Tribal Trouble On Steam? *UPDATED*

HUGE UPDATE : Ok so i got great news from oddlabs.                                     That cuts the initial price over 50%(the price i was originally given was $40,000 as a rough estimate). This is huge and makes this even more possible. Now there's the process of raising the money. Instead of kickstarter i will be setting up a go fund me due to it being easier all around. I won't be starting the go fund me until i get every detail ironed out, once they are the go fund me will be posted here.

Original post:
So, as you know oddlabs has pretty much shut down tribal trouble as a whole. They now develop other games and do freelance work, but what if they were hired to do freelance work to get tribal trouble up and running again, and onto steam? Well i emailed oddlabs and asked the question, "what is the dollar amount it would take to get tribal trouble up and running again?" I got a reply back saying This is not written in stone, but if sune figures out a estimate of how much it would cost exactly to get tribal trouble on steam, i think it would be awesome to try to do a community funded kick starter, to get tribal trouble up and running again. Of course not only the community could pay for this, but if we get enough people on board, i believe we can breathe life into tribal trouble once again. I know this is a long shot, but i will keep you updated on the emails with oddlabs.
(ALSO I AM NOT AFFILIATED WITH ODDLABS IN ANY WAY, I AM JUST ONE OF THE MANY WHO PLAYED THIS GAME AND LOVED IT)

A soft-launch on steam is an interesting idea. The main problem I can think of is that it's already open-source on github, so nobody would want to buy it.

Are there cheaper alternatives? Such as building a LAN server or an online server like the old one, but smaller (supporting 20ish people Max)

Helium_1s2 wrote:A soft-launch on steam is an interesting idea. The main problem I can think of is that it's already open-source on github, so nobody would want to buy it.

I don't think that it being in git hub would effect profits at all. For one once its updated to work on steam it will be different from the git hub. Second people will mainly be getting it to play it online with friends, i don't know how online will be implimented, but im sure it won't be to hard to make sure it has to be through a steam copy to play on the steam servers.

D e a t h y wrote:Are there cheaper alternatives? Such as building a LAN server or an online server like the old one, but smaller (supporting 20ish people Max)

I think that would be possible, but it would leave the same problem, the community for the most part would still be extremely small. I don't know if tribal trouble will ever have the player base it did back in its glory days, but i think it would help keep new players coming in. That way it wouldn't have to be an arranged event to have a full match. Can you imagine a day when you can log on to tribal trouble again and just play .

Back when you had to make more than 1 lobby because there was to many people online, good times lol.

m@tro wrote:Back when you had to make more than 1 lobby because there was to many people online, good times lol.

Oh the days, sitting down in my basement waiting for everyone to ready up. People fighting over having all guests on their team. And the games, ah when people made massive cites, towers galore. All the chickens on the map getting hunted, and then when ever one spawns every peon on the map swarms it XD.

large update

IMO it'd be better to just reconstruct the server like it used to be and to just pay oddlabs to build a LAN server + a small online server (20 players at a time Max).

I think it's better to start it this way, and progressively GROW it to a huge game (if possible).

D e a t h y wrote:IMO it'd be better to just reconstruct the server like it used to be and to just pay oddlabs to build a LAN server + a small online server (20 players at a time Max).

I think it's better to start it this way, and progressively GROW it to a huge game (if possible).

But steam gives tribal trouble a platform to grow its player base. Instead of trying to grow a community back, you just tap into a community of gamers that are always excited to try new things. If this was just a project to get a small online server, the game would just have the same problem of no player base again. If we do it this way its more of just for the old players to play on, instead of bringing brand new players into the game.

ert1231 wrote:

D e a t h y wrote:IMO it'd be better to just reconstruct the server like it used to be and to just pay oddlabs to build a LAN server + a small online server (20 players at a time Max).

I think it's better to start it this way, and progressively GROW it to a huge game (if possible).

But steam gives tribal trouble a platform to grow its player base.  

Honestly I'm with ert1231 here, Steam really would be the golden ticket for TT to ever go 'mainstream' and have a place forever, with a potentially massive playerbase.

However, there are some very important 'upgrades' which could (presumably) be easily implemented to take advantage of today's hardware compared to a decade ago. The obvious ones are more teams, higher population+building caps, bigger maps, better rated games system, better lobby/chat/graphics/general UI, make northern maps actually playable, make Hard AIs actually hard to beat, and nerfing towers of course .

Assuming they were completely rebuilding the game from the ground up to perform by today's standards (justifying the hefty price tag), they could probably even implement some of the good features of TT2 such as the theater, some of the other game types, forced peace, and the 'faster' game speed without altering the premise of Tribal Trouble 1 too much.

Probably the biggest issue though is the single player campaign. They had some really cool ideas with the TT2 campaign that they could easily run with, but in its current state there is absolutely no way they could re-release that game and expect people to get caught up in the TT magic and dive into multiplayer... or even drop the money to get the game to begin with.

Which brings us to the most important part: price tag. Tribal Trouble was asking $30 for a copy of the game until the day oddlabs.com went blackout the first time. Although TT aged super well and has a pretty universal appeal, the barrier of $30 to play as a member of a dying game is pretty ludicrous and proved to be the bane of its long-term existence (...and something about a sequel ). Steam loves discounting the crap out of things as it is, but I think a very modest pricetag is necessary to not shy people away from the game like last time... say $10-15 even. This would attract a sufficient causal userbase that would perpetually keep this game alive, maybe even snowball it one day. I would absolutely condemn any sort of pay-to-win style à la TT2 (buying extra starting peons? really???), as well as any subscription based pay system... which may not even be possible with Steam regardless. Honestly even if the game were free that would be awesome, because then anyone (and everyone!!!) would play! Is this sort of thing negotiable if we're trying to crowdfund it?

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let's talk about this idea of crowdfunding the money. $15,000 is no small sum, and this game certainly does not have the following to raise that off of microdonations from us alone, nor do we have any angel donors (at this point...?) jumping in to help us either. While crowdfunding has done wonderful things for projects in the past, if this is actually the method we want to take for this we have to take it very seriously and get complete strangers to donate money to revive a game they've nevery played. This involves promotional stuff which gets legal and blah blah blah, but as you said you're still "ironing out the kinks" so I'm assuming you're discussing all of this with Sune.

So yeah, despite this being a long road ahead I'm all for it, Oddlabs will have a golden age once again!

Actually yeah, now that I've thought about it, I agree with you guys.

But as Epic said, 15k isn't a small sum :/ we need to work out a plan.

Man its been a while since i have checked back here... Anyway, has anyone got any updates on how all of this is going? I feel steam would be a perfect idea for TT if possible