Unity LOK: Rebirth [v0.1.8.0 Test] [The Tribe Devs]

[Theovonpapen]

90% of furry patreon games are scams, LOK games even more so

I'll definitely say the 90% is that high because a portion of them are ex-Flash developers, with most of the games abandoned even before the flash shutdown announcement. Very few, if ever, tries to remake the game (with exceptions of Crowjob in Space and SpacEscape). But most of the modern 'games' basically follow the "art first, story second, gameplay third" doctrine, with the latter two lacking in quality and plastered with bad tvtropes examples. And while this phenomenon isn't exclusive to furry games unfortunately, it's a ridiculous amount of them.

As for the percentage, I'll certainly place the percentage somewhere around the 70% mark.

I'll just keep posting the receipts.

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I can at least tip my hat off for compiling this data into an imgur post. For the first original essay that Abelius post, I can only point to Crowjob in Space remake and say that there is something so wrong for development to be so ridiculously slow. The reboot only reaffirms me that something is at least made and explains the supposed hiatus.

View attachment 2226044

From this conversation, Kuja just wants a blank slate for a whole complete revamp. As an Austrian economics proponent myself, Kuja has no obligations to rehire Abelius. And what I can tell, either Kuja believes Abelius does not have the talent for this revamp or Kuja just found a better dev at a cheaper rate relative to its talent. Just look at this quote she made a year ago.

Indeed. We initially started a a three-person team with a proper coder but Abelius assured me a third person wasn't needed and that he could do everything by himself.

Also, placing your entire career on one game is asking to putting all your eggs in one basket.

If my words up there strike you as something different from pure desperation and shock, then you have a serious empathy problem.

This is the internet. Anyone can say shit to get what they want, look no further to pre-Musk Twitter and Reddit after the banning of TheDonald. While I can't speak for Kuja, if I were her, this reply feels so pandered to my emotions that an ex-dev is desperately trying to get his job after giving him what is basically a severance package based on the 2nd image.

 

[chopolander]

The previous game was left at 0.8.
Pizza Hot now at 0.7
LOK RE is still stuck in the same inconsistent shit.

 

[SorrowSam]

The previous game was left at 0.8.
Pizza Hot now at 0.7
LOK RE is still stuck in the same inconsistent shit.

Now I get what you're trying to say, but version numbering doesn't really equate content or progress.

 

[chopolander]

Well yes, but Pizza Hot is based on days, while Lok Rebirth seemed longer because of the freedom to move around.

 

[404NoNamegr]

After a year and a half im checking in back. Has there been any meaningful progress on the game ? Or any plans like what fetishes will be included and so on?
Also still can't understand why the older version was abandoned despite on the reasons why.

Yes, D4n0w4r. You keep attaching the words of the guys that removed me from my own project, as if they hold the absolute truth by default. It baffles me to no end. Especially because you ALSO hate them in addition to me.

Anyway, as you're such a fan of uploading screenshots, I'll attach a couple of my own.

View attachment 2226043

<Wall of text on why I'm the worst amateur creator ever...>

View attachment 2226044

If my words up there strike you as something different from pure desperation and shock, then you have a serious empathy problem. But I already know that. You've been obsessed with me for years now, doing stunts like denouncing my projects.

You're a prime example of why every developer needs to keep their anonymity.

Considering this makes me wonder why they would start completely over. On a dev perspective makes no sense

 

[D4n0w4r]

After a year and a half im checking in back. Has there been any meaningful progress on the game ? Or any plans like what fetishes will be included and so on?
Also still can't understand why the older version was abandoned despite on the reasons why.


Considering this makes me wonder why they would start completely over. On a dev perspective makes no sense

That's because, as stated in the imgur chat logs, Abelius never shared his code with anyone. Once he was gone, they had no foundation to work with. Even if they did get a hold of his work, I'm not sure how much they could parse out of it without him around. Spaghetti code plagues even the most polished of games, and if abel didn't leave any dev notes around, it might have been impossible to pick up where he left off. This is something I can vouch for personally since I've worked with dev teams before and I'm currently modding a video game that has no official documentation at all.

 

[kelkkmj]

This is reason, we shouldn't trust some devs can't keep their promise. We wait for a long time then abandon their game like nothing happen. Good job brother. I don't know who delete my post but I will tell you again. It started from your development's plan without any objectives to do in each release. Kuja is fkin exhaust by false promise. LOK rebirth dev is fkin bored with ur plan. It's all ur mistakes. You can say this is sh*t post but you can't control anything from start you shouldn't start project at all.

