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[ThtblovesDF]

Its a fact that they don't have the early version anymore if it ever existed, as least that much was admited on the forum back in ye olden day.

[ZeroGravitas]

I took the videos released in....2015 was it? To be showing something. Are you saying that's also just cobble together footage done in illustrator?

In October 2015. At the time I thought it was showing something, but the fact that we never saw anything more, even the "later turns" he promised, tells me that yeah, it was probably fake. Maybe even in Unity. But not based on any real game that exists.

[Xgamer4]

I.e. I invested since they already had a early build they showed off in the first videos and I wanted to play that. 3 years later, they now have LESS then that.

This actually isn't surprising. It was, I'd assume, a partial engine missing key functionality that could do some stuff. If they refactored or substantially modified the system after that, the early game - which again, was presumably not a complete game - would not include any of the subsequent work. If they had poor version management - and I'm not exactly impressed with their software engineering/project management chops from what I've (peripherally) read - they may not even have the early version any more.

Their "versioning system" has been mentioned in passing a few times, and the impressions I've gotten is that calling it "version control" is being waaayyy too generous. Josh apparently doesn't use any kind of version control, and just kinda wings everything. The off-hand comment Fenicks made a few months ago suggest that Josh actually keeps some code "in the cloud" and some code on his local machine, which is even crazier, but everything coding-related that Fenicks mentions needs to be filtered through the context that he knows nothing about development so... I'm not sure just what that entails, other than it sounds weird at best for a game like this.

(Unless... in the cloud is referring to some kind of source control that Josh does use, that Fenicks doesn't understand, which would make things make a bit more sense)

[Gornova]

there are games about influence/manipulation with a "lesser" scope than TWS ? I find this topic intriguing

[Shadowgandor]

The Last Federation maybe?

[ZebioLizard2]

That's a bit more of a grander scope aint it being galaxywide. 

There's a new game coming out that's a bit like this called Urban Empires.

[Scripten]

there are games about influence/manipulation with a "lesser" scope than TWS ? I find this topic intriguing

Drox Operative is pretty good. It's an ARPG, but it is pretty neat in that your goals are to influence various powers.

[Gornova]

thanks for suggestions.. I specify my last question with a game of manipulation/influence without action part (Drox Operative is high action). Best for me is a game like Crusader Kings 2, turn based with pause

[E. Albright]

That's a bit more of a grander scope aint it being galaxywide. 

Well, it's actually "only" a solar system...

[Xgamer4]

Someone from RPGCodex decided to hammer the final nail in.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/that-which-vapours-sauron-rapes-tbs-that-will-never-be-scam-maybe.93379/page-48

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the findings of my recent investigation of That Which Sleeps. Wall of text incoming.

First of all I’d like to mention, that even though I never backed this game on Kickstarter, I had high hopes for it and I followed its development very closely. A few months ago I re-read this whole thread, watched all the official videos and all the screenshots and I wondered – what went wrong? It seemed so polished and coherent, the gameplay was supposedly there – there were reports of testers playing the game and doing wonderful things in it. Could it really have been a scam?
Unable to satisfy my curiosity with anything I cound find online, I decided to go deeper. I contacted a certain fellow (whose name I will not mention at the moment, in case he would rather remain anonymous), who helped me obtain the map editor that was only released to beta-tier backers. Since decompiling Unity scripts is just a matter of downloading some free software (like ILSpy or DotPeek), I wanted to dive into the editor code in hopes of finding some clues on the game itself.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the dll file and found all the game code inside. It turns out that the map editor was built in the same project as the game shown in early videos, so all the scripts got included in the build.

Here’s what I found out:

1. Hundreds of third-party assets
Okay, maybe not hundreds, but there is a lot of third-party code in there – mostly from the Asset Store. Some notable examples:

    Gamelogic Grids
    Cartoon FX Pack
    ReadyMade FX
    Particle Dynamic Magic

Most of these are particle effects packs.

2. There is no game logic
There are some game-specific classes (like Agent, POI [Point of Interest], Nation etc.), but there’s barely any code that would handle actual game logic. Most of the code is related to GUI operations, like hiding and moving menus. AI scripts of any kind are nowhere to be found. The questions that show up during scenario selection phase are loaded from an xml file, but answering them does nothing – those answers are not stored anywhere. Lastly, the code that handles POI’s is not really universal – it only has direct reference to an „AventuraObject” which was the only Point of Interest seen in one of the early videos. The data for that city is not loaded from external sources, but hardcoded into the script.
To its defence, there are some data structures and pieces of code that show some foresight, but still there’s almost nothing happening „under the hood”.

3. The code quality is questionable
I don’t claim to be some kind of code-guru, but I know bad code when I see it. It’s poorly structured, there’s a lot of unnecessary code repetition (eg. like 6 tooltip classes that differ very little from one another). Not to mention the faulty approach of creating GUI effects and transitions first without any underlying logic.

So, what are the conclusions? The most obvious one is that King Dinosaur Games most likely lied when they said that they had a working game during their Kickstarter campaign. I’m pretty sure that at the moment of the map editor’s release the game (if you could even call it a game) was not in playable state. I’m not sure it was a 100% scam though. The code I’ve seen shows some signs of effort being put into it. If it was made for the sole purpose of misleading their customers, it could’ve been done way easier. My hunch is that Josh simply overestimated his skills and couldn’t handle the complexity of the project (and those stretch goals didn’t help either).

That’s it for now folks. I did refrain from posting actual code here, but if you have access to the map editor you’ll be able to see it for yourself.

[DISCLAIMER] : this analysis was based on the code found within TWS Map Editor files. KDG could claim that this was just some trash code and they do have actual working code somewhere else.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

(removed)

[ChairmanPoo]

suspected as much

[forsaken1111]

I'm not entirely surprised, but all of his findings are referring to the map editor. This doesn't prove anything about the game itself. Why would there be game logic in a map editor, for example? He states that like it's some big deal but what map editor includes any kind of game logic?

Using 3rd party asset packs and questionable code is probably a symptom if the map editor being hastily thrown together to appease the backers.

[Malus]

As mentioned, the map editor was part of the main game's project. It was probably just a different scene, which means all of the code referenced project-wide is still included in the build, even if you're only building the "map editor" scene. This makes sense: if you're going to make a map editor, it needs to live alongside the game code, so you're not going to split it off into a separate project.

I haven't looked at the disassembly myself (I don't have access to the map editor) but I'm sure it's very clear which parts of the code relate to the map editor and which relate to the "game". Specifically it sounds as if there are references to things only shown off in videos, not present in the map editor at all, which all but proves that the "game", whatever state it's in, was included alongside the map editor -- or at least the logic was.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

(removed)