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Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure - Out on Steam and GOG
Ps.
I went to your message board on Steam and it looks like you’re still having bugs according to some recent posts. It seems a lot of the bugs has to do with lower end PCs an trying to get the game to run on all of them, which is admirable, but it does not help the reputation when the game is a buggy mess bc of this. for the record my machine is older but met the minimum specs.
But on top of that I thought the actual story was not handled the greatest. I had a problem with the puzzles design and like I said I said the meta humor did not work for me. For example the rap battle with the Vampire was interesting and executed well, but came out of left field and served no other purpose than a Monkey Island reference to insult sword fighting. the game didnt earn the rap battle in my eyes that make sense.
characters constantly turning in a circle because the pathing is so bad after you click on an object, the character would walk there and spin in circles. the cursor not selecting what you actually selected, but something different. An example of this would be the attic in Paris with the pentagram puzzle, the cursor would not select what I told it to select and I had to restart that puzzle from an earlier save 10 times to get past it. the cutscenes not working at all, they would stutter and skip, so I had to go to YouTube to actually watch them.
I think we have very different definitions for what “buggy” means. Gibbous was made with Adventure Creator, which comes with its default pathing. Everything that you are describing = how Adventure Creator games work. Here’s a list of games that use AC. Unless they have done fancy custom work (most have not, I know this ‘cause I’ve discussed with some of the devs), pathing works the same for all of them. Upwards of 50,000 people have played the game without complaining about pathing issues. Those are not bugs.
Gibbous is a 2D game that is intense on resources. If cutscenes don’t work for you, or stutter, that’s most likely because your hardware isn’t up to the requirements. It’s a good idea to check those out before making any purchase.
Story and ending are subjective things. You may not like them, and that’s fine. Happens to all of us as gamers.
Had Gibbous had serious bugs it would be reflected in the thousands of user reviews. Thanks for taking the time to give us feedback. We always read all our reviews and keep what players say in mind for our next game.
Also if you think clicking on an item then having the character walk there and spin in a circle while not being able to interact with anything for 15 to 30 seconds at a time is normal then I don’t know what to tell you. For the record this didn’t happen every time but A LOT, it was the worst in the main protagonist apartment and at the dock Shipyard. At those two scenes everything I clicked on the main protagonist would walk there spin in a circle for 30 seconds and then finally interact with the object or the character he was speaking to. It also happened in other scenes but to a lesser extent.
I also can’t believe you don’t think the Pentagon puzzle was not a game-breaking bug for me. I really had to restart a save 10 different times to get past it. I almost gave up which I should have. Because I was ableto select a phrase in one of the books but the game would select a different word instead of the one i selected and then I would have to go back and do it over and over again to try and make it work. this is not something I’m making up, I posted my review months ago in the what games are you playing right now thread on here. For the record I don’t know what fixed that bug on the 10th try but it decided to work finally. For the record it happen again but to a lot lesser extent on the other real puzzle in the game which was using the computer to open all the secret compartments in the underground lair. I would have to select what I wanted to input over and over again before the game would finally select what actually I hit to begin with.
Thanks for your feedback.
I’ve watched countless streams of the game being played and never saw this pathing issue. We’ve had thousands of user reviews and tens of bug reports, and never has this been mentioned. I’d say most likely this is down to some specific hardware configuration you have, but that’s just a guess. If this were a widespread issue it would have been reported at least once in the 2 years the game has been out.
Respectfully, that does not qualify as “a buggy mess”, especially since we went above and beyond, as a 3 person team, to deliver the kind of game that would’ve taken a way bigger team with a way bigger budget (like, 10x what we had). Then again, we are not heroes, nor are we alone in that situation - that’s every indie team that makes games in this very non-commercial friendly genre. These games are made out of passion, and it’s amazing that we actually did well enough to do this for a living.
We’re just excited to make another game in the same universe, and we hope people will help us make it a reality.
Thanks for your feedback.
I’ve watched countless streams of the game being played and never saw this pathing issue. We’ve had thousands of user reviews and tens of bug reports, and never has this been mentioned. I’d say most likely this is down to some specific hardware configuration you have, but that’s just a guess. If this were a widespread issue it would have been reported at least once in the 2 years the game has been out.
Respectfully, that does not qualify as “a buggy mess”, especially since we went above and beyond, as a 3 person team, to deliver the kind of game that would’ve taken a way bigger team with a way bigger budget (like, 10x what we had). Then again, we are not heroes, nor are we alone in that situation - that’s every indie team that makes games in this very non-commercial friendly genre. These games are made out of passion, and it’s amazing that we actually did well enough to do this for a living.
We’re just excited to make another game in the same universe, and we hope people will help us make it a reality.
