End of development, removed from store.

[Craneballs]

Craneballs is ceasing to exist as an entity. It is my unpleasant duty to inform you that after months of searching for possible options for further solutions to the problems surrounding the PLANET nomads project, we must announce the end of the entire project as well as the existence of the company. Believe me, the development of this game cost us a lot of energy and financial resources, however, due to the coincidence of events and procedural solutions, we are unable to continue. I wish you all the best of luck and may gaming keep you cool.
All the best
Jan

[ymrich]

Originally posted by Lisias:

Originally posted by Sprocket66:

But you can still play that scenario in SE. They just added other options.

The point is that the developers lost focus on the core game, "wasting" efforts on adding features that didn't necessarily belonged to the game instead of fixing some serious problems on the core game - what undermines the final product.

They fell on the Feature Creep Trap - building non essential features over a rotting foundations to a point in which they can't fix the core anymore because there're so many (secondary) features depending built over the bugs that fixing them became too expensive.

But without fixing the core business bugs, your product struggles on the market.

And now we have a self-feeding vicious cycle in which your product walks slowly (at best) into premature obsolescence.

I think it's pointless to speculate what precisely led to the demise of this game. There is an infinite number of ways how it could have gone wrong. One would have to have lived it to really understand. And even then, I'm sure you would find people in the team who would disagree on what precisely happened.

It's just a shame, because it lets one build some really nice looking and intricate models...

[Hades]

Originally posted by ymrich:

Originally posted by Lisias:

The point is that the developers lost focus on the core game, "wasting" efforts on adding features that didn't necessarily belonged to the game instead of fixing some serious problems on the core game - what undermines the final product.

They fell on the Feature Creep Trap - building non essential features over a rotting foundations to a point in which they can't fix the core anymore because there're so many (secondary) features depending built over the bugs that fixing them became too expensive.

But without fixing the core business bugs, your product struggles on the market.

And now we have a self-feeding vicious cycle in which your product walks slowly (at best) into premature obsolescence.

I think it's pointless to speculate what precisely led to the demise of this game. There is an infinite number of ways how it could have gone wrong. One would have to have lived it to really understand. And even then, I'm sure you would find people in the team who would disagree on what precisely happened.

It's just a shame, because it lets one build some really nice looking and intricate models...

Agreed. The many different types of builds you could do is almost endless. I loved the danger fact when your building also, the Animals would even try and venture into your home before it was finished. Mind you that might have been because I smacked one on the side and it chased me. lol

[glabifrons]

Originally posted by ymrich:

I think it's pointless to speculate what precisely led to the demise of this game. There is an infinite number of ways how it could have gone wrong. One would have to have lived it to really understand. And even then, I'm sure you would find people in the team who would disagree on what precisely happened.

It's just a shame, because it lets one build some really nice looking and intricate models...

The post you're quoting was talking about SE, not PN.

The demise of PN is pretty well known.
Every time there was a sale that should have resulted in a rapidly increasing player base, Steam was flooded with bad reviews by trolls that were almost entirely kickstarter backers who were salty because unmet stretch goals were not implemented (like multiplayer and traveling to other planets). If you look through the bad reviews, most of them center around those complaints or are claiming the game was abandoned (3 years before the last update. not kidding).

Trolls killed the game by preventing the authors from making enough money to survive.

[glabifrons]

Originally posted by ZanyScum:

I think the reason could be - might be me - that the vehicle creation feels not complete.
I am always totally unsure what I do and without youtube videos of successful builds I would probably never start the game again because it seems either not logical or at at least not intuitiv what will work for vehicle builds and what not.

Don't get me wrong, I think this is one of the better survival/build games and I like it.
It just feels a bit "not complete". At least for me. Perhaps I am too guided in other games?

Not 100% sure if it is the game's fault or mine.

I'm not sure where you're having trouble so I don't know how to offer help (and it should probably go into its own thread).
There are help screens in the F1-F4 keys IIRC that show how to build a vehicle.
You need wheels, a source of electric power, and a cockpit from which to control it.

When I made (utterly amateur) videos (had no mic at the time), I showed every detail of my machine so others could re-create it (this was before the blueprints update, so copying a machine was purely manual).
For example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaOIvkC11Gs
Note that that vehicle was designed before the introduction of the deuterium generators and the mass increase of the uranium generator (it was much lighter back then). You could also heal and sate your hunger and thirst very quickly from the stasis pod (in the bumper), so this functioned as a completely fully mobile base.

Contrast this with what happened before many of their physics updates to fix things like this from happening (it's pretty funny):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsPR_GQnXJo
I posted others, including a comparison between two nearly identical designs, one that triggered some of the physics bugs and one that didn't (the difference was armored blocks vs the narrow wall piece).
Pretty much all of those bugs were fixed long before the final updates.

