From
2020, we banned any hacking of the TacticalNexus program and talked about that
on this website.
However, in 2021, TacticalNexus's topic of the so-called MOD
production went up on discord.
(#general's log details
from June 29 to June 30)
In conclusion, for legal reasons, we
cannot "absolutely" allow mods or hacks into Tactical Nexus.
Don't
try to remodel TacticalNexus.
Please Create and publish the
TacticalNexus-Like game yourself.
(Please do not perform data analysis using
hacking etc.)
There are multiple reasons,
but the reason "absolute" is due to the difficulty of handling "Connive /
Connivery" for these legal issues in Japan.
When the developer is prohibiting
such an action, it is necessary to provide a clear reference to some
extent.
Otherwise, there are many situations where fatal issues occur.
For us, STeam has an international issue that the content
of the law varies depending on the country.
Therefore, we need to keep
talking "prohibited" to the prohibited behavior.
When we are noticeable, it
is because we are more likely to be treated as "connive" if we do not
act.
We think
Japan is a country where the trial is hard to happen. Therefore,
there is a partially extremely severe place in the vague of
definitions.
There are many game development groups that
have left this problem and have been crushed. (In terms of companies and
coters)
Only discussions about the content of this article, we already have
more than a few hours.
(As if it is possible, we would like to make a
compensation for players by working such as publishing a simple stage every time
there is such an event)
If such events continue, (as the risk is weakened
by doing so), we have to make a clear terms and conditions.
And these tasks
consume a lot of time that can be originally developed.
Since originally
prohibited from last year, please do not make these actions
absolutely.
Also, some of our staff (programmers and game designers)
consider work a life and are extremely willing to receive feedback.
On the
other hand, the staff such as designers and composers value their private life
because they are not so involved in feedback.
Some of them have SNS accounts
as private rather than as game development.
It may not be "absolute" for
Team-Nexus operations as it is different from legal issues.
However, as a
group, he asks not to track individual staff.
(Some staff are very scared of
the spread of these behaviors in the last few days, and in the worst case they
may quit.)
However, we have no intention of banning the sale and
release of games that follow the Nexus system.
Even a beginner programmer can
make a game equivalent to Tactical nexus in a year.
(In Japan, some people
used RPG Maker to build the same system as the core of Tactical Nexus in two
weeks.)
TacticalNexus has certainly become a game with an average play
time unlike any other on Steam, and has a very high rating.
However, the
Nexus system where this game is popular is so-called "Columbus egg", and anyone
who knows the principle can do the same.
This game is an unprecedentedly
expensive game, but we have no intention of monopolizing the game system
itself.
We hope that TacticalNexus will only be bought by some
players who are interested in this genre,
and will function as a "bad
stepping stone" that will be forgotten in the player's memory in 10
years.
(In 2025 - 2030, there will be many Tower of the sorcerer-like games
in this world that follow the Nexus
system
etc.)
Discord on Tactical Nexus also has a channel to
talk about Tower of the sorcerer-like games.
So, if these games are on Steam,
it will be a hot topic.
Also, at least we have no plans to reduce the price
of this game until 2025.
So, in the next few years, Tactical Nexus won't let
the existence of this game interfere with subsequent developers.
Rather, I
think that many players feel that "a game that is cheaper than Tactical Nexus
and has a good BGM / graphics program has come out."
We do not intend to
claim rights as a game system, for example, we do not intend to obtain patents
in the Nexus system.
Like the Tower of the sorcerer, you are free to develop
games using this game system, and the difficulty is very low.
As we
say many times, the difficulty of making a game like Tactical Nexus is extremely
low.
It doesn't require much programming knowledge, and it doesn't really
require the effort of a game designer.
And Steam is made very kind to indie
gamer.
No matter what the game, once it's released, he'll be able to see the
game's store page from a certain number of people.
When we talk about
these bans, we don't really like to end up writing just that.
