Others Completed Future Fragments [v1.0.6] [HentaiWriter]

[Rezinschneider]

It's either dead or just 'eventually'.

Either way, very disappointing it had come to this.

 

[Themy19511]

I thought it was abandoned too but it seems like the devs give pretty frequent progress updates on steam. This is the most recent one:

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

 

[MasterXY]

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

I think we'll find out later this month or next month

I haven't followed this game closely at all since I played the demo 8 years ago or whatever. The whole thing about releasing a new demo rather than working on releasing the actual game tells you all you need to know. This game isn't coming out any time soon.

Nah I think its fine, we don't really have a proper trial demo for the game that isn't years old at this point and this needed to be done anyway. Wouldn't it be weird to have a trial for the game that takes place in the middle of the game? If his progress reports are to be believed he's just about done the fire level minus 1 cutscene, it'll be interesting to see whats been worked on in the last 2-3 years if nothing else.

Though all of that said, imagine my surprise when I heard about the demo right before I went on vacation thinking when I returned in a week I'd be able to to try it out, and here we are 2 weeks later lmao. Starting to feel bad for the dev they get so excited to announce they're almost done with something only to hilariously underestimate how much work is left to do.

 

[Noble 6]

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

The kerfuffle is that they've been saying this for years.
If you go back a few pages, you can find many links to official blogs and quotes that say things like "We're almost done, we'll send it off to Steam and have it up by the end of the month!" and the quote was from like two years ago.
It lead to many questions, as later things were revealed like the final boss still being nowhere done, or hundreds of scenes weren't in the game yet.
So nobody knew how it was near-complete years ago and almost ready for release back then, and everyone is pessimistic about it being said again this time.

 

[silver24240]

So nobody knew how it was near-complete years ago and almost ready for release back then, and everyone is pessimistic about it being said again this time.

From what I remember (granted this is from a while ago, which says something about how long this has taken lol) there's some issue with steam where they won't approve a game to be listed until requirements x y and z are fulfilled and the state of the game then didn't measure up. That's the likely reason why the progress towards it being released hinges pretty much on getting all those cutscenes finished or something. Now as to why the newest announced DEMO hasn't been released weeks later, who knows

 

[Noble 6]

there's some issue with steam where they won't approve a game to be listed until requirements x y and z are fulfilled and the state of the game then didn't measure up. That's the likely reason why the progress towards it being released hinges pretty much on getting all those cutscenes finished or something.

We only had one person's word on this, and that one person is known for saying things that end up being incorrect.
Even just thinking about it logically: Steam allows Early Access games all the time, as well as many blatantly-unfinished games in general.

I would sooner assume that what you and I were told was just not true.

 

[arkublai]

Like even if game will be released tommorow it wont live to expectations of 10 years of development. Fuck there are people who solo pulled fare more complex indie progects in far less time limit. And by the way how long since FINAL level enemies were showed with animations? 3 years ago? 4?

This is just money leeching at this point and few hundread guys with tons of copium and free money to donate to HackWriter.

 

[Rixen]

I'm gonna be honest, I feel lucky I discovered this game only a few months ago, because I didn't have to through that whole shitshow everyone's describing lmao

Then again, who knows, perhaps the game won't release this year either, so I'll know how that feels like

 

[Nildzre]

The full game is nearly done. Just saiyan

Yeah, well i've heard that one before... and not in the general kind of way but for this exact game.

 

[Xmire]

Edit: He PMed me lol. Guess he really doesn't have anything better to do.

Did he show you the spreadsheets? He loves his spreadsheets.

 

[arkublai]

I saw the face of god. He laughed at me.

 

[Zazazap]

I've been among the first people to support this project, I spent quite some money over time and really beleived they could do it... But frankly after all this time and seeing only spreadshits and them saying stuff like "Almost there !", "Final stretch !", "Next month we'll have something big !" only to get a new spreadshit explaining there was some bugfix, saddly I don't really expect this game to come out at any point...
I don't know what's wrong, either HentaiWriter was too optimistic about the release date when the project started, or they are a perfectionist who can't accept to release a game that's not perfect. And a "perfect" game doesn't exist, it's one of the first things I learned as a dev, you HAVE to accept your game is flawed in some aspect and just release the thing at some point.

[EDIT] From what they told me, it's because they had tons of things planned and did not want to release the game without core content, maybe their eyes were bigger than their belly. All I hope is for them to prove me wrong and release this game I've been waiting like the messiah... And I say all that without any hard feeling.

 

[L_sir]

a "ABANDONED" tag. The hell is happening?

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[dragonsix6969]

moral of the story, too much money can ruin your personality and make you greedy. Everything is like in a fable

 

[Crowza]

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.

 

[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.