RRodgers
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Also, I'm a big fan of the local Massimo's buffalo chicken pizza.

Buffalo chicken? You mean the kind of chicken that accidentally got in the way of an unfortunate gamma ray that had previously passed a buffalo as well? Anyway, it ought to be tasty. Chicken is good, but I have never tried buffalo. How does the evolutionary combination taste?

I am not much of a pizza supporter these days, it's too hard to eat with these damn teeth braces. But I do rather like the new DROD RPG, even if it has deviated somewhat from standard DRODliness.

The spitemaster
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Banji, it's like the time you were serious for a month or two and everyone wondered if your account got hacked. Now, we just don't know what to think of you, because you could be reverse trolling or just making a cool allegory that we all identify with.

I just like having different options. Greek or pizza.

____________________________
Last night upon a stair
I met a man that wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish that man would stay away

Dischorran
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Banjooie wrote:
Oh, I'm laughing hard, Niro, believe me.

It's just, er. I can say /without a doubt/ that this was not my intended result for this thread.

This is our thread now. Go find your own.

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Banjooie
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you know what, this isn't actually nearly as entertaining as I'd hoped, and has actually caused more problems than I was hoping for, so, okay. I am going to do something I do not do.

Pay attention, I'm actually going to clarify.

Step 1: I am actually vaguely disinterested in DROD: RPG. I am probably still going to buy it on account of I do like supporting the company and maybe it's not as terrible as I'm looking.

Step 2: As entertaining as making a gigantic rant thread about how I'm disinterested, I made a vague metaphorical thread to get out the dissatisfaction in a non-confrontational manner.

I figured someone would call me out, there would be some 'god banj, shut up D:', the thread would die, it would be /good times/.

Sillyman calls it too early, I go 'no way this thread is about pizza, lol' mostly because I was kinda having fun with the fact the thread was actually becoming about pizza, and anyone who needed to get the reference /actually did/.

Then Mrimer blew up.

I, uh. That seriously was not the intention of this thread. I guess in the future I will stop trying to be tactful and subtle and will be more directly aggressive with people?

Is...is that the lesson you guys are wanting me to learn here? I'm frankly kind of confused. The problem here is that I wasn't directly insulting enough about a vague qualm I had?

Don't get me wrong, the, uh, the quick course in Banjology made me laugh pretty damn hard, it's good to know that the way I roll is now catalogued and databased or whatever the kids are doing these days. But yelling at me for not directly stating my complaints and instead voicing them in a fairly tactful amusing thread that actually ended up somehow having worthwhile value outside of my complaints is kind of baffling to me in every way imaginable.

If you guys want me to go back to spitting out internet memes and calling people idiots outright, um, sure, okay, I can do that.

silver
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He didn't asplode, he did what he said, he let you know what he felt. and I didn't sense any anger in his post all. just weariness.


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zex20913
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I actually prefer outright anger to snarky passive aggressiveness.

It's like giving somebody a bomb as opposed to putting them in a room/zone with a landmine. While both situations are not good ones, at least with the bomb you don't have to try to find it before you actually attempt to defuse/disassemble/whatever it.

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Oneiromancer
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silver wrote:
He didn't asplode, he did what he said, he let you know what he felt. and I didn't sense any anger in his post all. just weariness.

For Mike, that's exploding. I was frankly taken by surprise.

____________________________
"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

Schik
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Banjooie wrote:
But yelling at me for not directly stating my complaints and instead voicing them in a fairly tactful amusing thread that actually ended up somehow having worthwhile value outside of my complaints is kind of baffling to me in every way imaginable.

Your being tactful and amusing ended after your first post, unfortunately. Then it turned into outright lying, which turned the entire thread into "oh hey look, Banjooie is stirring up shit again. Wheee." If you'd just kept up the discussion using your pizza analogy rather than going on and on about how no really, it's just about pizza, then it could have been a tactful and even amusing thread.

____________________________
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Someone Else
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I just re-read mrimer's post. I had thought that the bureaucracy was mostly a joke, but now I see that it's a really good thing that Erik got it in place when he did. I just want to say I'm way more impressed by what you've done, Mike. I'll try to actually finish learning how C works so that I can help out with the bug fixing part of this.

