Comments on: An Esther Binge: Korsakovia

By: Soliduck

Soliduck — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:10:18 +0000

For what it’s worth, I loved all of the jumping puzzles to death.
The last level is literally something I have always wanted to see in a game.

By: GreenReaper

GreenReaper — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:08:10 +0000

There is actually a health indicator; the screen gets more cracked the more you are hurt, until all four corners are cracked. Then you die.

By: gryffinp

gryffinp — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:05:00 +0000

Oh is that what happened? I closed the door.

By: chineseroom

chineseroom — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:32:23 +0000

hi all,

i usually avoid getting pulled into these conversations as I don’t know that my opinion is really relevant and don’t want to come over all diva-ish, but can we just clear up the money thing for once and for all as it’s really kind of insulting to the other people on the team who worked on this, and our other mods. Everything coming from thechineseroom is based within this research project of mine. So really, rather than thinking of them as mods, with a traditional ‘volunteer’ team (and that’s IN NO WAY a comment on professionality, just on lack of payment), the people who have worked on our mods have been paid to do so. The projects further my academic career as a researcher, as they are designed to look at research questions. So to co-opt people to spend large amounts of their time for nothing would be deeply unethical.

So there are two points here. One is that ALL mods have a cost value in real terms. The people who make them are clearly very talented, and often professionals working outside normal employment hours. If they were to be paid, they would come with an hourly rate. They chose to work for nothing on mods, but this doesn’t mean their time is worth nothing. In a perfect world, a large number of mod makers would be paid, because their work is of a professional standard and deserves to be paid. I just happen to pay people to work on my mods. That’s the difference. If that offends anyone conceptually, well, ask yourself if you’d be happy to work for your boss for nothing whilst they financially profited from your work. In essence, if I profit in terms of getting research profile or publications from the chineseroom without paying people, that’s what I’d be doing.

Second point is this. £10K is peanuts. It is absolutely tiny in comparison to the budgets of even small commercial games. Anyone who thinks this is a lot of money in development needs to spend a few minutes on Google for a bit of development finances education. It is nothing. Try dividing it down by £200 per day for staffing costs (that’s less than either the actor’s union Equity, or the Musicans’ Unions’ recommended costs, btw, and about what the Arts Council: England recommend as a daily rate for early-mid career artists) and you get 50 days. Now think about the fact that the team on Korsakovia comprised of a developer, programmer, composer and two voice actors (I don’t charge my time to the dev costs – and the standard rate for academic buy-out is bout £20 per hour). Suddenly, 10K doesn’t really stretch very far at all.

So can we please put these kinds of comments to one side. Korsakovia took about 6 person months to develop all in. That would give you a £20Kp.a. salary if ONE person developed it. Now go have a look at entry level graduate salaries for game developers and put this line of debate to bed. Please. Any criticisms of game design, AI, art, level, mapping, mechanisms, whatever else, are really important to me and I want to see as much feedback as I can get to work out exactly what happens for better or worse in our (my?) work. But these kinds of comments are really missing the point…

thanks, dan

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:28:01 +0000

Wonder how much Minerva cost to produce?
I’m thoroughly enjoying this mod. It’s highly evocative and very, very sad.
But 10G’s?! On what?!

Also, this may be just me being stupid, but that final jump? You know, the one with the fire and lightning at the bottom of the stairwell in the hospital… is that the end of the game? Would seam fitting if it was.
Or am I being silly?

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:22:04 +0000

Got to agree with you there.
All the levels in Thief 3 had moments of awesomness, which I could screenshot and post in here and the shots would like they were from the Thief game we’d all hoped for. It is a good game (kinda bland story), but nothing compared to the first two.

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 18:03:58 +0000

A great level in Thief 3. Although personally I don’t think it’s quite the piece of brilliance most seam to think it is. Nothing’s beat Life of the Party when it comes to Thief. In fact nothing beats Thief 2 in general.

By: Lewis

Lewis — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:24:58 +0000

Oi! Just noticed this, hidden beneath the smoke monster screenshot:

“That doesn’t look too scary to me, Denby. Are you sure? ARE YOU SURE? Come around Archway at gone midnight I’ll show you scary, my lad.”

I’ll have you know that screenshot took about ten attempts as I was perpetually running away from the bloody thing while mashing F6 in a blind, but very professional, panic.

By: Günter

Günter — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:08:50 +0000

Maybe this is just the mapper in me, but all of the stretched textures, blocky architecture, bad prop placement and terrible level design killed the mood for me.

By: Lewis

Lewis — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:27:24 +0000

I playtested, actually. Much earlier in the project, granted, and more in a “do these enemies work?” sense when it was basically just a few decontextualised rooms, but still.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:26:36 +0000

OH yeah I forgot about the TF2 jump maps, yeah they are quite a bit of fun. I was just thinking of the surfing when I was talking it down, no air control and it’s a frag fest. Ah I didn’t know about KZMOD, cool.

Might check me out some Defrag too, thx for all that. Here’s hoping the Perfect Stride creator makes some new maps/versions too.

By: fuggles

fuggles — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:26:50 +0000

Truly, desperately awful. No clues as to where you go, ganked by enemies you encounter by exploring and I can only imagine you have to construct an enormous pyramid out of boxes, only I gave up and god + noclipped the rest. There is no way that this was worth £10k or play tested by anyone not involved in the mod.

On the plus I now know how to use the half life 2 console – thanks Korsakovia!