[glabifrons]

Originally posted by ZanyScum:

Space Engineers is weird.
I fell in love when the start was "you in space on a small platform, now survive".
Later they added planets and land vehicles and lots of stuff and when I started the game again, it was something completely different. And not in a good way.

You must really hate SE after the AI update and the Signal update then! I can't imagine what you'd think about the upcoming one that adds another tech tier.
They've added so much more you can do, and none of it is forced or required (that aspect of the game has never changed).

Originally posted by ZanyScum:

Too bad they listened to the community instead of just fixing and releasing the original.
But.. that is my taste. SE is a successful game as far as I know, so my taste seems to be "wrong". Or at least different :-)

Listening to the community is why SE is still around.
I'm not sure what you mean about them not fixing the original. How "original" are you talking? RAGE v1 (the one that's on github)?
It sound like you might be talking about "crashed red ship". That scenario is still there, and the number of bugs fixed is astronomical.
You can select the old versions of the game if you really hate all the bugfixes and improvements, just go to "betas" to select them (they put them there since Steam offers no other means of version selection). It has quite a few versions in there, the last patch before each major upgrade (that added significant features) so at least you get the bugfixes for that feature-set.

As to a comparison between the games, had Craneballs not pulled PN from the Steam store, I would have made a video on the topic (I had a lot of notes on comparisons I wanted to make/show). From my perspective, the best game would be the food/bio mechanics, wildlife, and terrain generation from PN combined with the space travel, physics, space bodies, etc. from SE. One of the big exceptions would be suspensions... I love the way PN's suspensions work - far more versatile than SE's (unless you're using cheats).
(that's massively over-simplified vs the comparison I had in mind)

That said, we should probably stick to the topic of Craneballs & PN in this thread... SE has its own forum.

[Lisias]

Originally posted by glabifrons:

From my perspective, the best game would be the food/bio mechanics, wildlife, and terrain generation from PN combined with the space travel, physics, space bodies, etc. from SE. One of the big exceptions would be suspensions... I love the way PN's suspensions work - far more versatile than SE's (unless you're using cheats).
(that's massively over-simplified vs the comparison I had in mind)

I think the original idea was exactly that: SE expanded too much, like a too thin layer of butter scraped on too much bread. Would be more satisfactory to have fewer features with more some more depth (or more butter and less bread, using my comparison).

It's the reason I prefer to play PN over SE even nowadays. Yeah, I know, PN is not finished, there're many lost opportunities, yada yada yada. But what it have now feels... "warmer" to me than SE is - and I'm not criticizing SE, as time revealed that they, well, were in the right path. It only wasn't the path I'm willing to take.

I'm still pretty sad about P.N. being dead in the water without even a glace of hope of being further developed.

[glabifrons]

Originally posted by Lisias:

...
I'm still pretty sad about P.N. being dead in the water without even a glace of hope of being further developed.

Yeah, I can sympathize on that one. I may have gobs of time in SE, but PN is still one of my favorite games.

I remember a couple years back there were several people trying to reverse-engineer PN to the point that it could be modded or updated. I thought you were one of the people working on that, weren't you? (I'm just curious what happened on that project as I lost track of it)

[ymrich]

Originally posted by glabifrons:

Originally posted by ymrich:

I think it's pointless to speculate what precisely led to the demise of this game. There is an infinite number of ways how it could have gone wrong. One would have to have lived it to really understand. And even then, I'm sure you would find people in the team who would disagree on what precisely happened.

It's just a shame, because it lets one build some really nice looking and intricate models...

The post you're quoting was talking about SE, not PN.

The demise of PN is pretty well known.
Every time there was a sale that should have resulted in a rapidly increasing player base, Steam was flooded with bad reviews by trolls that were almost entirely kickstarter backers who were salty because unmet stretch goals were not implemented (like multiplayer and traveling to other planets). If you look through the bad reviews, most of them center around those complaints or are claiming the game was abandoned (3 years before the last update. not kidding).

Trolls killed the game by preventing the authors from making enough money to survive.

I see. Sorry for my lack of attention then. But I think it wasn't just the trolls. Communication on part of the devs could have been better. But I understand that not every developer is born with great communication skills. I just wish we could somehow open-source this, or get someone to make something very similar and make it open source... For me, it is all about the size of the blocks. I thought it would be a fun improvement to implement a part designer, to have a standard 1 unit size cube subdibided, let's say 4x4x4 into smaller cubes, which then could be filled with miniature versions of the stabdard blocks, and then one could save such a part. Add a few more functional mechanisms, like propulsion, sensors, logic and weapons, and it would be the ultimate sandbox. Modders are capable of achieving such a feat.

