Bought and can't wait to play it. I watched SpatterCatGaming do a gameplay impression of Barony and it seems like a cool game. If the Cursed Edition adds anything to the game that's even better.

Hi everyone, my name is Sheridan and I'm the creator of Barony. I'd like to answer some of your questions and dispel a few common complaints and criticisms. If you have any direct, honest questions for me, I'd love to answer them!

1. Is this just a Minecraft mod? Does it use the Doom engine?
No, Barony is based on completely original work that includes a game engine built from the ground up for the game.

2. Why does the game look like Minecraft?
By far, the biggest reason is this: Barony has a lot of content. There are several hundred different model files in the game, including a couple hundred just for collectible items, and starting off as a one man team (whose skills are primarily in programming) there was no way in hell I was going to get all of that done unless I picked an art pipeline that was fast and very productive. I did not take any artistic inspiration from Minecraft and was not trying to cash in on the "retro indie pixelart" wave that has become so prominent in gaming over the past several years. Originally I made Barony just for myself and my younger brother and I simply was not trying to appeal to a greater audience of gamers with an appetite for a unique and high-quality aesthetic.

Having said that, the art in the game is not intended to be meaningless crap, either. Originally the game shipped with very, very rough artwork that had no style or consistency to it whatsoever, but in the meantime, I managed to get in touch with a very wonderful and talented artist with over a decade of professional experience who redid ALL of the game's art with a much greater degree of skill than I had originally thought I'd see in the game.

If you get past the fact that the game shamelessly uses that overdone indie pixelart aesthetic, I think you'll find that the game's art has quite a bit of skill put into it. It's not perfect; the animation in the game is still not great (I hardcoded them all myself...) and a scant few assets never ended up being replaced (which occasionally clashes with the new art) but for the most part, I personally think the game looks reasonably nice.

3. Why are the system requirements so high?
The system requirements are actually super rough estimates I invented a long time ago, and maybe they should be updated. The reality is that you should be able to run the game on almost anything made in the last five years. You should especially note the game's video card requirement: "Intel Integrated Graphics." In other words, you can literally run this game on a laptop without a graphics card and expect a solid 60fps as long as you have a decent CPU (a 3ghz dual-core should be more than enough). If you only consider the game's memory footprint, I've never seen the game exceed 400mb. I rounded that tiny number up to 4gb and 8gb to account for the other requirements of a modern system, like the OS and other background apps.

So really, the reason for this inaccuracy is really just this: I don't have a QA department or leagues of testers. I came up with a rough estimate for what I thought you should need to have a good experience based on the devices I have at home. In terms of actual graphics requirements, I think the fact that the game doesn't require a video card is reasonably impressive. The game certainly runs much better than Minecraft without a dedicated video card.

4. I really dislike the minotaur, hunger, and boulders. Why can't I turn them off?
You can! Go into the game's Settings window, and under the Misc tab there are options to disable all those things and many other things you may or may not like. That being said, both I and everyone else on the team think that the minotaur and hunger are genuinely fun concepts, but if you don't like them, that's perfectly acceptable too.

5. What makes this game different from Delver, One More Dungeon, Eldritch, and other games like that?
The biggest differences boil down to the complexities in the gameplay itself. They do not appear on the surface, though we've tried to tell people about them by drawing references to System Shock and Ultima Underworld (which I believe are not far off the mark).

One More Dungeon, Delver, and Eldritch are comparatively simple games with, well, not a whole lot of content. On the surface, they all look VERY similar to Barony, but Barony has a number of things that set it apart from those games:

a. A much, much, MUCH more complex items system reminiscent of Nethack and Ultima Underworld.
b. More items in general.
c. More complex monster AI, including followers, factions, and more.
d. Far more spells.
e. An RPG system with far more depth to the stats, skills, etc.
f. In general, just way more STUFF than any of those other games.
g. Also of course, (and this was a big reason I even made the game to begin with) MULTIPLAYER.

Despite these things, I fully admit Delver and One More Dungeon have more visual polish than our game. We simply tried to make the most fun and complete game we could in 3 years -- Delver has taken a very very slow and conservative approach to its development, which has its own upsides, but I obviously like how Barony turned out better (as biased as I am).

6. Is this game shovelware?
I mean that's kind of a loaded question, but honestly? No, I don't think it's shovelware at all. I built this game from the ground up over the course of three years of my life without any outside funding (and very little coverage) at all. It is beyond anything else a labor of love and a true attempt to produce something original, compelling, and fun. Over the past three years, I've been lucky enough to meet several people who've shared and expanded on what this game could be, and I'm very proud of the contributions of all of my colleagues: Ciprian Ilies, Chris Kukla, Josiah Colborn, Sterling Rathbun, Frasier Panton, Ryan Hardiman, Julian Seeger, Mathias Golinelli and more.

If the game doesn't appeal to you on certain (or even on any) front, that's okay, I welcome your feedback and your criticism 100%. I do however ask that you withhold judging the game entirely until you've given it an honest try for yourself. Much of the game's intricacies are not going to come through in its appearance but I think the largely positive (86%) testimonies of our Steam reviews stand testament to the fact that most people find this game very enjoyable.

If you guys have any other particular questions for me, I'd love to answer them!

Sheridan

EDIT: I would post links to some art that I think exemplifies the skill our artist put into the game, but apparently I don't have the forum privileges to do that, so check out the attachment to this post to check out a render of the minotaur character that appears in the game. :)

First of all, if you'd like GOG can get you a special colour on the forum to signify you're a developer.

