Unity Condemned [D0.2] [Dos Arracachas]

[MoreNow]

great so far but we need enemies and levels!

 

[palpet]

As someone who is looking into creating a h-game myself, I think a big part of the appeal is the simplicity for the dev. Most 2d sidescrollers pick between either being fully pixelart sprites - that is, the creator has to manually create each frame of every animation (think kurovadis). Or they go the spine/bone animation route with higher definition art- think Mission Mermaiden or Hachina.
Problem is, both of those require a good bit of artistic talent that I, and quite possibly a good few other prospective devs, simply don't have, and both routes also have large timesinks associated with them (manually creating sprite art for each frame of animation, creating detailed sprites to animate with bone animation).

The Captivity artstyle however, is simplistic enough that putting entities together is far faster and easier than the alternatives. You're using bone animation, so you don't have to manually make each frame of the animation, and the detail is low enough that creating the art to animate is relatively fast too. Especially if you're reusing body types - making a lot of humanoids, or canids, or whatever - at that point you're basically just reskinning old assets to get a new base model to animate, and can potentially reuse basic animations like walking too.

So the style is simple to learn, and fast to creat assest with, which makes it great for 1man bands or small teams, becasue you can churn out a fair bit of work in a small number of hours. The quality is pretty good too - one issue I have with smaller sprite-d games like Kurovadis is that the detail of the animations is often a little lacking due to the limitations of the low pixel count, but with the captivity style you've got a fair bit of detail to work with, and going by the popularity of the original people definitely like it.

So yeah, TLDR is that the Captivity style is decent looking yet very simple/fast to work with relative to alternatives, which works great for scaling up to larger rosters of enemies or multiple animations. Makes h-game development easier for amateurs like me who CBA to learn how to actually make art.

And yet, despite this simplicity, no game of its style besides Captivity has been finished yet.

 

[Azrail26232]

And yet, despite this simplicity, no game of its style besides Captivity has been finished yet.

I personally suspect that may well be a direct consequence of the simplicity, actually.
I think we can all agree that producing a full game is a long grind, and even getting to the level of a basic demo can take a lot of work.
By lowering the barrier of entry for prospective devs, that means that more attempts can reach that V0.1 initial release benchmark, but that still doesn't neccessarily mean that they have the planning, skill and above all persistance to bring it to the big 1.0 full release.

I'm sure a whole bunch of prospective devs give up before even releasing an initial demo, but by using a simpler format like Captivity, more people can get to the point where their project is visible to others, even if they still give up well before getting close to complete.
At the end of the day, its making a massive endevour somewhat easier, but is sure as hell isn't making it actually easy.

 

[SomeGuyNamedKi]

I personally suspect that may well be a direct consequence of the simplicity, actually.
I think we can all agree that producing a full game is a long grind, and even getting to the level of a basic demo can take a lot of work.
By lowering the barrier of entry for prospective devs, that means that more attempts can reach that V0.1 initial release benchmark, but that still doesn't neccessarily mean that they have the planning, skill and above all persistance to bring it to the big 1.0 full release.

I'm sure a whole bunch of prospective devs give up before even releasing an initial demo, but by using a simpler format like Captivity, more people can get to the point where their project is visible to others, even if they still give up well before getting close to complete.
At the end of the day, its making a massive endevour somewhat easier, but is sure as hell isn't making it actually easy.

None of this would be so bad if those devs didn't usually have a patreon set up ready to milk the crowds on day 1 of their v0.00001(alpha) release with no long-term plans beyond the first demo. If they dropped content updates that affected the demo weekly, or bi-weekly, or did something like have the first few demos be free so people could playtest them, they'd have significantly better intentions than the usual patreon shills. But we won't see any kind of content update until next month at the earliest.

If game devs want to try and fail at their first games that's fine, but these "pet projects" always seem to come at someone else's expense before anything is properly established. Even if they're just a solo game dev making something for fun to see what popularity it picks up it seems to always involve a subscription somewhere, and I just can't bring myself to trust these types to finish or even get halfway despite their monetary support being perfect motivation.

In particular though, I really don't trust this guy because he already has a second project he's working on. Yet another visual novel alongside art commissions. That's an awful lot of divided attention so how can anybody expect them to reliably work on the game and put out monthly updates in the long-term? Not to say they 100% will do this of course, but it'll be an extreme exception to the usual rule of patreon shill game devs.

 

[Azrail26232]

None of this would be so bad if those devs didn't usually have a patreon set up ready to milk the crowds on day 1 of their v0.00001(alpha) release with no long-term plans beyond the first demo. If they dropped content updates that affected the demo weekly, or bi-weekly, or did something like have the first few demos be free so people could playtest them, they'd have significantly better intentions than the usual patreon shills. But we won't see any kind of content update until next month at the earliest.

