Temple of Dogolrak
November 25, 2011 53 Comments
Sex.
Now that I have your attention, Temple of Dogolrak is a point-and-click game, only without the pointing and clicking. That’s pretty much what I expected when I saw the screen caps the guys behind this game chose to put on its marketplace page. Actually, I expected a lot more than that, given that the pictures are a bit risqué. And by “a bit risqué” what I really meant is “a spaceship shaped like sperm flying into a giant astro-snatch.”
Subtle.
It’s always amused me (and creeped me out) that guys are into this sort of thing. Like really into it. Like “I know the FBI is likely keeping tabs on me and I don’t care!” into it. I just can’t get myself into the mindset where being aroused by a cartoon character is even possible. As it turns out, there’s a name for this sort of thing. It’s called “schediaphilia.” Imagine my disappointment when I found out that is what it’s called. You can’t even make a joke out of it. But it’s a real thing and guys really do get off on animated characters. And if they’re anime characters, statistically speaking they tend to be under age. If that applies to any of you schediaphiliacs watching this, then yes, that does in fact make you a pedophile.
But let’s say you’re not using some teenage cartoon (or video game) character to give your hand motivation. Let’s say you’re thinking of Wilma Flintstone. It’s still a cartoon character! In theory, there is a slight, slight, slight chance that you, the ugly dude reading this, might one day fuck a Playboy centerfold. Hey, it could happen. Zombie Holocaust! Last man left alive in the entire world. An amazing adventure of survival across the country. By total chance, you happen upon Miss November 2011. You save her life once or twice, three times tops and BAM, you’ll never look at your hand the same way again. That could happen! Sure, it’s a long shot. 1 in 4 odds at least. But it could happen!
But you will never ever get to fuck Wilma Flintstone. Why? BECAUSE CARTOONS ARE NOT REAL! You could become the richest and most powerful mother fucker on this planet who can have any girl he wants, because believe me, every girl has a price (I’ve personally calculated my price to be $1,057,295,285.98, not including the tax I’m sure California will manage to charge you) but you still never will get to fuck a cartoon character. And why the hell would you want to? They’re kind of weird-looking! Especially anime characters. They have great big eyes, tiny slits for a nose, disproportionate jaws, and pale skin. It would be like fucking Michael Jackson’s corpse.
Really guys? It looks like someone spliced the DNA of a smurf with a feather duster then gave it the mumps.
Okay, so I’m supposed to be doing a game review. But it’s kind of hard to because there is no game here. This is just one of those “choose your own adventure” books from when you were a kid, only with worse writing and a handful of raunchy anime static screens. And by a handful I mean there are four. Yep, the four high-resolution screen shots on its marketplace page that look like softcore anime pornography are in fact the only ones in the entire game. Or at least the only ones I saw in the fifteen minutes it took me to finish it and see the “you win” screen. Everything else is really bad graphics that would be embarrassing if they were on an early 80s computer. Misleading? Oh yea.
So what does the 240 Microsoft Points get you here? A few racy static screens of digital girls and a piss-poor, incomprehensible storyline that takes all of fifteen minutes to complete. I guess I should make it clear that I strongly advise that you do not purchase Temple of Dogolrak, but chances are I already lost most of you one way or another when I posted the picture of the giant astro-snatch.
Temple of Dogolrak was developed by Team Shuriken (page outdated, probably a good thing)
240 Microsoft Points think Johnny Bravo is kind of cute in the making of this review.
UPDATE: It took me 148 days but I finally got called a Nazi by someone for something I wrote! You know what that means!
Indie Gamer Chick 
Hahaha, is it really called Ogle Rack? Amazing and horrible, all at once.
A 1 in 4 chance of scoring with Miss November? I like those odds. I must begin working on creating a zombie virus at once!
Don’t you love it when femnazi bitches review things they have no interest in to begin with?
Video game reviewers are already worthless to begin with. You’re unbelievably worthless.
You should probably get a job at G4 or IGN.
Femnazi. Nice. I finally unlocked the achievement for that!
Really liked your writting style, reminds me of good old Maddox !
If you’re gonna hate, hate in style !
Nice !