---

[Last edited by Someone Else at 09-16-2008 02:25 AM]

eytanz
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Banjooie wrote:
Step 1: I am actually vaguely disinterested in DROD: RPG. I am probably still going to buy it on account of I do like supporting the company and maybe it's not as terrible as I'm looking.

Step 2: As entertaining as making a gigantic rant thread about how I'm disinterested, I made a vague metaphorical thread to get out the dissatisfaction in a non-confrontational manner.

The thing is, you weren't saying "I'm not interested in the RPG". That's perfectly fine. Nobody ever expected that everyone who likes DROD would be attracted to the RPG. If you would have said that, then Mike (and I) would have metaphorically shaken your hand and said "well, that's a shame, hope you enjoy the next product more".

What you actually said was more along the lines of "Mike has just arbitrarily decided to go in a totally new direction and Caravel is no longer working on the products it started with". That's entirely false, and it's also insulting to everyone involved, especially to Mike, who worked hard to keep the whole operation running.

____________________________
I got my avatar back! Yay!

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[Last edited by eytanz at 09-16-2008 03:01 AM]

Jatopian
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I agree that the lying was uncalled for, but honestly the metaphor was there for people to get, so I'm pretty sure Banj didn't really expect to fool people for long at all.

eytanz wrote:
"Mike has just arbitrarily decided to go in a totally new direction and Caravel is no longer working on the products it started with". That's entirely false, and it's also insulting to everyone involved, especially to Mike, who worked hard to keep the whole operation running.

I know this wasn't the intent - I've seen Mike's hard work... sadly, the end result has been about the same.

____________________________
DROD has some really great music.
Make your pressure plates 3.0 style!
DROD architecture idea generator

eytanz
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Jatopian wrote:
"Mike has just arbitrarily decided to go in a totally new direction and Caravel is no longer working on the products it started with". That's entirely false, and it's also insulting to everyone involved, especially to Mike, who worked hard to keep the whole operation running.

I know this wasn't the intent - I've seen Mike's hard work... sadly, the end result has been about the same.
No, seriously, it wasn't. I can see why you may think that, based on some reasonable but incorrect conjectures, but the simple truth is that DROD: RPG never came at the expense of working on other DROD products.

____________________________
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Oneiromancer
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eytanz wrote:
the simple truth is that DROD: RPG never came at the expense of working on other DROD products.

Indeed, F&M and DROD: RPG were always completely separate endeavors. F&M stopped because the funding/publishing went away (for more accuracy see one of Erik's posts) but DROD: RPG was under no such constraints and so it kept going. And people definitely wanted a bigger break between TCB and TSS than there was between JtRH and TCB.

____________________________
"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

Banjooie
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This would be a logical statement if your company was actually large enough to support two parallel game productions.

...This would also be a more logical statement if your company actually had a graphics person.

eytanz
Level: Smitemaster

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Ok, let me tell you a story:

Once, there was a man who made snowmen. His snowmen were quite popular. People liked how white they were, and shiney, and their comical poses. He made a few snowmen, over the winter, starting work on each snowman shortly after the last one was complete.

Then, summer came, and there was no more snow. So the snowman maker decided to build a man out of mud. When he was done, some of the people liked it, but others complained. "This mudman, he's not as white as the snowmen were", they said "and it's not as shiney". "Why did you build a mudman?" they cried, "you should have built more snowmen".

"But it's the middle of summer", he said, "there is no snow. Next time the snow falls, I'll make a snowman. Right now, I cannot". "That's not logical", cried the naysayers "for you have only two hands. If you are building a mudman, that means you cannot build a snowman at the same time. Therefore, the fact that you made a mudman is to blame for the lack of snowmen".

"Huh." said the man, and decided to stop listening to people who don't understand what they talk about.

----

I can't be more explicit, for various reasons, and you can decide whether you believe me or not. But you're assuming that at some point a decision was made to work on the RPG instead of DROD 4.0. That is false. For a variety of reasons, it was impossible to work on DROD 4.0 for a while, and, instead of doing nothing and just waiting for circumstances to change, Mike came up with DROD RPG in the meanwhile.