I don’t think you get it which is fine. I’m glad 50,000 users had zero problems I had major problems. so their experience does not reflect my experience and my experience does not reflect their experience. the game was a buggy mess FOR ME. In buzzes apartment that whole scene should have took 30 minutes to complete, it took me over an hour because buzz decided to stop and spin for 30 seconds at a time for whatever reason on every interactable object on screen, including the main room and the roommates room. Having to restart a puzzle in the paris attitc 10 times is a game breaking bug to me, I’m glad it’s not for you. Having to go on to YouTube to watch all the cutscenes besides the intro because the intro cutscene worked perfectly for some reason while the rest didnt was a hassle and a bug to me. For the record even though you acted like I was a moron who couldn’t check the specs for my machine, I did and it met them. I’m thrilled so many other didn’t experience the glitches i did. Even if I did want to give you all a second chance your responses to this thread killed that though.
Good luck with the project though, like I said there’s obviously some very talented artists that work with you
Sure, I get it. I just hope you, in turn, understand that this is likely something that is very specific to either your computer configuration, or software, or a bunch of possible factors. While we honestly regret this has happened to you, I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s not something that we can realistically account for.
We probably can’t offer you a refund since you’re past the two hour official Steam refund mark, but please reach out in DMs if you feel you’re entitled to one and we’d be happy to do that. It sucks when people can’t enjoy your game, regardless of who or what is to blame. Thanks!
After the disaster of trying to play through the buggy mess that was gibbious. I will pass on this, good luck though.
Mod edit: Responses to this now moved to the Gibbous thread.
I read your post and I can honestly say, I never encountered a single bug on Gibbous. The biggest problem I had with it was when I played it with a laptop with an Intel GPU, which made the game lag terribly on some locations. But on a better GPU, the game is smooth sailing.
It definitely sounds like the issues you have are caused either by your OS installation or your hardware.
After the disaster of trying to play through the buggy mess that was gibbious. I will pass on this, good luck though.
Mod edit: Responses to this now moved to the Gibbous thread.
I read your post and I can honestly say, I never encountered a single bug on Gibbous. The biggest problem I had with it was when I played it with a laptop with an Intel GPU, which made the game lag terribly on some locations. But on a better GPU, the game is smooth sailing.
It definitely sounds like the issues you have are caused either by your OS installation or your hardware.
I’m with Tomimt here Jdawg. I had absolutely zero problems with Gibbous. OK, I have a powerful desktop PC (well it was back then but it’s still no slouch today 
) but it does look like your problems are hardware based or, possibly, with your PC security software or, possibly, with programmes you’ve got running in the background.
Anyway, I was impressed enough with Gibbous to have backed Near-Mage - which looks like it’s going to sail through it’s Kickstarter. Been employing magic Mr Underhill? 
Life is what it is.
Jdawg445 wasn’t the only one experiencing technical issues the past couple of years. Nothing to detriment of the game or it’s developers and “buggy mess” might be rather strongly worded, but I don’t think we should completely invalidate Jdawg445’s experience.
From another perspective, I think that bridge has been sufficiently burned.
I’m certainly giving “Near-Mage” a spin when it comes out. If it’s awesome, I’ll give ol’ Gibbous another try as well.
@jabod: Always employing magic! It’s the ssssecret ingredient. Thanks for your support!
@Vegetable Party: absolutely, the discussion as I see it was more along the lines of if these issues were something most or a lot of players were experiencing, absolutely you can call the game a buggy mess, universally. It appears to be so for Jdawg only, which suuuuucks, and it sucks even more ‘cause it’s very hard to figure out why that is happening, since it’s such a rare occurence. I was very serious when I said we’d be happy to reimburse him, no questions aked, because the last thing you want as a dev is to have people pay hard earned money for your game and for it to not work properly.
I hope this clears out everything, and if I came across as a bit too harsh, apologies to everyone in the thread - launching a campaign is stressful stuff, and even though it’s going very well the adrenaline and the tiredness still gets you.
🙏♥
Jdawg445 wasn’t the only one experiencing technical issues the past couple of years. Nothing to detriment of the game or it’s developers and “buggy mess” might be rather strongly worded, but I don’t think we should completely invalidate Jdawg445’s experience.
From another perspective, I think that bridge has been sufficiently burned.
I’m certainly giving “Near-Mage” a spin when it comes out. If it’s awesome, I’ll give ol’ Gibbous another try as well.
I appreciate it, maybe buggy mess was strong, but having to restart the attic puzzle in paris 10 times really turned me off. The spinning protagonist was annoying but not game breaking, but when you add all them together it seemed buggy to me.
