#heartbound

[goblin-fucker-69]

The Heartbound Wikipedia page is up for deletion because Jason himself wrote it and the game itself is irrelevant I thought you might want to know you probably don't but now you do

[werewolf-cuddles]

is this anything?

[felsecyan]

Hylics vs Heartbound

I know that the clowning on PirateSoftware has really toned down, but I just started playing Hylics. And while I was playing, I realized, Hylics is a really fun game that took so much time and effort from Mason Lindroth, and has its own special charm that isn't just Redditor humor.

More under cut.

It's entirely claymation, everything in the game, including the characters and the combat animations, is animated with clay. That must've taken hours upon hours of time. But, it still came out, and five years later got a fantastic sequel. (Seriously, the scale went up massively with Hylics 2 in both visuals, soundtrack, and gameplay.)

Hylics is a claymation game that is still beloved to this day. It's a decade old! It got finished in a year, according to Wikipedia. And mind you, Hylics is a claymation game, that took time, and one dude is working on this whole thing. If you look at the combat animations, you can definitely see that time and effort went into making these clay swirls move in a satisfying way. I must emphasize this for you, one person did all that. And then, this one dude released the sequel five years later with only help from another music composer to improve the soundtrack. The only difference in the gameplay creation process is that Hylics 2 was created with the Unity Engine, and that was what made the scale drastically increase.

ONE MAN CREATED HYLICS 1 AND 2 OVER THE COURSE OF 6 YEARS.

Meanwhile, Heartbound's demo dropped on 2017 and was supposed to be released the next year. Here's the thing about Heartbound, this shit can be made on rpg maker or game maker. Yes, it will take time, but that doesn't mean that it should take 8 years for a single game to get finished.

ESPECIALLY, when it got kickstarter money. Could it have been the next Undertale? I don't know. It never got finished, and the hype for this game is long gone. Maybe it could've found success if it was finished in the timeframe Pirate had set.

I'm sorry but with what I'm seeing, this game, at most, should've taken 2-3 years. It's not like Pirate's working by himself here, he has a whole game developing studio, and he still has not finished. His studio has released only one, properly finished game, and that is Heroes of Breakfast.

Of course, saying the game can be made on RPG maker is not an insult to it, it's just that I don't understand what exactly was preventing this game from coming out faster. Pirate has a game studio and has more than enough money to find hired help thanks to the kickstarter.

For example, Fear and Hunger was made on RPG Maker and released in December 2018, and then got a sequel four years later. For proof, Hylics 1 was made on RPG Maker, and got its sequel that was made in Unity five years later.

This game has not received a significant update since its initial demo release. I'm sorry to all the heartbound fans, but this game is not coming out. I don't say that with joy because it is sad that it'll never be finished. The art has a charm to it, and so does the soundtrack, but the main developer of this game is not working on it and has a real nasty attitude.

[conchelle]

I can’t believe the main dev got so pissy that this game was being compared to Undertale when in reality, it sucks sooooo much compared to Undertale lmao.

It looks nice and probably had a lot of work put into it but story wise it’s a whole lot of nothing and there’s no hook. The dialogue came straight out of Reddit. Even if the art looks decent, the environments are painfully uninspired and uninteresting to look at. I can’t believe it’s taking over 7 years to make this thing lmao

Ten dollars for a demo btw lol

[smetakovec]

Every pirate deserves his yandere.

These two are heartbound after all.

I am so sorry.

Have I told you I worked at blizzard for seven years? I'm the first second generation blizzard employee.

[eff-plays]

Sorry for the ANCIENT, barely-related game drama but I am once again going through videos about PirateSoftware's game Heartbound. I'm constantly struck and tickled by the dissonance between his description of the game and its lofty design aspirations and the "final" product.

Because here you have this huffing-his-own-farts type of guy whose dad worked at Blizzard so he thought he just absorbed game design talent through genetics/osmosis, talking up his own project as having such UNIQUE and COOL features where even the SMALLEST, most INSIGNIFICANT decision will have MASSIVE consequences and SHIFT the game's plot in UNPREDICTABLE ways.