Which isn't to say that now that the RPG is out, it isn't going to affect future development of DROD. It is. And of course, if it is a big success then it will have implications. Some of those implications will be that some time and effort will be put into RPG SmS holds and sequels. Other of those implications are that profits from the RPG will go into getting resources for DROD 4.0 development. At the end, will DROD 4.0 come out earlier or later, better or worse, than in an alternate universe in which DROD RPG was never developed? We'll never know. But one thing that is certainly fact is that, even if DROD RPG was never started, DROD 4.0 development would be at this time, mid-September 2008, at exactly the same state.

____________________________
I got my avatar back! Yay!

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[Last edited by eytanz at 09-16-2008 04:38 AM]

Banjooie
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To be perfectly honest, I totally thought this was Mrimer going 'you know, TotS is totally awesome, let's do that instead.'

But, you know, if some bizarre sequence of events happened that completely made it impossible to make TSS but somehow left it possible to make a completely different game that just happened to line up with what Mrimer was fangushing about earlier, um, okay, sure, why not.

Weirder things have happened.

silver
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creativity doesn't spring on demand. if there was a complete DROD burnout preventing TSS ideas from coming out, it's unlikely that mere hope or demand was going to change that.


____________________________

NiroZ
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Banjooie wrote:
I, uh. That seriously was not the intention of this thread. I guess in the future I will stop trying to be tactful and subtle and will be more directly aggressive with people?

Is...is that the lesson you guys are wanting me to learn here? I'm frankly kind of confused. The problem here is that I wasn't directly insulting enough about a vague qualm I had?

Don't get me wrong, the, uh, the quick course in Banjology made me laugh pretty damn hard, it's good to know that the way I roll is now catalogued and databased or whatever the kids are doing these days. But yelling at me for not directly stating my complaints and instead voicing them in a fairly tactful amusing thread that actually ended up somehow having worthwhile value outside of my complaints is kind of baffling to me in every way imaginable.

If you guys want me to go back to spitting out internet memes and calling people idiots outright, um, sure, okay, I can do that.

I can't speak for everyone else, but in my cause I didn't know what to assume, thus I assumed the worst (perhaps mrimer did as well).

You had completely legitimate complaints and if you had posted "Ok, the RPG is like, /not my thing/ sorry guys.
So is there a way to , like, make sure DROD dev time isn't stolen by theh RPG?" this whole thread would be a lot more straight forwards.

But of course, with hindsight everything could be done better. My own opinion would be to stop trying to practice social psychology on the web, but I doubt I'm going to convince you.

So instead, I'll say that you can't plan everything perfectly all the time. Screwups happen. You picked a very difficult character to play in the forum, so it could be argued that this kind of thing would be inevitable eventually.

---

[Last edited by NiroZ at 09-16-2008 12:00 PM]

zex20913
Level: Smitemaster

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I love pizza.

And DROD.

And I'm coming around to DROD: RPG. I'm just not good at it yet.

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Lamkin
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Wait...I'm confused. When did Banjooie take over as CEO of Caravel Games?

"A course in Banjology"? Thanks for the (inadvertent) lesson in humility, professor.

Banjooie is truly a legend in his own mind!

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[Last edited by Lamkin at 09-16-2008 02:55 PM]

Briareos
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Lamkin wrote:
Wait...I'm confused. When did Banjooie take over as CEO of Caravel Games?

I.e. the Confuse Everyone Officer? That must've been a looong time ago...

____________________________
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)

Beef Row
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Banjooie wrote:
To be perfectly honest, I totally thought this was Mrimer going 'you know, TotS is totally awesome, let's do that instead.'

But, you know, if some bizarre sequence of events happened that completely made it impossible to make TSS but somehow left it possible to make a completely different game that just happened to line up with what Mrimer was fangushing about earlier, um, okay, sure, why not.

Weirder things have happened.

Warning, this post contains lots of guesses.

Alright, now thats out of the way. If you're reading this and happen to be Banj, you know I already ran this by you (though I don't know what you thought of it, really?). If you're reading this and happen to be Caravel Team, I know you probably aren't going to (and likely can't) say much about this one way or another. If you're not reading this, stop reading now.

This is my reconstruction of why I figure 'some bizarre sequence of events happened that completely made it impossible to make TSS but somehow left it possible to make a completely different game that just happened to line up with what Mrimer was fangushing about earlier' is exactly what happened.