 

[arghas]

Well let's see...
on the one hand we have a Dev who seems to progress quite well with his games on his own
on the other hand we have a team of six who still haven't delivered anything meaningful in how many years?

So are we blaming Abelius for that too now? Even if he kept his code, he didn't force them to redesign everything else.

 

[cVcxvsDvsXz]

Hey, I keep getting crashes when the disclaimer fades away, is there a fix for this?

 

[dragonsix6969]

kelkkmj
well they have free money now .

 

[Theovonpapen]

So are we blaming Abelius for that too now? Even if he kept his code, he didn't force them to redesign everything else.

The best analogy from this sentence is the fall of the Byzantine empire and the Ottomans basically spiking the travel fees of the Silk Road trade.

Sure, the Ottomans necessarily didn't force the Europeans to basically find another route to Asia, but they sure do make this option more attractive.

Another fitting analogy which only makes sense if you've watched "Little Corporal" of Epic History TV, is the state of the Army of Italy when the Directory refused to send over sufficient resources to Napoleon (which is understandable since the Directory was focused on Germany). Sure, Napoleon needn't to plunder Piedmont, but it sure is the best option at hand.

 

[D4n0w4r]

Well let's see...
on the one hand we have a Dev who seems to progress quite well with his games on his own
on the other hand we have a team of six who still haven't delivered anything meaningful in how many years?

So are we blaming Abelius for that too now? Even if he kept his code, he didn't force them to redesign everything else.

Despite how much I dunk on Abelius, everyone involved in this project is at fault. Abelius didn't want to play nice with the people that Kuja recruited. Kuja misplaced his faith in the new team. Vlad was far too ambitious and increased the scope of the project to an impossible degree. It's just funny how of this stemmed from such a simple porn game.

 

[Staning]

Is there something interesting in the v0.1.5.0 that was released on the 22 of last month or are they pure fixes?

The majority was bug fixes, a couple backgrounds for the ship, and a Maeve/Kay Shower scene.

 

[Tannin00]

Wow... and no news on patreon or trello...

Yep... I see that now we have returned to another time of afk or abandonment.

 

[Staning]

Fair about the Trello and Patreon. I’ll be better on those 2 for yah.

 

[Theovonpapen]

Wow... and no news on patreon or trello...

Yep... I see that now we have returned to another time of afk or abandonment.

For sure Abelius had a hand in delaying the game, however there has been at least 3 years since he was fired. So what updates has been made?

2021
It's impossible for me, a non-patron, to document any update post before July 20th as the post titles are so vague as fuck whether they are actually updates or just art/animation preview.

July 20th: The decision is made to rework the launcher
September: 2 updates noted
October: 3 updates noted
November: 1 update noted
December: 2 updates noted

Note that these updates may be as small as fixing one bug (idk, don't have patreon access)

December 24th: One long post is made

The decision is made publicly that they hired an experienced coder as stated in this paragraph
" For those unaware we have an expert in the industry helping us refactor our pipeline and get everything sorted. This, along with the experience we've acquired from developing, has helped us get together a much better plan as we move forward. This means we've made some compromises with the original scope, which I shall discuss in this post later. All of this is in the vein of pushing out updates every **two** months at most, rather than the long delays you've seen so far. Non-patrons being 1 build behind the patrons. "

It appears that we have only played the surface level of the game judging from this paragraph:
"Okay so what exactly is in today's update? Well, quite a lot beneath the visuals actually. This is the last of the foundation builds. What that means for those unaware is that much of the work that has gone into the game up until this point has been in the foundation and skeleton of the game itself, i.e. making sure we can smoothly make content for it, and get everything sorted before hand. Because if we were to build a big game onto a foundation of rotten buggy garbage, it'd collapse almost immediately."

It seems apparent that this is sort of a soft reboot here
"Another recent issue we discovered is how Kuja's amazing backgrounds were being imported into unity was problematic, and sadly a number of these had to be redrawn, which cost us quite a bit of time, but the benefit (which you'll see ingame) is that the backgrounds look 20x better than they did. Figuring out this bug now was vital for progressing development, because if we figured it out later we'd have a ton more environments to have to redraw."

