RTS Archives - Gametrodon

Pikmin 4

Overall I like Pikmin 4. I have issues with how its mechanics play into the game’s overall theme and aesthetic, and I have skeletons worth of bones to pick with the game’s difficultly curve, but I liked it. I would recommend it. If you want a game that doesn’t quite play like anything else, grab this.

Pikmin is one of Nintendo’s strangest franchises. An apocryphal tale states the series’ designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, was inspired to create the game after watching ants while he was gardening.

Here’s Pikmin 4 in one sentence: “Pikmin is a game about strategically managing ants. Except the ants are mobile semi-sentient plants and everything wants to eat them.”

As a summary, it hits a lot of high points. Pikmin is a strategy game. Your units are adorably small, and the Pikmin, while not stupid, have the same amount of self preservation skills as an ant. They also exist in a world where they are the very bottom of the food chain.

Story-wise, Pikmin 4 is the lightest in the series. The main game modes have unlimited days to work with, even though the time pressure is still present. The story does what it needs in order to serve the mechanics.

Mechanics

Gameplay in Pikmin 4 takes place across zones. Each zone is a single large map that can be revisited. Each visit is one day, lasting about 16 minutes.

Unlike other RTS games, the player only has direct control of two units. These are Oatachi and a custom player character. Oatachi is an upgradable space dog, and the Rescue Team member is a small alien in a spacesuit.

Across these zones, the goal is to explore and retrieve treasure and castaways, and delve into dungeons. There are other game modes. I’ll cover them later.

There are two pillars to Pikmin’s gameplay: real time combat, and strategic management and planning. The real time combat is simple to explain. The player character and Oatachi can command a force of Pikmin to follow them, and instruct them to interact with objects or attack enemies by tossing Pikmin directly onto those enemies.

The indirectly controlled units, the Pikmin, come in several different flavors. As this is the fourth game in the series, there are now seven types. Using the right one for the right task is often necessary. For example, don’t throw the yellow Pikmin (electricproof) into the fire.

Pikmin will attack enemies that they’re tossed onto. Most enemies will eventually shake Pikmin off, flinging them to the ground. Both Oatachi and the custom PC can whistle to call fallen back Pikmin to the main group. While Oatachi the PC control mostly the same, they do have some of their own strengths and weaknesses.

These are the micro mechanics of Pikmin, small interactions dependent on mechanical skill. But they’re fairly subservient to Pikmin’s macro mechanics, a term the game even has it’s own word for: Dandori.

Pikmin’s macro strategy revolves around a really interesting push/pull tension. The player has a limited number of Pikmin, and can only control their own character and Oatachi directly. Ultimately this turns Pikmin into a sort of resource allocation/routing game, where the real question becomes “What is the minimum number of Pikmin I can allocate to any single task, and still complete that task in a desirable manner?”

Combined, this is what makes up Pikmin’s mechanics: the high level ability to plan and route individual enemies and encounters, and the quick twitch ability to deal with enemies effectively (and respond when things don’t go according to plan).

Game Modes

Pikmin 4 has multiple game modes. They all use pretty much the same controls, but I do want to cover them quickly.

Overworld Expedition: As mentioned above. Adventure around a large map with a 16 minute timer looking for treasure and enemies.

Dungeons: Can be entered from the Overworld, bringing Pikmin with you. With no timer, dungeons made up of a series of floors, with various challenges, often with a themed gimmick (ice, conveyer belts, etc), and a boss fight at the end. You can’t refill Pikmin during a dungeon.

Dandori Challenges: Also entered from the Overworld, these are effectively puzzle rooms. You’re given a set amount of starting Pikmin, a goal, and a time limit. Beating them requires getting a certain amount of points, or completing the goal within the time limit.

Dandori Battles: The player faces off against an equivalent NPC to try to gather more stuff than they do over a given period of time.

Night Explorations: The easiest way to describe these might be “tower defense.” The player is dropped into a night time version of a day time area, and has to defend an object called a Lumiknoll until time runs out, or all enemies in the map are defeated.

They differ in two key ways from day time, in that enemies will periodically aggro and actively attack the Lumiknoll in waves, and that the only Pikmin available are Glow Pikmin. Glow Pikmin are immune to all elemental damage, and also warp back. The end result is a fairly different experience than normal gameplay.

Shipwreck Tale: Closest to something like a New Game+, this mode has the player trying to complete a separate set of objectives on the same maps, but with only 15 days. It’s much harder than the base game.

End Result: Pikmin has a lot of pretty different content.

Bugs, Minor Issues, and Bones to Pick

Pikmin 4 isn’t perfect. One of my biggest issues with the game is that it has pretty terrible load times, taking forever to transaction between zones and dungeons. This is mostly not an issue, except for when you find yourself jumping in and out of a given dungeon floor to farm a specific type of Pikmin.

There were a few graphical issues, but far more annoying were some of the bugs related to the game’s task system. There’s very clearly a hidden system that manages the player’s actions around throwing Pikmin at certain interactable objects. These can include ropes to be unspooled, or sticks be dug up and used as a shortcut. Sometimes it just breaks.