(In the first
place we have been talking about the ban on these acts since last year)
So,
in order not to finish writing the same thing, we will sell Tactical Nexus
and publish the information we found.
If you look at these data, you can
see that the difficulty of developing a game like Tactical Nexus is extremely
low,
and it is faster to make a game by yourself than to make a
mod.
[About the number of views on
Steam]
The following is the data to explain that "you can get a certain
number of views for the time being in any game".
At first, we didn't know the
Steam discounting specs.
After selling the price at the time of sale as 60 $
before discount, we learned that the price reduction is not possible for
one month after the sale starts.
For this reason, Tactical Nexus
will be sold for one month at the original list price of $ 60.
(Pricing
couldn't be undone, so we temporarily released the game for free during this
period.
Also, during this period, the sentence "Please purchase the game
after the price has been reduced" was posted at the very beginning of the store
page.)
By the way, the one sold at this price was returned after tens of
minutes.
However, as you can see from the first access statistics and the
second Wishlists, every time you start selling a game, you're getting some
attention.
Even for games that don't sell at all, you can see thousands of
store pages a day at the start of sales.
If you don't have
unusual pricing or old-fashioned graphics,
you'll sell dozens to hundreds in the first 1-2 weeks.
Also, if you get a lot
of high ratings at the start of the sale, the chances of subsequent Steam users
buying the game will be greatly increased.
Once upon a time, we saw an article that "Indie games sell
an average of 1500-2000 on Steam."
[About the material used for
Tactical Nexus]
This image is a summary of some of
the equipment items and map chip images used as of Chapter 5 of Tactical
Nexus.
As you can see from the graphics, this game requires very little image
material.
Furthermore, "graphic materials", including free and paid ones, are
open to the public all over the world.
Map chip images and item images will
probably give you more than 10 times more data than the above images if you look
at them for a whole day.
Unless you have a staff member who draws a picture or you
have a strong commitment to the original,
you don't necessarily have to
prepare the material for the image.
This is also true for music.
Also,
in Tactical Nexus, characters other than the main character only need to have a
downward-facing graphic, not a horizontal / upward-facing graphic.
Whether
you make your own or use publicly available materials, it takes a very short
time.
As anyone who has put together a site that can be used as a
material for a game will know,
in 3 days you will have all the data you need
to make a Tactical Nexus-like game.
Team-Nexus is a group that spends
a lot of time doing completely unnecessary work, and we don't have
to be thorough in "using original materials" like we do.
[About
the basic structure of Undo / Redo]
In this game, "which variable changed and how" is saved in
the array variable for Undo when fighting or picking up an item.
For example,
if the variable "HP" goes from 100 to 200, the program will look like
this:
When actually undoing, the
program is processed through the following branches.
if
(Undolog[0][changevaluename] == "HP") {
HP =
Undolog[0][beforechange];
}
Similarly, when redoing, the program is
processed through the following branches.
if (Undolog[0][changevaluename]
== "HP") {
HP = Undolog[0][afterchange];
}
By creating this
"if (Undolog[0][changevaluename] == "HP") " branch with the
undo / redo routine for the variables to be processed by undo / redo,
you
can easily implement the undo / redo process.
The structure of this program
is available in almost all languages.
(There is an easier way to make it
depending on the language)
In C ++, CPUs of this era can perform simple
operations such as a = 1; billions of times per second per core.
Most of the
games are made in the form of picture-story shows with 60 sheets per second, but
each frame can perform tens of millions of calculations.
Therefore, it is not
necessary to think much about the processing speed in the calculation.
(It's
the graphics that slows down the game on Tactical Nexus)
We rarely see
users of this Undo / Redo structure other than us.
(Basically we are
self-taught, so maybe they know a simpler and easier-to-understand
structure)
However, we thinks that this structure is a function that can be
widely used from map editors to games, so there is no loss in implementing
it.
[Game designers
don't need effort]
For example, an action RPG game designer needs to ponder
her game balance.
