Home Forums Shops Trade Avatar Inbox Games Donate
  
Not Logged In
Reply
 
Thread Tools
Coda Coda is offline
Developer
Default FusionFall   #1  
Let's have a FusionFall retrospective thread! I'm just making the thread right now so I can link to it, but I'll post some of the sordid details about what happened later on.
Games by Coda (updated 10/1/2023 - New game: Adrift)
Art by Coda (updated 8/25/2022 - beatBitten and All-Nighter Simulator)

Mega Man: The Light of Will (Mega Man / Green Lantern crossover: In the lead-up to the events of Mega Man 2, Dr. Wily has discovered emotional light technology. How will his creations change how humankind thinks about artificial intelligence? Sadly abandoned. Sufficient Velocity x-post)
Old Posted 11-21-2019, 11:32 AM Reply With Quote  
Default   #2   Coda Coda is offline
Developer
Okay, so first off, my own background with the game.

Early on in the game's lifecycle there was a problem with the account servers. My own personal account got caught up in it; if I tried to log in, the game would crash. So I ended up playing on my wife's account because she lost interest in the game fairly quickly.

So this meant my in-game name was Mrs. Moonbunny (MrsMoonbunny on the forums). I went ahead and followed through with the character design my wife wanted to pursue, collecting the equipment necessary to do a Sailor Moon cosplay.

I ended up never getting past about level 17, because I got distracted from the main gameplay by exploration. I heard about the possibility of a way to break out of bounds, and I started searching. I ended up being one of the leading explorers of the game, and when the moderators started cracking down on "glitching" they talked to me about it. The conclusion was that the staff at the time didn't so much care about our little group exploring the game world because we were behaving ourselves, but they didn't want discussion of game exploits on the forums and they didn't want us to share our information around because they didn't want to deal with the support requests if kids got themselves stuck out of bounds or, worse, got their account stuck in a crash loop because they saved somewhere unstable.

So I started the FusionFall Explorers website with a forum hidden from public view. With the help of Viva Alecto (Mandie LeScum) and others, we screened applicants to make sure that we weren't spreading information to people who didn't already know it. Viva and I also helped out as citizen moderators on the official game forums, helping answer questions about the game, cautioning new users about the rules, and when possible even providing technical support for other players.

For our efforts in helping the community, we were invited into a newly-formed Player Advisory Council, where the forum staff would solicit feedback about the game and various community issues. They served as the liaisons between us as representatives of the player base and the South Korea-based development team Grigon that was honestly pretty out of touch. (It was in part thanks to our efforts and feedback that we got features like the Croc Pot and even going so far as to rebalance the XP system to avoid the stupidly tedious stereotypical Korean MMORPG grind that most FusionFall players didn't want to deal with.)


Espy, since you used to play, what was your in-game name and/or your forum name?
Games by Coda (updated 10/1/2023 - New game: Adrift)
Art by Coda (updated 8/25/2022 - beatBitten and All-Nighter Simulator)

Mega Man: The Light of Will (Mega Man / Green Lantern crossover: In the lead-up to the events of Mega Man 2, Dr. Wily has discovered emotional light technology. How will his creations change how humankind thinks about artificial intelligence? Sadly abandoned. Sufficient Velocity x-post)
Old Posted 11-21-2019, 11:48 AM Reply With Quote  
Stabbsworth Stabbsworth is offline
Pixelist
Default   #3  
sounds like a sort of neat game, sort of reminds me of Glitch.
percival is busy being queer as hell. he was also here.
somewhat busy working for trisphee.

a reckoning will not be postponed indefinitely.
Old Posted 11-21-2019, 11:58 AM Reply With Quote  
Default   #4   Coda Coda is offline
Developer
I'm not familiar with a game named "Glitch."

The general gameplay was a pretty standard MMORPG with instance dungeons containing bosses and quests given by characters in the world. The thing that set it apart was that it was a Cartoon Network crossover game -- representatives from LOTS of different CN shows were there. Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory was the central NPC in the story, the Kids Next Door were coordinating the resistance effort against the alien overlord invading the planet, and heroes like the Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack were contributing their strength in the war effort.
Games by Coda (updated 10/1/2023 - New game: Adrift)
Art by Coda (updated 8/25/2022 - beatBitten and All-Nighter Simulator)

Mega Man: The Light of Will (Mega Man / Green Lantern crossover: In the lead-up to the events of Mega Man 2, Dr. Wily has discovered emotional light technology. How will his creations change how humankind thinks about artificial intelligence? Sadly abandoned. Sufficient Velocity x-post)
Old Posted 11-21-2019, 12:11 PM Reply With Quote  
Espy Espy is offline
Wanderer
Default   #5  
That was a decade ago, and I don’t remember. Also, this was back when I lived w my parents, so I couldn’t play much, especially since FF sometimes hung on closing, and I was constantly scared my parents would catch me playing.