[Lisias]

Originally posted by glabifrons:

I remember a couple years back there were several people trying to reverse-engineer PN to the point that it could be modded or updated. I thought you were one of the people working on that, weren't you? (I'm just curious what happened on that project as I lost track of it)

Yes.

We had some (good) exchanges on the is it still in devplopement

Originally posted by ymrich:

Modders are capable of achieving such a feat.

But at a cost. Modding takes time, no matter what they tell you - if someone is telling something is "easy" it's because they forked someone else's work and are just using it, and didn't developed it from scratch.

Patching games without completely screwing up things is hard - and I'm seeing this happening on another game I like pretty much and am modding for some years already. You can really **RUIN** the game by mangling it too much, permanently destroying the savegames. Believe me on this one - I'm fighting problems created by 3rd parties for years already.

And I want to repeat something I had already posted here in the long past:

Originally posted by Lisias:

In theory, yes. Once we secure a way to inject code (relatively easy) into the game **without** screwing things up (relatively hard…), the true is tha we can do anything as long one have the time, the will and the skill to do that.

Modding is a hobby effort made on your free time. Most attempts I found to monetize modding ended up in tears (and I'm talking about big tittles - on something like P.N. is even worst).

There're legal issues too, but now that P.N. is dead and without an owner, there will be nobody to raise them and it's now on a legal limbo - even on my country (that have a pretty draconian legislation about Reverse Engineering...).

[Menzagitat]

Originally posted by ymrich:

Originally posted by glabifrons:

The post you're quoting was talking about SE, not PN.

The demise of PN is pretty well known.
Every time there was a sale that should have resulted in a rapidly increasing player base, Steam was flooded with bad reviews by trolls that were almost entirely kickstarter backers who were salty because unmet stretch goals were not implemented (like multiplayer and traveling to other planets). If you look through the bad reviews, most of them center around those complaints or are claiming the game was abandoned (3 years before the last update. not kidding).

Trolls killed the game by preventing the authors from making enough money to survive.

I see. Sorry for my lack of attention then. But I think it wasn't just the trolls. Communication on part of the devs could have been better. But I understand that not every developer is born with great communication skills.

They had somebody responsible for communication (Daniel)
He left the company in Autumn 2017 after their first attempt that summer to bring the game back to positive rating failed. I was told that more developers left at that time.
Then the devs had less interaction on the Steam forum than on their own company forum. That is a mistake one of the developers told me.
The other one acknowledged was that the physics middleware caused them to spend a lot of time trying to find workarounds to fix bugs and keep things stable. They thought that the game engine will advance faster as they develop the game. And it didn't. The dev told me about another better middleware engines but that required a licence.
They also confirmed to me is that they started with a small prototype and based on that, the decision to make the game was taken without more research on where the limits are. Then scaling the prototype to a full game didn't happened as they thought it will.
The decision to make the game as it is now, was also based on the popularity of sandbox games (probably Minecraft) and that was not reflected in the sales on Steam. The dev suggested that such games were not as popular anymore.
They made more mistakes but I don't know the other ones.
But before coming to early access, the kickstarters which had access to the alpha posted on their internal forum to not release the game because it will get a bad reception.
That post managed to convince the devs to delay 2-3 months but it still got a mixed rating. That might be the biggest mistake, to not prepare a bit more. Still the physics bugs were present until the end, with vehicles being ejected into the space.

I perfectly understand kickstarters being disappointed for not getting multiplayer because I also support a game which is being developed and if the vision will change I will feel betrayed. In PNs case I know the technical reasons but that is still developers' fault for not having a multiplayer prototype before their kickstarter campaign. They shouldn't have promised that in the first place.

But players are also unfair when they claim the game is not finished.
They want features added continuously or getting features which were not possible with that Unity version.
The devs did all they could with their small team and I hope they are doing fine, away from the toxicity of Steam forums.

[glabifrons]

Originally posted by Menzagitat:

They had somebody responsible for communication (Daniel)
...

Daniel was the only one I was in contact with, having exchanged emails more than a few times.
I was amazed how they treated Linux players (like me) just like any other customer. Bug reports I submitted were mostly handled incredibly quickly, with only the most outrageous physics bugs taking much longer.

Originally posted by Menzagitat:

Then the devs had less interaction on the Steam forum than on their own company forum. That is a mistake one of the developers told me.
...