2022
January 3rd: New Build up in the launcher 1.0.1

March 9th: De facto release of 1.2.0 (I think, it's hard when they don't numerate their update build)

May 5th: Release of 1.3.0

July 20th: Release of 1.4.0

August 23rd: Kuja made this statement on that day
"Today we made the difficult decision to delay build 0.1.5.0, by one month, into October. At the beginning of this year we made a commitment to releasing builds every two months. We’re disappointed to rescind this promise."

November 23rd: Update of 1.5.0

Now, comparing to other animated games published on F95 (Doggie Bones' Happy Hearts Panic and Shanbahak's Lewd Maze) the pace of updates for a high quality game is faster than average, though you can chalk up to more helping hands on the development. It takes Doggie Bones and Shanbahak 3 months on average to update their games, though they're solo devs.

To me at least, the problem with the LOK development team isn't the fact that they are slow. For now, they are making content at an unusually quick pace, but I have to question this: what happened between mid-2019 to early 2021? If there's any patron that can dig the info, let us know in the comment section below. I can only speculate that they have constantly been reworking the game with mixed results until July 20th of the previous year.

And if you think the updates this year are underwhelming, let me enlighten you with this: Halo Infinite has road map subject to change (which means they can't even keep up their promises of the best case scenario). Oh but what's inside this road map for the Winter update echoes from within? Well they took A FUCKING YEAR AFTER RELEASE to CONSIDER adding a match xp beta (basically a progression system that's... in every single damn fps game with leveling system), In-game reporting (yeah before that, you had to send tickets to a completely different website if you got an issue), a custom game browser (before that, let just say it's not easy to find a specific lobby to join). And from what's NOT on this list: no Extinction, no Assassination, no Firefight (or any equivalent PvE), no in-game file sharing and theater fixes, yeah not even playable elites. And yet, I still want 343 to prove me wrong. To prove me wrong that they are incompetent and ill-equipped for Infinite. To prove me wrong that this game is a lost cause, because Halo was one of my top franchises back in 2010's. And yet, they prove me correct.

One thing is for sure: Kuja, at the bare minimum, isn't Yandere Dev.

 

[D4n0w4r]

For sure Abelius had a hand in delaying the game, however there has been at least 3 years since he was fired. So what updates has been made?

2021
It's impossible for me, a non-patron, to document any update post before July 20th as the post titles are so vague as fuck whether they are actually updates or just art/animation preview.

July 20th: The decision is made to rework the launcher
September: 2 updates noted
October: 3 updates noted
November: 1 update noted
December: 2 updates noted

Note that these updates may be as small as fixing one bug (idk, don't have patreon access)

December 24th: One long post is made

The decision is made publicly that they hired an experienced coder as stated in this paragraph
" For those unaware we have an expert in the industry helping us refactor our pipeline and get everything sorted. This, along with the experience we've acquired from developing, has helped us get together a much better plan as we move forward. This means we've made some compromises with the original scope, which I shall discuss in this post later. All of this is in the vein of pushing out updates every **two** months at most, rather than the long delays you've seen so far. Non-patrons being 1 build behind the patrons. "

It appears that we have only played the surface level of the game judging from this paragraph:
"Okay so what exactly is in today's update? Well, quite a lot beneath the visuals actually. This is the last of the foundation builds. What that means for those unaware is that much of the work that has gone into the game up until this point has been in the foundation and skeleton of the game itself, i.e. making sure we can smoothly make content for it, and get everything sorted before hand. Because if we were to build a big game onto a foundation of rotten buggy garbage, it'd collapse almost immediately."

It seems apparent that this is sort of a soft reboot here
"Another recent issue we discovered is how Kuja's amazing backgrounds were being imported into unity was problematic, and sadly a number of these had to be redrawn, which cost us quite a bit of time, but the benefit (which you'll see ingame) is that the backgrounds look 20x better than they did. Figuring out this bug now was vital for progressing development, because if we figured it out later we'd have a ton more environments to have to redraw."

2022
January 3rd: New Build up in the launcher 1.0.1

March 9th: De facto release of 1.2.0 (I think, it's hard when they don't numerate their update build)

May 5th: Release of 1.3.0

July 20th: Release of 1.4.0

August 23rd: Kuja made this statement on that day
"Today we made the difficult decision to delay build 0.1.5.0, by one month, into October. At the beginning of this year we made a commitment to releasing builds every two months. We’re disappointed to rescind this promise."

November 23rd: Update of 1.5.0

Now, comparing to other animated games published on F95 (Doggie Bones' Happy Hearts Panic and Shanbahak's Lewd Maze) the pace of updates for a high quality game is faster than average, though you can chalk up to more helping hands on the development. It takes Doggie Bones and Shanbahak 3 months on average to update their games, though they're solo devs.