I do remember exploring a lot and trying to break out of the playable area; I do that in every game I play.
STONEWALL WAS A RIOT

Old Posted 11-21-2019, 02:31 PM Reply With Quote  
Default   #6   Coda Coda is offline
Developer
Out-of-bounds exploration in FusionFall benefited from having friends. I noticed that your character doesn't change animation states when using the buddy warp function, so I tested it with a friend -- you had one game tick between spawning into the world and starting to actually fall where you could jump as if you were standing on the ground, so you'd warp to someone who was at the peak of a boosted jump and then go even higher.

Originally you could go arbitrarily high with just two or three people, you could keep leapfrogging each other. Eventually they tried to patch it out by adding a cooldown to the warp function, but that just meant you needed more people collaborating to get that high.
Games by Coda (updated 10/1/2023 - New game: Adrift)
Art by Coda (updated 8/25/2022 - beatBitten and All-Nighter Simulator)

Mega Man: The Light of Will (Mega Man / Green Lantern crossover: In the lead-up to the events of Mega Man 2, Dr. Wily has discovered emotional light technology. How will his creations change how humankind thinks about artificial intelligence? Sadly abandoned. Sufficient Velocity x-post)
Old Posted 11-21-2019, 04:58 PM Reply With Quote  
Espy Espy is offline
Wanderer
Default   #7  
Huh. That’s really interesting.

I’ll admit, one of the reasons I explore and constantly try to find the highest points in maps is, I love taking screencaps of scenery :|
STONEWALL WAS A RIOT

Old Posted 11-21-2019, 05:30 PM Reply With Quote  
Default   #8   Coda Coda is offline
Developer
Oh, then you might like what Drazil found. (I'm still in contact with him; he's the most significant contributor to my Ludum Dare stuff.) He laid claim to an entire out-of-bounds mountain (the game staff actually ended up unofficially referring to it as "Drazil Mountain") by being the first to reach it, climb it, and document it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chgQW2ZFMgg
Games by Coda (updated 10/1/2023 - New game: Adrift)
Art by Coda (updated 8/25/2022 - beatBitten and All-Nighter Simulator)

Mega Man: The Light of Will (Mega Man / Green Lantern crossover: In the lead-up to the events of Mega Man 2, Dr. Wily has discovered emotional light technology. How will his creations change how humankind thinks about artificial intelligence? Sadly abandoned. Sufficient Velocity x-post)
Old Posted 11-21-2019, 05:53 PM Reply With Quote  
Espy Espy is offline
Wanderer
Default   #9  
Ah, yes, floating flora, the omnipresent marker of being out of bounds.
STONEWALL WAS A RIOT

Old Posted 11-21-2019, 09:37 PM Reply With Quote  
Default   #10   Stabbsworth Stabbsworth is offline
Pixelist
Quote:
Originally Posted by Coda View Post
I'm not familiar with a game named "Glitch."

The general gameplay was a pretty standard MMORPG with instance dungeons containing bosses and quests given by characters in the world. The thing that set it apart was that it was a Cartoon Network crossover game -- representatives from LOTS of different CN shows were there. Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory was the central NPC in the story, the Kids Next Door were coordinating the resistance effort against the alien overlord invading the planet, and heroes like the Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack were contributing their strength in the war effort.
Glitch was basically an old MMORPG thing where you'd collect things to make other things and give them to the gods or screw over the economy. It's a bit hard to explain, but there is a Wikipedia page.

There's at least two revivals, one of them is currently in alpha and is called Children of Ur, completely free to play, provided you've got a browser, but it hasn't been updated for some time AFAIK. The team from Children of Ur are working with another team from another revival of the game to try and make a better build of the game.
percival is busy being queer as hell. he was also here.
somewhat busy working for trisphee.

a reckoning will not be postponed indefinitely.
Old Posted 11-22-2019, 12:19 PM Reply With Quote  
daikokunyo daikokunyo is offline
기다려
Default   #11  
so how did it all go down?

Buying Runes.
PM if you're selling?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tohopekaliga View Post
Don't be alarmed, we just have a minor case of face hugging adorable monsters. I'm sure it'll blow over eventually.


Old Posted 02-27-2020, 03:14 AM Reply With Quote  
Default   #12   KittyBeary KittyBeary is offline
A*DIC*TED
I remember the game a little. I didn't play much, kinda wish I could've back then. :(

ty bluebird for the art! :D
Old Posted 02-27-2020, 08:06 AM Reply With Quote  
Coda Coda is offline
Developer
Default   #13  
Quote:
Originally Posted by daikokunyo View Post
so how did it all go down?
Oh! I forgot to finish the story, didn't I. Thanks for the ping.

