Hiveswap discussion and News

I haven't seen anything to suggest that that will be the case...? My assumption has always been that they will be releasing episodes more or less as they complete them--but that future episodes would hopefully take much less time to produce than the first one, since future episodes would just be building off of the existing game engine and art assets.

I haven't been following this thread really, but have people seen this yet? (Indeed, speaking of Broken Age...)

That's a good read, there. I really do hope we get a Tell All at some point (even though we almost certainly never will.)

Unfortunately, he sunk so much time into the game that he paused the comic too much, truncated the ending which took a ton of wind out of the IP's sails, and delivered a non-satisfying ending. In essence, he didn't do his core product justice which hurt his base income. I mean, he's one guy, so yeah, but.

Comparing it to Broken Age, holy shit.

Okay number 1, there's no way I'm actually going to play and enjoy this game, as opposed to just watching a (relatively short) LP.
Number 2, there's no way the rest of the episodes are actually going to be released.

No....... don't do that. Let's Plays aren't meant to be a free way for people to experience games. It's fine to watch a Let's Play to see if a game is interesting or to listen/watch the commentary or things like that, but doing a Let's Play for a (presumably) linear narrative-based game is just lame. You might not enjoy adventure games that much but still.

I got it after all the drama around the release had long since died down, but I thought Broken Age was good. I think its biggest issue was that the second part felt far more rushed than the first, but even so I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I'm still a little confused. Is it that the game is multiple episodes long and at least one episode will focus on the human and at least one will focus on the troll or will there be multiple games or will there be multiple games that are multiple episodes or is all that just stuff we don't know yet?

Isn't it supposed to be Houseswitch though.

I didn't watch the interview (2 hours??) so maybe I don't have all the information exactly correct, but that's fine. I'll just find out when I play it for myself. ;3 Anyway, I'm thinking the game will be linear for the most part, but what I'm hoping for is character dialogue to change. In particular I imagine the troll twitter and all of that will play into this system as well. That's about as much "branching path" as I really need in a game like this, and is already probably more than I can handle because I like to be able to read ALL the dialogue, so missing out on some options is going to kill me and force me to reset, which will be doubly confounding because I've never played an episodic game before and I don't know how that's going to work.

On the other hand, if there are some small choices you can make along the way that can save a character's life or get one to hate you, that would be interesting too. Still not very big things, like I'm not expecting this to come along and change the nature of the finale or whatever, but still something fun. I think that's about as much as I'm comfortable hoping for. And really, much more than that might be too much.

Nope. Actually, Hauntswitch was dropped as the name of the town Joey and Jude lived in in some piece of media some time back, but it wasn't confirmed if that would be the name of the companion game until now. Makes me wonder if the community Joey winds up in will be called Hiveswap. Which would be kind of on-the-nose. And that's amusing.

Maybe this isn't quite bump worthy, I hope you don't mind. Just some thoughts I wanted to share.

So, I didn't really follow the Mighty No. 9 train. Heard some scary things, but didn't really take it to heart until I just now watched an interview about the game coming from one of its backers. Basically, his consensus was "it's okay, but not worth what it took to develop" and it wasn't until I saw him hit a lot of the same notes I've seen around here, lack of communication, numerous delays, that sort of thing, that I really am starting to fear for Hiveswap's reception.

Even as I've tried to be as patient and understanding as possible, trying to defend the silence from the developers and show sympathy for the troubles of game development, plus the crap hands they've been dealt, I still set my bar kind of low for the game. I mean, coming off of Homestuck, this big sweeping tale about multiverses and galactic frogs, I knew it was going to take some tempering of expectations so I don't wind up disappointed that the story of the game would be comparatively "normal" and much smaller in scale. As it is, I still think Hiveswap will "only" be a good point and click. It's a genre I've never really participated in the fandom of, so I have no idea how big its waves could possibly be when it finally launches. And the mounting number of angry voices might decide it isn't good enough.

I used to think, and really still do, that the overall population of people that are really just fed up with waiting and will never buy it is actually pretty small overall. But at least most people who backed the game will probably still play it. But I guess now it's sinking in that unless the writing is really THAT great and wins people over almost immediately, or there's something about the gameplay that's really good, I'm starting to worry that too many people will end up disappointed in the game, and that will be the final nail in the coffin.

Maybe I'm just a little nervous. God, I really really hope that doesn't happen, after everything else. And for the most part, I have the utmost faith in What Pumpkin and the development team. But it'd be heartbreaking if their biggest venture ended up flopping that badly.