Others Completed Future Fragments [v1.0.1] [HentaiWriter]

[sirretinee]

I just... does the team talk to eachother? At all?
How on God's good green Earth do you announce a demo will be releasing within 24 hours, and then somehow end up taking almost two weeks now to release it?

Like, surely this was a thing they all planned to release, not just something HW decided on a Sunday. Surely they talked about and worked on the demo before the announcement. Surely they played the demo before announcing it'd be releasing to find issues. What kind of bug do you discover in the 24 hours leading up to a release like this that takes you almost two weeks, so far, to fix?

It's just so hard to take this at face value; so difficult to believe they actually, genuinely, ran into a critical demo-obliterating bug, instead of it just being more of The Future Fragments Experience™


Also, to piggyback off my previous comment:

They should've announced a demo Soon™ on Thursday/Friday, at least then we'd be too busy playing Armored Core to notice if the release was delayed or not.

It took me less time to 100% Armored Core 6 than it did for them to release the 'demo in 24 hours', so I guess my original point is moot. Maybe they can release it before we finish Starfield?

 

[Xmire]

I wonder if this game would have been received differently if he went down the Subverse approach; that being release the first stage of the game and then release updates every 6 or so months.

It depends on how much new stuff he would release per 6 months. Subverse is basically a kinetic novel with 3D avatars so most of the content you would expect from that game is in the form of story and lewd scenes. I only tried first 2 updates and although there were some chunks of new plot there, it wasn't very interesting because 95% of that was silly penis jokes, and the lewd scenes... well, not a lot of them were added. But still you can download the update and see Studio FOW actually doing something (not what everyone expected them to do though). Also another point: they don't announce a release date just to delay it by 3 months 10 times in a row. As for Future Fragments - there is no full game, you can't tell whether the dev actually working on it. And the dev did everything to make himself look completely unreliable.

 

[AngrySpergMarine]

I still don't get HentaiWriter. Was he just a compulsive liar, or did he intend to slowly move the goal posts forever?

First project for an indie dev and everything that could cause issues has occurred. HentaiWriter doesn't appear to be the one coding so he really doesn't know how long anything will take to be finished initially. The first programmer, Cheshire, doesn't live anywhere near HentaiWriter and 9 months into development they changed engines (their own original engine, yeah that won't cause delays) and started looking for new programmers when that caused obvious issues which tells me they have no idea what they're doing. 2 years later, they're still working on basic parts of the engine like a cutscene editor and lighting. Overambitious to implement branching/conditional story in your first game not to mention fully voiced dialogue. If this was a VN that would be fine, but this is on top of a platformer. They decided to build everything from scratch and they started collecting money before the tools were even useable. In 2018 they release a public vertical slice, the electric level we're familiar with, but since then they seem to have a nightmare of a time with bugs from their engine. Even with all that and a small team, a game of this scale taking 3+ years after a vertical slice is not normal.

EDIT: HentaiWriter let me know Triangulatepixels did all the CG. He's also compared his game to Skyrim. I wasn't expecting that.

Also, the "vertical slice" took us 2 years, so multiply that by 5 levels and you have an idea of why it took so long.
...since we already have more NPCs, dialogue, cutscene variants, and endings than it does.
...But it's the game we wanted to make, and so we made it. It'll be out in 2023.

It's worth mentioning Bethesda is famous for overpromising but even they are very cautious about changing game engines because they can't justify the learning curve and time investment. The same Creation Engine for Skyrim is still being used for Starfield today.

 

[Gregor_Samsa]

First project for an indie dev and everything that could cause issues has occurred. HentaiWriter doesn't appear to be the one coding so he really doesn't know how long anything will take to be finished initially. The first programmer, Cheshire, doesn't live anywhere near HentaiWriter and 9 months into development they changed engines (their own original engine, yeah that won't cause delays) and started looking for new programmers when that caused obvious issues which tells me they have no idea what they're doing. 2 years later, they're still working on basic parts of the engine like a cutscene editor and lighting. Overambitious to implement branching/conditional story in your first game not to mention fully voiced dialogue. If this was a VN that would be fine, but this is on top of a platformer. They decided to build everything from scratch and they started collecting money before the tools were even useable. It looks like all the CG was done on commission which can work but is usually very slow. Huge financial support despite a paucity of playable content which encourages the feature creep and never releasing. Lack of experience and track record leads to overpromising and a thin skin. From the very beginning many of the updates were regarding payments and complaining about feedback. In 2018 they release a public vertical slice, the electric level we're familiar with, but since then they seem to have a nightmare of a time with bugs from their engine. Even with all that and a small team, a game of this scale taking 3+ years after a vertical slice is not normal.

To back up what you said about having issues with bugs, Hentaiwriter recently put up a detailed list of every bug that needs to be fixed before they can release the demo and while some are just visual others are absolutely crippling. A demo released containing these would be unplayable for some.

 

[Rixen]

To back up what you said about having issues with bugs, Hentaiwriter recently put up a detailed list of every bug that needs to be fixed before they can release the demo and while some are just visual others are absolutely crippling. A demo released containing these would be unplayable for some.

And all that trouble about releasing one single level despite the fact that the full game is supposed to release before the end of the year.

 

[Noble 6]

What kind of bug do you discover in the 24 hours leading up to a release like this that takes you almost two weeks, so far, to fix?

It's just so hard to take this at face value; so difficult to believe they actually, genuinely, ran into a critical demo-obliterating bug, instead of it just being more of The Future Fragments Experience™

I hadn't been getting "A new post was made" alerts for this thread for months apparently, so yesterday I just read everything from my last non-deleted posts until now. And back then, I said:

And (since these are bi-weekly) the pace seems to be about 5 scenes implemented a week. Assuming no other hiccups or delays, and the pace is kept the same, it would ideally be ready for release in about 11 weeks, which would be the end of July.

