Paprium: The Official Thread Mk 2

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

Fonzie is great at programming and seemingly at getting funding for his game (say what you will about the gems scam, but it worked), but if you can't get a team onboard and pay them appropriately you've utterly failed as a manager and shouldn't have been in that position in the first place.

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I know very little about Fonzie, so I'm asking this as a genuine question. But is Fonzie really great at programming? The only other project I know of him being involved with is Pier Solar, so is there any other software he's made that is impressive? I don't mean to come across as an asshole with these questions, I'm genuinely curious as to whether the lack of progress with Paprium is unusual for Fonzie. He certainly does seem to be good at getting money out of people, that's for sure.

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

if you can't get a team onboard and pay them appropriately you've utterly failed as a manager and shouldn't have been in that position in the first place.

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It's a well known fact that Fonzie doesn't wanna work for the man, yet he's exactly the type of person who needs the man to keep him from going crazy.

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Originally Posted by Mad Moham

I know very little about Fonzie, so I'm asking this as a genuine question. But is Fonzie really great at programming? The only other project I know of him being involved with is Pier Solar, so is there any other software he's made that is impressive? I don't mean to come across as an asshole with these questions, I'm genuinely curious as to whether the lack of progress with Paprium is unusual for Fonzie. He certainly does seem to be good at getting money out of people, that's for sure.

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At some point, like 15 years ago, I think he was one of the first of the homebrew community to figure out how to toy with the Sega CD and he also developed several samples of his tests with the hardware. He also developed one or two mini-games prior to Pier Solar AFAIK.

But, to be very honest, I think he's overrated nowadays. He's good but I think community kept evolving, new tools and more talent are now part of it and he kept himself out of the loop to the point that I don't think he has the same technical relevance anymore.

There's also a gigantic technical gap between a game like Pier Solar and what Paprium was supposed to be.
Many more details to figure out and also much more optimization needed.
Aside from the major flickering issues we've seen in this last party demo, I've also noticed some sprite priority issues which IMHO shouldn't be there anymore if the game was really nearing its completion.

I think nowadays Matt Phillips (Tanglewood) and the guys behind Xeno Crisis have a lot more knowledge and matured skills than him. Also 'cause they are professionals.
I'd put my money on Vetea and Sik over him as well, since they can, for the most part, do a whole small game alone, unlike him.
Guys like Chilly Willy, Stef and Mask of Destiny are living MD oracles in my book and far more relevant than him IMO.


Anyway, the issue IMHO is not how good of a programmer he is but how bad he seems to be at anything process/management related.
If he was bad at programming but good at managing his resources, this game would have been finished years ago considering the caliber of people initially involved, the amount of money they had raised and the leverage the WM brand had inside the community prior to him ruining it.

Does anyone still work with Fonzie, or is WM Games a one man show? At any other company Fonzie would get fired or at a minimum pulled off the project after that disastrous launch party. Based on the work I've seen I totally agree with Barone's list of talented MD programmers, if Fonzie needed help he had plenty of people he could have contacted.

In my experience a person with mediocre technical skills and good people/professional skills will always surpass a guy with strong technical skills who can't play nice with others.

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Originally Posted by Barone

At some point, like 15 years ago, I think he was one of the first of the homebrew community to figure out how to toy with the Sega CD

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Nope, I wrote all the CD-specific code for Mighty Mighty Missile.

EDIT: I guess there's the CD soundtrack stuff for Pier Solar though. Not sure who implemented that.

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Originally Posted by Barone

He's good but I think community kept evolving, new tools and more talent are now part of it and he kept himself out of the loop to the point that I don't think he has the same technical relevance anymore.

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I'm not sure if he's really behind the times from a technical perspective, but a number of things that made Pier Solar such an accomplishment are less relevant now. There's a proven market for new Gen/MD releases. There are established crowd funding platforms. Getting carts manufactured is more straightforward, etc.

Fonzie just seems like the kind of programmer who tends to make cool tech demos but doesn't have space in his life to commit to a full ambitious game production.

Except now he's trying to do it anyway and using a lot of other people's money to fund himself, without paying any of the other bills/contracts involved with it.

If he's in way over his head as far as being incapable of managing the situation, it only gets worse each day going forward.

He should just be a secondary programmer on an ambitious game project, where he gets to work on one gimmicky thing (like Pier Solar Mode 7) at a time, until he completes it. Then he can come up with another one.

Barone and Black-Tiger already pretty much said it but I was definitely talking about Pier Solar Mode-7 and Sega-CD usage and things like that.
Nowadays it's not as impressive anymore but it sure was when Pier Solar came out.

I guess he wanted to one up everyone again by using the DATENMEISTER or whatever the name of the chip is and all the other nonsense. Boy did that backfire.

