Dragonball T Downloaded 3495 times
'Bubblegum Crisis' Downloaded 1196 times
That is a lot of downloads, far more than a dozen
Also slightly deceptive. DBT went through roughly a dozen development releases, and there was a core group of people who downloaded with every new release. Though I suppose even then, yes...that's more than a dozen. Well, only a dozen people were giving me feedback, anyway.
The BGC downloads surpise me though. That only ever had three development releases, and none of them were ever far enough along to really be 'playable' like Dragonball T was.
Servant Corps
What is Dragonball T?
Dragonball T is/was a module for the T3 roguelike engine.DBT was the flagship module for the engine, with ~700K of dialogue, 70+ unique maps and more than 50 dungeons. So far as I know, it's the biggest roguelike ever made, though even at that the final version only included about half of the original design plan.
DBT's biggest claim to fame is that it received a full color two-sided postcard advertisement that was placed in the convention bags of ~1800 participants at
Anime Los Angeles in 200...7, I think. An image of the ad used to be archived on ocmartialarts.org, but OCMA disbanded after their
final perormance.
Unfortunately the lead engine developer for T3 got married towards the end of the development process, released a buggy final version and then disappeared. I continued work on DBT for about six months after that, continually expecting engine development to continue, but it never did. So I was left with the choice of whether to revert six months worth of work to make DBT compatible with the prior, less buggy version of the engine. Right around that time the ToME wiki was devastated by some sort of bug, and shortly afterwards the forums were hacked, and the communty pretty much fell apart, so I abandoned my modules since it didn't seem like there were many people left to play them.
'Bubblegum Crisis'
Bubblegum Crisis started as an experiment after engine development stopped. There were really only a couple parts of the engine that were bugged, so with BGC I just built around them. While DBT was something I had started with on day one as a learning project that grew to epic proportions, BGC was begun after I already knew what I was doing, and so from day one I started with fantastic plans. Personally, I thought the results were amazing. BGC does some amazing things, but as mentioned previously...apparantly it was too complex for most people in the ToME comunity to deal with. To quote my lead playtester, "Holy FUCK does this game have a steep learning curve."
See...I've been a gamer all my life. To me, roguelikes are just one type of game. As a gamer, I didn't feel limited to roguelike concepts when making BGC. But apparently a lot of people in the ToME community are roguelike-ONLY gamers, and a lot of the gameplay concepts I used were unfamiliar to them. The game itself is based on the
Bubblegum Crisis Anime from the 80's, and the premise is that you're a team of girls with access to power armor technology trying to save the world from an evil corporation that sells human-like robots, and then remotely hijacks them to peform assassinations. The game has time-based events, the hardsuits you wear are customizable like Mechwarrior, parts are ordered via delayed purchase order like XCOM. You control four unique characters with whom you can swap positions, team up as a group, or play individually in any combination. Swaps were done via cellphone, so you could be at the local mall, call up one of your other teammates at another location and swap to them as the active character, and then call up the character you were playing a moment ago and ask them to meet you back at base. And with the time-based events, you could actually
be called by the other characters and they would inform you what was going on where they were. A huge part of gameplay was that one of the characters was a police dispatcher, so she could call you up and inform you when boomer events happened. There's even a voicemail system so that if you don't answer, their messages go to voicemail which you can check later. The map...oh, the map. The main game map in BGC is psuedo three dimensional. There are places on the highway system where you can travel in a tight circle to end up in exactly the place you started on the X and Y axis', but you're somewhere else entirely because you're on a different Z-level. And the whole thing had line-of-sight visibility, so you could go around a corner, or through a highway overpass and suddenly everything would look different than it did a moment priot. People were having
nightmares over that.
Personally, I thought it was an amazing game, but the general consensus of the community was that the game was on entirely too much crack, and they'd rather play a mindless dungeon crawl. So like DBT, I abandoned it.
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Topic: CCS now under development (Read 32775 times)