Rough stuff indeed.
The whole team over at Witch Beam are hardworking, professional, passionate and generally a force for good.
Play Assault Android Cactus, it's incredible
Assault Android Cactus
Assault Android Cactus is an arcade style twin stick shooter set in a vivid sci fi universe. Play on PC, Mac, Linux, PS4 or Nintendo Switch!www.assaultandroidcactus.com
It truly is.Play Assault Android Cactus, it's incredible
Assault Android Cactus
Assault Android Cactus is an arcade style twin stick shooter set in a vivid sci fi universe. Play on PC, Mac, Linux, PS4 or Nintendo Switch!www.assaultandroidcactus.com
the last tweet is pretty telling how frustrated he is :
That's really shitty, sega!
It's the AAC people? Man, that game is awesome.
As a programmer that has more than one occasion been blamed for mistakes made by managers, I can understand how he feels. Especially in this case where it is publicly advertised. Fucking morons.
I get how he feel, but i have a totally different opinion, i think the marketing of this is on the wrong side a little.
But when i worked in a shitty video game company (for mobile games) we have that a lot and i felt worse when the stuff was canceled or not released after putting so many hours of your life into it, but i gues everyone feels differente on this situations, i would totally prefer the thing to be released.
I mean in the end, Tim's understanding that it's within Sega's right to do this because all his old work belongs to them. But it's more of a swift kick in the rear to say in the marketing that the original team gave them blessing to do it when that's clearly not the case and everyone so far has expressed shock that it's even out.
I was under the assumption that crunch happened at the tail end of development, before a game's release.
I seriously feel for anyone in this situation. I know the counter argument is that you are working for someone and as long as you got paid for your work you have nothing to complain about. But it's seriously rough seeing your work just thrown out.Yeah I don't think Tim or I or any of the others who contributed to this feel that it's horrendous for it to be made public or anything, his frustration is clearly with the way in which this whole thing was handled, compounded greatly by the circumstances under which it was created.
Also, Tim's experience prior to this was working at Pandemic Australia, who had a very famous game cancellation after years of work.
We also had a ton of work at Sega that never saw the light of day.
It's a rough world out there.
Lol, ive crunched just to reach a 15 minute E3 demo on time. Then i crunched on that same project AGAIN because management wanted three weeks off for Christmas instead of 2. And of course, close to release crunch as well.I was under the assumption that crunch happened at the tail end of development, before a game's release.
Was Sega going to have this small
team crunching through the entire development? Good grief!
Thanks for the additional perspective, fascinating (but depressing) stuff.I said it in the other Golden Axe thread but this morning's news about the prototype was some real bizzarro world shit to wake up to.
It's really Tim's story to tell so there's not much point sharing more anecdotes from my experience, but being the designer on this is something I'm still super proud and super bummed about at the same time.
We had a lot of absurd experiences at that place, things that don't make any sense if you assume the company wants to make money and or good video games, but this was a particularly messed up two-week period of time.
Oh, one really funny thing I'd like to point out is that Tim Dawson is actually an animator, he taught himself to program in Unity so that he could make prototypes and used those skills with me to make a prototype in our spare time to help Sega pitch for projects, so like what we were doing here was 100x as bizarre as it even sounds.
Yeah I get you. I was just triggered by his Twitter thread.I get how he feel, but i have a totally different opinion, i think the marketing of this is on the wrong side a little.
But when i worked in a shitty video game company (for mobile games) we have that a lot and i felt worse when the stuff was canceled or not released after putting so many hours of your life into it, but i gues everyone feels differente on this situations, i would totally prefer the thing to be released.
"SEGA Europe reached out to former members of the Golden Axe: Reborn dev team to produce this prototype of the game for Steam as part of our 60th Anniversary celebrations. We wanted to bring the work of the developers at the time to light and celebrate it as a part of our history. Something we didn't get the chance to do first time around.
"We certainly didn't mean to dredge up painful memories for Mr. Dawson and his former colleagues or appear disrespectful. We've removed the line from the Steam copy that could have been taken as a slur on the development and would like to reassure everyone that it was intended as a comment on the build we had ported to PC, not the quality of the original work.
"We're hoping lots of fans play the prototype and can appreciate the work he and his colleagues put into this developing this prototype."
I saw a comment somewhere else mentioning the letter "D" is called "Demo".
Something makes me... doubt that.I saw a comment somewhere else mentioning the letter "D" is called "Demo".
It's basically "Golden Axe Demo", or shortened to "Golden AxeD".
There's literally nothing to suggest that, it even says it's "tongue in cheek" in the Steam descriptionI saw a comment somewhere else mentioning the letter "D" is called "Demo".
It's basically "Golden Axe Demo", or shortened to "Golden AxeD".
As soon as this was unveiled and the PR specifically referenced the studio had shuttered, I knew there was probably at least one skeleton in the closet. It's like they knew this would dredge up shit but somehow thought this would still be a PR win.
I'm a translator who works mainly on game localization. Recently, I was involved in a project that was a trainwreck from the start: the client imposed draconian limitations to our work, the source text was absolutely awful and the deadlines were crazy short. Some sentences were very hard to understand, most were clearly wrong and made no sense at all, and we somehow had to make sense of it and translate it. We asked many questions, the client would take 2-3 weeks to answer and the answers were frequently useless or made things even worse.
I had to work overtime for weeks. It affected my personal life and my health. The client ignored our complains during the localization process, but after the work was "done", they came back and complained (very aggressively) about the very issues we had asked them to solve. The end result was terrible and I promised myself I would never again work with that client. Now, if those guys release this ten years from now and make jokes about how bad the localization is... Yeah, I totally get how the dev feels about this.
Rough stuff indeed.
The whole team over at Witch Beam are hardworking, professional, passionate and generally a force for good.
Play Assault Android Cactus, it's incredible
Assault Android Cactus
Assault Android Cactus is an arcade style twin stick shooter set in a vivid sci fi universe. Play on PC, Mac, Linux, PS4 or Nintendo Switch!www.assaultandroidcactus.com
A lot of managers I know unfortunately belong to a very peculiar breed of person: one that takes pride in supposedly not needing to be familiar with the fine details of a task in order to make important decisions about it.
This is often accompanied by a very high degree of confidence and rigidity in their own vision, despite basing it on an admittedly superficial understanding of the situation, to the point where concerns and points of view from more qualified individuals are often perceived as something akin to political squabbling - an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of having to deal with people - rather than critical input.