Hmm... but didn't Naganuma (skankfunk) work on some music for Monkey Ball 3D? Seems a little odd considering that game came out two years after he left...
I imagine it's a bit more nuanced than that. Prope, IIRC, was started with SEGA money, and in the same way, Yu Suzuki left SEGA but his company keeps working on SEGA stuff. So what he means is probably more "once you leave SEGA's umbrella"- companies like Prope who are technically independent but keep a relation to SEGA probably not counting.
So Shadzter at the Stadium found these links that seem to show there is/was a F2P mbile Boom game in development. Anyone recognize that Sonic image behind the dude in the first link though?
Wasn't it already known for a while that Sonic Boom mobile games were planned? Also, the Sonic video behind him seems to be from the Lost World opening.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Mo7esa1Tfk Watch this video, basically confirms what was assumed but still. Nice to have a confirmation.
The other side of the story is pretty funny and depressing as well. It links up very well to the events the video lists.
Eh, while I'm more than happy to acknowledge Sega's fuckups with this, I can't hold any sympathy for BigRedButton when I can't even see the game having any promise as a bug-free, polished turd.
Question is if it would have been one if they didn't have to port it to Wii U. Going by when SEGA made the Nintendo exclusivity deal, they spent 1.5 years of development getting the game to work on the platform. That's 1.5 years they could have spent improving the game. Besides that, it's also possible that they had to remove features and/or parts of the game to get it to work.
Read: they had to get the engine working on Wii U, which is a tall feat because Wii U + CryEngine 3 = immense pain. That alone takes a hell of a lot of time to even accomplish. And they still had to optimize stuff, and it's clear they ran short on time, Sega was being awful with directions, and people were just pushed beyond their limits.
Ooohhh so THAT's why music is unmemorable, story is cringeworthy and dull as fuck, gameplay has no depth and gets old super fast. It's not like these things have nothing to do with porting to another console or should be thought out at the start of production.
Yeah but testing time dude. Every game is shit without testing time. You can 'think' about things at the start of production all you want, but those things will always be shit and you find out about that through testing.
There is one think I don't fully get from that video. At the start it says Big Red Button was founded in 2008 and started pushing various project to other publishers (which where never greenlighted) and only years later they actually got a real contract with Sega. So when exactly did development on Boom start? Are we really sure the game was in development since 2011/12?
http://kotaku.com/5989192/amazons-potential-jump-into-cloud-gaming-and-other-secrets-from-the-world-of-video-games
So, spring 2011 seems to be the time when the Boom project officially started. If the game was always planned to release in November 2014 it was supposed to have 3 and half years of dev time. And since SoA and SoJ never comunicate between them it wouldn't surprise me if BRB discovered they were working on a Wii U game the day Lost World was officially announced in the May 2013 Direct. This gave them 1 year and half to port the game on Wii U (so 40% of the total dev time) if we go by what the video said. Yet, in January 2014 (at least seven months after the exclusivity was announced) they released a trailer with "in-engine" footage which obviously doesn't look anywhere like the final game. I still remain by my original idea that Boom was not supposed to release in 2014 but in 2015 (not necessarily in November). It would make sense to release it after the cartoon aired at least once. And this would mean the decision to make it a 2014 Wii U game must have come during the chirstmas 2013 period, giving BRB less than 6/8 months to port and finish the game. I feel that there isn't just one reason on why the game ended up like this. The exclusivity deal, SoA and SoJ mismanagement, a new unproven team, time constraints, lack of a real direction, all these things killed Boom in the end. But I agree with Falk (durr) Felik: everything in the first trailer looked like complete shit even with the improved graphics. The areas were bland, the gameplay was still "go into room, kill enemies and repeat" like the final game, it looked slow and let's not even talk about the dubstep music. And yeah, you can see these things very well in the fisr trailer (or you could see them if the trailer wasn't suddenly set to private). Boom was destined to be bad from the start just like every reboot in the previous generation.
