Trials of Ascension, Shady Practices and the Big Crowdfunding Debate

[Bodoh]

They spent $37k

For $37K on professional artist and 3D modeller, you would get a ton of concept art and models.

The concept art on that site is worth just US$20 x 24 = $480.
Store brought assets. You can do the maths.


That site is a Xenforo forum site.
It has nothing to do with AddThis. AddThis is just to share the website with others.

[Osoroshii]

I wonder if, in his delusions, "Lord Brax" (lol) tried to get himself into this year's E3 as a developer to do a presentation.

[Bodoh]

I wonder if, in his delusions, "Lord Brax" (lol) tried to get himself into this year's E3 as a developer to do a presentation.

E3 is on right now. Why not ask for the pitch E3 video and/or pictures of their booth?

I would love to see their pitch E3 video and/or pictures of their booth at E3.

[Deleted]

We're getting back to ToA-con?

[Azrile]

For $37K on professional artist and 3D modeller, you would get a ton of concept art and models.

The concept art on that site is worth just US$20 x 24 = $480.
Store brought assets. You can do the maths.


That site is a Xenforo forum site.
It has nothing to do with AddThis. AddThis is just to share the website with others.

That is the transparency question with the money. They stated on their website they raised $67,000 to make the video for the Kickstarter. They paid Teddy about $28k, and then give them another $2k for buying some small stuff like the naming system, spawning system etc.. non of which actually worked in demo island. Then also a $100 for the networking system which comes with their building system.. so total, I can see them spending less than $30k on the demo video So it is one of two things.

1. They lied about the total and never raised $67k. The thing is, back before we started this thread, these guys were sending out press releases every couple weeks bragging about hitting fundraising goals with their cash-shop. It was one of the major ways they were marketing the game. When they hit 20k, 30k, 40k and 50k... they were basically trying to show how popular the game was through those press releases. Obviously this isn´t something you have to belief, but a lot of the big donor people on their website were actually fake accounts. They are the posters with $500 after their names who suddenly all disappeared at the same time, as soon as we pointed out that we had IP addresses that showed they were coming from the same few IP addresses. These are also the same ´dedicated´ fans who completely stopped posting on MMORPG.com at the same time (when Brax found out we had access to IP addresses). Just my opinion, but it is not hard to think they they used those fake donors to jack up the total contributions so they could hit new milestones in order to send out new press releases.

2. They really did raise $67k... and then you get to ask how they wasted the other $37k. Did Brax ´pay´ his daughter for writing fiction? Were they paying the social media team for spending all day posting to themselves on mmorpg.com? There is NOTHING on demo island that isn´t easily accountable for by the $30,000. There was very little there, and I already linked in this thread to the tutorials on youtube that teach you how to do most of the stuff they did.. those tutorials are like 20 minutes long ( how to chop down trees etc).

My guess is they were just fudging the totals in order to be able to send out press releases. The fact that so many of their high donor posters suddenly stopped posting as soon as we started this thread, both on their main site and 3rd party fansites.. Xansword came to this thread and already said that it was true their dev team was reacting and changing things based on this thread... my guess one way is they stopped using fake accounts

[Bodoh]

Which raises another question?

Why don't they hire professionals to do the job than jerk around hiring noobs and idiots?

They are idiots themselves?

[Azrile]

We should neat up the first post of the thread, update it with all this new shit at all.
If they really go for Steam Greenlight many people will end up by coming over here.... it would be nice if they didn't had to go over 350 pages to know all that happened during this thread.

yeah, it is getting pretty hard to summarize... I think I have the newest part starting at the last KS

Brax - Guys, I am going to cancel the KS again, it is obvious we aren´t getting funded. I also must admit that none of us know anything about making a game.

Fans - Screw this, you guys are idiots, we are going to play Life is Feudal!

Brax - please don´t go

5 months later

Brax - Look guys, we are making Life is Feudally Exiled. We still don´t know how to make a game, but you can pre-order our new game soon....

- - - Updated - - -

Which raises another question?

Why don't they hire professionals to do the job than jerk around hiring noobs and idiots?

They are idiots themselves?

They would have to spend their own money. They did hire Teddy for $28k (using cash-shop money), and he worked for them for about 8 months and made most of what was on Demo Island.

We talked about this earlier in this thread. Anyone who can actually make a game, has the skills necessary to make a good game... is not going to work for someone like Brax. Why would you? the guy has now screwed up 2 different KS, has changed his game about 5 tims on a whim.... and after 13 years of promoting this game, still has not learned any actual skills himself. Teddy lasted a few months before he realized they were incompetent idiots, and then he screwed them over at the end. Everyone else that has ever worked with them has left and called them incompetent. Each time, Brax just finds a new set of people, with less experience, and starts the process over. So now he has two new programmers who have never made a game before, working for a share of the profits.. my guess it will take them a few months to realize Brax is an idiot and they will leave also. Teddy left even though he was getting paid, how long will people last who aren´t getting paid.