Here’s an example: I would throw Pikmin on a rope, but they would fall off the ledge near it. The game considered them to be still performing the rope “task” but there was no way for them to get back up. So when I threw additional Pikmin, the hidden system managing the task wouldn’t let them interact with the rope, because as far as the game was concerned, I already had the max Pikmin that could be assigned, even though some couldn’t actually reach it.

This is intended to be an anti-frustration feature, as it actually is mostly visible when the game stops you from tossing more Pikmin then required to carry an object. But it was still annoying.

My biggest bone though, has much more to do with tone than mechanics.

Pikmin: Ants or Locusts?

Pikmin has a weird tone. It’s a tone that I generally enjoy, one where you lead small plant creatures against monsters fifty times their size, something captured quite well by the Pikmin 2 box art:

There are a few things underlying this tone, but one of the biggest ones is an unspoken statement that Pikmin are underdogs, and they are the bottom of the food chain. They are small, individually quite weak, and live in a giant world of terrible things.

So here’s the problem: Pikmin 4 doesn’t respawn enemies in the overworld once they’re defeated. It’s a reasonable design choice to allow anyone to progress through the game, and it means that obstacles don’t have to be dealt with more than once.

But it also means that after a certain point in the game, every map ends up feeling completely empty and wiped out, stripped clean of wildlife by the Pikmin. And it’s kind of a weird feeling, more like you’re commanding a group of loathsome locusts, instead of adorable ants.

I get why they did this, but it does lend the game a really weird tone.

Difficulty Curve

One of the strangest things about Pikmin 4 is the difficulty curve. I would say that approximately 80% of the game is incredibly easy, to the point of being a non-challenge. Then there’s the other 20%.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So here are two pictures.

These are my total stats for the game as to Pikmin lost/grown. I lost a total of 336 Pikmin, not including rewinds and redos.

And these are my stats for Cavern for a King, the final dungeon of the game. Total losses, with rewinds, for a single dungeon are 61 Pikmin.

21% of my total losses in the entire game came from this single dungeon and that’s including the game’s system for save scumming (rewinds).

Every dungeon in the game has a maximum of 5 floors (except for a single other dungeon with 6 floors), and usually 1-2 to boss fights .

Cavern for a King has 20 floors, 15 of which have bosses.

Up until this point in the game, I was actually going to write this article about how disappointingly easy Pikmin 4 was. But then Cavern of Kings was much harder than every other dungeon. The final night exploration missions required more save scumming than every day exploration combined. The final super secret challenges are incredibly difficult.

It’s a super weird thing because it’s not a bump in difficulty or a smooth escalation; it’s a massive jump. The term “Vibe Check” comes to mind, as it just feels like at some point, the developers pulled off the kiddie gloves with no build up in-between, and smacked me in the face.

Conclusion

I liked Pikmin 4. I recommend it. It’s supremely weird, and there really aren’t any other games like the Pikmin series. Pikmin 4 isn’t a perfect entry, but it’s very fun overall.

Even if it does have a difficultly sheer rock wall instead of difficulty curve.

Eximius: Seize the Frontline

Today, I am the fifth dentist.

I like Eximius, and generally speaking, I’ve enjoyed playing it. I think at $30, the price feels high, and I’d have a much easier time recommending it if it was like $10, or had some sorta bulk pack for multiple copies, because it is most definitely a game that is way better with friends. On the other hand, given what it took to get the game finished, I kind of get why they’re charging $30 for it.

My summary for this game is, “Today, I am the fifth dentist.” In my group of friends that I roped into playing the game I am the lone dissenter, the only one who enjoyed the game.

Like, the only person.

I’ve attached a video of about an hour of gameplay from a Twitch stream. I was gonna grab screencaps and stuff from the stream, but the quality at 720p felt too low. If you’re on the fence about the game, you’ll most likely get a better opinion of watching me play for a bit than from screencaps. Unfortunately, I also forgot to unmute my mic while streaming, and didn’t mute my friend, so you’ll get to listen to his lovely voice performing half a conversation.

Whoops.

My friends disliked this game enough that, at first, this article was gonna be about why you shouldn’t buy Eximius. But this is my article, and until one of my friends offers to write their own, telling you why you why they regret buying the game based off my stupid opinions, this article will remain the sole source of Gametrodon truth.

Okay, so let’s start by talking about Eximius actually is, for starters: Eximius is a combo RTS/FPS, played between two teams. There are five players to a team, with one player taking the role of the commander, with the ability to build structures, command AI troops, and get a top-down view of the battlefield, like a classic RTS. The remaining 4 are officers, with the ability to run about, shoot people, and generally cause all kinds of chaos. These other four can also have AI troops of various types assigned to them, and can give said troops fairly limited commands. (Gripe #1: I really wish you could actually order your troops to either stand in specific places or leave them somewhere to call them in later.)

You can assign general infantry troops to your officers, but you have to control special troops yourself. There are two factions in the game, AXE, and GSF, which stand for something I can’t remember, but all you really need to know is that the GSF are your typical generic future military dudes, with access to mortar and machine gun squads, infantry and engineers, and a few fairly typical vehicles. (Gripe #2: Vehicles can’t be manually controlled or ridden in by players, and have a tendency to get stuck between various things, due to questionable AI parking. On one notable occasion, I saw a tank sort of leap across the map after clipping into terrain.)