Yeah, the fat ugly girls that read romance fiction probably aren’t going to end up with those protagonists either. Also, none of these videogames are real (a fact that I am condescendingly going to assume you are unaware of) so you’d better stop playing them! Now I just need to find a bad name to assume that you’re going to call me so that I can divert from any legitimate criticism about the childishly snide, self-indulgent way that I talk about… well, everything really.
Unlike.
I was making fun of a stereotype. I guess it just hit a tad bit too close to home, huh? Chris Hanson would like you to have a seat right over here.
I was going to reply and rebut your points…but then I realized you didn’t say anything coherent.
I can’t even make fun of it! Your own words make you look more ridiculous than anything I could add.
Fail.
The thing that’s boggling my mind most here is 240 MSP. I mean, 240? Really? Why?!
The game is image intensive enough that we can’t sell for any less even if we wanted.
Microsoft has a policy of 50 mb maximum for 80 mspoints, or 150 mb for 240 or 400 points.
The question for me is why are so many developpers selling their game short at 80 mspoints when we have to work so hard to get games out. Each game we release we have to face the possibility the game will be an absolute flop and we get paid next to nothing, it’s happened to us before.
It is incredibly hard to make enough money to be equivalent of a 10$ / hour job at 80 points. Many will argue that 80 points ends up paying more due to more sales, but i disagree (not getting in this debate, theres many pages on this subject on the xna forums).
240 points works a lot better for us. You could call us greedy all you want but we all got skills that could get us much more money getting paid hourly for big companies if we wanted to take that route. It would also be a lot less stressful not having to wonder weather our next project will completely flop or if it will do well enough.
We want to follow our dreams and build games on our own, but we also want to be able to sustain ourselves while we work toward becoming better indie devs.
If you think 240 points is too much, then too bad.
It’s what we can afford to do at this moment.
If you’re making XBLIGs for the money, then you’re in it for completely the wrong reasons. That, combined with your ‘tough shit’ response here, tells me a lot about your attitude. Good luck.
Even though 3$ is 3 times as much, it’s still chump change to most people and crying outloud about our prices being too high is not only greedy, it’s also hippocrite in trying to make us wear the greedy hat.
we make game because that’s what we want to do and we love it. Making games is what i want to do at this point in my life, and foreseeably for many years to come. I grew up playing games and will always strive to keep as big of a place as possible for them in my life.
I never meant for my attitude to be offensive to you, even if it can seem so.
I am only trying to give you the most accurate answer possible to the question you asked.
Peace.
It may be chump change to you, but it isn’t to me. We’re in a recession, you know.
In any case, I wasn’t crying about your prices being too high, I was wondering what the game contains that merits that price tag relative to some 80 MSP games that have far more content.
Regardless, it’s not my intention to fight indie developers. The indie community, particularly on Xbox, needs all the support it can get.
P.S. you answered my question about the price point, so thanks for that.
no problems..
We try not to base our pricing in comparison to other devs, as we believe many of them are undervaluing their work. We think the total amount we make in comparison to the amount of time we put into the game is fair overall.
As for the recession making the price hard for you, i’m sorry to hear that and wish i could accomodate the less fortunates while at the same time meeting our own expectations.
If you get to read and use this first, here’s a token to download the game for free :
BKTRT-39JBH-JG2R9-J6RW4-9F326
Completely unrelated to this topic (I get that you had to charge 240MSP) but you really should put a seizure warning on your game. When I pushed the eyeball in on the statue thingie, I wasn’t expecting a very intense strobe effect and as a result I did suffer a mild seizure. This was the first time since I started Indie Gamer Chick that I had one as the result of a game I played.
ouch, this is serious business.
Definitely will do next time. There was a much bigger strobe effect sooner in the game that we removed from the game to avoid that problem, but i wasn’t expecting that one to cause troubles. Lessons learned and i’ll put a seizure warning even for light strobe effects next time we use them.
Actually i’ll patch in it in 3-4 days (there’s a 7 day after release where we are not allowed to patch). Patch should be up in about 2 weeks to account for peer review time.