Who knows how much of an idiot Brax is. But he has managed to pretend to be a game developer for 13 years without doing any work, learning anything, or spending any of his own money.... that is an accomplishment.

[Deleted]

It has begun:

https://www.trialsofascension.com/fo...2/#post-131024

What I find odd is that after a long month nothing has been accomplished yet.

[Pizzaman199]

Well if you notice, Game server is something that's still being worked on. So I think they've spent this entire month trying to figure out how the hell to access their own server since Teddy never taught them properly. Or he did but only for that one server and they're baffled by the prospect of switching to another one.

[Azrile]

It has begun:

https://www.trialsofascension.com/fo...2/#post-131024

What I find odd is that after a long month nothing has been accomplished yet.

Yeah, I wish someone would ask ´ why is it that stuff that was marked as ´100% complete´ was not in demo island´ for the last roadmap.

Also they keep talking about this huge switch-over to Unity 5 which really is nothing. They had so few non-plant models in their game that there would be almost nothing to switch over to the new shaders. ( most plants you are almost better off not switching over). You literally click on the model, then click on a drop down list and change ´legacy shader - bumped diffuse´ to ´ standard shader´ and move onto the next model. maybe.. big maybe.. they had 50 models in the game.. which would take about 2 hours to do all of them. But again, there is no reason you would even have to do that.. your game would work fine, and exactly like before using the legacy shaders and you just go through and update the shaders when you have time.

Audio is the same thing. Unity had a huge amount of upgrades to the audio system. I don´t think ToA had any audio except for footsteps. But even still, you update to Unity 5.. all your stuff works just like before, but now you have some fancy new gizmos to play with. It doesn´t break anything you did before.

I would love to hear them explain anything else about Unity 5 that is causing them so much grief. They had a freakin empty demo island with almost nothing on it.. and they had Unity 5 for 10 months already.. Games that are of huge scope were able to upgrade in a weekend.

Of course what can you expect from a lead developer who can´t turn on his server.

Loved this gem from their forums.. advice on how to not get bad reviews on Steam.

´I suggest making everything server side and make sure the server has authority over ALL.´

haha, good luck with that. You want to have server authority on servers that are parked on someone´s home computer. You are going to have crazy lag waiting for authorizations, you are going to get hacked by the people who have the servers on their computer... and you are asking a guy who didn´t know how to turn on a server to overcome those issues... Also to point out, this is still a major thing the clients of Atavism are waiting for... and that is just on a regular server, not on one that will be on home computers.

[Post]

Yeah I don't think it surprises anyone that they used this switching to Unity 5 to say they had to scrap EVERYTHING (AGAIN) so they could buy more time to collect $$$.

[Kyanion]

See you don't understand Azrile, they were too busy doing "This week I was 100% committed to the launch of ToA: Exile’s new website and forums. The funnest part of building the site was working with the team to come up with the Exile logo."

From the devblog they just posted. The important thing was getting a logo because BRANDING + TRANSPARENCY = $$$$! Forget that coding crap.

[ThePotato]

It still never fails to amuse me that the "community" really know to ask the big questions that matter to the fundamental development of the game at its current stage. For instance not being able to have more than 20 people online at any one time is less important than the stat differences between male and females.

Though in their defence their new website does look alot better than that abomination they had before. Perhaps this is what they've been doing since their cancelled kickstarter?

[Kyanion]

It still never fails to amuse me that the "community" really know to ask the big questions that matter to the fundamental development of the game at its current stage. For instance not being able to have more than 20 people online at any one time is less important than the stat differences between male and females.

Though in their defence their new website does look alot better than that abomination they had before. Perhaps this is what they've been doing since their cancelled kickstarter?

A new coat of paint on a pile of shit is still a pile of shit with a new coat of paint.

[Logwyn]

See you don't understand Azrile, they were too busy doing "This week I was 100% committed to the launch of ToA: Exile’s new website and forums. The funnest part of building the site was working with the team to come up with the Exile logo."

From the devblog they just posted. The important thing was getting a logo because BRANDING + TRANSPARENCY = $$$$! Forget that coding crap.

So they were 100% committed to doing something I could hammer out in 3-4 hours.. they needed a team?

[Bodoh]

Unity 5, Unity 5.1:

I did work for hire for 5 different projects in the last 10 or so months. I maintain my own projects and my own code.

Unity 5:
- less than 10 minutes to upgrade, for each project. Code that gets snared is Unity 3.xx code which requires some minor code changes, like SetActive, Active changes, addition of #IFDEF UNITY5_0, UNITY_5_1, UNITY_5_2, UNITY_4_7 constants in your code. Flash constants are fully removed, so if your code depends on it, they will fault so you just #IFDEF it. PhysX changes for wheel, joints are different.

I don't think they use joints and circular movement yet?