AXE, on the other hand, are more of your “future tech” faction, complete with outfits that make them look like something from Warframe, with smooth Exo-skeletons, and crisp weapons. They also get Ironguards, which for all intents and purposes you can just read as “T-1000 Terminator Units,” massive hulking exo-suits equipped with miniguns, that can just mulch 90% of unencamped infantry they come across. They have a selection of vehicles as well.

Let’s talk about one more thing before we get into why I like the game, and why my friends do not: the general structure of a game of Eximius.

There are two ways to win a game of Eximius. The first is to destroy the enemy base. This is easier said than done, because even if you’re crushing your opponent, their base is surrounded by 7-8 very high powered cannon encampments.

The second is to run your enemy out of supply points. More than likely, this is how you’ll actually win. Both teams start with a predefined amount of these points, and you take points from the enemy team by killing their units while they control less Victory Zones than you do. Different types of units are worth different amounts of supply.

In addition to the Victory Zones, there are also Resource Zones, which give either money, ammo, or power. Money is your base resource used for buying most units, with power used for buildings and other higher tier stuff. Ammo is used for activated abilities, like airstrikes, repair drones, and troop drops.

The end result of all of this is that you spend a lot of the game either holding points, trying to hold points, or pushing in to hold points. What I heard from other folks was that the game felt like Battlefield in that respect, except again, minus a lot of the polish you get on something like Battlefield. It’s not always the most thrilling thing in the universe.

And I don’t disagree with them. The hitmarkers that show up when you get shot are really subtle, and not necessarily enough to figure out where you’re being shot from. There’s also no difference between being shot with shields (HP that regenerates over time and out of combat) vs unshielded. There’s also no tracer rounds on most weapons, meaning that if an opponent is hiding in a bush, you can die before figuring out where they are.

They also had issues with some of the games economy system and power division, with the commander role feeling far more impactful to then the officers. And I can’t really disagree with that either. Officers really only have the ability to run around, capture points, and shoot stuff. You can’t use extra money you get to do things like call in buildings or extra ammo, so it’s fairly easy to get to a point where you are effectively just burning cash as an officer because you can’t have more than your cap.

And on the subject of the commanding/commanders UI. It’s not great. I would mark it as passable. I suspect my friends would go with awful. It disregards a lot of standard conventions for RTS controls (No shift queuing actions,), the action bar isn’t standardized across units, (infantry has an attack move, but vehicles don’t) and it can just be a pain to use. (You can’t assign officers to control groups for example.)

So the end result if you feel the same way they do is that it’s a game where you spend a lot of time either trying to hold a given location, getting into unclear gunfights, and being shot or blown up by encamped morters half a mile away when you round a corner.

On the other hand, I actually like trying to figure out how to break defenses, hold points, and stall for time. The fact that you can have gunfights with “winners” where neither person ends up dying is interesting to me. The mechanics of death, having to buy up your loadouts each time you revive, along with being able to use AI troops as cannon fodder/distractions is neat.

The big differentiator for me is that every conflict in a round has costs associated with it. While the moment-to-moment gameplay might feel similar to other shooters, the gunfights themselves feel more meaningful in the bigger picture.

Sneaking into a back line to capture Resource Points and harass the enemy’s economy, or trying to hold a point while fairly outnumbered until resources arrive are things you can do in other games, but in Eximius they have meaningful impacts on the rest of the war taking place, instead of being separate skirmishes. Where and when you choose to take fights is just as meaningful, if not more meaningful, than winning them. It’s not another shooter where if your K/D is greater than 1, you are a credit to team.

And that’s why I like it. There are a lot of elements in the game that could be improved, but they haven’t stopped me from enjoying the gunfights, trying to be sneaky, or desperately rushing in to try to salvage a win. The game does a really good job of creating organic set pieces and exciting clutch moments, and the fact that you’re playing against other humans makes it that much more fun. When you get to the end of round, it’s possible to look back and figure out what you needed to do differently, or what you could have tried instead.

Eximius is an ambitious indie game, when all is said and done, and more importantly, I find it fun. I might not be in the majority here, and there are definitely a lot of areas that the game could either use some improvement, or some hardening. But even in its current somewhat janky state, I enjoy playing, and I’m likely to continue playing it. I do wish I had more people to play it with, but y’know. Taste is subjective.

Amazing Cultivation Simulator

I’ve really been struggling with how to review Amazing Cultivation Simulator. I usually open these reviews with a “I Liked It” or “I didn’t like it.” But while Amazing Cultivation Simulator is firmly in the “I liked it” group, every time I try to get screenshots or play more to refresh my memory, I boot the game, look at the menu screen, and then close it again. Not inherently because I didn’t enjoy it, but because it feels like too much effort.

Okay, so enough yammering. Amazing Cultivation Simulator starts out as a settlement management game. In this sense, it’s not unlike something like Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, or Odd Realm. Unlike Dwarf Fortress and Odd Realm, you can only build on the X/Y Axis, so everything you make will be at most one story tall. This won’t be a big issue in the early game, but it can be become a problem for some reasons later on.