I appreciate that. I never get angry for with devs for strobe effects. I take on a certain amount of risk by playing games. I do think if a developer knowingly puts strobe effects in, a warning is common courtesy, BUT I’m at risk by playing any games. And, by my own admission, I’m in part to blame because I had the lights out in my room at the time I was playing it, and I’m not supposed to play video games with the lights out.
I don’t blame you. Not mad at all. And yes, I do think your game absolutely fucking sucked 🙂
I still feel this is a courtesy that should be given to epileptics, and will do.
I don’t have a problem with you not liking the game, those who don’t like it just won’t buy it and i’m fine with that.
More then fine actually, since your review/article entertained me. You should write a script for us one day, would be awesome 🙂
Wow, that’s very kind of you, especially considering the above discussion about keeping yourselves in business.
I suddenly understand more clearly why Indie Gamer Chick doesn’t accept free codes. I find myself wondering what I can do to return the favour, and that wouldn’t be a good position for a reviewer.
It’s to much for the level of inane bullcrap your team produces. Which amounts to generic manga art of monster/magic girls with a random button press to load another picture. Free is still a rip off as far as Team Shuriken games are concerned, and I can’t put enough quotation marks around the word ‘game’ so I won’t even try.
You should be a shamed of the level of shit you dare to charge any amount of money for. You should be paying people to play this crap, and then apologize afterward. Your games are like a parody of themselves.
I don’t mean to be rude, but what you have here isn’t a professional game product. If you are trying to do this as your profession, to pay the bills, you’ve frankly got a long way to go.
This game is just a series of simple modal dialogues. There’s no controls to speak of, and no real gameplay. You do have a few well drawn static arts, but beyond that…this can’t have taken more than 2 days to code. I do appreciate that $1 is a bad price point for making a profit (thanks, Apple!), but this game doesn’t seem to be worth $3.
The drawing part was the real time consumer in this game. As the programmer (and aspiring artist), my attention is focused on a game we will release around february/march of next year.
Chris, I don’t think this game is any good, but in pricing policy that is irrelevent. This game was 70MB. Anything over 50MB has to be 240MSP.
Having said that, whether or not some gamers are underpriced, good games priced at 240MSP or higher tend to not sell at all.
Right — MS does everything they can to handcuff the indie devs. It’s kind of a silly rule.
That being said, it is the dev’s choice to make the game have 70MB of content in it, and therefore ultimately their choice to price it at $3. If the artwork was supported by a similar quantity of gameplay, it might be a different story.
Team Shuriken! An unfortunate case of XBLIG’s standard content and price fixing. The amateur developer went from crazy fighting game, to softcore porn in a matter of months. This is what happens when talent enters a market where simply put, game development skills just aren’t appreciated. Regardless of the reason for their offerings, I give them props for knowing the market. Despite obvious sales results, MOST developers still don’t know who buys their games – sexually depraved American males 14-30 years old.
Team Shuriken, I got a couple H-Games I’d like you to develop. I need to pay the bills too. 😀
Thanks for the offer, but we already have so many projects waiting to be realized. We’ll be switching up our offerings a lot in the next year, trying this and that. If you can work (program or draw really well) then there might be a possibility for a coop effort. Just by quickly reading the definition of h-games on wikipedia though, i don’t think that’s something we can do.
I assume by “so many projects” you mean short slide shows of bland, uninspired, softcore anime porn, interrupted by button presses.
Hey there. Welcome to my site. I do ask that readers try to keep the comments civil. Browbeating developers is MY job.
There is no technical reason for this game to be 70 Mb, it just doesn’t have enough content. I suspect what you did is use compressed bitmaps for all the images, when JPEG would have worked just as well and used 10% of the file space with no noticable quality impact. Even PNG probably would’ve been a third of the file space. I generally agree that devs should be prepared to price games at 240 MSP and either sink or swim at that price point, but this really does not stand up well compared to the content in say a budget dating sim game.
Sorry, ‘compressed bitmaps’ should be ‘uncompressed bitmaps’ i.e. XNA’s default content importer.
All images were compressed. Anyway I’ve given enough reasoning as to why we would of priced the game at 240 regardless.
I am happy that you take the time to share your opinion on our pricing, Thank you.
Who cares about the pricing, you should have been embarrassed enough to never release this garbage at any price.