This is because it is necessary to consider "human
reflexes" and "human thinking time".
Basically, humans have a time lag of
about 0.2 seconds to recognize an object.
For example, let's say you have an
enemy who makes the motion of "holding an ax and then swinging it down."
The
enemy's "holding motion time" is at least 0.2 seconds, and in reality he wants
0.5 to 1.0 seconds for the player to attack and defend.
In this way, if you
do not make a game considering the characteristics of human
beings,
enemies that the player can not attack and enemies that are
abnormally strong will be born.
Now, we are spending a tremendous amount
of time implementing new game systems and game balance.
So do all developers
of Tactical Nexus-like games need time for these thoughts and test
plays?
Does a game like TacticalNexus really need such a good game
designer?
The answer is that there is no such thing. It is a waste of time in
most cases to spend time creating a map.
When we make a game, we think
about "what kind of rules the game has" and "how to make it to create fun that
is familiar to games of various genres".
However, it is usually not necessary
for game developers to think about such complicated things.
Perhaps players
wants game developers who sell their games on a regular basis, rather than game
developers who are delayed. Team-Nexus is a group of abnormal people
who spend time on unnecessary actions, and there is no need to imitate
this method.
To prove it, we made a map like
this.
This map is a map created in just 24 minutes
using our map editor.
The maps we usually release are made after hundreds of
times more production time and test play.
This game "Tactical 24 minutes" is included in the Tactical
Nexus Main package.
As you can see by playing this game, it will be as fun as
or even more fun than the usual Tower.
That's right. There
is almost no need to think about game design.
After making a map, by
doing a little test play and manipulating only the parameters of the enemy a
little, it will be a map that everyone can enjoy playing.
Basically,
everything Team-Nexus is doing is useless.
We are looking for "property
(serendipity) common to completely different things" and "reproducible logic",
so we try to make all actions reasonable.
But in reality, it doesn't need
that "theoretic nature" for game developers and game players.
Team-Nexus is
just a group of sleepwalkers swimming in the dream sea called Tactical
Nexus.
As you can see by actually making it, you can make an
interesting game just by placing random enemies with different parameters in a
simple maze.
This is because Tower of the sorcerer-like games have the
initiative in "players who pioneer routes" rather than "map makers".
No
matter how sloppy the map or how much the map is made, it is the "players who
are good at developing routes" who conquer the game.
As long as the
initiative is in the "player", the effort of the game designer is basically
unnecessary.
In particular, it can be said that the group that creates
and releases maps is much more sincere than the group like us that causes a
situation where development is delayed.
If it is a "big tower", it
may be necessary to consider the game balance to some extent, but it is rarely
necessary to build a big tower in the first place.
(As a player's tendency, I
think that the majority of players prefer a tower with a short
volume)
Creating a map with a map editor for 1 hour and setting up
a Nexus room where you can use Nexus medal and Sunwisher.
If you repeat it 60
times and sell it for 10 $,
you will probably be able to make a game
that has a higher rating than Tactical Nexus and sells in large quantities and
makes a lot of money.
[Postscript]
Again, due to legal issues, Team-Nexus has totally banned
Tactical Nexus mods and hacking data mining.
Every time such a topic comes up
and it is about to spread, we have to react to
it.
And it is overwhelmingly more fruitful to make your own
game than to bother with such actions.
Perhaps if you see one or two Tactical
Nexus-like games for sale, both developers and players will know that what we
wrote here is true.
By 2030, we expect to see about 20 Tactical Nexus-like
games that sell tens of thousands.
Nexussystem has been a factor in
increasing Tactical Nexus play time by orders of magnitude.
But we don't want
to monopolize it.
If it spreads to groups and companies that can make good
things, we think that team-nexus can disappear like a mirage and be
forgotten.
Regarding Tactical Nexus format games, there is already a
place to talk about a Tower of the sorcerer-like game called "Tactical Nexus
Discord".
