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Before I forget, I've decided to do a Let's Play Walkthrough of Neofeud. 

Caution: walkthrough will contain spoilers / hints for the game, so if you plan to buy the game, maybe don't watch too much of it!

[embed=1020,630]http://youtu.be/ouv7RqS2Czw[/embed]

Here some likes and dislikes that I am finding during my first gameplay.

Note: I love this game, so I don't feel like I lost 15$ .

...

Thanks so much for your great and fair review, LuciferSam86!

I'm glad that you feel that the $15 price-point is worth it.  I lost a little sleep fretting that people might think it's too much!

Since it seems you liked the soundtrack, and since you bought the game by April 1st, you can get the soundtrack for free, if you haven't already.

RE: Death - I've heard about the death issue from at least one other tester.  I'll keep that feedback in mind for future adventure games.

Thanks for your vote, and please vote on Steam Greenlight if you can!  I'm hoping to do a Neofeud 2, or some other project if Neofeud 1 can bring in enough revenue to support the development.

Hm, yeah, I can't say I know a ton about Greenlight, but I've heard it's not super tough or anything.  Crossing my fingers though!

@Cassie: Thanks for the suggestion!

Yay, I hope this game will be available on Steam soon, already voted and shared on Facebook!

Thanks a ton, Blondbraid!

It's gotten over 500 views so far, but unfortunately, there are more "no" votes than "yes" votes.

Please tell anyone that you know that might like Neofeud to help with the "yes" votes! 

Thanks, Merlin, for all your help!

@Creamy:  Hey man!  Hope everything has gone well for you since Dislocation.  I do hope you enjoy Neofeud.

EDIT: Neofeud is now on Steam Greenlight!  We need your votes!

Ok, thanks very much, merlin86!  I have just added an alternate download to the Itch.io site, if you could just do a test and see if it downloads at all that would be great.  Don't have to download the whole thing, maybe just see if it at least starts up.

I'm working with the Itch.io staff to try to get the Neofeud to work with the Itch.io app right now.

Thanks all for your kind words!  I am just glad that folks are enjoying the game, because I had a good (if sometimes stressful) time making it!

@merlin86:  Sorry about the URL problem, I will look into that... What operating system and type of computer are you using, by chance?  I have not tried downloading through the Itch.io client myself, but I will look into that as well.  I know there is an issue downloading the game using Firefox.

Oh also!  If you want to have the soundtrack to listen to outside the game, it's over here: https://silverspook.bandcamp.com/

EDIT: Would anyone be interested in testing a Linux version of Neofeud?  Are there many Linux AGS users out there?  Let me know!

@Mandle: Thank you!  And you get a special thanks for your testing and advice, especially so early in the "game".

@Dave Gilbert: Thank *you*, sir, for making games that brought me around to using AGS.  And can't wait to play Unavowed!

@CrashPL: Getting Neofeud out has been a Odyssey, no doubt, in the best and worst senses of the word, but it is amazing to be finished!  I am getting game-dev withdrawals already, in fact!  I do hope that you enjoy the game when you get paid.

Thanks!  I couldn't have done it without your support, Blondbraid, and the support of the rest of this awesome AGS community. 

Crossing my fingers now that it runs smoothly on everyone's machine.  If anyone wants a Linux version I can look into that.  (If we want a Mac version... we'll see how well the PC version does and maybe I'll hire someone to convert it for Mac!)

[Synopsis]

Thanks everybody who voted for Neofeud in IndieDB! Neofeud made it to the Top 100 Indie Games Of 2017 (Apparently out of over 10,000). We'll see if we beat Cuphead! (Not likely but one can hope!

"A Diamond Of Storytelling In The Scrap Pile... The characters of Neofeud are developed so much more than characters in nearly any other game I've recently played" --Sprites And Dice

"'Cyberpunk-Fueled Noir.' Reminiscent of Beneath a Steel Sky and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream... The art, gameplay, music and story come together to deliver a solid game." --Indie Ranger

“An ambitious, atmospheric cyberpunk scenario and essentially the work of a single person (voice acting excluded). Oh, and it might also be one of the best adventure games I have played in a while... The world building is something else. It has a thickness, a density to it." --IndieGames.com

"An immersive cyberpunk adventure game... Echoes of H.R. Giger and William Gibson... [Christian Miller] knows what makes a quality game." --Brandon C. Hovey

"I loved the quirky but fantastic hand-painted visuals, the gruff, cynical humour." --Gaming Respawn

Get Neofeud on Steam!


Get Neofeud on Itch.io!



4/17 - You can also vote for Neofeud on GOG!

Or get Neofeud on Gamejolt.


Synopsis

2033 - We create AI. Sentient robots arrive, but not as our Terminator overlords or our Singularity saviors -- conscious machines are humanity's unwanted bastard children. A few are geniuses who design flying cars, beat cancer, invent teleportation, but millions of defective prototypes roll out of factories -- mentally challenged, motivationally-challenged, criminally-inclined. Legally conscious, but unhirable, these "Defectives" are shuffled through public housing and welfare assistance, straining the already overburdened back of the meager social safety net. The robots who don't end up in prison are dumped, as a last resort, into a massive landfill known as "The Pile".

Humans engage in perfection of their species -- or at least the powerful and well-connected -- genetically engineering children with human and animal DNA. The failed eugenics experiment "Frankenpeople" are discarded into "The Pile" as well. The new dynasties, 'Neofeudal Lords', live in towering neon glass castles, shuttle around in pristine nanotech-enabled pods, minds and bodies full of cyberware, spending most of their time taking selfies and "optimizing their monetization schemes". A race of supermen concerned only with their own status, their prestige, their success. Where machines have become all too flawed and human, people have become flawless, perfect, cold machines.

Karl Carbon is an ex-cop, dishonorably discharged from Coastlandia PD for disobeying an order to shoot an unarmed sentient humanoid. Karl is exiled to "The Pile" as a lowly social worker. There he counsels gangbanging foster-kid robots and confiscates chimera-children from deadbeat half-wolf parents. Till one day a case goes horribly sideways and Karl is drawn into a sordid conspiracy that could threaten the strained fabric of Human-Robot-Hybrid civilization -- or save it.

A Diamond Of Storytelling In The Scrap Pile

"When I play a game, I play to be compelled or immersed in some way. The game has to dig its claws in and drag me in. Walking away has to be difficult or that's exactly what I'll do. Neofeud grabbed me in just that way through its gripping mastery of storytelling, akin to how last I binged on episodes of Game of Thrones.

Neofeud is a point-and-click game set in a sci-fi dystopia borne of the minds of every prominent science fiction writer from the past century, from H.R. Giger to Ridley Scott. The result is a disturbing yet strangly familiar dystopian society in which social inequality is systemic, the top one percent have their own one percent, and the birth of A.I has resulted in a massive population of unemployed sentient robots. Sound interesting? We're only just dipping our toes.

Beginning by introducing the main character of the story, an ex-cop and currently social worker named Karl Carbon, the story of Neofeud quickly explodes into a story rife with pseudoscience and more twists than an M. Night Shamylan movie. As a single conspiracy unfolds, others follow, creating a story layered so deep that by the halfway mark of Neofeud's potential 15-hour game time I found myself questioning characters motives even more than the main character of the game itself.

Past endless conspiracies and a spiraling story, the characters of Neofeud are developed so much more than characters in nearly any other game I've recently played. Karl and the cast that he interacts with are human to a tee. Interactions with them are immersive and real, a necessity when a majority of the game is dialogue."

Sprites And Dice

"This is an ambitious, atmospheric cyberpunk scenario and essentially the work of a single person (voice acting excluded). Oh, and it might also be one of the best adventure games I have played in a while, so there's that."
Granted, a lot of this is "just" good cyberpunk in the vein of Gibson, Dick, and Stephenson. However, the world building is something else. It has a thickness, a density to it. Almost every line of the game's technobabble fleshes out the game world some more. If that's your thing, the game is immensely enjoyable."

Indie Games

"I did not know what to expect going into Neofeud, but I came out excited to see what's next for Silver Spook Games. The game has more than the surface indicates, which I loved. It offers social commentary, much like its many influences, but successfully stands on its own.
In the end, the art, gameplay, music and story come together to deliver a solid game. Check it out if you are looking for something different and cerebral."

Indie Ranger

FEATURE TIME
- Tricky yet satisfying, point-n-click detective work, interspersed with action shootouts.
- Handpainted, uber-gritty, noir futureland. Makes Mad Max and Rick Deckard crap their pants.  1366x768 resolution for MASSIVE, fully realized backgrounds.
- Endless bombardment of witty one-liners from a veteran hardboiled cyberpunk writer.
- An original world and story that will (hopefully) make you question some of your core beliefs. Or at least my sanity.

Silver Spook Games

Patreon Site

Facebook

Twitter

Itch.io Store

[embed=1020,630]http://youtu.be/wVxUMWqIGIg[/embed]

















In addition, if you're more of a bookworm type, Neofeud - The Original Script is now available on Lulu for four bucks.

Heya!

Having just finished work on Neofeud, I am now looking to future projects to work on.

I did all of the story writing, programming, artwork, animation, almost all of the music, and voice acting for the main characters in Neofeud.  Here are some samples of my work below:

[embed=1020,630]http://youtu.be/wVxUMWqIGIg[/embed]

[embed=1020,630]http://youtu.be/VW3-skxPYAo[/embed]

[embed=1020,630]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asTKrXLHbTU[/embed]

If anyone is interested in working with me, preferably in a commercial game, give me a shout out!

More on myself and my company:

silverspookgames.com

Awesome!  Thanks for answering all the questions; that's a lot of work!

RE: What would you do with a larger team / budget -- makes sense!  And I hope Grundislav gets that string quartet* for Lamplight.  That was one of my favorite things about Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.  I'd probably buy the game just for the soundtrack!

*Bonus points if you get The Kronos Quartet.

Great 'cast!  That was an enlightening bit on the point about game development, choosing what to redo and what to let go of before calling the game 'finished'.

Here's a question if you feel like answering it on your podcast: If you had the resources to fund your own small team (say 3-7 full time employees for a year) and had full creative direction of the game, no strings attached, what would you work on and why? 

Great show guys!

So I think the take away is that, 'Everything, including the rule of 3rds and Chekhov's Gun is just another tool in the toolkit: each used when appropriate, in moderation, and to the end of producing a great game.'

Welcome to the internet, where everything is either a panacea or the Black Death, depending on which side of the polarized flame war you are on, to the end of producing rage-induced-virality, eyeball time, clickthroughs, and useless, self-obsessed, blowhard individuals.

Game Over.  Insert Coin. 

JK I like the concept of the rule of 3rds though I have never actually used it myself.  I did like the part where Ben was ranting on how no matter how perfect your composition of your background is, it's gonna get thrown off when characters show up.  And how the minute details that eat away at you as an artist or designer, like the slightly-too-blue backlight shading on a bookcase or something, how that stuff in all likelihood will never be noticed by players.  Learning how to put the brush or the pen down and be ok with things is a hard skill to learn!  Especially for someone with OCD or APD (Anal Perfectionist Disorder).

I think Grundislav is spot on with the overuse of the tropes, as someone guilty of it at times.

It's a lot easier to make some random reference, knowing someone will smile cause you dropped that name.  Harder to say or do something new or meaningful with the reference.  I'd say the difference is (to use a dated 90's business term) 'value added'.  "What are you adding that's new?"  Something like Kung Fury is pretty much 99.9% trope, but at least the jokes it makes about them are kind of 'fresh'.  (Rotten Tomatoes thinks so anyway, haha.)

"Hackerman" is inspired by 80's nerd fashion and action movie "pretend-hacking" tropes, but he is a unique creation.  As opposed to just ripping the 'Only Way To Win Is Not To Play' scene or quote directly from War Games, dropping it into some random scene in your thing where it makes no sense, and hoping someone will wink and chuckle, "Cause, cause WAR GAMES!  LOL!"   Then tropes just become grating.

I also agree that if you're going to make fun of something like, "Adventure Games have terrible forced puzzles" and then the game is full of terrible forced puzzles, that is the worst.  It's like someone complaining about climate change and then commuting in a monster truck-Hummer.

So perhaps the lesson is, "Don't do anything too original, until you've got the market cornered, or you have massively wealthy or well-connected angel investors / relatives and can afford to lose money."

I definitely struggle with degree of genrefication and what hashtags I'm going to tack on to Neofeud when shooting tweets out, put in the synopsis.  If you go too genre, you risk blending into the herd, but at least some people might actually take a look at your thing cause it has the word 'cyberpunk' or 'steampunk' or 'it's like Monkey Island but on Mars' or something people recognize.  If you go really original, try to be an auteur and do some setting or something never done before, you either have to have CRAZY good and massive marketing and distribution to ensure that it's played by more than a handful of roarin 20's wonks, or professional economists, who *happen* to also be adventure gamers.  And, the game has to be mindblowingly, literally *mindblowingly* good.  You have to blow people's brain matter out of it's current configuration, and restructure their noodle to account for this brand new "Way of doing things".  You do that, and people fall in love with it, you sell like crazy, become a phenomenon, a legend, get asked to all the important events, lifetime achievement awards, etc..  That's how William Gibson *created* the entire genre of cyberpunk, by blowing everyone's mind with Neuromancer, winning the Triple Crown of the Hugo, Phillip K Dick, and Nebula awards.  Then Shadowrun borrowed the nuyen, the mohawks trenchcoats and 'hackboxes' and said, 'it's cyberpunk, but with elves!'

If you meet those requirements, maybe you pull a John Romero.  Doom was insanely good, and ID software got the word out, and the next year, the entire genre of 1st person shooter became a thing, with copycats turning out left and right.  Now you can tag stuff with, "First-person shooter, demons" or whatever and at least some people will find and play your thing.  It won't be as good as Doom, but they just want more of that awesome thing they had when they were 14 or whatever.  If it IS actually a good game, and does something new, that's a bonus!

Now, if you don't want to be rich and famous and have a gulfstream and all that, and you are trying to run a stable small business as an indie game dev, it seems that you would want to think like a grocery store.  You want a steady supply chain bringing in nice, recognizable tomatoes.  Maybe those are your nice orangey post-apocalyptic games.  If your post-apocalyptic tomato is not recognizably post-apocalyptic (weird green color) then it might actually *taste* good, and it's just an heirloom, but when people are in your market, they're going to buy all the nice orangey, nuclear-apocalypse with dirt and rust and rag-swaddled protagonist tomatoes.  The green and purple tomatoes might not get sold, and you need that money to keep the lights on.  Then you have your nice dark, maybe a little blue-ish cyberpunk eggplants.  If it's not too dark and black helicopters and missing the trenchcoats, people might leave those pale eggplants in the eggplant pile, "Wait... something is wrong with this eggplant.  This cyberpunk doesn't have enough mohawks and post-industrial angsty programmers!"

In Richard K. Morgan's Market Forces the central premise of the book, which essentially involves corporate street-war where it's legal to speed, fire missiles at other cars, etc. only becomes legal because the son of someone really, really rich and important does it in a totally glorious, Fast-n-Furious way, and then what was illegal and frowned upon becomes not only legal but an entire sport and multi-billion dollar industry.

This translates, in a way, to anything that has to do with entertainment, especially in music, gaming and film.  You've got to play by the genre rules, unless you're either totally awesome or totally rich or related to Warren Buffet.

Hey Eric-

Awesome work, man!  And +1 to the thanks for offering this great music for free.

A suggestion, if you have time - something Blade Runnerish?  I'm considering using some of this music for Neofeud.  Don't feel obligated or anything, though, if you've already got a plan for your compositions.

In the next episode, you guys should get into a really big fight argument to increase listener counts. 

I was one of those bad puzzle makers, and then Blue Cup Tools cured my cancer!

I personally throw games out the window nowadays if I get stuck for more than about 5 minutes.  Also, if I leave a game and come back to it like two days later, due to work / RL overload, I hate it when some key piece of information had been given JUST before the last save game.  Especially if that piece of information is of the, "The current mission objective is X" variety. 

Great work and thanks for the assortment of pro-tips, Francisco and Ben!

I must say I feel Ben's pain in trying to make the switch from 320x240 to 640x360 or what the new resolution is.  Although not all THAT sorry since I am working in AGS 3.4 at 1360x768

As for playing more DOS games, I've been trudging through System Shock but the 30+ key assortment is proving too 1337 for me.  I do plan to do the yearly Christmas vacay runthrough of Doom, though!

Thanks for the tips, ThreeOhFour, I will definitely check out those Infocom game.  I don't claim any guru-hood or encyclopedic knowledge of gaming history, and I'm from Hawaii which has a very J-oriented geek culture, embedded in a heavily Americanized mainstream.  Adventure games never got quite as big as in places like the UK, certainly not when I was at the age to be able to handle them.  (I got my NES at 5).  Story-wise, I was all about the Fallout(s), and Deus Ex, and I kind of circled back through the college and post-college years to the modern point-n-clicks, the LucasArts and Sierras. 

I do remember interactive fiction being a hot thing at a certain point during the honeymoon phase of the "amazing computer" in the 80's.  Around the time of virtual reality and the Power Glove as I recall.