queso, Imagine, and a few others mentioned, sometimes we have downtime or spare time, and when we do, we'll jump on something else and do a quick sprint on it. The Hamsterdam work over break was a good example. But this I try to manage as best as we can. By the way, for school or team projects, we've been using this online project management tool called Trello. Not sure if you guys have checked it out, but it's awesome. It's based on kanban, and really easy to use. You guys should check it out. But yeah, trying to manage all the moving pieces sometimes is a challenge - fun, but stressful.
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Queso mentioned physical rewards, gulp. It's been a taunting challenge. In hindsight, trying to do all the packaging ordering, packing, labeling, and shipping, etc. ourselves was a much bigger undertaking than we anticipated. We've done 2 Kickstarters before, but this time the number of packages we have to ship out to people are over 10x what we did before. Before I can get away with doing everything by myself, and spend my nights packing and labeling, and weekends at the post office. Not this time. And the variety of items we have this time is greater as well. The new art book for example is double in volume, and we're more demanding in quality, so we had to find a new print shop. After looking at a few, we settled on one, then getting the set up right, and getting proof to look right took a few weeks. There were quite a few other challenges, such as finding anyone to do iPhone covers is small runs, along the way that took a bunch of time to figure out. If it wasn't for Josh (Dynamenti) and Anthony (Draekalovich) who volunteered a ton of their time to help us, we would have been more desperate than we are in shipping everything out. No excuses though. The bottom line is that it took us forever, and we learned some hard lessons along the way. The good thing is that, with the art book now being in print, and with additional t-shirts being ordered, we have just about everything we need to send out the rest of the stuff. We're also working on the documentary and making the big big poster (which we've made before). By as early as next week, we should be able to start sending the rest of the stuff out to people.
I also just want to thank everyone for being super super patient with everything. Can't thank you guys enough.
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I just have the feeling that HamsterIV will get some sort of in-game bonus in Hamsterdam.
Oh and i was thinking about an in-game name for bubbles in hamsterdam.
I only manage to think of Dev HamsterBubble, or Dev Hamsterball.
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Definitely record the game jams, it sounds great.
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Definitely record the game jams, it sounds great.
I'd quite like to see that :D
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Definitely record the game jams, it sounds great.
I'd quite like to see that :D
I'll make sure I get time to watch it, and then watch it again.
What if you have all the Muse people play Haxball.... I wouls sense chaos.
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A game jam is not an event where people get together and play games — it's basically a hackathon where you create a game, and would likely be incredibly boring to watch.
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A game jam is not an event where people get together and play games — it's basically a hackathon where you create a game, and would likely be incredibly boring to watch.
Editing is a wonderful thing :P. I think it would be interesting to see the games they come up with on the fly, it's a very clever creative exercise and whatnot.
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A game jam is not an event where people get together and play games — it's basically a hackathon where you create a game, and would likely be incredibly boring to watch.
Am I the only person who watches the streams of Ludem Dare? It's actually really cool. Or if there isn't interest in seeing them write it all out, I'd at least like to see a timelapse.
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why don't muse record their own dev games?
I would love to hear to screams and cries as they get double galleon rammed.
:P
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Am I the only person who watches the streams of Ludem Dare? It's actually really cool. Or if there isn't interest in seeing them write it all out, I'd at least like to see a timelapse.
I don't watch the streams because I am usually working on my own entry. I do like the time lapses post even. Especially when they get their art on.
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Am I the only person who watches the streams of Ludem Dare? It's actually really cool. Or if there isn't interest in seeing them write it all out, I'd at least like to see a timelapse.
I don't watch the streams because I am usually working on my own entry. I do like the time lapses post even. Especially when they get their art on.
what if we have HamsterIV stream hamsterdam gameplay. that would be great and ironic.
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Hamster streaming hamsters while bubbles plays with a hamster. Yup, I'd watch ot.
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Hamster streaming hamsters while bubbles plays with a hamster. Yup, I'd watch ot.
Me too, if not just for the hamster puns. The whole thing sounds hilarious and I want it nao :P
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Hamster streaming hamsters while bubbles plays with a hamster. Yup, I'd watch ot.
Million dollar idea here.
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Hamsters are cannibalistic hyper aggressive demon spawn. I am not dumb enough to put my hand in the same cage as a hamster. Those plastic balls hamsters roll around in are not to protect the hamster from the world. They are there to protect the world from the hamster. I call my self HamsterIV to imply there was a selective breeding program to produce even more aggressive hamsters of which I am the fourth iteration there of.
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Hamsters are cannibalistic hyper aggressive demon spawn. I am not dumb enough to put my hand in the same cage as a hamster. Those plastic balls hamsters roll around in are not to protect the hamster from the world. They are there to protect the world from the hamster. I call my self HamsterIV to imply there was a selective breeding program to produce even more aggressive hamsters of which I am the fourth iteration there of.
We definitly need to let him play hamsterdam and stream it...