Howdy, Stranger!
Can Someone Please Explain?
So, as a philosophy major, I saw this on the humble bundle page and I bought the alpha before doing any other research. This concept sounded unprecedented and AMAZING. I launched the game only to get very "buzzy" sounding music that cut in and out and a menu so tiny I couldn't read the options. I laughed it off.
'No problem!', I figured, 'it's an alpha game. The menu isn't that important. The content is probably better!' and I hit enter on the option that I assume was 'start'.
I don't understand. Did I click the wrong button? I am just a dot floating around particles and grappling from one speck to the next. I'm not a person, I'm not anything, I'm just a beam of light and a dot.
I suppose I could find it humourous if this was supposedly a metaphor for human insignificance, but I paid twenty dollars for this when I have paid five dollars for games that are beautiful and polished.
What am I supposed to be doing here? I'm playing an alpha based on a dot simulator. How can I provide any useful feedback on gameplay?
Comments
Hi @EmilyofShalott !
I'm sorry that you are having problems with our game.
Your menu shouldn't be so tiny...
Just to be sure, does the Alpha 91 on your PC look like this:
NOWHERE - Alpha - Sailing, Youtube
Could you send us your debug log to support[at]duangle[dot]com?
Currently the game doesn't have much content but the next alpha release in August will be better.
We can add you to the forum as a founder. This will give you access to the founders lounge and the release archive with all previous builds. Just email us your purchase notification from the Humble Store and we will add you as soon as possible.
Thank you!
Ah, okay! I understand if you just needed to get some sort of content out to show your plans for graphics and such! Excellent to hear. I'll consider increasing my donation amount as the alphas get better! I'm excited to witness your progress and I'm very satisfied to have some feedback from you, Slyvia! Thank you very much for your response. When I have time, I'll help your team track down this nasty bug. I'm very excited to be a funder in this project and I want the Nowhere team to know that this concept is simply thrilling!
If I may be so bold as to allow my questioning side to emerge, it seems that Nowhere has a planned release date of winter 2015. Given that there is about a year and a half of development left and this is the current progress of the game, taking into consideration that most games of this level of ambition require 3 years of development with a FULL production team, can you feel confident in that release date?
Hi Emily,
the alpha that's currently out is about five months old if I recall correctly; In the meantime I've been working on a dozen systems which supply the foundation of procedural audio and geometry to the game. They're going to be featured in the next release.
Progress shouldn't be linearly extrapolated, but exponentially; from that perspective, we're doing great - at least that's my estimation. Because we don't manufacture assets, but instead work on procedural generators, the initial setup effort is higher, but allows to produce a wide array of diverse expressions once it works, as individual systems coalesce.
As an example, compare the invention of 500 alien names to the engineering of an alien name generator that is supposed to provide a nearly endless number of variety. The manual work can provide results much sooner, but caps out at a maximum efficiency rate. Constructing an interesting name generator takes much longer, but is able to suddenly fabricate an endless stream of names without any additional manual effort.
Of course there are risks. XKCD has two cartoons on automation that appear to be relevant to this point here, a satirical one, and a more honest one.
I'm also continuously working on ways to multiply the expressiveness of a single artist working with such systems. Generators can be understood as individual modules that could be arranged in a visual programming environment. I'm currently building such an environment so we have more time to experiment with combinations. The tools will also be available to players, and are also hosted in an open source repository.