I’m not even showing the menu for making structures and its UI in this screenshot.

The thing that makes Amazing Cultivation Simulator different than any of those management sims is that while it has the typical, “Get food, get water, how did that guy break his leg trying to cook dinner?” sorts of problems and moments, the game is… well, it’s a cultivation simulator. This is a game where you will repeatedly burn down your kitchen and give people permanent disfiguring burns because your kitchen has bad Feng Shui. It’s a game where you will make someone’s dick fall off because you had them learn the wrong magic technique. For those of you who haven’t heard the term before (like me before playing this game), let’s talk about what “Cultivation” is, briefly.

No really. I’m not joking about the dick thing.

“Cultivation” is a term used to describe a type of novels and stories, generally referred to as “Wuxia” stories. I think of “Wuxia” as a setting kind of like “high fantasy” is a setting. If I say something is high fantasy, there are some assumptions you can make about it. Elves will live a long time, and live in forests. Orcs will be violent and brutish. Humans will be a mix in between. In short, Cultivation is a set of story elements/general world building tropes that are consistent between a lot of the stories written in this genre.

An example of the trading menu. There are quite a few different items, and I have no idea how to even get like half of them. For anyone wondering what a “Fortuitous Treasure” rod is, here’s a hint: it’s related to that magic art that makes your dick fall off if you have one.

The rules for Cultivation worlds are completely different from traditional western high fantasy. As part of writing this review, I asked a friend to recommend a web novel that followed general Cultivation themes, and read 50+ chapters of it. I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t love it (sorry buddy). But it was incrediblely useful for understanding the sort of world Amazing Cultivation Simulator is trying to simulate. So let’s talk about these general rules.

People in the world have the ability to train, practice, and meditate to get what effectively amounts to magic powers. These powers are varied, but generally function kind of like spells in the 5E Player’s Handbook. They often require Qi (mana) to use, have specific names and effects, etc.
Different schools of Cultivation have sects that form around the people practicing and studying them. Sects have power structures with practitioners who are strong at the top, and weak at the bottom. The sects also tend to give different abilities / access to different magic spells.
Cultivating and gathering Qi requires sitting really still for a while, so that you can have more mana.
Dragonball Z levels of power scaling. Low tier cultivators get the shit kicked out of them by magic animals that just happen to have magic powers. Mid tier cultivators can paralyze your entire body with like 2 punches. High tier cultivators can just obliterate cities.
Powering up to higher tiers requires you to either have a breakthrough or pass a tribulation. A breakthrough happens when you successfully surpass your own limits, but you will fail a lot while trying to do it. A tribulation is something like literally being repeatedly attacked by lightning clouds or whatever, while you try to survive.
There are also magic artifacts. They range from “neat,” to “secret pocket dimension” levels of bullshit. There are also magic pills and drugs. You need these to get to higher ranks of power, and they follow the same levels of bullshit, except they’re even harder to make. You make these pills and artifacts out of dead monsters, and really old plants.

Okay, so now that we have that all out of the way, let’s get down to talking about video games again.

If we try to assess Amazing Cultivation Simulator in the light of the Cultivation genre, how does it do? My answer would be, “Pretty well.” The game has pill crafting, artifact crafting, ascension to divinity, formations of power structures. There are multiple schools of Cultivation, each with their own unique abilities and quirks.

I want to stress that the game is constructed like a simulator, not like a casual sim game. It shares more in common with Dwarf Fortress than it does with the Sims, in terms of asking you to both learn a billion things, and a cheerful willingness to punch you in the mouth if you don’t.

For example, lets take a look at a what amounts to the stat screen for a single character.

Psych. Also for reference, that small stats drop down on the side? It scrolls.

Oh, this isn’t even considering the skill menu, for actually selecting passive and active skills for your dudes. Cause that shit looks like this:

There are like 20 of these skill trees, and some can’t even be used together. There is an entirely separate school of Cultivation called Body Cultivation that uses an entirely different interface with options to select individual bones that you want to modify.

Okay, so I played the game for 65 hours. Why am I putting so much into stressing this stuff? Well, because game is incredibly system-dense. And while I suspect this usually wouldn’t be a problem for many of my readers, there’s a situation where your ability to learn things in game breaks down.

And that would be the localization and translation.

Sometimes the translations work well. Sometimes they do not.

This is probably my biggest issue with Amazing Cultivation Simulator that I consider to be an actual problem (as opposed to a “I don’t like how things work” sort of complaint. Don’t worry, we’ll get to those later).

The game has an incredibly dense set of systems for almost everything, from the materials you make your house out of, to the items you craft, to crafting legendary artifacts and drawing talismans.

Did I mistakenly turn my incredibly valuable demon hide into an umbrella? Yes. But is it a great umbrella? Also yes.

