Update on the THD.VG story + Patch estimates for KAG

Haha, more info in a while perhaps, we're still working out the specifics. The general idea is a trench war game with a focus on cooperative play and a lot of humour.
This has been the THD game project @Furai has been involved in the development of, which has been fun - we're maybe 30% of the way along with it though.

We might post some gifs of it to the kag devblog but we really want to move over to a more centralised "THD Dev" site where people can follow and discuss everything, which might or might not include kag forum migration there - as you can imagine that's quite a big job that involves careful planning, so we're spending most of our time on development at the moment.

 

While I agree completely about the length of the domain, we're not planning on using it as anything other than a last resort for name preservation. It'll redirect to whatever we choose as our core domain.

Literally nothing has been done other than register it and point it to an old server. The site there is 2007-8 content.

Some might consider SEO suggestions both premature and grubby :^)

While SEO is important, we're well aware of what needs to be done and cable of doing that on our own (off hand evidence : kag2d.com is top result for all the searches we care for). Sorry for not responding particularly cheerfully to your surely well meaning post, it's just very strongly reminiscent of cold spam we get on weekly basis.

Re: Soldat + KAG mashup
You might want to look into storm 2d for something more Soldat like. We're currently leaning more for a lo-fi feel with this trench wars game (though taking inspiration from Soldat's trench wars mode) so that we can get it done quickly and so that it's maximally education (rather than confusing) for Lucas /Furai.

Off topic: posting on these forums from a phone is usability hell!

 

Ah Trench Wars, good old memories... Leo's servers, eC, DO. That was to me like the golden age of Soldat.

 

Hey, Once you get thd.vg (or the new domain name) online again, please make sure to create a new place which makes sense for people to visit. The old site didn't change in years and there was nothing on it which would make a re-visit worthful for players.

As a management tip: It would be good to have all THD - Games major news posted there (KAG,Soldat,Storm2D,Transmigration), so that existing players will immidiatly take notice about your new games.
Just a place where you have all your stuff on, instead of having several sub-sites which are not related to your main site in any way. (catridge, your flash/java?! games, and whatnot)
Since there is WordPress, that can be done in just a few minutes!

PS: What's the plan about KAG now? I didn't follow KAG too much recently, so what's the futures plan? KAG Beta, is the beta according to the name, so I guess you will make KAG 1.0 / or KAG now?
The latest posts have all been made by Geti, so is MM not involved too much in the KAG-development any more?

 

@darDar: to be clear (I've talked about this in IRC but not too much here), we are planning on consolidating like you've said, with a main THD site. We're actually tossing up the branding side of things at the moment (mainly debating the name THD), because a lot of people don't really know what THD is, recognise the name or anything, but obviously we have some attachment to it. We hope to be able to consolidate forums as well, with general discussion/offtopic boards and per-game discussion boards as well. Hopefully we'll be able to trim some of the "crap" boards away as that happens (suggestions being the main one that springs to mind, haha). That's going to be a big job, which is why we haven't made the move on it yet. I'm glad to hear you think it's a good idea though.

We'll still likely have landing pages for games like the kag2d.com main site (hopefully a little cleaner than that, but gives you an idea) because it's good to have something to point people to

Re: "What about KAG?" KAG "beta" hasn't been beta for quite a while (we consider the steam release "KAG Release"), though it still installs itself from the site installer that way because the installers haven't been able to be updated due to Tom/Shad being afk due to exams and other personal commitments for quite some time. The naming of KAG stuff is a pain (as @BlueLuigi has commented on recently). We're still patching KAG things as they need to be patched (for example hopefully after my exam this week I'll get the changes mentioned in this post through testing and out by Friday, but it's going to be tight), however it's mainly maintenance work. We have a few larger patches that we'd like to make, but the waning community presence and our finite resources have prevented us from making them, which might be for the best. If we get a big patch together further down the line we can probably afford to make more of a fuss about it!

Re: "Other Games" MM and I have worked on 5-7 (depending how you count) smaller prototypes since the steam release, and there are 3 other "divisions" of THD working on 4 other games (Soldat, Storm, Transmigration+The Butcher). The current plan is to finish this side project to get Lucas some development experience, and then polish the previous prototypes into a small bundle, and see what people think of each of them - perhaps taking a somewhat "democratic" approach to deciding what game we should focus on next.

Re: "MM?" MM doesn't interact with the community much but he's still involved; MM, Lucas/Furai and I are working on a standalone side project using the KAG engine, so he's still touching the codebase.

Re: "Storm is a soldat clone" - at the moment, it's basically soldat+liero. My personal hope is that they take it further than that and really tighten it up without constantly fighting bugs like the soldat guys have to do. It's a completely new engine coded by one guy, so it's a little rough around the edges but from all accounts is much nicer than the monstrous decade-old soldat pascal code, and 100s of times nicer to mod (javascript vs pascalscript, no need for binary patches for complicated mods). I have been very interested to see the variety of feedback they've gotten from soldat vets and new players; I agree that they should nail the basics before plowing ahead with hundreds of ramshackle features though, and should definitely adopt a more modern, less directly-copied-from-soldat HUD/font etc.

@Vampire yes we have people cold spam us about how they could totally help us with SEO for a few thousand dollars and it would of course help with market penetration advertising retention and all that bullshit, it's just templated spam: "hello transhuman", "hello king arthur's gold". It's maddening because it often gets through spam filters anyway, and they paste it in the KAG contact form.

