MAX MCGEE'S PROFILE

Sweet deal. I'll catch upon these soon. : )

RM2k3? This wasn't that advanced yet, this is vanilla RM2k.

Anyway I could totally have evented in a map. And probably should have.

Energy Suckers: I think you won a battle of attrition and they ran out of MP. Best strategy in that fight is probably to spam Flux (you made almost no effort to keep your Energy up, I noticed) or using Twitch to confuse one (of course I can't remember if they were actually susceptible to confusion). Upgrade also adds substantial hitting power to Carter's weapons.

"That's REFMAP"

This was absolutely from my fucking Graphical Consistency LOL how does it work stage.

"I'm just gonna keep quiet until the cutscene ends if you don't mind"

No problem by me, I haven't seen this cutscene in 8 years!!!!

Aether Nightwurm: You are correct, Flux is "Int" based and thus its damage is not increased by Upgrade. I hadn't even thought about that but I guess I coulda made that more clear, huh. It is so nuts that Carter is still barehanded at this point. You have traipsed past two or three weapons I think.

"This is what I don't like about many games..."

Man...me either, nowadays! Xenosaga did this to me the other day (I had to play for like TWO HOURS before it would let me save) and I was like "seriously motherfucker?". I didn't even realize that I had Xenosaga'd motherfuckers in Iron Gaia.

Starting 3:30: it's not Sigmus it's Carter I'm sure you know that by now since you're 5 videos deep. Yes I used different facesets for the same characters to try and show different emotions and angles. But the different faces actually came from different characters so yeah...it was a mad strange and awkward choice.

The 'download your menu' thing was an interesting choice that likewise I now find myself scratching my head about. I'm pretty sure it was inspired by MGS2. Iron Gaia's save system is weird. You do get save anywhere once you unlock the menu. Until then you get these portable save terminals that act like combination ink-ribbons and typewriters from Resident Evil. It's fucking weird.

You pronounced opaque correctly.

Armand Carter's date of birth was IIRC 2186 so he's actually 194 years younger than you XD.

Yes Jesus exists this is the real world just far in the future you probably know that by now too.

Iron Gaia is really full of self-conscious self-referential lampshade hanging. It is odd.

sorry mario but your princess is in another castle

STRAIGHT UP MARIO IS ONE OF THE THINGS YOU CAN GET OUT OF THAT STASIS CHAMBER ON NG+

It would be fascinating to see you LP IGV after LPing this. While maybe 20-35% of the problems carry over, overall it's 300-500% better. The amount I learned about game design between '02 and '06 is nuts.

I actually agree with you about random encounters. In IGV all encounters are at least potentially avoidable. All my games since 2008 have had on-touch encounters too.

I have no idea why your proggie crashed at the end, I don't think that was Iron Gaia's fault though.

It's cool. I'm actually happy with the reviews I've gotten and I can live with the LPs too.

The only circumstance under which public opinion would make me not finish the game is if I genuinely believed that the most visible reviews/LPs were actually

a) so screamingly negative
and
b) so unchallenged/uncontested

that they would actually dissuade most people from giving it a fair shake. I don't think we're anywhere remotely near that point thankfully. What we've got here is just someone who really, really did not like the length of the intro. Which is an understandable position to take.

So basically...we're good. I got a bit irate but I'm back on track now.

***

I've been thinking about changing the main, default battle music to something more subdued and less rocking. I really it like the way it is but a couple people now have had some issues with it rocking too hard for their delicate little eardrums :P.

it's a fight between good and evil, was that so hard, really?

nice job of missing the entire fucking point of the entire fucking game by a fucking mile.

***

Look, around here, I used to be pretty much a jerkass a lot of the time. I say used to be out of a probably unearned sense of optimism, lol. I would get super pissed at people who did not like my games. I came to regard this as bad behavior and I haven't indulged in it in literally years. I have just been repeating the mantra "not everybody is going to like everything that's good" and refusing to engage in those kinds of conversations for a while.

So yeah, it's been a while since I've had a rage bomb like this go off in my brain. And even now I'm struggling really hard to turn down the 'FUCK YOU GO DIE' dial that I've got from 11. But it's not going well. And the fact that my personal life is really...not awesome...right now is certainly not helping.

The overlong and complex lore/backstory infodump really ruins any changes of engagement. By the time the actual game arrives the player is too tired of the game to give it a chance. (more feeback in the video, but the infodump intro is really its biggest problem).

