Josiah Pisciotta
Josiah
They have a new toy to play with and let us stand alone. Guess it's the last time i try and help a small company. I thought it would be fun to recieve lots of updates and stuff, editors and maybe the source code after a while. But no.. not even 1 single lousy update after some bugfixes. #### this makes me angry.
At first it would seem to be worth the money, played bb1 a long time, and bb2 some time longer. But after finishing the levels (wich are not that difficult) the fun of building is dissappearing, with bb1 the levels were huge, and bridges were gigantic structures.
Hope you are going to rethink about not updating, i personally think you should try to keep it active. I'm not buying your new game in a million years, i forsee the same thing
Hope to be building bridges in a short time!!
Unlike Pontifex, triptych is a type of game where, at some point, all the ideas for new features will be exhausted, and the "final version" label will be slapped on. From then on, you'll get the same gameplay over and over again -
Not so with Pontifex - There can always be new map packs coming out, though that hasn't happened for over two months. Someone needs to breathe some life back into the bridge builder community.
Pontifex on its own, however, is getting old. There is only so much you can do with the physical limitations affecting level sizes. I miss the large-scale construcion projects of the original bridge builder.
Josiah
We got:
* a map pack
* 3 contests, quite similar, for the economics-oriented; no "hall of fame" yet
* a forum that does not allow file uploads
Updates=improved gameplay, (more) editors, and source were never promised, though I agree that'd've been nice and easily summed up as "warm fuzzy feeling" which *was* promised :-)
But then, I've said the same thing before, to no effect (perhaps the 3rd contest?). If you want to scare off potential buyers of pontifex, you have to say it in a public forum. Everyone who reads it here has already paid.
Anyone else out there have a Thinkpad T20 series they can test on as well?
Quote: from rrheuts on 12:57 pm on June 19, 2002
yep was afraid of that.. once they had enough of things they would drop it like a brick :/
They have a new toy to play with and let us stand alone. Guess it's the last time i try and help a small company. I thought it would be fun to recieve lots of updates and stuff, editors and maybe the source code after a while. But no.. not even 1 single lousy update after some bugfixes. #### this makes me angry.
At first it would seem to be worth the money, played bb1 a long time, and bb2 some time longer. But after finishing the levels (wich are not that difficult) the fun of building is dissappearing, with bb1 the levels were huge, and bridges were gigantic structures.
Hope you are going to rethink about not updating, i personally think you should try to keep it active. I'm not buying your new game in a million years, i forsee the same thing
Hope to be building bridges in a short time!! Ok updating Pontifex, sure everyone wants it, sounds easy enough right? Wrong, if part of Pontifex is changed then the whole game has to be re-balanced, this was probably the hardest part of making Pontifex and most time consuming. Sure it would be nice to do, and it would be fun for the people that own Pontifex, but you have to look at the whole picture. If we spend 2-4 months updating Pontifex, that is time that we are working towards something that will bring in no money. Josiah Pisciotta
Now you can go and say, you #### small company all you care about is making money. Right let me explain something else, if we are going to make games, we have to make money, I have bills to pay, I have to eat, no one here is rich or independently wealth and never has to care about money in their life. Sure if none of us had to eat, or needed a place to live or anything else that requires money then ya sure, we could work on updating Pontifex for free for the rest of our life's just to keep you happy.
As for never helping out a small company again? So you would rather go pay twice as much for a game from a big company that does not give a #### about you and would not even take the time to reply to this? That makes a lot of sense, you know what a big company would do if they updated one of there games? They would not give it away for free, it would be called a sequel or an expansion pack and you would be paying for it. So go support your favorite corporation and for twice the price see how much they care about you and your complaints and ideas.
We actually have worked on a newer bridge building game but could not complete it because of our limited resources. We also planned to upgrade Pontifex after finishing with Triptych, but because of our financial situation it is not something we can do at this time.
As for releasing the source code, where did you ever come up with this idea? We are a small company so we like to give away all our hard work for free. We have spent years developing a complex physics engine and now we are going to give away all the code for it, to make our fans happy? So that a "big" company could take our code and make their own games with it to make their executives even richer? Think about it.
Alex
Its a scary world we live in.
Anyways, if you want an indie developer to be able to update their game, don't just get in a message board and bitch, go out and make some noise to help them sell more copies. Get in message boards and tell people, send emails to gaming mag publishers and game website webmasters, share thoughts with Chronic Logic on ways you think they could bring in more money. Personally I sent an email to Computer Gaming World telling them they should mention Pontiflex in their magazine. Maybe someone will send them the game to review :cough:.
The point is if you really want to see new content, be constructive and take some initiative.
But let me take another game as an example: Clonk. It's not a very famous game (i think) though it has a vast community. And lots of updates. And the company itself updated it for about 2 years. Now the're working on a brand new version, completly diffrent from the thing they started. And they have released the source code. That gave the community a new boost, someone used the source to make a opengl verison of the game, wich really looks nice, and has great potential.
So i never meant that you promised us the source, but if you look at the opensource world, it's doing ok. I'm sorry if I sounded a little rude, but I've bought other games/programs from small company's (clonk for example) and have seen the story there. And i'm just a little afraid the communnity would die. So no hard feelings
AS for larger company's... I only buy really good games/programs, the others I ehm.. well.. i don't buy them. But for most of the small company's i do buy the software, just to support them in giving me a community and nice service + updates.
Josiah Pisciotta