But the combination of translations that don’t always hit the mark, genre-specific vocabulary, and systems that just aren’t really localized (looking at you, combat formations) means that the game can become very frustrating to play at points. I suspect that some of this would be mitigated if I was already familiar with the rules of the genre, but I’m not. I had to talk to a friend familiar with the genre, read a sixty-five-ish page guide, and read the aforementioned webnovel to even understand some of what was going on.

I don’t want to be overly down on the game. I think it’s successful at a lot of what it’s trying to be. And compared to many other entries in this genre it does great; I never lost characters to incredibly stupid pathing, and there were no game-breaking bugs that shredded my save file. There’s a lot going for it. But the fact that past a given point you basically have to join a Discord server (or at least follow a guide) takes away some of the joy of discovery for me. Now, to be fair, I could just die and make a new save file, and perhaps that’s how you’re supposed to play the game. Losing is fun, after all. But it feels bad to lose 40 hours of progress because one of the folks in your sect turned into a giant snake after being struck with lightning bolts.

Again, this is a thing that happens.

Okay, so now with all of this done, I want to spend some time complaining about a few specific systems, before I praise the game a bit more, and hopefully wrap up this incredibly fucking long review. It’s a bit rambling, so if you want, you can stop reading here.

No really, you can stop.

Oh, you’re still here? Okay, so let’s get into it.

I’m not sure the concept of Cultivation lends itself well to a video game in certain aspects, specifically in the type of story that it tries to map to games.

Typically speaking, I think a lot of European stories go a certain way. Smarter people then I have written more things about this, but the point I want to quickly make is that generally speaking, in many games, stories, etc, ANYONE, at least in theory, with enough grit and determination can aspire to reach incredible heights.

Cultivation worlds though, do not follow this rule. And Amazing Cultivation Simulator especially does not follow this rule. If you are not a “heaven blessed talent” or just incredibly lucky person, you will not make it very far. Without having what amounts to way higher than average stats, you simply do not have the potential to become a god. You may not reach Golden Core. You may not have the ability to even cultivate enough power to beat up magic animals.

This leads to a situation where you can stagnate and fail if one of two things happen. First of all, if you don’t go out of your way to roll starting characters with insane stats, or if you just get unlucky, and never have anyone with the potential to be godlike show up. While there are ways to increase base stats, they’re all locked behind various tiers of cultivation which you may not be able to reach, so the whole thing becomes a catch-22.

And this would be fine; it would turn into a game of building a stable sect, and then just running the numbers until you get one of these folks, if it wasn’t for one more thing: the reputation system.

See, you’re not the only group cultivating in this world. There are at least half a dozen other schools, a whole world map with side quests, and whole system for visiting other sects.

Aside from all these incredible features however, there is also a bit of a snag in the reputation system. There is a value called reputation, and the higher your reputation, the tougher the enemies you’ll be attacked by in random events will be. The game is fairly clear about this.

What it’s not clear about is what actions will raise your reputation. Reputation has good/evil/neutral alignment, but all that really matters is score. Are you generous and helpful? Prepare to get attacked by murderous cultivators. Do you turn the souls of visitors to your ~~cult~~ sect into magic gems made out of human emotions, and then reanimate their corpses to sweep the floor? Prepare to get attacked by folks who think that maybe human lives are more important then making a really cool new hat.

The combination of these two systems, reputation and general cultivation, means that if you want to avoid being curbstomped, you are going to have to spend a lot of time waiting around, not attracting any attention, and hoping somebody with godly potential shows up asking to join.

Okay, so that finishes my gripe. Just for the record, let’s summarize what I think of the game very quickly, one last time.

Amazing Cultivation Simulator works as a simulator, or a sort of colony management game. The key difference is it’s management of a group of individuals in a world that has some very weird genre-specific rules. Most of the systems are fairly in-depth and interesting, but the game itself feels hamstrung by questionable localization, and tutorials that don’t always teach enough.

There are a few things I just straight up don’t like about the game, like reputation, and how cultivation works, but those are more system design choices then flaws, if I had to judge. It would be like complaining about how Dwarfs in Dwarf Fortress have to drink to stay happy. It’s deliberate decision about made about how to enforce the rules of the simulated world, even if it isn’t one I like.

I think if you’re big into Wuxia novels, or mildly obtuse colony management sims, this is a game worth checking out. And I feel like I got my money’s worth out the game. It’s just so dense that I’m not sure I’ll return to it unless I have a lot of free time. (And maybe the game gets a few localization patches.)

Didn’t Make The Cut – 12.25.2020

I spent part of this weekend in what I have come to think of as a public service, pruning and hacking my way through through the massive glut of games that is itch.io Racial Justice Bundle. While some might devote this time of year to giving to the needy, feeding the hungry, and other such charitable pursuits, I stayed home and played video games.

Phrased like that, it seems slightly less heroic doesn’t it? Hmm. In any case, here are 3 of the things I played this weekend, and links to the incredibly high quality stream in which I played them. These are all games that didn’t grab me enough for me to really want to continue playing them past around an hour, and I also don’t have enough to say about them to write a full article. So here we gooooo.