I disagree and so do at least some other people who have played it. But as far as the future course of the game goes, only the fact I disagree really matters here.

So let me talk about why I disagree. I mean, look, I will be blunt with you: this is only true when "the player" is hell bent on being a complete jerkass like you. It is not true for a general case "player" that is a normal fucking person.

Listen, I actually have a collegiate degree in creative writing (har har assholes). I have been paid thousands and thousands of dollars as a professional game designer. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DON'T GET ME WRONG, I am not saying this because it sanctifies everything I make and means I can do no wrong. It fucking doesn't. I am saying this simply to assure you of where I'm coming from when I say that I fully understand concepts like exposition, infodump, and the one you were grasping at towards the end of the video, the limited conceptual space of the audience. This is not my first rodeo and most of the last ten or twelve games or demos I have released have quite knowingly had a shorter introduction than Lionheart.

Many of them, in fact, have leaped directly into gameplay with almost no introduction. Certainly, the "introductory expository text crawl" is a tool I have, quite consciously, not taken out of the toolbox since about 2002. The reason for this is that I am thoroughly aware of all the broad, lowest common denominator, generally applicable advice of "get to the gameplay fast, people have short attention spans, etc".

Not every decision that might not be in keeping with the conventional wisdom or your particular taste is made out of ignorance or naivete, however. After considering many possible opening styles and approaches, I made a conscious stylistic decision to start the game the way I did. I chose to begin with a ponderous invocation of the lore, and I chose to do so based out of respect for the average player's intelligence, patience, curiosity, and conceptual space capacity and out of faith and trust in the actual quality of the writing to engage with the player.

This is, I guess to put it one way, a calculated risk. Respecting the intelligence of your audience is always a risk in creative ventures.

Some people are going to hate it. You, certainly, obviously, excessively, flagrantly, hated it to the point of vulgarity and obscenity. It seemed to me like you were pretty much deadset on hating it from the very start of the video, but whatever. In any case, I get it, it's fine.

Pick most commercial RPGs released between, say, 1997 and 2003 and they've got several times as much exposition as Lionheart. I'm not saying that that's a good thing or a bad thing or that it justifies any design decision. It's just a thing to think about. Based on your reaction to Lionheart I think that the amount of bullshit and waiting and bullshit and waiting that say, Xenosaga puts you through before you gain meaningful control over a character would be enough to make your head literally explode. Again, I am not generally a fan of long expository introductions, quite the opposite, in fact. But there are very few tools in the developer's toolbox that are "always bad" to use.

tl;dr I really like your accent but I find your seething, borderline psychopathic hatred of exposition, facts, proper nouns et al. to be more than a little baffling. It actually reached an unintentionally comic zenith where you were bitching about a character not having elf ears who in point of fact was not a fucking elf, as you would have known if you had not ragequit the process of basic reading comprehension prematurely.

Ok, you hate stories. That's fine. Please just play games without them from now on.

***

The long, (mostly) skippable intro could probably be recut and spliced back into the game at later points in favor of more of a shotgun start. I definitely agree that it could be tighter for a final version, but as someone who's hoping to playtest, I'm going to be the minority voice here and say I'd rather see more new content than editing at this juncture.

This was an extremely rough release. It is an imperfect, misshapen baby game. It is filled with rough edges that need to be sanded off before the shape of the thing underneath even begins to become visible.

A lot about it is imperfect and needs firming up and tweaking. However, one thing that's not going to change much, even when this goes commercial, is the basic narrative structure of the intro. I like it how it is and I think it's extremely well written and well handled and aesthetically beautiful. I am very satisfied with it. Other people might not like it, and that is fine. I will strive to be fine with that.

Please people, don't get me wrong. Generally speaking, my general case goal is to incorporate as much feedback from the community as possible to make this the most "perfect" game possible to reach the broadest audience possible. But there will be specific areas where I will stand my ground and say "no, I like it the way it is". The (skippable) intro is one of these. I'm not saying it will be EXACTLY like this in the finished version of the game, it will probably see minor changes. But it's not getting major work done either.

Grand Grimoire, Lionheart's sister game (no gamepage yet) will handle it's storytelling and worldbuilding very differently, and will in fact actually handle its lore in a much more Dark Souls like way. Lionheart uses a much more traditional storytelling approach.

*Warning/Notice: I swear and rant a lot by default, the tone is not aimed at the game in particular.