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STEAM | May 2015 - Paid Mods? We hardly Nuuvem!

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Hektor

Member
I managed to get Batman Arkham City! Real cool man thanks. Be sure to put them in email tags next time so you have to be quoted to see the links.

Yeah, I thought people were fast, haha.

But Mini Ninjas actually worked. I snagged it. Thanks!

Nice to hear that, at least it wasnt for nothing.
while im at it, i could just aswell free my steaminventory from useless games i guess.

ModBot said:
Instructions for Hektor:
Press the quote button to the left of this PM, select the quoted text, copy, and paste in the thread. You can remove these lines from the version you paste.

Instructions for participants:
I am giving away 7 Steam keys. To enter this giveaway, send a PM to ModBot with any subject line. In the body, copy and paste the entire line from the message below that corresponds to the game you want. (if you include more than one game, you will be blocked from entering). Confused? Watch this GIF tutorial or ask for help.

ModBot Basics:
- I really appreciate thank you messages, but please send them to me (Hektor, not ModBot!) via PM instead of in thread.
- Do not trade keys you win off-site to enrich yourself. Don't try to claim games you have no interest in collecting or playing. Don't claim games to give them to friends off-site.
- If the key is already taken you will not receive a reply. Replies may take a minute or two.

Rules for this Giveaway:
- This giveaway is a raffle. The winners will be selected by random draw 3 hours after the draw was created. Any games not claimed after that point will be given away first come first serve.



Interstellar Marines -- MB-BE2AEB508A2202D7 - Taken by tioslash. 4 entrants total.
Starvoid -- MB-68466AC68538E8B1 - Taken by Haunted. 5 entrants total.
xheRJRF.gif
Bad Rats: the Rats' Revenge -- MB-807BFD0E16357EC1 - Taken by Loptous. 1 entrants total.
Poker Night at the Inventory -- MB-F67338E28C698241 - Taken by Henry Swanson. 4 entrants total.
Left 4 Dead -- MB-3599E45181DD4B3D - Taken by Jmanunknown. 14 entrants total.
t1cxE6r.gif
Shadow Warrior -- MB-8673A058EBFF6F7C - Taken by Natty1. 18 entrants total.
PAYDAY 2: A Merry Payday Christmas Soundtrack DLC -- MB-B1156F712BE4050D - Taken by TheLight. 1 entrants total.


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I hope i got it right with the gifting-links.

Welp, preordered Arkham Knight.
I told myself I wouldn't.

But I did.

I did it too, on Nuuvem. I hope JaseC is right.
 

Dusk Golem

A 21st Century Rockefeller
Alright, now a week and two hours after launching the Steam Greenlight page for Close Your Eyes: Redux.


As I talked about before, it slowed down a after the third day. There's been some ups and downs since then. I have sent out a message to a lot of different YouTubers and indie sites, out of the 40+ YouTubers I've messaged, 7 of them have emailed back to me, 1 of them uploaded the first part of Close Your Eyes yesterday, it didn't help much with votes but it was appreciated and made me think to rework one or two things for a better experience, though they seem to be enjoying the game. 1 of the 6 indie sites I messaged got back to me, IndieGames.com, I'm kind of disappointed one of them haven't gotten back to me yet as I used to write for them and I still have my email with them so I know they got it, but what're gonna do, it's also true I was the one when I wrote back there that used to tackle more the obscure indie horror games.

Going better than expected still, but it definitely becomes a tortoise 'slow and steady' race after the first few days and have to push harder to inform people, though getting to 67% into cracking the top 100 in a week is not bad, especially for a game that isn't graphically impressive and a bit part of the appeal comes from the pacing and slow-burning creepiness.

See how it does in the next couple weeks and see if any effect by the people who decide to tackle Close Your Eyes on their YouTube channel/game website.
 

titch

Member
Looks like many games got removed. :(

[13510] Removed store name – Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter® 2
[13640] Removed store name – Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter®


F-1/Ramayana subs are in store, so could be mistake.

Awe no i wanted to pick them up hopefully during the summer sale :(
 

Kuroyume

Banned
Nice to hear that, at least it wasnt for nothing.
while im at it, i could just aswell free my steaminventory from useless games i guess.



I hope i got it right with the gifting-links.



I did it too, on Nuuvem. I hope JaseC is right.

Is that Shadow Warrior 97 or the new one?
 

lashman

Steam-GAF's Official Ambassador to Gaming-GAF
Looks like many games got removed. :(

[44310] Removed store name – F1 2010™

F-1/Ramayana subs are in store, so could be mistake.

in case anyone wants to grab F1 2010 for some reason - it's still available in most stores
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
F-1/Ramayana subs are in store, so could be mistake.

