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#1 Think elf from T2 !!!

#2 I'm interested in beam weapons as well as flamethrower type weapons. If GG decides there isn't enough of a demand you could sell it on turbosquid or something.

#3 Why don't you just setup a site that sells weapons ect for TGE?

#4 hey guys... I guess three responses aren't bad for saturday night-sunday morning... still, I was thinking there'd be more of a commotion over this :P, I guess I shouldn't have added all that other stuff in the .plan, guess it's a little long. Anyway, I've given turbosquid and selling it myself some though (and I've gotten offers from other people who have content pack sites who'd like to sell this).

My main concern with not offering this on GG is exposure. Because an aspect of this pack is code, it will undoubtedly need to be updated over the years to keep working with newer incarnations of the engine. This means that if we sell it on turbosquid and only ten people hear about it and buy it, then we've made maybe 70 bucks (split two ways) and now have to support this thing for the next few years. The only way something like this is going to work is if we sell this for very cheap to a lot of people, or very expensive to a few people (we'd prefer the first option).

Also, I personally believe this pack is better (especialy for the price) then many of the other packs offered on GG. Now I don't want to bash BraveTree since Joe is like my most favoritest person ever, but I can't deny that out of the two content packs I've gotten, one doesn't work with the engine anymore, and the other was very different from what was advertised. I personally believe that our pack is a far better value, and that many community members would be interested in it. I really don't see any reason why this shouldn't be offered on GG for all of the community to see, and I'm really committed to convincing GG of that fact as well.

#5 I'm interested in your weapon packs.

As far as GG saying you don't have enough content, then maybe you'll have to bundle a couple of weapons together. Or sell them yourselves and put up a resource to your web with key words of "weapon beams rays" etc.

Get them working for TGE and TSE, then play it by ear after that. Most software is only supported for a couple of years anyway. If you find that you don't have a customer base to support the supporting of it, then stop support. You never know, what technology will be like in a couple of years.

#6 Remeber guys GG has to be choosy about what they decide to produce. They are still trying to make a name and attract attention, and they have to be concerned about quality and quantity in the content packs. I think you can add more weapons and features and it will sell well.

Jeff is giving you straight honest feedback from real world experience. This gives you time to think about what would be useful and put alot more stuff in it. Look at it this way, it gives your more time for testing and debugging as well as adding new features I bet after a few weapons you will come up with some very clever ideas that you would not have thought of with just one. Jeff iss providing you with the kind of feedback that will really increase the quality of your content pack, and give you guys the shining A+ rating your conetnt pack will deserve.

Here is a few ideas that I think would be great.

(1)Grenades, with an animated arm / hand. (this would show people how to have a different look and feel for 3rd person / 1st person view, and how to get custom animations into torque)

(2)A sniper rifle with a zoom and a cool reticle, with sniper scope look around the edges. (this would show developers how to change the look and feel of the gui / hud by integrating it with the weapon and add new special states to weapons)

(3)A ghost busters plasma weapon where you get more power by "crossing the beams" or like the link gun in UT2003.

(4)A teleport weapon like the one used for CTF in UT and UT2003, love that thing. Add in the ability to use a remot camera, once the projectile landed so you could spy on the enemy.

(5) BFG. A Really bug gun that detonates a nuke. Now that would rock!

(6) A rail gun that has a richochet projectile, or one that penetrates buildings and terrain.

(7) The U4E mod for UT had a warp gun that would suck people into it. The projectile would hit and form a vortext that sucked everything into it with in a certain radius. Man that was fun.

Just a few ideas.

#7 Hey guys, thanks for the comments. Your both right, maybe we should bundle several weapons together, it's something we've been considering (especialy since Jeffs comment). We still personaly feel however that people would rather that we sell the laser for like 10 bucks, then the lightning as an add on for like 5 bucks (the lightning class is a child of the laser class) instead of just offering them as a 15 dollar bundle. However we're commited to do whatever Jeff and GG would want in order to get this thing released on their site. If they want us to bundle a dozen new weapon types then we'll do it, they're the bosses.

Also, I do appriciate Jeff's response. He didn't outright refuse the content pack, just said that he thought it was a little sparse. I just thought that I could convince him that lots of people were willing to pay 10 bucks for it regardless of it's originaly planned content size. I guess I was wrong.

Thanks for the suggestions Britton, some of them sounded interesting.

I know Plan B is a young studio manned by young developers with a very short track record, and I know we still have a ways to go before we can hold our own with professional companies. However I believe the demo of our laser speaks for itself as far as quality is concerned, and I'm pretty sure that once we get the lasers and lightning going in TSE with shader effects, people are going to go absolutely nuts over this ;)

Please leave more feedback!

#8 Personally, if I was buying this (I am developing it with Eric), I would rather have a selection of weapons that I could pick and choose from. Why pay more for a pack of 5 different weapons when I could pay less and just get a laser (if thats all I wanted)?

I like your ideas Britton. Especially having ricochet/penetrating projectiles.

#9 It simply is not worth our effort to sell something for $10 that is going to sell maybe 20 copies a month. We have to go through the contract process, then there is all of the bookkeeping involved with paying royalties, etc. You have seen the quality of the latest content packs, i.e Synapse Lighting Pack, Forest Generator, RTS, etc. In today's market, we would not publish some of the early BT content packs. They were experiments in finding out what works and what does not. BT's new content packs are awesome (official announcement TBD), and move the bar MUCH higher.

We would consider a weapons pack that has maybe 15-30 different high quality, Torque ready wapons along with a bunch of scripts, sfx, etc. that shows how to use them. It is very important that the pack is easy to use, well documented, has follow up support, and provides huge value for the money (think of the kind of value Torque provides). A $10 price point is not enough. The pack needs to be worth at least $20 or it isn't worth publishing.

For future reference, there just isn't going to be much of a market for a couple of days worth of programming effort. Think in terms of what a very good, professional Torque programmer could accomplish in 1-2 month's worth of full time work. That is probably the minimum amount of effort that needs to be put into a content pack.

#10 Thank you Jeff for a complete and honest answer, this clears up a lot of confusion on my part.

We've never been very good at giving up. We'll need to rethink our strategy a bit, but I think we can still make this work for us. We'll probably bring this up again in about a month or two when we have considerably more to show.

#11 Well apparantly we're better at giving up then I thought. Dylan isn't up for the workload in addition to our game projects and being a full time student. He had some good points, we're already spreading ourselves awefully thin, and this would just make our other projects and personal lives suffer. We might package up the laser and lightning gun along with the ray gun model as a content pack somewhere else and sell it all as is... but I doubt it, we'll probaly just use what we've done so far for our games. Sorry if I dissapointed anyone.

#12 Eric,

I think it would be really valuable to a lot of people to package the things you already have working. The beam demo you had from your other post worked very well. Maybe Turbo Squid or Game Beavers? It doesn't need to be a polished product then. I know I'd get it. Right now I'm the only one working on a project so anything that can save some time would help. I'm sure there's a lot of very small teams trying to make games and could use the option.

-Sabrecyd

#13 yeh. if the project is dead, then please post the beta code as a resource. then, post a donation link on your web. I'd pay $10 today fer a good laser...

Mark Woods