This is guesswork, people, even if I don't remind you of that again. Much of it is based off this: November 2007 Illumination

Time to tell a third interesting story, which may or may not be true:

Sometime 'several months' before last November, Erik met with GarageGames. Now, he was hoping this would be a chance to try something new. He'd been thinking about a new game concept, and so had Mike, and he was hoping maybe they'd fund one of these new games. Mr. Slam was one, and DROD RPG was the other. As it turned out, GarageGames wanted the established performance of DROD, and weren't willing to test drive anything else. Erik didn't want to let the next DROD game be released exclusively on InstantAction, that just wouldn't be fair to the fans. But this was a good offer, so a side franchise called "Frogs and Mice" was concieved.

Meanwhile, Mr. Imer had already begun some preliminary work for DROD RPG, so Mr. Slam got pushed aside, and F&M and RPG were the projects of the day. This wasn't hurting DROD development, because after all, improvements to the F&M engine and/or the RPG engine could be used for The Second Sky. But this also made working on TSS silly until F&M (and the new engine) was done. So work commenced, F&M progressed, RPG progressed and TSS waited for its new, high-horsepower engine.

It's possible GarageGames actually stipulated no work on TSS until F&M was released, but even if they didn't, there wouldn't have been reason to work on it. After all, F&M was funded, and work on F&M would translate to work on TSS. Why work for free when you can work with funding and get exactly the same result?

Eventually, GarageGames decided they didn't want any 2d games flattening their site's tires, and dropped F&M from their lineup. This left F&M's status uncertain while new agreements were being made. With F&M stalled, all work focused on the RPG, and soon it was ready for release.

Now some might say that the fact that the site was called 'InstantAction', not 'InstantPuzzles' or 'InstantSteppingGames' may have been a clue this would happen, but hindsight is, after all, 20/20.

Now, a question: "What kind of pizza was Mr. Slam and would a conniseur of pizza have found it to be more delicious than Greek Food?"

____________________________
"Now I will repeatedly apply the happy-face rule"

Rabscuttle
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Beef Row wrote:
Time to tell a third interesting story, which may or may not be true:

Sorry, most of this story is confusing. What on earth are "DROD" "F&M" and "The Second Sky?" Stop making stuff up! Say what you mean!

The following is all I understood of your story.

...Garage ... test drive ... new, high-horsepower engine ... flattening their ... tires... stalled

I think I get the gist, but I'm sure I'm missing some subtleties.

---

[Last edited by Rabscuttle at 09-16-2008 03:03 PM]

Briareos
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Rabscuttle wrote:
The following is all I understood of your story.

...Garage ... test drive ... new, high-horsepower engine ... flattening their ... tires... stalled

You must have this site mixed up with Slashdot, as that is where car analogies usually happen...

____________________________
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)

Beef Row
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Rabscuttle wrote:

Beef Row wrote:
Time to tell a third interesting story, which may or may not be true:

Sorry, most of this story is confusing. What on earth are "DROD" "F&M" and "The Second Sky?" Stop making stuff up! Say what you mean!

The following is all I understood of your story.

...Garage ... test drive ... new, high-horsepower engine ... flattening their ... tires... stalled

I think I get the gist, but I'm sure I'm missing some subtleties.

I know, and I'm sorry this story is less direct than the others on this page, but I thought it was time for some obfuscation and pussyfooting.

____________________________
"Now I will repeatedly apply the happy-face rule"

Banjooie
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Am..am I actually losin--

Yes.

Yes, I think I am, in fact, actually losing this argument, I--

...

Hnhnhnhahahahahahahahahahha.

...

Yes.

Nillo
Level: Smitemaster

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Banjooie wrote:
Hnhnhnhahahahahahahahahahha.

...

Yes.

It finally happened. He's slightly mad...

____________________________
“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the 'Ellie May,' a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”

Lamkin
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Slightly mad as in "crazy," or slightly mad as in "angry"?
(Perhaps an itty-bitty touch of both...)

Nillo
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Lamkin wrote:
Slightly mad as in "crazy," or slightly mad as in "angry"?
(Perhaps an itty-bitty touch of both...)

Well, he *is* known for getting confused and angered by things, so I guess a little bit of both?

____________________________
“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the 'Ellie May,' a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”

Banjooie
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Eh, you got your one clarification post out of me for this thread.

I am so done clarifying things for you people.

ahhah