Catlateral Damage

In Catlateral Damage, you are a cat, and you must destroy as much stuff as possible within the time limit. You can jump, and you can bat things left and right. And that’s it. That’s the entire game. It’s a cute concept, but it doesn’t feel super well executed. The controls are fairly floaty, and the things you whack around don’t feel like they have much weight to them. Personally, I also really dislike the art. I think these cats are incredibly ugly… and yeah. The game just didn’t feel great, or look good, so I did a single run playthrough and then called it a day for this one. It’s short and chaotic, but I didn’t find it particularly satisfying or fun to play.

From Orbit

If you told me that From Orbit was an early access game, I would believe you. In fact, after writing that sentence, I went and checked to see if it was on Steam, and it is, but it isn’t early access. Where Catlateral Damage has an interesting premise, From Orbit feels like it got to the next stage of making a good game, which was having interesting mechanics. But it kind of falls apart there because then they didn’t really make anymore game. For example, the idea of having your workers being able to shift form based on what you want to use them for is cool! But then it sorta falls apart.

My biggest gripe, though, has to be that you can only have 4 units (5 if you count the spaceship which you can’t actually control), which is strange for a game that bills itself as an RTS. By this standard, playing as Meepo is an RTS.

My other big gripe is that the resources you gather on a given planet are also the resources you use to buy upgrades to improve your dudes, ship, and unlock abilities. So yeah, you could build a auto-miner, if you’re willing to lose 60% of the haul from a planet, or you could just do the whole thing manually. Oh, and the enemies you face are dumb as bricks. (I do like the flashing red outline you get for your units letting you know they’ve pulled agro.)

Everything else I can gripe about with the game is pretty small. The game doesn’t follow standard RTS controls schemes, you can’t queue commands, you can’t make control groups, attempting to select a unit automatically centers the camera on it, even if what you wanted to do was move it where you were looking BEFORE you selected it.

The stream is here, and the itch.io page is here.

Quiet As A Stone

I have a link to the stream of playing Quiet As A Stone here. I say “Playing” but honestly, “interacting with” might be a more accurate summary. My notes for the game have the following:

Experimental Photography Simulator
Rather Pretty
More like playing with actual rocks thana game

Here are some screenshots of Cragthor the Mountain Titan, the only thing I really did in the game before getting bored and quitting it.

Behold his majesty.

I have a few more games I’d like to do writeups for before the end of the year, so keep an eye out for those. One of them might be Depth of Extinction, which is this neat procedural XCOM/FTL style thing.

I’ve linked the names of the games up above, so if one of these looks like your cup of tea, you should go take a look. At the time of writing, I think From Orbit is actually free.

The Case of the Missing Publisher or How Ammobox Studios got their game back.

An Interview with Jeremy Choo, CEO of Ammobox Studios.

Last week, a really interesting Reddit post caught my eye. It was by a smaller game development studio from Malaysia called Ammobox Studios. The post was a warning about how their game had almost been stolen by their publisher, and how the fraudulent publisher was potentially back in business.

While everyone has heard stories about shitty publishers, one of the surprising things for me was that Ammobox was able to actually recover their game, and continue development. I wanted to know more, so I reached out to Ammobox, and was able to talk to Jeremy Choo, their CEO and Founder.

(F) John “Fritz” Wallace: Hi Jeremy, just wanted to say thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. To start, can you tell us a bit about yourself and about Ammobox Studios?

(J) Jeremy Choo: Well, I’m Jeremy Choo and I’m the founder and CEO of Ammobox Studios. Ammobox was started back in 2008. My game development background actually started with modding, with stuff like Warcraft and Starcraft. When we were first founded, we started with doing some outsourcing work, and this project [Eximius: Seize the Frontline] has always been a bit of a passion project for us.

It’s a garage project, something we’ve done in our spare time and I’d say we’ve been thinking about it for almost 10 years. Development actually started in an entirely different engine. We started full time production in 2018. And as part of this, we started looking for a publisher.

So, this is where Eduardo Monteiro and his company, TheGameWallStudios comes into the picture. How did you meet him, and end up publishing with him?

(J) When TheGameWallStudios first approached us, they weren’t the type of publisher we were looking for. Another member of the team, our business developer, an experienced guy who had worked in industry, was handling our publisher discussions. And one of the people he brought up was TheGameWallStudios and Eduardo Monteiro.

Our business developer came to me and said, “Look, I’ve found someone we might be able to work with. He’s really keen, he’s got a publishing background, he worked with big companies before, and you can check out his background, his LinkedIn looks good. He’s got funding, they’re doing things bespoke, one title at a time.” It sounded very convincing! But even at the end of his pitch, some of the other co-founders didn’t really like it. So, GameWallStudios was not the type of publisher we wanted to go to.

Sometimes, because of what happened, I think people will take the wrong message from our experience, which is to never go for a small publisher. I want to go on record and say “That’s not the case!”

There are small publishers that do really well, even with small teams. I have several friends with teams about that size who do well. I want to mention this because the moral of this story isn’t “Small Publishers are Bad.”

In either case, at the end of the day, I ended up letting our business developer make the call. The thought was, “Since we don’t have another publisher, and this guy is promising a lot, but doesn’t necessarily have the reputation to prove it, let’s structure the contract so if he doesn’t keep his end of the bargain, the contract automatically terminates.” So we got what is called a performance-based contract, and drafted it out with a lawyer over here in Malaysia.