Like I said there really wasn’t any rhyme or reason to why any of the glitches happened. Why did the intro cutscene work flawlessly, but every other cutscene would stutter and skip. What would cause buzz to stop and spin in some scenes but not others. Why in some puzzles the game would select something else and not what I clicked. I can tell you in those situations it was always dealing with a real puzzle aka the attic puzzle, the computer puzzle in the lair, and the other computer puzzle, where you had to triangulate the hidden location of the final island.
As far as a refund goes, I appreciate the offer but no thank you. to me it’s the same as going to a steakhouse eating the entire steak and then telling the chef, I didnt like the steak give me my money back. that’s not how I work, I just won’t eat at that restaurant again but thank you for the offer.
Its nice to have devs answering about these concerns…
I was wondering about why and how could 2d games still be considered hardware intensive? Ok there is this dynamic lighting, but other than that I can not see any reasons…
Especially cutscenes! Those are basically videos, no?
Image compressions for non printed materials can be huge and still work well on big screens.
Is it all about the unoptimized engine for Unity?
Any advice or thoughts on that?
cheers
It’s a valid question, happy to answer it. This is because most indie adventures are pixelated and made in something like Adventure Game Studio. Just look at the size of an average title of that description - it will be around 350MB. Gibbous is a bit over 10GB. There are a few reasons for that, the most important being the sheer size of the environments, and the number of frames in our animations.
You average PC will have no problem processing a 320x240 or 640x480 pixel screen with zero real time effects (as it should, those are specs that were only problematic in the mid 90s 🙂). Gibbous’ smallest screen is 1920x1080px, with parallaxing layers. There are scenes that are in excess of 6000px wide. The fluid animation of the player character(s) and the NPCs = hundreds of frames for even the smallest and most subtle idle animations - that’s hundreds of uncompressed PNGs playing in succession. Add to that real-time reflections calculated when the rain’s falling. Add to that reflective water. Add to that a real time lighting system.
Keep in mind that the game is _only_ 10GB because we use smart solutions like TexturePacker that optimize the insane number of frames of animation that go into the game to an impressive degree, otherwise Gibbous would’ve easily taken up 30GB of HDD space.
Speaking of the lighting system - if you look closely you’ll notice the shadow rotates around the character depending on where they are in relation to the light source. The only way we could achieve that was to build invisible 3D planes that the shadow gets cast on. Yeah, it still looks like just a 2D adventure, but there is so much work that went into making it look like it does. Let’s not even mention the tens of thousands of lines of dialogue and the fact that the musical track changes with each screen.
The way cutscenes play is all up to the engine we’re using (Unity). We’ve had a lot of headaches trying to make them run well on lower spec computers, did our best to write custom code for them and optimize, but ultimately you’re working within the limits of an existing engine, and that’s that. Unity is mostly used for non-adventure games, the fans of which expect to require a stronger PC for them to run well.
We don’t do pixel art or lo-fi - nothing against that approach, I have so many favorites in that category, but it’s just not us. Stuck In Attic will always deliver super high res cartoony games that are hardware-intensive for 2D games. Our new game, Near-Mage, has an even bigger standard resolution (3840x2160px), and some screens will be more than 10k pixels wide, and the hardware requirements will reflect that.
Hope I managed to answer your questions and shed a little light on why we do what we do and why our games don’t run well on not-so-powerful computers.
PS: Quick fact: this is a rough estimate, but the in-game animations + cutscenes total over 200,000 individually hand-drawn animation frames.
I played the game with a very regular laptop and had no bugs or problems. I know it sucks when everybody says it works fine, but is not your case. Maybe is the graphic card, maybe is another program installed which interfere, maybe you’ll never now. That’s why computer science it’s not really a science. How can it be when 99% of the problems are solved by reseting the computer?
That been said, my solution for those cases is to wait until I buy a new computer and then play the game.
Currently translating Strangeland into Spanish. Wish me luck, or send me money to my Paypal haha
It must be very difficult for a game developer to produce a game that works well enough on a variety of systems but I have played at least one game that played perfectly for me but was slaughtered in a review because the reviewer encountered so many ‘bugs’. I concluded that the game had no bugs whatsoever but was incompatible with some game setups which I’m sure is no less of a headache to developers!
I’m more familiar with problems with an aspect of a game that affect many players & then of course considered a bug which are easier to identify & fix.
Gibbous worked smoothly for me & many other players so any problems really have to be thrown back to the system it’s being played on & if it’s up to the mark as far as specs go must be due to other conflicts that could be compromising the smooth playing of the game.
On a lighter note I’d just like to thank Mr Underhill for Kitteh’s passport so she’s now on holiday somewhere ‘Between Time and Space’! 
Heheh, nice. We didn’t manage to get any time off this year, so it’s good to see at least Kitteh is enoying the sun and waves! 🏖☀🍹
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