- Many third-party libraries were upgraded successfully. I could also upgrade them if vendor doesn't do it. It's usually the SetActive, Active issue, or the texture resizing or small GLES shader changes.

- Unity editor issues
Some things like lists handling are changed, multiple undo and redo is changed.

- Legacy Shaders to new Shaders.
No difference. You can just leave it and it would work same or similar.

- Skybox needs to be more detailed or else you would get grainy skybox. This requires you change resolution of images.

- GI lighting is much better than Beast. It's much faster. I would spend ages lightmapping. Now I don't have to wait hours on end for baking.

Unity 5.1
- it took around 30 minutes per project. This was because they removed Flash, some unsupported features in WII, older IPHONE2 support,
older Android support - don't bother. Just move to Jelly Bean or KitKat, PhysX changes, Resource Load changes.

So upgrading from Unity 4.xx to Unity 5.xx wouldn't do much.

They are not making a Mobile MMO where it works on constrained environments, or AAA quality where you are an outsourcing studio and you get orders or contract for hire to do AI or coding C++ or tons of concept art or tons of models.


I haven't seen anything worthy of interest, like server-side navigation, server-side AOI (Area of Interest) management or mesh navigation without Unity.

How is their terrain management?
Are they able to show a demo of chopping trees or lower or raise land?

I would like to see a Youtube video of the artist doing concept art sketch.

- - - Updated - - -

their own money. They did hire Teddy for $28k (using cash-shop money), and he worked for them for about 8 months and made most of what was on Demo Island.

The videos smells like $1,500 of work. If they did pay US$28k, they overpaid for by US$26,500.

- - - Updated - - -

Audio is the same thing. Unity had a huge amount of upgrades to the audio system. I don´t think ToA had any audio except for footsteps. But even still, you update to Unity 5.. all your stuff works just like before, but now you have some fancy new gizmos to play with. It doesn´t break anything you did before.

I would love to hear them explain anything else about Unity 5 that is causing them so much grief. They had a freakin empty demo island with almost nothing on it.. and they had Unity 5 for 10 months already.. Games that are of huge scope were able to upgrade in a weekend.

Audio, little or no difference. Most of Audio code works without changes 99% unless you want to have old code that supports Unity Flash, WII or older Android or older iPhone3 audio.

I would like to see their error list.

[Azrile]

ah yeah, I forgot about the SetActive.. I saw that somewhere in our project, but I never fixed it. I think it was just a soft-error (yellow). I will have to check again to see where we had used it. It is possible it was on some script we swiped from Unify.

But yeah, You said it right.. there just isn´t anything going from 4.6 to 5.0 that would ´break´ anything or require a ton of time to upgrade especially when you consider they had so little actually done. And they had bought Unity 4 Pro, which means they should have been using Unity 5 last fall at the latest.

Audio, little or no difference. Most of Audio code works without changes 99% unless you want to have old code that supports Unity Flash, WII or older Android or older iPhone3 audio.

I would like to see their error list.

Did you see any of the live-feed stuff of people playing on Demo Island. I am not sure I heard any sounds except footsteps and certainly nothing that would be heavily scripted. Maybe some point sounds. I don´t think they even had combat sounds.

[lawow74]

So they were 100% committed to doing something I could hammer out in 3-4 hours.. they needed a team?

Welcome to ToA. The only thing the Three Stooges are good at is wasting people's time and money. And entertaining us as they claim to make a game and we point out their incompetence over and over.

[Bodoh]

We have Unity 5 Pro.

They are not doing dead-end projects which require massive code changes, like a Flash Sandbox MMORPG, or mobile Sandbox MMORPG that works on Android Froyo or Android Eclair, or iPhone 3 or iPod 3 MMORPG, or legacy Unity WII.

Also, the licensing terms for Unity 5 has changed. Now it's just a splash screen. nobody gives a damn.

[Azrile]

So they were 100% committed to doing something I could hammer out in 3-4 hours.. they needed a team?

more hype more hype more hype.

We don´t need no stinkin game, all we need is more rebranding and some marketing!!

And...... confirmed... like I guess, they were not able to get the stuff off the server that Teddy did.... they aren´t starting over because they want to, they are starting over because they have nothing they can continue from...

- - - Updated - - -

We have Unity 5 Pro.

They are not doing dead-end projects which require massive code changes, like a Flash Sandbox MMORPG, or mobile Sandbox MMORPG that works on Android Froyo or Android Eclair, or iPhone 3 or iPod 3 MMORPG, or legacy Unity WII.

Also, the licensing terms for Unity 5 has changed. Now it's just a splash screen. nobody gives a damn.

I think Gassy probably mispoke.. I doubt even they were dumb enough to actually buy Unity 5 Pro. I even questioned why they had bought 4 Pro last year when nothing that they were doing required any pro features. And ironically, the only reason you would buy 4 Pro would be to get instant access to Unity 5 beta, which they didn´t use.