That was in May, and projecting two months out into July. We're now two months beyond July, and it's still nowhere near done.
I don't understand how this was projected to release in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, or 2022 if it still supposedly has these kinds of bugs.

We've even had demos before, even of this specific level after it got its big rework. What could possibly be new that causes a "demo-obliterating bug?"

 

[Xeline]

Other than the hundreds of cutscene variants? Over twenty new NPCs? Map Edits? A lot of unprecedented bugfixes alongside engine improvements, new added scenes, new music and sound implementations? Engine improvements? HW has been pretty transparent with what their very small team has been handling here.

 

[lraas]

We've even had demos before, even of this specific level after it got its big rework. What could possibly be new that causes a "demo-obliterating bug?"

HentaiWriter posted a list of some "programming related bugs" on the discord if you wanna take a look, most of them don't really seem to affect the fire level at all, and the ones that do don't seem to be so bad that it warrants delaying the demo any further in my opinion. Really don't understand the rationale behind wanting to release a perfect bugfree flawless demo when the main criticism is "we have no idea what youve been working on and would like to see some progress." If there is no progress: Also don't understand the rationale behind saying a demo is gonna be out within 24 hours and then going weeks without releasing it. It's just. so. weird. to. me.

 

[iamnuff]

They sent it to the testers and they are squashing bugs nonstop

Wait, HW said "The demo will be out in 24h" and THEN sent it to testers who've been bugtesting for... like a week or longer two weeks by this point?

Fucking hell. He really can't help himself, can he?
I can't tell if he just gets overexcited and overpromises, or if he actually has no idea how far the project actually is along development.
Like... HW is the writer and community manager, right? Does he even gamedev at all?

It's the same as when he posted here that it'd been submitted to steam and he expected it to go through within the week, only to later reveal like 100 cutscenes weren't done, the game didn't have an ending and half of the dialogue wasn't voiced.

It's not even a case of "Just put it out already."
Rather, it's a case of "Stop telling us it's done when it clearly isn't."

From what it says in there they're almost done with it.

They've been saying 'This is the final delay, no really, I mean it.' for literally 5 years.

Take that with a grain of salt.

 

[AngrySpergMarine]

Other than the hundreds of cutscene variants? Over twenty new NPCs? Map Edits? A lot of unprecedented bugfixes alongside engine improvements, new added scenes, new music and sound implementations? Engine improvements? HW has been pretty transparent with what their very small team has been handling here.

Sounds like it was a really bad idea for a first time game developer with no programming experience to create his own game engine.

 

[OmniFurious]

Why do you people invest so much time worrying about a game that you want to see fail so badly?

 

[ThatWeirdGuyWithaWeirdHat]

I doubt it's incompetence.

He has admitted multiple times that it is, in fact, incompetence. HW has, or at least had, no sense of time when it comes to game development. Thus he would constantly overestimate release date schedules and then have to delay that release date every single time because he couldn't meet them.

This isn't a Cyberpunk situation where they wanted to make the game perfect and kept delaying it. This is a foolish game dev who vastly and consistently underestimated the amount of time and money he needed, burning all of his good will with a lot of his audience while he was at it.

 

[dronehero]

Delays happen. Its understandable. Its the fact that the dev is collecting money monthly from his patreon on top of making false promises.

I just feel bad for the people who gave the dev money in the hopes they would have a game released long ago but are still paying up though I suppose its their choice that they are paying the dev for nothing.

 

[sirretinee]

Why do you people invest so much time worrying about a game that you want to see fail so badly?

If your takeaway from the past few pages is "People want to see this game fail badly" and not "People want the dev to release something when they say they will, just once. One time. Just one." then i'd like to ask you to re-read them again.

A lot of the big talkers here negatively talking about HW are jaded ex-patrons, myself included. We've been around long enough for that glimmer of "This game looks cool as hell!" to fade away. At one point we were so happy to see the game cross that finish line, to be able to play an outstanding game in the adult game genre. However the goalposts have moved time and time again, the runner is exhausted, and now it feels like FF is going to trip and fall over that finish line, covered in its own shit, and then vomit all over the place. What should've been an exciting release for a bunch of us has turned into something that just needs to be gotten over with, and that fucking sucks.

 

[Siphonapteron]

I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the fact that you can't even check the status reports on Patreon without giving them even more money is really a bad sign.

 

[lraas]

I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the fact that you can't even check the status reports on Patreon without giving them even more money is really a bad sign.

You can see them on itch.io or discord with no problem. They used to upload them here as well but have stopped with that a while ago when the thread got freezermanned

 

[Bulbanych]

You can see them on itch.io or discord with no problem. They used to upload them here as well but have stopped with that a while ago when the thread got freezermanned

I still find it funny that HW stopped uploading progress reports here (mostly likely because he'll be outnumbered), yet he still continues to send walls of text to people in DMs if they ask something.

 

[Smaild]

I haven't played this game in years. What happened? Was it finally released, or is it in the limbo of never ending games?

 

[Bulbanych]

I haven't played this game in years. What happened? Was it finally released, or is it in the limbo of never ending games?

Gonna copy my comment from August 28: "Still in development. People that are watching the dev's progress reports estimate that the game should come out in 2-3 months, unless another delay happens...".

 

[Noble 6]

I haven't played this game in years. What happened? Was it finally released, or is it in the limbo of never ending games?

I hear that, if it doesn't release by Christmas 2021, it's free.