If the developers advertise to Discord, Discord users will surely
go there. Probably we will play too.
Feel free to create and sell Tactical
Nexus-like games, regardless of the Tactical Nexus game itself.
Programming eventually reaches a stage where it is not necessary to take "the style of the language" or "general format". This will be understood if you study programming for about 80,000 to 100,000 hours or do enterprise-level development individually. pic.twitter.com/GDy9HfX8Zz
The programming difficulty
of this game is extremely low.
Postscript (written in Discord on
9/6/2021)
I should mention that these are quite long sentences,
but that is because I tried to be as clear as possible in explaining my
reasons. It is not written with a very strong feeling.
(I hope you will
understand that I am not saying that you should do this, but that there is such
a way of thinking.)
(Japan has a special nervousness about proposing and acting on ideas, so
this may just be a matter of cultural difference.)
While it's important to
think of ideas for improvements that will make the game better, it's better to
start thinking about the practical implementation of such processes when your
total tots-like programming time exceeds 2000 hours, or when your lifetime
programming time exceeds 20,000 hours.
Since Team-Nexus staff members have
been trying to achieve the same level of performance as a medium-sized company
in their own area of expertise, and since they tend to be more interested in
enhancing their abilities and pursuing fun and technology than living, it is
okay to make such suggestions to Team-Nexus staff members or large companies,
for example.
However, in the case of indie or individual development,
focusing on improving QOL tends to stagnate their development.
(Note that we
didn't register stepping on the one-way arrowhead as an "Undo" because we were
concerned that it would unnecessarily increase the Undo history.
Maybe some
time later, I'll take a survey and if I get a certain number of votes, I'll add
Undo decisions to one-way floors)
---
A large-scale program, or a program that costs hundreds of thousands or
millions of dollars to develop (in Japan), is not only a new technology, but
also an application of an existing technology that has been made more convenient
and easier to use.
On the contrary, adding new functions to improve usability
is a difficult task even for companies. It is easy to think of a single
additional processing structure, but there are times when it is necessary to
integrate it into the program in a realistic way, or when there are multiple
places to modify the source code, even if the processing structure itself is
only one.
Also, when adding or modifying a process, some parts can be done
quickly, but one or two important parts can cause problems that take a lot of
time to solve.
The increase in the number of "additional processing
structures" means that the number of such tasks increases exponentially
(actually, not all of them are tedious, but for every additional processing,
there are 0 or 2 more time-consuming modifications, so it is at most a gradual
temporary curve).
(If you have more than 20,000 hours of programming time,
you will have the mental strength to force yourself to continue even if you
break down a little, and if you have 30,000-40,000 hours, you will have the
ability to identify "will this process hinder future development" before you
implement it.)
For example, if you add 10 scripts of dozens to hundreds of
lines that add additional quality of life to a single operation, that's at least
tens of thousands of dollars of work, and possibly hundreds of thousands of
dollars.
This is because it tends to take a lot of time and work to complete
a "realistic script", even though the finished script is only a few thousand
lines at most.
---
In particular, indies, unlike corporations, do not have much coercive power
over their staff, so if they find a task too difficult or troublesome, they tend
to stop working on it.
Japan is particularly vulnerable to this kind of
stress (we originally surveyed about 3,000 game developers in Japan and spent
about six years studying their progress and the tendencies of developers who
make it big). We learned that overseas (outside of Japan) indie developers tend
to actively introduce their own gimmicks and systems, but I think there is a
difference between "implementing new gimmicks" and "improving quality of life"
in terms of the kind of stress placed on the developer.
The reason is that
the former is the implementation of "a program that we actively want to
implement and realize", while the latter tends to be mixed with the feeling that
"the program is already working, so this is an optional task".
---
As you
all know, TacticalNexus has a very unusual price tag (designed to make the
experience more enjoyable than the increased purchase cost). There are a number
of reasons for this, but currently one of the biggest is to allow for "new"
developers to follow in the footsteps of Nexussystem and others over the next
few years.