I'll see if I can put together a summary post of this stuff for the blog at some point, as it seems like it's the kind of thing it would be good to clear up with the community at large. Interesting that some like @SeanAS have been oblivious to any side developments going on.

 

Thanks Geti for your large reply. I'm always getting confused about all THD related games since there is not that kind of a company page you are trying to build now yet. Since there was nothing about Transmigration on your mainsite i tried looking it up on google by searching for the keywoards : "Transmigration, Into, Darkness, Pearing" and I could barely find the official website for it, since all of those words are quite over-used in terms of SEO. I've talked to MM but he didn't think that it was a large problem and the game is in a too far progress to consider renaming it now (has also been in the press etc.)
I'm sure you guys know that by yourself but I would make sure to choose a unique game now the next time.
I'm really looking forward to see that new thd page and all of your new games + the sub-workers games (I just hope that the new company site will be done "in time", because that's really nothing which would require a lot of time to do)

Yeah, you should always have an own website for each game.

PS: It's pretty cool how you adopt Lucas into the coding part for the future :)
PS2: I didn't forget about the layout for the chat console suggestion, I'm just busy lately but since you are a pixel artist and a game dev, I'm sure that you kinda know what I was trying to do.

I wouldn't rely on those replys in any way since most of those people didn't even test the game for just a second and even if they did, that wouldn't be enough to rate a game. It seems to be a human habit to rate people / or whatever without looking any deeper into it.
Especially the soldat community is pretty... let's say.. "special". (I guess most of gaming communities are like that, it's not really a problem occurring on forums - I guess it's just the humanity.)

 

Trust me that I wasn't involved in Transmigration naming :^) I'm not very involved in that project, though it's looking fantastic other than the name imo.

Re: hope it happens soon - me too! I've got more time over the next month or so and will be pushing this along.
Re: chat console thing - I'll see what I can do, got a feeling we're going to need a misc options 2 tab soon enough, haha.

There's more constructive feedback on the storm forums and via twitter. Hilarious that people are saying "if it had soldat graphics" when a lot of it is soldat assets at the moment.

 

You missed the point of Geti's post Spidey.
It doesn't matter how many years those people have been supporting MM, as most of those post are useless for a developer. He asked for constructive feedback. Let's go through the posts:

• "lol"- The Punisher
  • Useless, doesn't give any useful info
• "I saw that before everyone else while I was looking for some mods... I didn't wanna say anything <new line> Here: <img>SHAKING MY FUCKING HEAD!" - Control
  • What part does he find bad? once again useless from a developing stand point
• "looks... strange" - Chopip
  • And again, What looks strange? Graphics, or what's happening at the time? useless
• "New generation of Soldat. If it will be created then probably most of players will leave Soldat. I'm just waiting impatiently for this game." - elMorvano
  • While it may be positive this time, its still useless. What does he like about?
• "GAAAAAAAAAAAY!" - RT da arkman
  • Probably don't need to explain why this is useless at this point
• "movement is way too goddamn stiff, some weapons look out-of-place, and I really cant see there being a 'competitive scene' with all the weapons, classes, and such. Would try it out some day again though... just not anytime soon" -toom
  • Finally an actual useful post for a dev. Sure it's negative, but at least he says why he feels that way and why he doesn't like it
• "Honestly dude... the game looks like total crap. It looks like someone tried to mod their gostek/guns for the first time in Soldat not knowing they had to make everything smaller than what was originally thought (I'm guilty of this D. I mean... look at this crap: <image>" - Control
  • Another useful post, same reason as the last one.
• "michael bay" - beradinho
  • Does he like the fact that there are a lot of explosions or hate it?
• "'quote from Control' Woah no shit, the game is in its alpha stage it'll take a long long time before it's ready and considering Soldat had a 10-year head start, this game is doing pretty well. also MM is apparently working on the game, too."
  • Another sort of positive yet useless post as far as constructive feedback goes.
• "if they added soldat graphics and inserted halo mods/whatever for particular classes(Also resizing weapons), it would probably be a decent game" - toom
  • somewhat useful, explain what he thinks would make it better
• "what a messy game" -DutchFlame
  • What about it is messy?
• "<quote from dusty> yea soldat had 10 year head start, but it doesnt mean that Storm2D devs should realse unfinished crappy version in fuckin 2014, its totally unplayable. Nothing new tbh and I hope they will leave it on alpha stage and not waste time on it." - Bune
  • Why is it crap? Why is it a waste of time?
• "dafaq did i just watch" - Aimless Arrow
  • useless
• "When I first heard of it I thought it was a fanmade spinoff of soldat etc. But to hear that MM seems to actively be involved in this is seriously heartbreaking. Kinda enraging." - Samwise
  • Still nothing useful from a dev's point of view
• "<Long ass post>" - Kenix
  • Lots of information on what he thinks will make it work better and what should be focused on
• "Wow... Waiting for Beta Funny thing is. They put Necromancer song Q_Q THAT'S ONLY FOR SOLDAT FUU" - Death-Knight
  • Why is he waiting for the beta?
• "the last thing you guys should do is bad-mouth this" - Tarrega
  • Defending the game, but still not Constructive
• "I suggested KAG + soldat mash up. It could be awesome. But this game looks so strange atm."
  • Why would it be awesome? What looks strange about it?

3 useful posts that have constructive criticism out of 18. That's why Geti said the Storm forums and Twitter were more useful. If those people explained why they feel the way they feel, then it'd actually be useful. Just saying something is bad or good is not useful.