So the lawyer comes back and says “This looks pretty standard”, and we go forward with it.

It never really occurred to us to think about the ultimate end: “What if this guy just doesn’t care about the contract? What if he just vanishes?”

You’d been careful: talked with lawyers, drafted a contract that would protect, but had trouble finding a publisher. So at this point, you decided to take a risk with TheGameWallStudios.

(J) In our mind, we had nothing to lose, right? We didn’t have a publisher, and if things go wrong, he takes his cut, we go our separate ways.

This next bit is sort of personal for me, but at this point we’d been rejected by a lot of big publishers. Most big publishers will never really want to take a chance on a first time team. They say things like “there’s too much risk” or “you’ll never be able to execute.” And even if they are interested, they’ll want to wait and see how the game does in Early Access.

So we thought, if big publishers aren’t interested, let’s go after the small guys, let’s find an underdog. Someone like us. We didn’t really tell him that, but we were thinking about it. We thought, “He’s small, but so are we.”

We were a four man team trying to build a first person shooter/real time strategy hybrid. We were trying to punch above our weight class. And it felt like Eduardo was the same way, in trying to publish and work with these smaller indie games. He was like us.

In hindsight, we definitely made the wrong choice there.

Just as a quick aside, do you have any idea why you might have had such a hard time finding a publisher?

(J) So, Eximius was our first major title. We’d published smaller stuff before, but when we met with publishers, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. And I think that was kind of a turn off. What we did know is we wanted our publisher to get more copies of the game out and get the word out. What wanted strong Esports support, strong influencer marketing, and tie-ins, people to do write ups on sites like Kotaku, Destructoid, stuff like that. Very cliche stuff and regular stuff.

I think the Esports support is probably the most unusual thing there. And of course Eduardo did mention that he was very much into Esports competitive gaming, that he knew how to get this and that. It’s all a bunch of lies at the end of the day, but we thought it would all work out.

Back to the story at hand. You have your contract, you’re getting ready to launch into Early Access on Steam. When did it start to feel like something was wrong?

(J) So we were going to try to get a write up from Destructoid, and we were going to reach out to some specific influencers. So, the game launches, we’re expecting to see a write up, some ads, something. And none of these promises are followed through!

I reached out to the Destructoid employee we were in contact with to ask if Eduardo ever followed up, and he says “No, he never did.” So the game launches, and I find that we have no write ups, no marketing, no ads. And this was when we realized that something is really wrong here. Then all of a sudden, Eduardo starts becoming harder to contact, and starts to disappear.

What do you mean by started to disappear?

(J) Well, I say he disappeared, but it was actually a pretty long time before he fully vanished. So right after we launch, we ask him where the marketing is. And he goes “Don’t worry, it’s coming, it’s coming.” And around the same time, we had a tournament planned with a company called Triforce Tokens, that does some crypto-currency stuff. So we were putting a lot of effort into the tournament, recruiting teams, putting up marketing.

So about two months after release, we’re talking with him, asking for the money, asking for money from sales of the game. He keeps buying time until he can’t anymore. He keeps making up excuses. First he tells us there was a problem with the bank, then he tells us he was in a car accident. At some point I went to my co-founders and said “What’s the contingency if he just disappears?” And then finally, right in the middle of the tournament, he vanishes.

That sounds pretty rough, to say the least.

(J) When this whole thing took off, it was very chaotic for us. We had a larger team, we were backed up on salaries that we weren’t paying, and we were thinking “Okay, well if we don’t get the money out, we’re gonna be dead.” Like, in a month. We’re still in active development on the game, we’re still running this tournament that we have to pay out prizes for, and we haven’t told the community anything. It was just too much going on all at once.

And people are still buying the game! But we’re not getting a cent. We’re supporting the game, we’re pushing out bug fixes. People are asking about the price and such, when the game will be on sale, and we’re thinking “We don’t actually have any control over this!” So we had to keep our game faces on.

So at this point, he’s dropped off the face of the earth. You’re in the middle of a tournament, you don’t have access to any of the money from your game. How did you go about getting your game back?

(J) First thing we did was find an indie friendly lawyer in the UK. [Ed Note: Eduardo Monteiro and his company, the TheGameWallStudios does business out of the UK, which is why Ammobox had to do this.] This person tells us to wait for the termination clause in our contract to kick in, and when it does, we’ll send him a letter to terminate the contract. He also gave us examples on how things could go if Eduardo responded. So for a pretty nominal fee we had him send that letter.

At the same time, we had been reaching out to Steam. We were lucky enough to have had a contact at Steam that we had just met. Steam had just come to Malaysia around the time we launched. So we met some of them and asked “Hypothetically, let’s say all this is happening, what could we do?”

They told us “Well, we can’t actually just take the game from his account and give it back to you, we can only do it if we get a court order.”

But they did tell us that we could put out a DMCA so that he couldn’t sell the game anymore. Because at this point, not only is he stealing the game, he’s also stealing the money from the game sales. So this Steam contact told us “If you can’t get the money, don’t let him have it.” So that’s what we did.