Team-Nexus is focused on "increasing the density of enjoyable
experiences per hour", so we are actively working on improving QOL (but we may
delay or fail to implement some extremely difficult
processes......).
However, while TacticalNexus is a single developer of game
programs, it was also recognized as a programmer with technical skills that are
not available to more than one in ten million people in Japan. (We don't think
Japan is a country with particularly good programming skills in this day and
age, and Team-Nexus programmers tend not to use a global standard development
language, but instead focus on "ease of use" and occasionally "update" their
work with ridiculous bugs.)
While a game system like TacticalNexus is easy to implement "vanilla", it
becomes much more difficult to implement special features and quality-of-life
enhancements.
We happen to be obsessed with implementing features that are in
high demand by players, and we did our best to implement them, but I think that
the pursuit of such quality of life is quite challenging for ordinary
developers.
(Probably, if you have the technical skills to create the exact
same QOL improvement system and map editor as TacticalNexus in a year, you can
make a million dollars a year working for a company.)
--- That's not to say
we don't want "revenue from our games" or "recognition for our games", but at
least it's not our "primary goal", and probably our primary goal is to share
what we find interesting with our players. (This is, when you get right down to
it, an imposition of our own desires. We also don't want to increase the number
of players who buy a game and then gradually find it unsuitable, so we try to be
flexible and make decisions based on surveys.) Our focus is not on the
evaluation of TacticalNexus itself, but rather on the expansion of the system,
including the Nexussystem. (That's what all of staff think about this part.) So
for a few years TacticalNexus will be a very expensive game that almost no one
will buy, and we hope that during those few years a reasonable follow-up game
will come along that will be well received and sell well. It may not be up to us
to decide, but we think that what will be valued in indie games at that time
will not be convenience (as Team-Nexus has pursued to some extent), but
originality and enjoyment of the main part of the game. (That means making
TacticalNexus orders of magnitude more expensive for a few years to avoid being
compared to TacticalNexus in a bad way when a follow-up comes out.) If we try to
learn to improve quality of life like we're trying to, we'll definitely end up
like the game designers at Team-Nexus first.
TacticalNexusは このジャンルに興味のある一部のプレイヤーだけが買い、
10年後には
プレイヤーの記憶から忘れ去られる「出来の悪い踏み台」として機能すればそれでいいと思っています。
(2025年や2030年になれば、Nexussystemなどを踏襲したTower
of the sorcererライクのゲームがこの世界に沢山出回っている事でしょう)
TacticalNexusのDiscordには Tower
of the sorcererライクのゲームの話題をするチャンネルもあります。
ですから、こういったゲームがSteamに出回れば
その分話題にもなるでしょう。
また、少なくとも 我々は2025年までこのゲームを値下げする予定はありません。
よって、今後数年間において
このゲームの存在が、後続の開発者の妨害になる事はないでしょう。
むしろ、「TacticalNexusより安い上、BGM・グラフィック・プログラムの良いゲームが出た」と感じるプレイヤーの方が多いと思います。
ゲームシステムとしての権利を我々は主張するつもりはありませんし、例えば我々がNexussystemにおいて特許の様な物を取得するつもりもありません。
Tower
of the
sorcerer同様、皆さんがこのゲームシステムを使用したゲームの開発は自由であり、その難易度も非常に低くなっています。
TacticalNexus形式のゲームに関しては、既に「TacticalNexusのDiscord」という
Tower of the
sorcererライクのゲームについて語り合う場も出来ています。
開発者の方がDiscordに宣伝すれば、Discordのユーザーの方はきっとそこに遊びに行くでしょう。 おそらく我々も遊ぶと思います。
TacticalNexusのジャンルに拘っても、TacticalNexusというゲームそのものに拘らず、自由にゲームを作り、販売してみてください。
