Banished [Shining Rock Software]

[Kezza]

Just saw a preview of this game at a german gaming website.
Looks very nice, reminds me of the medieval Anno series.
Its made by one guy!
Just wanted to share it with you guys.

http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/?page_id=48

[Kazuya Mishima]

I have this loaded in my steam wishlist so the minute it comes out i'm likely gonna pull the trigger. I think i want more for my Simcity itch that never got scratched when i found out what a piece of garbage SC 5 was.

[magikeh]

Just read thru all the dev logs. I like the way this guy works, most definitely worth a good penny.

[Wafflewaffle]

Am i a bad person cuz i was the whole trailer looking for orcs and dragons? I am playing way too much High fantasy games these days.

Strangely enough i had the sensation this looks alot more like Tropico then Simcity and my first reaction was the fear it would not present enough challenge. (You know... like Tropico)

[Sockthing]

wah! awesome :D reminds me a lot of the Anno series. Definitely gonna pick it up when released!

[Gormador]

Read an article in a gaming magazine and, yeah, it looked promising.

Not that we aren't accustomed to one man jobs around here, but this one is particularly impressive.
I'm sure this is how I'll feel like when RTH comes out ;-)

[Gilberreke]

I'm pretty sure there's been other threads about this guy in the past, but I can't seem to locate them. But yeah, bunch of guys over on the IRC have been following this for months now. Can't wait for it to come out :)

[Kazuya Mishima]

So the game's release is imminent and i have managed to find Quill18's channel who has a rather long playlist of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gAXcRE ... fUWFtg29py.

After watching for a few episodes i'm not so sure about the game anymore. I can't quite put my finger on the why other than disappointment at how difficult mines are to place. Quill has about 16 videos, all about half an hour each so you really do get to see the game in action. Any revised thoughts before we make impulse buys ?

[Gunnerman21]

I'm a good fan of Banished, but I do see your point on it lacking something. I believe you're relating the difficulty of Banished to minecraft in which not only survival is necessary, but also defense. As Quill18 says in some of his videos, there is huge potential for a game like this. We really could keep teching up and building better things, like in the middle 1800s when the industrial revolution boomed, once the game adds more content. All an advancing civilization needs is more people to keep up with resource consumption.

[Rob]

If mine placement is your only caveat so far, I think the game would be worth your patronage. I have also watched a few of Quill's videos and a guy named Arumba, who's not as equally versed with the mechanics of the game. My only concern with the game is it's end game difficulty. It appears to become trivial past a certain point in the game play. I haven't seen a video for either youtuber about that sweet spot where all your original villagers die out at abruptly the same time. So maybe it does get difficult eventually, I just haven't seen that difficulty present itself to either person.

[jorgebonafe]

[Rianaru]

Now that this is out, can anyone personally vouch for the game? It looks really cool, but I'm taking 20 units of upper division science right now, so I'm not sure I want to get it unless it's gonna blow my mind

[DaveYanakov]

It is very much less SimCity, more Dwarf Fortress. If you like the idea of having all the children in your village starve if you screw up, pull the trigger. You're not building a city, you're trying to keep as many of your people alive as possible while homesteading.

I for one am sold.

[Tsugumi Henduluin]

Sounds about right. I have only a few hours logged, but the focus is clearly on the survival part. Don't expect to be building any kind of massive sprawling metropolises or complex trading networks.
If anything, Banished reminds me a bit of the old Impressions Games citybuilders where you had to constantly make sure your production side of things were up to par, lest your entire city collapses.

It's not quite as expansive as those games or Anno, but it does seem a bit more challenging. I'd say give it a shot for the price. From what I gathered from reading the dev's blog over the past two years or so, he also fully intends to support the game after release so it's probably a fairly safe investment.
A bit of a warning though: The game is pretty slow paced and rather hands-off. If you need to be constantly doing things in a game and don't like just observing for rather lengty periods of time, this is probably not the game for you.

[Gunnerman21]

The music is very catchy :) Which I like about a game. For myself, being able to remember the music of a game is a major bonus. Like The Legend of Zelda: Four Sword Adventures I played so much as a kid on my gamecube. That music is great and can be picked up in an instant. Plus.. da nostalgia feels..

[EvanT]

So I have bought it yesterday and have a 11years old village now. The game itself makes a solid impression, definitely a survival game, but I can't get the "Oh so hard to keep them all alive" tenor of some people. So far I had one death and that was caused by a rock falling onto a stonecutter.
I find the trading rather annoying though (maybe I have missed some essential point there). The prizes for livestock are beyond ridiculous. (Not if you think of them as activation barriers for the production line and the same concept is present in games like Gnomoria too.) And I have yet to see the trader willing to sell seeds of any kind.
So difficulty at this point is to get enough surplus high value products to afford some new livestock and wait for seeds.
I did have a shortage of stone until I was able to constantly assign >6 workers to a quarry.

The pacing on the other hand is OK in my opinion. You may fast forward up to 10 times the original speed so no big deal there.

[DaveYanakov]

... I have (yet) to see the trader willing to sell seeds of any kind.
So difficulty at this point is to get enough surplus high value products to afford some new livestock and wait for seeds.