A DMCA is pretty easy to do. The content owners are obligated to take the offending content down, and then decide what to do with it. It’s shoot first, ask questions later. It can definitely be abused, but in our situation it was a bit of a lifesaver. Steam had to take the game down immediately. We sent the letter on the 23rd of December, and they took it down from sale at the start of the new year.

Then I realize that I can see his strategy. He’s trying to get as much money out while he can, so he has the game on sale at other storefronts as well. We had to DMCA them too. And finally we were able to get everyone to stop selling the game.

Honestly, a lot of the law stuff felt very pay-to-win. If we had the money, we could have gotten an injunction and gotten the bank accounts that the various digital storefronts were sending money to locked. If we had won the case, we would have gotten him to have to pay our lawyers fees. And because he was using his home address as the address for his company, I think it would have been possible for us to seize his assets or something, even if he declared bankruptcy. All the clauses in the contact say he’s in the wrong. He can’t argue his way out. This isn’t a case of “Well, we got screwed by the contract” or something. He just took the money and ran.

I think he probably knew we couldn’t afford the legal fees. 15,000 pounds (Just under 20,000 USD) may not sound like a lot, but it’s two years’ salary for a single artist in Malaysia.

So, you finally get your game back after talking to Steam, and using the DMCA to block sales of it. This was a while ago at this point. Where is the game now, and what brought all of this back up?

(J) So since then, we’ve gotten much farther. We were lucky to be able to move on. It wasn’t a natural position, I think he expected us to be dead and buried. He tried to crush us to get away with maybe… $100,000? It’s unbelievable to me. But we got out, because of some lucky decisions, and some helpful parties. We got a lot of support from our community, we had some influencers cover it, people bought the game to support us. We did try to run a gofundme to sue him, but we didn’t raise enough money to have it go forward. I think it came in a bit too late, after interest in what was going on died down.

Alright. So, that’s all the mildly depressing stuff, but the story has at least a bit of a happy ending with you getting the game back. I actually wanted to try Eximius, but it wasn’t for sale on Steam. When is it coming out?

(J) Right now we’re close to our launch date, and we’re aiming for Q1 2021. Hopefully, we’ll finish the game in time. No more sleep for us! [Laughs] But I’m feeling confident we’ll hit our schedule. We wanted to release at the tail end 2021, but I think we’ll have a higher quality product if we release it early next year. Right now we’re focused on getting it to 1.0. We’ve restructured our marketing strategies, to get better results. We want a successful launch, and to put this behind us.

Few quick questions, and then I think we’ll be done. What sort of game is it, and given your background, do you have any plans for mod support for Eximius?

(J) Eximius is what I would call an FPS+. It’s a first person shooter, with a real time strategy game also added on.

Regarding mod support, we want to, but it will be post 1.0 if it happens. Right now our systems are constantly changing, and every time it changes, it would break any mods that existed. I want to make sure stuff is really solid before we work on that, I don’t want to break peoples mods. And Steam auto-updates means you break stuff easily. We’re all really big into modding, and if it becomes something we can do, we want to. But right now, we aren’t planning for it.

What are your goals for the game, like after all of this struggle and work, what will make you feel like it was all worth it?

(J) We want to make something that is timeless. Something like CSGO 1.6, Renegade, or Natural Selection. Something that people will be playing for years. Something that there is nothing else like.

How much will the game cost?

(J) Releasing at around the same price, maybe a bit higher. I don’t have an exact price yet, but what for 1.0 is more than double what we have in EA [Early Access] now. Our 1.0 is actually on a separate branch that we aren’t pulling into EA, because it’s a semi-separate game where a lot of systems are rewritten. We’ve released maps/weapons, and 1.0 has double the content of EA. Customizations, squad mechanics, etc, stuff people have been asking for.

Just one last question, one I like to end these interviews with. Anything you want to say to your players?

(J) I would want to say thank you. The games industry and gamers can be harsh these days.

It’s very easy for someone to just buy the game, decide they don’t like it, leave a bad review, and refund it. But our community hasn’t done that, even as we have struggled. So I’m grateful to the people who bought our game and didn’t just refund it. To everyone who has stuck with us as we’ve been on this journey to 1.0 release. We keep these people in mind, and we want to make a high quality product and not disappoint them.

In addition, there were a lot of people who bought the game just to support us, back when this whole thing started to come out, and when people learned what had happened to us. We had hundreds of people buying it just to support us, not even to play the game. We wish they would play it! But we’re still very thankful for them, and want to thank them from the bottom of our hearts.

Thanks a ton for your time, and best of luck with Eximius. I’m looking forward to seeing it when it comes out!

Editor’s Postscript – Eduardo Fernando Teixeira Monteiro is the full name of the scammer mentioned in this article. If you do a few searches, you’ll find that he’s been up to this sort of bullshit since about 2014, and Ammobox isn’t the first group of people he’s done this to. Like any scam artist, he operates at his best when people don’t talk about him, his tactics and what he’s done, so I want to give a huge shoutout to Ammobox for sharing their story, and hopefully making it harder in the future for him to do business.