Thank you for clarifying some stuff.
I was wondering, does the game use Galaxy for multiplayer or is it only LAN and Direct IP?

I get the game has permadeath, are there temporary saves though?
Save on quit etc.

Thanks for identifying yourself as the creator and thank you for posting information about the game. I enjoyed reading what you posted.

Is this game modifiable at all?

Is this the final version? Can we expect patch support for awhile?

I'm on the fence about purchasing. I may wait to see what the weekend sales look like haha.

Is that Jesse Cox swinging a mace?

Thanks omega64! We've already contacted them about it.

The GOG release unfortunately only supports LAN and direct-ip connections. I'm unfamiliar with the galaxy service and GOG pushed out our release pretty quickly, but for Steam we worked for several months after the fact to add lobby support to the game so there's nothing to say we can't add Galaxy support for GOG in the future. :)

@DieGans: Currently the game code is not modifiable because the engine does not use a script language, but we've been working hard over the past couple months to clean up the code significantly and prepare it for an open-sourcing, meaning every single aspect of the game will be modifiable soon. As it stands though, you can still modify many other parts of the game, including:

1. Replacing any model, texture, sound effect, or music file
2. Modify character riggings
3. Create new levels with the bundled level editor
4. Create new level types
5. Add new textures
6. Add new item visual varieties
7. Modify certain item properties

... and some other things I may have forgotten.

You can expect us to release patches over the coming months mostly to address bugs, add new usability features, etc. but in terms of content, we'd like to leave that to the community after we've open-sourced the game. The reason for this is that we are already developing our next game on a brand new engine (which among other things will support scripting for ALL aspects of the game) and we have limited manpower, so we can only divide our efforts so much between two products.

That being said, we want to give you the full value for your money and you can expect the game to improve as time goes on.

@cstuckma: Unfortunately I have no idea who Jesse Cox is :)

You might even be able to get crossplay working to let Steam people play together with people here. :P
I'm quite curious about the game.
Sadly don't have money to spend right now.
I'll definitely consider picking it up later though.

Hello, Sheridan!

Thanks for all these information.

I would like to ask you one question: because of instant death is there any progress in the gameplay?

I mean, you can find many items, books, etc. as I watched/read some reviews but, does it make any sense, to find all of these items, if the game can not be saved or there is in reality no progression, no character development, nothing (or only until you die)?

Lobby support sounds interesting.

Thank you, Sheridan, for taking so much of your time and explaining about the game and some of the questions about it. My concern was not that I didn't want the game, I'm a huge fan of Ultima Underworld (and the whole series, especially VII with it's "crude" graphics) and find content is much more important than graphics to me. Personally, I love the graphics, and I really want to buy the game. It looks fantastic, and doing it as a one-man team really shows dedication and love for the project.


The only thing getting in the way of me rushing to buy the game was the requirements. I have a 2015 model laptop with Intel graphics (I love that you considered us integrated graphics users and didn't just flat out say "no" to anyone without a fancy graphics card) and an i7 processor which is 2.4, 2.4, but after your answer, I'll give the game a try. I think it will work.

Thou hast gained an eighth, good sir.

/me too. *annoyed noscript user*
I guess it's because of the new witcher 3 expansion though. gog probably don't trust their own equipment to take the expected load, or something...

EDIT: On Topic for a change ;)

Thank you sheridanr for explaing a bit about the game from the dev's perspective, and a very much kudos for your plans on open sourcing the game! That is a great incentive for me to want to buy Barony :)

The value in the books is that they contain numerous gameplay hints which will improve your technique for future sessions. They also sometimes just contain funny stories, which I think are amusing in their own right.

Besides books, the purpose of collecting the items is to improve your chances of survival for one session only. By design, you will lose absolutely everything if you die and move on to another character, but that being stated, the game is not impossible, and does not take a lot of time to beat if you know what you're doing. In fact, each session is designed to last no more than a couple hours at max (like Spelunky). It just takes time to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to end the game in victory.

Yes, it is a sad day indeed. I don't mind cloudfront and co. but for GOGness sake, stick with ONE server cluster please.
Which could be spread all over the planet for all I care.
If it has the *sea* of holes inside, colour me intrigued.
But indeed, procedural generated dungeons are only palatable if they are chockful of humour.
Which brings me to the question why Dungeons of Dredmor still hasn't landed here. I already have the full and yes: DRM free version on HB and it's a blast to play.

I've noticed that many indie devs do this (=exaggerate the hardware requirements), presumably for the same reason as yourself. The reason I've noticed is because my ancient laptop runs most of these games, when it should burst into flames according to the min requirements. The same goes for Barony - the alpha demo runs on a single-core, 2 GB RAM machine. I'd assume the performance has gotten better since then. On that tangent, does the Linux version come with a 32-bit binary? I had to run the demo via WINE.

My suggestion for your next game is that you ask your testers for their hardware specs, and put the lowest one that works well as the min.

Unfortunately not. For a time we supported a 32-bit linux version, but so few people used it and it was so much extra work to maintain it that we just decided to drop it.

I think it's reasonable in this day and age to require a 64-bit system for a new game. The new DOOM does not support anything less on any of its supported platforms.

On a side-note, part of the reason the system requirements were set quite high is that I wanted to ensure that the game could be played smoothly even at the lower requirements. I'm reluctant to challenge people to find the worst piece of hardware they can that will still run the game because I can't make guarantees about hardware that I don't personally own and can't actually support.