To me at least, the problem with the LOK development team isn't the fact that they are slow. For now, they are making content at an unusually quick pace, but I have to question this: what happened between mid-2019 to early 2021? If there's any patron that can dig the info, let us know in the comment section below. I can only speculate that they have constantly been reworking the game with mixed results until July 20th of the previous year.

And if you think the updates this year are underwhelming, let me enlighten you with this: Halo Infinite has road map subject to change (which means they can't even keep up their promises of the best case scenario). Oh but what's inside this road map for the Winter update echoes from within? Well they took A FUCKING YEAR AFTER RELEASE to CONSIDER adding a match xp beta (basically a progression system that's... in every single damn fps game with leveling system), In-game reporting (yeah before that, you had to send tickets to a completely different website if you got an issue), a custom game browser (before that, let just say it's not easy to find a specific lobby to join). And from what's NOT on this list: no Extinction, no Assassination, no Firefight (or any equivalent PvE), no in-game file sharing and theater fixes, yeah not even playable elites. And yet, I still want 343 to prove me wrong. To prove me wrong that they are incompetent and ill-equipped for Infinite. To prove me wrong that this game is a lost cause, because Halo was one of my top franchises back in 2010's. And yet, they prove me correct.

One thing is for sure: Kuja, at the bare minimum, isn't Yandere Dev.

This has been discussed ad nauseam, but the biggest problem after Abelius's departure is the scope of the game and the overcomplication of the paperdolls. The original LoK:R strictly used 2-directional models and flat backgrounds, since this was supposedly to be a spiritual successor to the playshapes LoK flash game. The first reboot switched to an 8-directional model and 3d backgrounds. I probably don't need to tell you that this bottlenecked the development severely. Here's how those first baby steps looked:

2019
View attachment GameView.mp4
















They then switched back to a static camera...but stuck to the 8-directional rigs.

2021

The overcomplication of the paperdolls led to the team deciding to just animate CGs instead, which kind of defeats the purpose of the models to begin with. They were suppose to be simple to animate so doing sex scenes would be a fast and easy process. So in short, it's not like they've been lazy these last few years. It just seems like much of this effort continually gets wasted as they try to iron out what they actually want the game to be.

 

[Theovonpapen]

This has been discussed ad nauseam, but the biggest problem after Abelius's departure is the scope of the game and the overcomplication of the paperdolls. The original LoK:R strictly used 2-directional models and flat backgrounds, since this was supposedly to be a spiritual successor to the playshapes LoK flash game. The first reboot switched to an 8-directional model and 3d backgrounds. I probably don't need to tell you that this bottlenecked the development severely. Here's how those first baby steps looked:

2019
View attachment 2242070
















They then switched back to a static camera...but stuck to the 8-directional rigs.

2021

The overcomplication of the paperdolls led to the team deciding to just animate CGs instead, which kind of defeats the purpose of the models to begin with. They were suppose to be simple to animate so doing sex scenes would be a fast and easy process. So in short, it's not like they've been lazy these last few years. It just seems like much of this effort continually gets wasted as they try to iron out what they actually want the game to be.

I honestly didn't see the game back in 2019, moreso I only had played the Abelius-2d build before returning here a few weeks ago. I honestly didn't think they actually made a completely different game between 2019-2021. So I guess I know what happened between 2019 and 2021. In all honestly, converting your game from 2d to 3d without much experience is a recipe of production hell. It certainly did, at best, delay the completion of the game by 2 years.

Needless to say, there's a lot of problems
- Customization (I mean, why does Krystal, the face and icon of the game, need customization. It's a waste of resources.
- The Dialogue wheel would sometimes open when there's only one option during a non-repeatable scene, such as the chief introduction.
- Why do we need animation of Krystal picking up stuff?
- The quest system is broken on the top left, below your health bar, is broken.

Honestly, it certainly does feel bloated.

 

[chopolander]

I've always said that the eight directions are not necessary in a side-scrolling game and only makes it look even more like paper dolls.

 

[D4n0w4r]

I've always said that the eight directions are not necessary in a side-scrolling game and only makes it look even more like paper dolls.

It's like everyone told Vlad it was a bad idea, but he was far too stubborn with his ambitions to ever change any of it. If only they just kept the project simple instead of turning it into some kind of 3d platforming RPG mess that no one wanted.