There's four-page thread on Ramayana's hub filled with accusations of asset stealing. Valve's usually good about removing pages and subs, though, plus the dev still has his tag, so he may be pulled it voluntarily until he's replaced the offending content.

F-1 Drive is still up on Desura but is freeware versus the Steam version's $1 price tag, which may explain its disappearance (i.e. it'll have a store page again when a FoD sub has been set up).
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
Steam should be a bro and put "This is what you loss for buying this as bundle, you dimwit:" to replace "This is what you save for buying this bundle:".

Sounds like we've found the basis of a more robust "Valve is evil" hypothesis!
 

Dusk Golem

A 21st Century Rockefeller
Maybe I should do a post about some recent horror games that have come out that have been very good. Some I've played recently have been surprisingly great.

There's also a few interesting ones about to release that are right around the corner, such as Kholat, which is an insanely pretty indie horror game coming out in a week that also features music by Silent Hill's Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, and Sean Bean (probably best known as Boromir in Lord of the Rings) voicing the main character. It holds promise, and is based off of the Dyatlov Pass Incident.
 

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
Has anyone backed the KS game Last Life? If you have, would you mind posting the current Backers Only update here or PMing me? The dev hasn't updated for a few months and came back with a Backers Only update, and this is often a sign of a post that's going to read "I'm sorry. Development is hard. I had no idea it was this hard. I'm out of money. Well byyyyyeeeee..." I don't really have much interest in the game personally but I'm trying to update the KS tracking list. Thanks for your help.
 
game is not that good?

It has some really cool artistic design. The environments are pretty and the music is fantastically done. The metroidvania aspects are done mostly right too. Mostly.

But it's got a fair share of problems as well.:
Combat is a bit wonky; I can't put my finger on why, exactly, but some of the enemy design/AI combined with player movement leads to a lot of getting hit and taking damage if you're not playing exceedingly carefully and it feels unfair because damage taken from some of the enemies is in the ridiculous zone. You don't have any sort of defense against this either, other than to try to power up your own normal attack through ability points as the one ability that raises your defense is the last ability in the purple tree. Also, there's some of the wonkiness from a few of the ability designs (most of all: the dash mechanic that you use to shoot projectiles at things).

Map design, while satisfying when you finally have all your traversal and attack abilities for full exploration, has a bunch of areas that are one-time only. I didn't know this until after the first area was closed off to me and I couldn't return to it. There are a few factors that offset this, such as the patch that added the ability to access your last 5 saves, so if you catch your mistake early, you can still fully explore, but again, I didn't realize this was a feature until long after I was done with many of the 4 or so sections that had missable items/exploration. The feature does come in handy though.

Speaking about the save system, due to the way life recovery works and the design of the save mechanic, the 5 slots may not be enough in some cases. There are abilities which cause you to heal 1-2 points of life when you create a save point and enemy health drops are very rare, so there are times when I had to save spam to get my life back up to try not to die another 50 times trying a section.

But by far, the worst thing about the game is that it's chock full of frustrating trial-and-error chase/escape sequences. I don't know what to say about them, other than they drag the whole experience down a notch or two. As a friend of mine said, "I loved Ori, but if I were a professional reviewer, I would have knocked a few points off the score for the chase sequences for sure."

So it's solid and a good time when you're not encountering some of the more annoying/frustrating things inherent in the design.
 

hohoXD123

Member
Has anyone backed the KS game Last Life? If you have, would you mind posting the current Backers Only update here or PMing me? The dev hasn't updated for a few months and came back with a Backers Only update, and this is often a sign of a post that's going to read "I'm sorry. Development is hard. I had no idea it was this hard. I'm out of money. Well byyyyyeeeee..." I don't really have much interest in the game personally but I'm trying to update the KS tracking list. Thanks for your help.

Yeah sure, let me check it.

Edit:

Update 14

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Hello to all our friends and backers.

This is J.F., Sam’s co-writer on LAST LIFE and also mystery author & mystery writing instructor. I thought I’d write to you while Sam is still deep in calculus (shout out to @ndef for coming to the rescue on twitter)—creating a new custom tool for Unity to swoop the camera through our MarsTopia environs.

The game is playable from start to finish, and now we’re iterating and polishing to make sure it really shines for you. We’re jazzed because that little indie game we humbly set out to produce with all your help and this crazy cinematic noir mystery game that's now emerging are really galaxies of quality apart.


Following below is a fuller update for those who want to read about our process and the breakthroughs that have helped move us forward. But if you don’t have time, please just read one more paragraph:

LAST LIFE: Episode 1 is in the final production phase. We have extended our projected ship date to early 2016, with the advice of Double Fine, who suggested that time for our game’s release. We hope you all understand that we need to be absolutely sure this is the finest game we can possibly make. If it takes a little more time, please bear with us: we may need to take it. Thank you so much for giving all of us this chance.