I mentioned that the development studio, Grigon, could sometimes be painfully out of touch. There was a span of MONTHS where development seemed to just be completely halted -- we knew there were promised features on the horizon, but we never got any updates, not even bugfix patches. From my semi-insider perspective I learned that Grigon (in South Korea) had been really slow to answer messages from the management (in the US). There were a couple of times where they flew a manager to Korea just to get communication moving.

At first, we thought it was a language and time zone barrier combined with known challenges on the technology side of things. This is actually information that you won't find on FusionFall's Wikipedia page, but FusionFall had originally been written using the Gamebryo engine. It switched over to Unity3D mainly to support being run in a web browser -- the management at Turner Entertainment wanted to avoid requiring young players to install and update a game client. (It turns out that installing and updating the Unity3D web player plugin might have been even more of a hassle for players than a game client would have been.) This was a fairly rushed migration, and a moderately challenging one: Gamebryo uses C++ while Unity uses C#, so basically all of the code had to be rewritten, and Unity was very new and wasn't fully mature yet, so they had to work around a lot of stuff. (FusionFall was directly or indirectly responsible for a LOT of development in the Unity engine.)

But no, it wasn't any of those things. Those were just excuses. As a matter of fact, Grigon had been on the brink of bankruptcy. I don't know the specific details, but I can imagine they were taking Cartoon Network's money and trying to use it to stay afloat but not having the funds to pay their engineers to work on the game. Turner management found out about this with barely enough time to demand that the assets and source code get handed over so they could develop the game in-house. Grigon closed its doors in early 2010, merely a year after the game's public launch.

It's not clear whether or not it was coincidence that the game went free-to-play in late 2009, but it was widely considered to be a bad sign. Cartoon Network did finally get things up and running on their side, but it was too little, too late. A lot of players had gotten bored of the lack of content updates, and the new content that was added afterward was not what players had expected and the release pace was inconsistent (sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow), and it didn't really tie in with the rest of the game.

The game kept limping along until the servers were shut down in 2013, but with no real monetization strategy and no marketing whatsoever it really didn't have a future. I think they were planning on merchandise, but that never happened.
Games by Coda (updated 10/1/2023 - New game: Adrift)
Art by Coda (updated 8/25/2022 - beatBitten and All-Nighter Simulator)

Mega Man: The Light of Will (Mega Man / Green Lantern crossover: In the lead-up to the events of Mega Man 2, Dr. Wily has discovered emotional light technology. How will his creations change how humankind thinks about artificial intelligence? Sadly abandoned. Sufficient Velocity x-post)
Old Posted 02-27-2020, 06:35 PM Reply With Quote  
Default   #14   Stabbsworth Stabbsworth is offline
Pixelist
would be nice if it was brought back tbh, but kids these days won't know the characters from the shows because they don't air anymore.
percival is busy being queer as hell. he was also here.
somewhat busy working for trisphee.

a reckoning will not be postponed indefinitely.
Old Posted 02-28-2020, 01:25 PM Reply With Quote  
Coda Coda is offline
Developer
Default   #15  
There's FusionFall Retro, which works... reasonably well, if you have Windows. Unfortunately it doesn't work on Mac at all despite Mac being one of FusionFall's original supported targets, and it takes a ridiculous amount of hackery to get it to work on Linux and I wasn't able to get it running again after an update.
Games by Coda (updated 10/1/2023 - New game: Adrift)
Art by Coda (updated 8/25/2022 - beatBitten and All-Nighter Simulator)

Mega Man: The Light of Will (Mega Man / Green Lantern crossover: In the lead-up to the events of Mega Man 2, Dr. Wily has discovered emotional light technology. How will his creations change how humankind thinks about artificial intelligence? Sadly abandoned. Sufficient Velocity x-post)
Old Posted 02-28-2020, 03:05 PM Reply With Quote  
Default   #16   Stabbsworth Stabbsworth is offline
Pixelist
dual-booting is probably your friend in that case, but that's a pain in the ass to set up if you don't like fucking about with bootloaders.
percival is busy being queer as hell. he was also here.
somewhat busy working for trisphee.

a reckoning will not be postponed indefinitely.
Old Posted 02-28-2020, 04:00 PM Reply With Quote  
Reply


Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)
 
Thread Tools

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump

All content is copyright © 2010 - 2024 Trisphee.com
FAQ | E-Mail | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | Forum Rules
Twitter | Facebook | Tumblr
Return to top
Powered by vBulletin®