Welcome to Wrestling Gamers United Newsletter #295
1) It's all about the game 2) Link of the Week 3) Question of the Week
1) It's all about the game ************************************
So the action is all done and now it’s all about integrating more content. More moves, more audio, more polish, etc. And it definitely needs polish. All of the basic game mechanics are working but they need to work better. For example, player animations adjust themselves to keep from passing through objects (ropes, walls, etc.) but it's not subtle. Neither is the adjustment of lying opponents away from ropes to make room for ground submissions to initiate. The sliding is a bit too obvious and sometimes buggy. But all that matters is that the programmers have it 'working' and now its a simple matter of fine tuning it.
Another thing that needs tuning and maybe even a small rebuild is the way grapples are initiated. Right now they work perfectly fine...as long as you're the attacker. But I'm not satisfied yet with the window of opportunity for the defender to evade a grapple attempt. It's a little too unbalanced in favor of the attacker. If we don't give the defender more of a chance to block or reverse a grapple attempt then it will be too tempting to just spam the grapple button. That's not cool.
We have a nice long list of bugs. Trust me that’s a good thing. Bugs are easy to fix compared to getting new features working. I'd much rather deal with "player sometimes does not collide with turnbuckle" than deal with "make submissions work".
AI is needing some help and last week we began interviewing new programmers to give the AI task to. We have almost two dozen more programmers to interview but so far we've met with some good ones. I'm a little concerned that two experienced programmers we interviewed suggested rebuilding the game from scratch to make it easier to write AI for but I'm not too worried because in my experience anyone you add to the crew will tell you they could do a better job if we started over. We don't have that option until after PWX: Uprising ships and we hopefully get an opportunity to do a console project which would be a convenient time for a rebuild. I am excited though about the different proposals I got for AI design. A lot of very cool and advanced stuff can be done when we're ready for it. And thankfully we got additional opinions from programmers with AI experience that confirmed our AI needs at this stage are fairly basic and won't be too much trouble. But we definitely have some exciting potential to build out some advanced AI that could affect everyting from stats and reversals to realtime animation morphing as well. But first we have to nail the basics of AI (follow the other guy and beat him up).
So gameplay work marches on which brings me to a semi-related topic. Recently there has been a lot of talk, not all positive, about the direction PWX has taken since we started all those years ago. Some of the original supporters have seen things such as the balcony dives and the announcement of Uprising itself as a sign that perhaps we have forgotten our promise of gameplay first. I won't go into detail with my response here as I've already addressed the discussion in detail of the PWX forum and Cube's board. But I do want to say again (because it can't be stated strongly enough) that our commitment is to gameplay. Our programming team's time is 99.8% dedicated to gameplay inside the ring. Nothing has changed in terms of what the programmers are working on and it wouldn't be any different no matter how we were funded or published. Some have said the full version of Uprising should have been totally free and we shouldn't have asked for money for it. In a perfect world I would agree. But in this world I borrowed almost a half million dollars so far to build PWX and I'd really like to start paying it back.
But for the sake of letting both sides be heard let me end this section of the newsletter with the thoughts of one of those concerned original PWX supporters. He gave me permission to reprint his private email to me so don't worry, he isn't being Punked:
If you look at my issues with the balcony dives in and of itself, I'm being an asshole I will give you that. In the context of everything else you and I have been talking about I think I did have a point. I think your right releasing something to gamers. If your not getting a good deal from a publisher yet you are right in waiting it out. If you need money your right to try and get it from your fanbase. I just really think that making Uprising a bonus for people who preorder is the way to do that. I think people will be more attracted to knowing that they have either paid for PWX or paid in part for the full game than they will by a balcony dive. The balcony dive is not a big deal in and of itself, but I definitely think that there were better things to work and and if Im wrong thats fine but it should have been debated sooner. Which you have admitted thank you. My problem with doing these small stand alone releases is that your having to make choices based on justifying your price tag. That means doing things like balcony dives and development zones. Things that are great short term but may hurt the game down theroad. I think Mel is right about people forgiving scope over quality. You will never, ever, be able to have the scope of your competitors. Thats why I think you need to focus on sim in ring game play. If you narrow your scope and put as many resources as possible into making that aspect of the game great your golden. If you were treating uprising as a beta test for people who pre-ordered you wouldnt have had to worry about selling the product of Uprising, because the product would be PWX. If the product was PWX, that would give you an oppurtunity to define PWX better and pitch that to people. You may say all is said and done but I think your wrong.What Uprising gets some bad reviews or pisses some people off who like me don't like the pricing? What if Uprising doesn't give you the deal or cash you need to finish the game? Then what do you do, ask for more money for another small release? Make more decisions based around justifying that games price rather than keeping your development focused? How many times can you do that? If you make Uprising sales go towards a preorder you wont have to make decisions based on the short term.You will gain a lot more buzz and fan respect,especially from the old boys. You will probably gain more sales after Uprising gets around, because if someone doesn't think its fun on its own they might think its fun enough if its going towards a pre order.Most importantly, if you need more fan generated cash,you can easily ask for five or ten bucks here and there till you reach 40 dollars. By that time you willbe such a low risk investment publishers will be very friendly assuming you have not finished the game already.'
2) Link of the Week ********************
This may very well be the toughest and most determined pro wrestler alive today: