The Future of Symphony?

[Trinary0]

I remember the golden days of yore, where every turn was a surprise and every unlock was fresh and new. The challenge in tweaking out just the right ship setup for optimal spread and firepower. The amazing bosses and creative methods to deal with them.

Pages and pages of ideas and QoL improvements were suggested and brought to light for ways on how to make Symphony even better.. But what happened to those? Where did they go?

What's Empty Clip working on now? Any word on what might be happening here?

[Sephrax]

They are working on other games atm. http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2998048

There's still some bugs they need to fix. One of the bugs is so annoying that I can't play this.

[Empty Clip Studios]

Thanks for the follow-up Sephrax :) That describes our situation pretty well.

However we *are* planning a "bug fix/functionality update" in the coming months. We do want to improve the game with more features, but that's sometime farther in 2013. We were originally planning to do a demo this fall, but we had to put that on hold due to time constraints.

Symphony will keep growing! The best way to stay posted is probably to follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Sephrax, may I ask which bug is causing the most irritation? (Apologies if it is in another post here)

Francois
Empty Clip Studios

[[NAG]Oreo]

Love the game so far!

One thing that I do not agree with (and remember I haven't played it THAT much yet) is that since points are multiplied negatively for a more powerful ship, this DISCOURAGES upgrading.... There's a whole in-game economy for upgrading and getting more powerful, but why would you want to do it if you get LESS points for it. Perhaps have one mode... the hardest mode maybe where you get less points for having a powerful ship, but through the regular progress through the game, the player should feel like his cool new ship is a GOOD thing, not feel GUILTY for it.

In short, you are penalizing us for having fun with the game mechanics that YOU made for us to have fun with.

That doesn't mean I'm still not having fun with it. I just ignore the points or they'll make me mad.

[Empty Clip Studios]

Hello Oreo! (Nice!) :)

This is an interesting point. Let me explain where we are coming from on that one.

The reason we did that is to provide the longest replayability we could think of. First, to finish the game and the storyline you need to upgrade your ship to make it as powerful as possible.

But what happens then? How can we make the game "infinitely replayable" without having to provide an infinity of bigger weapons? Our answer was to have leaderboards reward "elite skills" of completing levels with underpowered ships. This would make it nearly infinitely replayable, as you hit a certain difficulty wall when downgrading your ship, where only excellent skill and knowledgeable ship configuration can provide higher scores.

In short, we think you can play the game in either mindset at any time (try to finish the game, or tweak your ship to get the highest leaderboard score). We thought of including a "leaderboard mode" which is the only place the multiplier would be exposed, but that introduced extra complexity.

Anyhow, we're happy you are enjoying the game, and hope this explanation makes (some) sense! :) During development, we found ourselves constantly making trade-offs and this was one of them. We just hope it achieves our goal is much as possible!

Thank you,

Francois
Empty Clip Studios

[[NAG]Oreo]

Thank you for your response! I see your point of view. I guess I just shouldn't worry about points while playing through the game and enjoy my dual upgraded double cannons blasting out in a giant X formation destroying everything! :-D

[Empty Clip Studios]

Ha ha totally! THEN try to survive on mezzo-piano with the default blasters... ;)

[Vorpal Soul]

Game is very fun and worth to play 4000+ songs on my pc ^_^

[Mars]

Still needs capability for longer songs. That's what's stopping me from playing this game as much as I'd like to.

[CrushingVictory]

The ability to play longer songs, more random (Like Random as in you won't know which one you'll be fighting) post-story demon attacks, and some controller support would make this game quite interesting. I used joy2key to beat the game the first time with a 360 gamepad

[Animus Furandi]

Might want to get that demo and those fixes out sooner rather than later. Now that it's on sale, I'd like to try it out, and the lack of a demo coupled with what I'm hearing in this thread has cost you a potential sale. Thanks to some of your less scrupulous forebears, I don't take to heart promises from indie devs that things will get fixed.