If game devs want to try and fail at their first games that's fine, but these "pet projects" always seem to come at someone else's expense before anything is properly established. Even if they're just a solo game dev making something for fun to see what popularity it picks up it seems to always involve a subscription somewhere, and I just can't bring myself to trust these types to finish or even get halfway despite their monetary support being perfect motivation.

In particular though, I really don't trust this guy because he already has a second project he's working on. Yet another visual novel alongside art commissions. That's an awful lot of divided attention so how can anybody expect them to reliably work on the game and put out monthly updates in the long-term? Not to say they 100% will do this of course, but it'll be an extreme exception to the usual rule of patreon shill game devs.

Oh believe me, I get it. I understand why it happens but that doesn't mean I agree with the extremes its come to nowadays. The amount some people earn for vapourware is obscene.

 

[Deathclawedin]

damn another one, i hope this one gets finished it looks good! (also add horse and dog enemies)

 

[Sesquipedalian]

Can anyone post any of the concept art and stuff from Patreon here? I don't have the extra money yet

 

[Nirr Herr]

Huh this thing is still on 0.1?

 

[Trashman94]

Lookin' forward to seeing more of this as it develops. Hopefully it doesn't gas out and die like so many others.

 

[NamelessHollow]

at this point we need a "Captivity" tag. and i would LOVE IT.

 

[bouioasduncoasd]

For those who are curious:

A demo was supposed to be released a few days ago
seems the next demo's been delayed to a "it's done when it's done" state.

Since they've posted for their other project recently (as in a few hours ago, at the time of writing)
The demo could be anywhere from a few days to a month away, maybe more.
*I'm left to assume a potential infinite deadline since they didn't clarify it in the post ("soon" is way too vague in this context)

So things may be quiet on this game for a while.

Will report back if I hear anything else of potential interest

 

[bouioasduncoasd]

View attachment 5164996
For those who are curious:

A demo was supposed to be released a few days ago
seems the next demo's been delayed to a "it's done when it's done" state.

Since they've posted for their other project recently (as in a few hours ago, at the time of writing)
The demo could be anywhere from a few days to a month away, maybe more.
*I'm left to assume a potential infinite deadline since they didn't clarify it in the post ("soon" is way too vague in this context)

So things may be quiet on this game for a while.

Will report back if I hear anything else of potential interest

Oh and to clarify, this was for the new Patreon-Exclusive Demo, with a public one supposed to be releasing later. Judging by the dialogue in the discord, the patreon demo hasn't released at all, let alone the public one that was originally gonna release (I think) sometime this week.


So yeahhhhhhh~

 

[bouioasduncoasd]

Oh and to clarify, this was for the new Patreon-Exclusive Demo, with a public one supposed to be releasing later. Judging by the dialogue in the discord, the patreon demo hasn't released at all, let alone the public one that was originally gonna release (I think) sometime this week.


So yeahhhhhhh~

Update from a dev working on the code for the project:

 

[Lemonsofliberty]

TBH I don't expect this to get an update

 

[roland_donald]

oh boy yet another captivity "successor" cant wait to see this get abandoned at v0.1 again

(dev if you're reading this please for the love of god BREAK THE STREAK ALREADY)

 

[bouioasduncoasd]

Patreon-locked update is out, Public version should be out next week.

 

[bouioasduncoasd]

View attachment 5222685 View attachment 5222688 View attachment 5222689 View attachment 5222690

Patreon-locked update is out, Public version should be out next week.

Also to note:
I'm in the Discord but given that I'm not a Patron at this time, I cannot see, let alone download, the Patreon-Timed-Exclusive content.

So either we'll need a hero or a week more of patience until its public release on itch.io

 

[bouioasduncoasd]

public version's out

 

[bouioasduncoasd]

now hold up

windows defender warning on both links.
Yes, both itch.io and opaimon. Checked it myself.

It may be a false flag but i'm waiting to see what the dev says or if anyone else here gets a red flag before downloading again.
(or if they can somehow grab a clean version without a seeming trojan)

this is the first time a captivity-like or similar H-Game set off these alarm bells in my PC so... yeah
gonna wait and see.

 

[bouioasduncoasd]

For comparison.
Did a quick scan on my PC and one of Trials in Tainted Space just to see if it was on my end.
*Also did a scan of another H-Game from itch.io, Hailey's Treasure Adventure, just to ensure it's not a weird itch.io thing

The warning only came from the zip/compressed folder of the Condemned game.

So be advised before unzipping it, it *MAY* have a trojan but good chance it's also a false flag.

Just be careful with this one.



Dev response:

now hold up
View attachment 5246678
windows defender warning on both links.
Yes, both itch.io and opaimon. Checked it myself.

It may be a false flag but i'm waiting to see what the dev says or if anyone else here gets a red flag before downloading again.
(or if they can somehow grab a clean version without a seeming trojan)

this is the first time a captivity-like or similar H-Game set off these alarm bells in my PC so... yeah
gonna wait and see.