And I'm just sitting there like haha sure bud let's get you a Happy Meal and then you can go for a nap. I'm not even a coder/programmer and even I can tell that this is just straight up hubris, because whenever there's Some Guy talking about how HIS pet project is UNIQUE and DIFFERENT from all those OTHER GAMES and goes against DUMB AND SIMPLE concepts of having ITEMS and COMBAT in a game, there's a 90% chance he's talking out of his ass or hasn't actually done much dev work on the game/in general.

Because as much as the game industry and its mainstream design conventions are flawed, it's really rich for Some Fucking Guy to stand up and be like "wow all those decades of hundreds of thousands of people making games and creating frameworks and establishing design principles are fucking stupid as shit, I can do allat better and on my own without any help whatsoever because I know better." Like brother do you think those things are conventions because some big suits decided for them to be and not through people using trial and error to see what works and what doesn't? (Some are, to be clear, like loot boxes and microtransactions, but I'm talking about stuff like the player having a health pool that gets reduced when enemies do damage, or the game 'remembering' what items you 'pick up' with an inventory system.) You think you're the first one to *gasp* want to make a new and unique game, and nobody's ever tried your ideas before? And not that thousands of people did try and turns out it's either extremely hard or literally impossible?

And even though it's absolutely possible to make a game like the one he advertised, it would be a massive undertaking that would force compromises in many other areas. Game design in general is often just a lot of compromises. There's a reason a lot of conceptual games that fuck with game design conventions are usually focused on that fuckery in specific and make that a central mechanic, while games with a heavier focus on storytelling tend to be more linear. We all know and make fun of the whole "character will remember this" thing popularized by Telltale (may she rip in piss) precisely because the interactivity of gameplay often rubs up against telling a coherent narrative. But this guy is basically saying that his game is one huge Baba Is You level where moving a single block to the left instead of to the right will cause Ellie LastofUs to trip over a mine and die two hours from now. Not only is it extremely unlikely that one would program such a massive outcome for so minute a choice, but also why the fuck would you want to? Why the fuck would you do that? That's stupid! You cannot give every decision a player makes massively consequential narrative impact. You have to prioritize. Part of game development is figuring out what to prioritize!

And on top of this lack of prioritization is the fact that the story itself is so absolutely shit, too. Like the guy got SO upset about MatPat comparing his game to Undertale, but that's clearly the main inspiration for Heartbound. His list of inspirations is circling the Undertale black hole listing every game BUT Undertale, making it conspicuous in its absence. He's blatantly trying to copy the narration and dialogue of it, but he has no concept of anything, so all his jokey-jokes come off as tryhard lolrandum rawr xD humor. He's played Undertale and thought the jokes were funny, but didn't realize why, or how the humor was constructed, or the fact that the jokes worked because of timing and context more than the actual "random" content within (which, to be clear, was never actually random). He thinks it's enough to just make some cutesy nonsense jokes and that'll be just as good.

Anyway. I just wanted to yap about this stupid man and his stupid game. I loooove the way it's advertised as this unique and groundbreaking indie experience where even the unconscious choices may affect the outcome of the emotional and intricate story. And then you look inside and it's uh. One boss battle, "put sphere in the round hole" level puzzles, unfunny flavor text, and a dead dog pausing the game to lecture you about mental health.

Can't get enough of it, honestly.

[msmissing-possum]

word dump

Heartbhound is weird. The game itself seems boring and uninspired, and the developer is notorious for writing bad code while LARPing as a senior engineer, and being stubbornly resistant to criticism. It’s been in early access for years and still doesn’t seem to have had any updates to it’s status. Also if I recall correctly the talking dog dies

[lena-in-a-red-dress]

Heartbound Chapter 13 (smutty smut smut)

Here yah go!