I could be wrong but I thought I remembered reading that Steve Snake helped with some of the more impressive-looking parts of Pier Solar? I wonder why Fonzie did not go to him again, unless that is another bridge he's burned.

exactly what games released after Pier Solar are more impressive than that one?

Fonzie is the Hideaki Anno of the MD scene, so he's gonna get a lot of flak from a lot of people, it goes with the job. Deal with it. Wait or don't wait anymore, but stop this revisionist thing where this Paprium so called debacle suddenly makes Pier Solar a gimmicky demo. Every new Anno movie just shuts a lot of mouths that were yelling during the multi-year gaps/delays, let's hope it'll be the same with this, whenever that will be.

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Originally Posted by chilled

exactly what games released after Pier Solar are more impressive than that one?

Fonzie is the Hideaki Anno of the MD scene, so he's gonna get a lot of flak from a lot of people, it goes with the job. Deal with it. Wait or don't wait anymore, but stop this revisionist thing where this Paprium so called debacle suddenly makes Pier Solar a gimmicky demo. Every new Anno movie just shuts a lot of mouths that were yelling during the multi-year gaps/delays, let's hope it'll be the same with this, whenever that will be.

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Surely you see the difference between fans angry at delays and what we have here: investors who seemed to have been explicitly lied to on multiple occasions.

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Originally Posted by Gryson

Surely you see the difference between fans angry at delays and what we have here: investors who seemed to have been explicitly lied to on multiple occasions.

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pre ordering something at 60 $ is not investing, even if the company behind says so just to entitle people into thinking they are.
the difference between promising things (and not delivering -or massive delaying) and lying is quite thin these days. Tanglewood or Xeno Crisis did good PR and Paprium is the opposite. That is just what there is. Do you really think most companies tell the actual truth of what is happening behind the scenes during development phase?

EDIT: also do not forget things change overtime and sometimes you say something is solved and two months later the same problem surfaces back and then the problem is not solved anymore... of course in retrospect no one should open pre orders if the game is not nearing its completion, and no one should promise a new DSP which in retrospect looks like it wasnt needed at all, etc etc but this is still looking like a Neo Geo game whereas PS looked like a SNES game and that was always the point WM was trying to make: that the MD could do all those games that were marketed as far superior that the MD ones (more colors, mode7, bigger sprites, better sound...)

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Originally Posted by chilled

pre ordering something at 60 $ is not investing, even if the company behind says so just to entitle people into thinking they are.
the difference between promising things (and not delivering -or massive delaying) and lying is quite thin these days. Tanglewood or Xeno Crisis did good PR and Paprium is the opposite. That is just what there is. Do you really think most companies tell the actual truth of what is happening behind the scenes during development phase?

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You're right - not investor in the sense of shareholder, but I mean investor in the sense that they invested their money in seeing the product complete. And many of the people involved here invested much more than $60.

Have you kept up with what happened at the "launch party"? The game was clearly not anywhere near complete, yet promises were made and people wasted travel time / money to see basically a tech demo. There's no excuse.

@Chilled
KS is not pre-ordering tho. It's funding with incentives.

yes, but funding with 60 $ is not investing... and most people fund these things because the incentive is, well, the game in cartridge format, which suspiciously looks a lot like pre ordering... interesting debate, though mostly offtopic.

as for the party, it was just ANOTHER event (like the trailer etc) in order to keep up the hype and maybe preordering. Whether this is actually backfiring or not should be evaluated having the real numbers in consideration, maybe all those events do boost preorders in France? When talking about such a small market (what are they aiming at? 5 to 8.000 copies worldwide?), you have to see way past english forums like this one

I don't know if this has happened to Paprium too, but....

During Pier Solar's very early development, wasn't one of the reasons development took longer than planned was because one of the artists who was working on the game quit and demanded that all of his work be removed? I don't know the specifics but there's a lot of artwork that I've seen in videos on youtube of the playable early beta version of the game that ended up missing or being redone for the final version of the game (on the Mega Drive).

The inventory system is totally different looking, plus there's a bunch of enemies and the first boss is completely different too. Not sure if they were re-done for this reason, but glad they were redone as they just didn't look good at all imo.

Anyway, regarding Paprium and with Watermelon having always freelanced individuals to work on their games, it's possible that people who were working on Paprium quit (perhaps weren't being paid and felt they'd never be paid) and that's why the game has been stuck in development hell. Doesn't make much sense either to show off a tech demo of the game at the "launch" party and it looks even less complete than what was shown in the trailer from what, 2 years ago?

The game could've ended up running into the same problems that the now vaporware "Elysian Shadows" had. Fortunately, I haven't pre-ordered Paprium and I decided at the last minute to not back Elysian Shadows's kickstarter just because I had major concerns over the actual gameplay shown (or more like not shown) of the game.

I've included in the 3 attachments the enemies from the beta version of Pier Solar which were never included in the final version of the game.

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