Survey: Top Priorities for Ogre VG Improvement

[AurochJake]

Originally Posted by dwalend

Selenite and I finished our game - first time for me to get all the way though with a real opponent! Thanks!

Jake - at what point do you want to hear about minor bugs? (Like Selenite's name only showing up intermittently vs "Unknown Player?.)

That's great to hear!

Happy to receive minor bugs now, we'll look at them and prioritise accordingly :)

Best to send them directly to me if that's ok, with logs and screens as usual. For anyone who doesn't have my contact details, I can be reached at jake@aurochdigital.com

Thank you

[Tim Kauffman]

I would like to see an official statement about what the game is actually intended to finally be when it is finished.

With a list of objectives and their chances of being able to be done and completed and fully implemented and a guestimated completion timeline and the status of each one.

What are the games capabilities based on the engine being used?
How much more can be done with the game within the games capacity?
For example, what features can be implemented with the Scenario Creator and what can't, and why? If we had a better sense of these things, we could make better suggestions based on what can and can't be done or may be able to be done.

All of this would be nice to have conveyed to us in more detail, even when some of the answers are "we can't do that because the Game Engine and/or the way we programmed the game won't allow us to implement that.
Or, "We can try, but are not sure if it is possible to be fully implemented. We will keep you updated on the progress as we have more info on this."

Can we have such a list made so we have all of this in one place to view as it is updated? Otherwise it's spread out all over between the STEAM Forums and here and difficult to keep everything in perspective.

[Alain H. Dawson]

[QUOTE=Tim Kauffman;2198912]I would like to see an official statement about what the game is actually intended to finally be when it is finished.

That is an entirely reasonable and sensible request. We are already working with Auroch to put together an official State of the Game message, which we will release as soon as the details are worked out.

[GranitePenguin]

Originally Posted by Alain H. Dawson

That is an entirely reasonable and sensible request. We are already working with Auroch to put together an official State of the Game message, which we will release as soon as the details are worked out.

Sounds great. Looking forward to it. :-)

[Tim Kauffman]

[QUOTE=Alain H. Dawson;2199348]

Originally Posted by Tim Kauffman

We are already working with Auroch to put together an official State of the Game message, which we will release as soon as the details are worked out.

Thank You.

[AurochDigital]

Quick note to say - we're doing an update next week. Some shader additions, some UI fixes. Then we'll come back to this topic - not forgotten!

Thanks

[Tim Kauffman]

Originally Posted by AurochDigital

Quick note to say - we're doing an update next week. Some shader additions, some UI fixes. Then we'll come back to this topic - not forgotten!

Thanks

Awesome. Thanks! :)

[AurochDigital]

Hi all. Tomas from Auroch Digital here.

I wanted to speak with you about the current status of development for the Ogre video game, and what current plans are.

From our viewpoint, Ogre is largely free of major bugs. We define major bugs as Class A and Class B bugs. Class As are crash bugs: hangs and issues that stop a game progressing. Class Bs are major issues that don’t stop a game from being played and / or have a workaround.

We say “largely”, as with any complex system, there will be ones we don’t yet know of, or ones that we think we’ve done but under a new set of conditions may reappear. We are aware there are Class C and D bugs in the game (as in most games), which are minor visual / UI issues that are noticeable sometimes (a Class C) and really minor visual issues that most players won’t spot (a Class D).

There are also of course improvements and additions that we would like to make; new content that either enhances the existing game or brings new content that is not within the current scope of the project.

What is that scope? Basically, it’s what you see now.

When we started the project we had huge ambitions to get absolutely everything Ogre in the game, and more. We had set points throughout the development where we’d assess the current work list, how much of the resources and budget were left, and define what we should focus on and what we should drop into the backlog. We kept the core plan - the base original Ogre game, GEV rules, multiplayer, a new campaign and Steam Workshop.

Backlog content became things that were either a bit more complex to implement or things that we felt were of less importance to have when we had to make choices about our budget. Our hope was that post-launch we’d be able to return to the backlog and start ticking things off. However, none of us knew that Steam Direct was coming...

As I’m sure many of you are aware, the game is sold primarily via Steam. Steam has 90% of the PC games market, so it’s the key platform for anyone creating computer games. A few months before launch Steam decided to change to a new system called Steam Direct where anyone could, for $100, buy a release slot for Steam. This change, only a couple of months before Ogre released, changed the Steam environment dramatically for the worse. In 2016 there were 4,207 games released on Steam and developers were worrying about how this was impacting them - 2016 was a hard year for releasing games. In 2017 this number almost doubled to 7,672.

Ogre did well for the difficult environment it released into, which is a testament to the strength of the original tabletop game and all the hard work that went into our digital adaptation, but it did not nearly do the numbers we had forecast for it back in 2015.

What this means is that Steve Jackson Games and Auroch Digital have yet to recoup our original investment in the title. I believe the game will make its money back and get into profit eventually, but not right now. Because of this, spending additional development money is something both Steve Jackson Games and we have agreed that we just can’t afford to do right now.

We’re also going to continue our ongoing support, i.e. answering questions, investigating problems, and promoting the game to bring new people into the world of Ogre. If major issues appear, we will of course fix them.

I understand this will be disappointing for some of you, and both companies really wish we could pour more time and resources into the title. But it’s sadly not feasible right now, so we wanted to be transparent about the status of the project, and that additional content is not currently planned.

Any questions on this, do please post them and I’ll do my best to answer…

[GranitePenguin]

Originally Posted by AurochDigital

From our viewpoint, Ogre is largely free of major bugs. We define major bugs as Class A and Class B bugs. Class As are crash bugs: hangs and issues that stop a game progressing. Class Bs are major issues that don’t stop a game from being played and / or have a workaround.

It's unfortunate that we won't see new content, but if the money isn't there, it isn't there.

The main question I have is what class do Rules errors fall under? I assume they are Class B, since they don't break the game, but they are not cosmetic issues, either. IIRC, there are still some outstanding issues around movement (e.g, how ramps connect to roads in town doesn't work right) that are pretty annoying and really mess up gameplay. When the rules don't work as expected, it makes things "interesting."

With that said, what's the level of active development we can expect to see to fix those remaining "not working as intended" rules?

Thanks for keeping us all informed.

[AurochDigital]

Originally Posted by GranitePenguin

The main question I have is what class do Rules errors fall under? I assume they are Class B, since they don't break the game, but they are not cosmetic issues, either. IIRC, there are still some outstanding issues around movement (e.g, how ramps connect to roads in town doesn't work right) that are pretty annoying and really mess up gameplay. When the rules don't work as expected, it makes things "interesting."

That's a good question. We've generally bumped rules errors up to a B as you suggest. A few rules differences are there for the asynchronous nature of the game. The one area that is a concession to how the digital game works is this issue of edges of tiles. Basically we had to make a call on how it would be implemented early on that gave us advantages in other development areas, so giving us scope to do more, to code the tiles in a way that made these edge cases something we'd have to live with. As with other aspects, success on Steam would mean we could re-do that component. However without that, we'd have to add a lot of instability into the game to fix. Not idea, but pragmatic from a dev POV.