So at this point, I suggest you grab a beverage of choice and read on.

ANIMATION BREAK-THROUGHS

Here’s a glimpse at how we have evolved. The LAST LIFE team is small, so Sam is always on the lookout for ways to introduce new tech to our process. If there is a better system to push the game’s look, sound, or user interface to a higher level, and also streamlines our production, we’re on board. Here’s just one decision we’ve recently made to let you in on the way we work and what is inspiring us to improve our animation capabilities right now.


In LAST LIFE, we’ve consciously mixed our abstracted character art with realistic human movements. For several years, great motion-capture style animation has been available to the larger studios, but we were curious to explore how close we as indies (read: tight budget, tighter manpower) could get to achieving similar results to studios with huge animation staffs.

When starting this project, we were excited to discover the amazing mo-cap library at Mixamo, and have used these motions exclusively in our prototype animation sequences. We are really grateful for the professional look we’ve achieved using these high level animation tools.

But then our custom animation needs grew to support all the dialogue that's in the game. Then Sam explored new tools, which use the Kinect 2 to record mo-cap data and output custom animations for our characters. So here we go! He recently completed a one-man mo-cap test that delivered amazing results in naturalistic motions. A trip or two to the hardware emporium, a few hard-hats and gloves, plus some PS Move controllers, duct tape, and a game design intern with a great spirit of adventure and we were on our way. Our new capacity to generate custom animation as-needed allows all of Jack Parker and friends’ actions to be acted by professionals. Exciting times.

VOICE-OVER ACTING

We finished recording a portion of the final VO and we are blown away with the talent and generosity of two of our fine actors. Jack Parker is voiced by Adam Howard--and this guy could probably breathe believable noir life into a fairy tale reading. Instead, we gave him a tense, gritty script and his voice sounds as world-weary (Mars-weary?) as a newly reprinted detective can sound. In addition, we’ve added actor P.J. Ochlan to our cast. We’ll keep his role under wraps for now, but P.J.’s voice can do anything. He is simply extraordinary. We can’t wait for you to hear them.

THE TEAM

Since our Character Artist lives in Brazil and our Sound Designer is moving to Portland, we’ve bonded using the online tool Slack, a private work board that allows our music composer The Tone Ranger to post his latest tracks and, as he’s also our project manager, to keep an updated production schedule posted. We have all enjoyed the support and enthusiasm as we dive deeper into completion. Here are a few words they wanted to share with you...

JACOB

“Hello! I’m Jacob Pernell, the sound designer for Last Life! Recently, I’ve been talking with the rest of the team and am really trying to hone in on the sonic aesthetic of the world of Marstopia. We want the sounds of everything in this world to feel grounded, but of course represent technology that would exist in the future on another planet. Finding that balance has required a bit of experimentation, but we’re excited about the direction some of the sound ideas are headed! In a future update, I’ll give some specific examples of some of the sounds I’ve been working on, and can go into more detail about the concepts and design thinking that’s going into the sound design."

CHRIS

“Hi, I’m the Tone Ranger. Over the past year, I’ve created a variety of original compositions for Last Life, from tense and creepy atmospheric pieces to the iconic neo-noir vibe of Parker’s Theme. That piece is an unexpected mash-up of styles, using a spaghetti western-style guitar rhythm mixed with a moody noir jazz trumpet. To illustrate, here are three iterations of Parker’s Theme, showing the sequence of development from the core musical idea on my solo electric guitar to a fully orchestrated rendition with trumpet, vibes, lead guitar, and more.”


PRESS

Thanks to backer Wayne Sung for pointing out that LAST LIFE was included in Game Informer’s recent list of 15 Exciting Adventure Games to keep on your radar. We look forward to playing so many of the games on that list, and it’s an honor to be included. It’s comments like these that make our work on our game all the sweeter.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/featu...ng-adventure-games-to-keep-on-your-radar.aspx

RECAP

All in all, it has been a brilliantly packed year of dev work, redesign, world building, script polishing, animation, character imagining, programming, story-boarding, animatic-rendering, lighting, rigging, composing original music, sound effects generating, organizing, VO recording, directing, and more.

We now have a deeply imagined world of 2084, one that is detailed and very specific: As one of the remaining colonies of Earth with human life, MarsTopia was built as a destination theme park and resort complex, which has now been converted to house a population of thousands of stranded visitors who cannot return to Earth. As we have built this dazzling and detailed world, with spaces to explore and items to discover, and we’re excited to present our story that centers on Jack Parker’s murder investigation.

We believe this level of execution will invite players to explore the streets of MarsTopia along with Jack. And we’re so happy you are on this journey with us.

ALL OUR THANKS!

- Jerrilyn Farmer, along with Sam, Chris, Jacob, Rodrigo, Austin, Adam and P.J.
 
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