The Elephant-sized Obeliskian in the Room

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by Unforked, Jan 9, 2017.

  1. Kaidelong

    Kaidelong Member

    Yep, nothing's happened until it has happened. I'll wait until summer before coming to any conclusions.
     
  2. There's no official word, but the anecdotal stuff isn't looking promising at all. The guys aren't in complete seclusion, they're being active on Twitter and such, they've just stopped coming here or talking about Gaslamp or CE it seems. Daynab is gone, Moomanibe answered a tweet asking if things were better now that CE was released with "Uh...well...I'm not employed at Gaslamp anymore." The only even remotely "official" word we've seen at all has been from people who are no longer working with the company.
     
  3. Unforked

    Unforked Member

    I have no expectations at this point. I'm guessing they must not be legally allowed to discuss the game or the company for some reason, at least for an unknown amount of time. Because I seriously doubt they'd willfully keep everyone in the dark for this long otherwise... even the most vague "Hey we know you're waiting, we'll let you know what's up when we can!" type of comment.
     
  4. Naffarin

    Naffarin Bureaucrat-Inspector Exemplar of The Empire

    Well, the other point of view would be that they are deliberately not issuing any statement to get as much sales as they can because once they say that the support is discontinued sales figures would plummet even more.
    I really think that the whole thing is just based on money shortage. Since all of the employees don't work anymore with gaslamp only the founders are left and according to the twitter feeds they are just doing other things.
    Indie game developers have to pay for their living cost too, so i could absolutely accept such behaviour...
     
  5. Unforked

    Unforked Member

    That's fair, I certainly wish them the best and hope they can continue to get what they can from the game for as long as possible (I still think it's a damn fine game despite its issues), I'm just not sure how that prevents them from at least throwing us a non-committal remark or two.

    I mean, now I'm wondering if the website will just suddenly shut down.
     
  6. Kaidelong

    Kaidelong Member

    Wait a second. If that was the motivation, why not keep up contact so that people don't start thinking support has been dropped? There's also a largely-finished patch ready to be pushed that they could put out to help reassure people otherwise. It would surprise me if that was the reason.
     
  7. Naffarin

    Naffarin Bureaucrat-Inspector Exemplar of The Empire

    If you want to keep contact wouldn't it be a good idea to keep the community manager in the team ?

    You don't actually need to reassure people, they will stay for quite some time hoping for something to appear until the last of them silently faded away.
    About the largely finished patch...where do you get that impression ? There are some bugs mentioned to be fixed for 1.0e but this doesn't mean that the build has been completed, internal testsuites have run, the acceptance tests were successfully completed and the build was delivered to the steam platform (on windows and mac os).
    A software development cycle contains a whole lot more things than just fixing code and those things take time. Time that one is not necessarily willing to invest if the return on invest is small to non existant...(at least i wouldn't do for the few people still posting here :) ).
     
  8. Wolg

    Wolg Member

    Daynab's departure announcement was pretty vague about why it was happening...
     
  9. Naffarin

    Naffarin Bureaucrat-Inspector Exemplar of The Empire

    Yes, of course he may have left on his own accord...but if i also take moomanibe's twitter feed into account where he mentions being unemployed in twitter responses where he also talks about a big employment layoff in 2014 at gaslmamp games (and also mentioning that he no longer works for gaslamp) it doesn't seem likely to me. But frankly admitted, everything i posted is all assumptions based on what is available on the internet.
    And hopefully i am completely and utterly wrong.
     
  10. Jarardo

    Jarardo Member

    Thanks for posting this thread. The team was so passionate about CE it makes it seem like some legal issue is barring any communication.

    I had a TON of fun with lots of playthroughs in various incarnations of UI, gameplay, optimization, content etc. So whatever happened/happens, I understand their idea was ambitious. /salute
     
  11. Kaidelong

    Kaidelong Member

    I was talking about 1.0D, not 1.0E. That said:

    My general impression from the past is that the only two important steps taken tend to be "get it to build" and "acceptance testing", where "acceptance testing" is "release it, maybe on the beta branch on steam if we're feeling merciful today". That seemed to be the approach taken to Dungeons of Dredmor as well. While I'm sure it's not quite that bad, I still half expect Nicholas to pop up here with a post just saying "Internal test suites?".

    I mean I'm not saying you're wrong, just I doubt that's the sole reason. If there is an intentional quiet spell, I'm going to chalk it up to legal trouble being part of the mix, particularly since they've mentioned trouble with a contractor that was porting the game to Linux.
     
  12. Rentahamster

    Rentahamster Member

    So, uh, what happened here?

    (I've been traveling abroad)
     
  13. Unforked

    Unforked Member

    Not much more to say I'm afraid, I think we've exhausted all reasonable speculation. I still believe a legal issue may be keeping them silent. In any case, things don't appear to be looking good for the future of the game or Gaslamp, but I hope for everyone's future success no matter what's going on.

    Hopefully we'll get a concrete answer... eventually.
     
    Rentahamster likes this.
  14. Naffarin

    Naffarin Bureaucrat-Inspector Exemplar of The Empire

    Well Nicholas no longer quotes being cto of gaslamp games on his twitter profile, David's doesn't show Gaslamp Games at all on his profile (though i am not sure he did).
    So i'll assume this as the concrete answer that everyone is waiting for.

    I'll take this opportunity to say goodbye to all of you. It was a pleasure to be part of this community. Best wishes to all of you :)
     
    Kazeto, PeterH and Cthulhu_Awaits like this.
  15. Unforked

    Unforked Member

    His new profile tag: "I made games once, it was awful."

    That kind of hammers it home as well.

    I'm still probably going to keep checking this forum every day out of habit, until it either dies or gets overrun.

    But if there's no reason to talk anymore, goodbye all, it's been a blast bugfinding/colonizing/suggesting/feature dreaming/joking with you. I will certainly miss this community! :(:skull::cannibalism:
     
    Last edited: Jan 24, 2017
    Rentahamster and PeterH like this.
  16. Toddland

    Toddland Member

    Kazeto likes this.
  17. I was hoping for a sort of legal issue somewhere, but it seems that Gaslamp Games is running out of its light. I really love C.E, I played it over 250 hours, and I still think it's a cool game, despite its issues. I'll keep checking for updates, but I think I'll simply get a 404 someday, without warning.

    I just hope to be wrong, and someone at least posts some explanations.
     
    Kazeto and PeterH like this.
  18. Geoffrey

    Geoffrey Member

    I would have settled for "stable enough to be playable past midgame". I know supporting multiple platforms is work, but if you're going to take money for a Mac version, maybe put in the effort to deliver something that works on Mac before wading into experimental extra content :-/
     
  19. DaCrAzYmOfO

    DaCrAzYmOfO Member

  20. Maxumym

    Maxumym Member

    So is it safe to say the game is done for at this point?