So many devs make that same mistake.
It's actually far worse in SE (as much as I hate to bring that back up) as the devs have absolutely zero Steam presence (there's one guy with the dev label that is not actually a dev, he's their "ambassador" and has the dev tag only so he can manage the forums for them... he's great, but cannot actually represent the company).
ARK has historically been the same way, especially for the (now extinct) Linux version (the Linux support thread is insane). They'd post there (in the non-Linux threads) only every few months at best (and maybe once a year in the Linux thread, if that). Worse though, ARK devs use a google form (I forgot what it's called) to submit bug reports to a spreadsheet no-one can see (or at least that's how it used to be). That's the most incomprehensibly idiotic ticket tracking system I've ever heard of.

Also, IIRC, PN had at least two sites with which they interacted with the community. I seem to remember a forum and a really cool interactive roadmap site (I totally forgot what the site was called, not sure if the host is still around or not).

I guess what I'm saying is PN's communication with the community, as poor as it was, was still quite a bit better than some games that survived it.
At the same time, devs all should understand that if Steam is the bulk of source of their sales, they should maintain a Steam forum presence. Fail to do that and the game better make up for it in other ways.

[ymrich]

Originally posted by Lisias:

Originally posted by glabifrons:

**RUIN** the game by mangling it too much

For a number of years now, I have been running Skyrim with hundreds of mods, some of which change it drastically, made a few myself, keep swapping them around, and I still haven't gotten bored with that. Savegames aren't an issue. So it remains to be seen, whether there is such a thing as too much modding. But never mind. I'm just sad this project did not go any further...

[ymrich]

Originally posted by glabifrons:

Originally posted by ymrich:

You mis-attributed that quote... that was Lisias.

Sorry. Damn this interface, I give up :D

[Lisias]

Originally posted by ymrich:

For a number of years now, I have been running Skyrim with hundreds of mods, some of which change it drastically, made a few myself, keep swapping them around, and I still haven't gotten bored with that. Savegames aren't an issue. So it remains to be seen, whether there is such a thing as too much modding.

I never played Skyrim, what do say mod it - but I'm modding KSP for years now, and had toyed with Hollow Night and Carrier Command 2 (as well some other minor titles, as Haydee2), and in all of them I had lost a savegame by uninstalling (or installing incompatible) add'ons. Never really lose a savegame because knowing that sheet happens, I always make backups (and I'm modding KSP for so much time that I'm able to fix savegames using an editor by now).

From all these projects I do (or did), KSP is the one with more similarities and... well... It's also the most problematic one - there're add'ons on KSP that if uninstalled, will render all your savegames unsalvageable (more of the game's fault than the modder, but still).

Of course I didn't did a full decompile of PN, but did a lot of exploratory tests for my savegame-editor thingy, and ... yeah... I crashed the game a lot, it's the reason the Editor is so pesky about doing backups - and this by merely mangling the savegames!

So... Yeah, modding PN should be done with care and attention. And, yeah, sooner or later different add'ons from different modders will collide and conflicts will need to be handled. Not a big deal on a small community like us, to tell you the true.

Originally posted by ymrich:

I'm just sad this project did not go any further...

Boy, you can say it again. I fell exactly the same, it's some months since the last time I fired up the game without a long sigh...

[ymrich]

Originally posted by Lisias:

Originally posted by ymrich:

For a number of years now, I have been running Skyrim with hundreds of mods, some of which change it drastically, made a few myself, keep swapping them around, and I still haven't gotten bored with that. Savegames aren't an issue. So it remains to be seen, whether there is such a thing as too much modding.

I never played Skyrim, what do say mod it - but I'm modding KSP for years now, and had toyed with Hollow Night and Carrier Command 2 (as well some other minor titles, as Haydee2), and in all of them I had lost a savegame by uninstalling (or installing incompatible) add'ons. Never really lose a savegame because knowing that sheet happens, I always make backups (and I'm modding KSP for so much time that I'm able to fix savegames using an editor by now).

From all these projects I do (or did), KSP is the one with more similarities and... well... It's also the most problematic one - there're add'ons on KSP that if uninstalled, will render all your savegames unsalvageable (more of the game's fault than the modder, but still).

Of course I didn't did a full decompile of PN, but did a lot of exploratory tests for my savegame-editor thingy, and ... yeah... I crashed the game a lot, it's the reason the Editor is so pesky about doing backups - and this by merely mangling the savegames!

So... Yeah, modding PN should be done with care and attention. And, yeah, sooner or later different add'ons from different modders will collide and conflicts will need to be handled. Not a big deal on a small community like us, to tell you the true.

Originally posted by ymrich:

I'm just sad this project did not go any further...

Boy, you can say it again. I fell exactly the same, it's some months since the last time I fired up the game without a long sigh...

Rebuild it in Unreal then, I guess, with modding in mind from the start... we need a volunteer.

You must have loved the whole s**tshow with KSP2 then :D