You should be able to place orders with the traders for their next trip

I think this is going to be my Dwarf Fortress. The interface makes sense and the complexity to depth ratio is nearly perfect for me. Not to mention it runs silky smooth while being pretty as hell and a tiny investment of my hard drive. For a guy learning how to make games in his home, the optimization on this product is very solid. It makes me really look forward to seeing what FC does with his years of experience.

[EvanT]

I have thought about ordering some specific goods but am afraid of the "additional cost to individual orders". And since no trader sold seeds so far I didn't even had a chance to order them. But that is all very early game.

[Gilberreke]

For a guy learning how to make games in his home, the optimization on this product is very solid. It makes me really look forward to seeing what FC does with his years of experience.

Uh, Dave, the Banished guy has like more than a decade of industry experience. He used to be a graphics engine programmer. He's not far below FC in terms of development experience, though I think it's his first time as a designer.

[DaveYanakov]

I was going off of the statement in his blog about taking a chance with quitting his job to work on an engine and do game development. I never saw anything about having quit game development to do game development.

I have thought about ordering some specific goods but am afraid of the "additional cost to individual orders". And since no trader sold seeds so far I didn't even had a chance to order them. But that is all very early game.

That is one design decision that confused me. Most people who sell things for a living will actually offer a discount if you eliminate the risk of trying to guess what you need. I understand that there needs to be some difficulty added on for requesting specific things but one would think that having to survive without for a year or two for that particular trader to get back would cover it. Not to mention that if another trader has those items available before your order is filled, do you buy them from him because your children are freezing to death right now and risk snubbing the guy you ordered from, thereby decreasing the frequency of trader visits? It feels like low hanging fruit that was passed up.

I am probably entirely wrong about that, it's just the impression I get as a fan of games with limited resources forcing you to try and do more while rolling with the setbacks.

[Tsugumi Henduluin]

And since no trader sold seeds so far I didn't even had a chance to order them. But that is all very early game.

I'm at year 14 now, only just got my second type of seed (at fairly immense cost I might add: 2500). So yeah, traders seem to be a bit luck-based. Had tons of traders offering stone at the start which I didn't really need yet, but now that I do want them, they're not showing up.
I'm also not entirely sure if I like the fact certain traders won't take certain types of goods. First time I had the livestock trader show up, I couldn't for the life of me figure why I couldn't trade any of my goods for the cattle he was offering... until I realized all of the goods I had stored (mostly food) were worth 0 points. I suppose it makes sense from a balance point of view, as you could otherwise simply stockpile huge amounts of easy to collect goods like basic foods, but it's a bit frustrating nevertheless.

Now that I'm a bit further in, I must admit the challenge isn't quite as high as I initially expected though. Maybe I've simply been lucky so far, maybe the many years of playing citybuilders are finally paying off, but my town has been growing steadily over the past few hours without much trouble. People are slowly starting to die off from old age* and I've had a few accidents here and there, but so far replacing them hasn't been much of an issue, even while expanding production. Maybe it's not until you get to a larger population that things start getting problematic? I had a disease break out around year 12, but only a whopping two people got infected, which was promptly taken care of by my hospital, but I'd imagine that if you have several hundred people living in close proximity of one another, things could spiral out of control really damn fast. Happiness and health (aside from that minor outbreak) haven't been an issue whatsoever either.

All in all still really enjoying the game, but I have had to tweak my expectations a little. Fantastic game to play while listening to podcasts or whatever, though.


*What's up with the ages anyway? Only 14 years in, but I have people in my town that are late 60s, early 70s even though none of my initial settlers were older than mid twenties...

[Gilberreke]

I was going off of the statement in his blog about taking a chance with quitting his job to work on an engine and do game development. I never saw anything about having quit game development to do game development.

You misread I think. His blog says the following on the about blurb, right on the first page:

I've been gaming and programming for a long time. I used to work as an professional graphics engine programmer making console games for about 10 years before going 'indie'.

[FlowerChild]

Haven't really been following this thread, but decided to take a peak given the flurry of activity today. Game looks interesting, and I take a recommendation from Dave pretty seriously. May pick it up :)

Uh, Dave, the Banished guy has like more than a decade of industry experience. He used to be a graphics engine programmer. He's not far below FC in terms of development experience, though I think it's his first time as a designer.

Let's not start breaking out the tape measure on dev experience, as there's really no reason for it. Thanks.

[Sarudak]

Especially since we all know flower's is longer. And we don't want to give the poor guy a complex. He's just trying to make a fun game for us to play. Just saying.

[Gilberreke]

Let's not start breaking out the tape measure on dev experience, as there's really no reason for it. Thanks.

Oh, I'm sorry, that wasn't my intention, it was just a reply to Dave's statement that "if this newbie can do it, I wonder what FC will do" is a bit unfair to a guy with a decade of industry experience. I didn't mean it as a comparison to you, just a correction towards Dave :)

This is what I was replying to, for reference:

For a guy learning how to make games in his home, the optimization on this product is very solid. It makes me really look forward to seeing what FC does with his years of experience.