Actually, the default is compressed to the format used internally on the gpu, and then packaged down into an XNB file. It doesn’t matter if his source was png, jpg, bmp, or whatever. Some people have used Jpeg2000 to get better size results, by decompressing and converting at runtime, but that’s alot of work.
Still, if Kairi’s review is on the money and there’s only four high res textures, then something else is taking up the space. Is there much audio here? Audio has been the big space eater in my games.
did you compress your audio ? it is ridiculously big without it.
Yes, all of the music, at least. The sound effects are uncompressed.
Still, I have a tendency to use lots of music.
The XNA default is Color, which is an uncompressed RGBA texture. You have to manually enable DXT, which is an inefficient lossy compressor that looks horrible on detailed art and only gets 4:1 compression anyway. PNG usually beats DXT while remaining lossless and even classic JPEG is vastly better on both quality and compression. However you have to manually load JPEGs and PNGs in code, the content pipeline doesn’t support them as intermediate formats (still better than XNA 3.1, which didn’t even include the codecs). All XNA data including compressed and uncompressed images of all formats goes through a second general-purpose lossless compression stage when bundled for publication. Obviously uncompressed images benefit from this second stage more, but even JPEGs and PNGs are usually crunched a little more by it. The efficiency of general purpose compression on Color or even chained with DXT is far lower than the dedicated image codecs in PNG and JPEG.
I was under the impression that Color was compressed, just not a lossy compression like DXT.
In fact, looking at the background images for Bluebones’ Curse (which are pretty huge, and I layer them to get parallax effects), the Xbox Release build versions of the XNBs are actually smaller than the source PNGs. In total, I have 19 images that are bigger than 1280×720, and the game was still easily under the 50 MB mark.
I can see why a big game might need extra optimization work, but Temple of Dogs doesn’t look like it should. (But the dev seems to think that 240 points is fine even if he’d come in under 50 MB.)
This was a really fun review to read. It was quite unfair, though, as it is focused more about a particular group of people rather than the game itself.
* Yes, the game is somewhat “risque”.
* Still, it is nothing, and I mean nothing whatsoever as scary as other games available in the market, and I’m talking about those flash games that can be downloaded for free. Now, those are the ones that we need to be warned off.
* I’m quite sure that the authorities are more focused on tracking and shutting down those flash games, and leave “Temple of Dogolrak” alone.
* For people that are already beyond sexy images, I’m sure that they can see that there is an actual story, and the end is original.
* Still, I do have to admit that the game is overpriced. Just a little bit of work, and the size could be shrunk to something below 10Mbytes. After all, most of the pictures have exactly the same background, so using PNGs with alpha channels would have done wonders.
For those that are not familiar with image technology, alpha channels are used for transparency. I didn’t say that because of the game context – you know what I mean.
I think the +50meg==240mspts is an excuse devs use to set the higher price – “Look, guys, our hands are TIED here! We tried really hard, but just couldn’t get it below 51 megs.” 🙂
Well then you just need to stop thinking and start reading.
Don’t make lowest-common-denominator games and I’ll give the benefit of the doubt next time 😉
You say it’s impossible to make it with Wilma? Challenge accepted.
Note from Kairi: I had to remove your link so as to keep my site from being marked as “mature” by WordPress. Having said that, you’re a sick man. 😛
This is the thing, because I did play the trial for Avalis Dungeon actually(bored Saturday Night a little over a year back), and it’s pretty much the same formula I’m seeing. I mean, I’m looking at both Avalis Dungeons in the opening page and the girl in the first one is kneeling in EXACTLY the same form and position as the girl in the second shot, only differences are palette and aesthetic.
I mean there is a way to do this but just that kind of turned me off a bit. I like artwork of volumptious females admittedly because it allows me to stretch and expand thoughts of the female proportion a little bit. Seeing females in those outfits, lots of guys really just imagine similar proportioned real females(not the face) in those outfits. It’s pretty much a template for an overall scheme. Just a little more variety though. Heck, maybe a card-game or something. I’m just saying without some sort of animation or user-initiated things there’s just nothing for anyone with Internet to gain. It’s pretty much paying $3 to view DeviantArt.
We have the beach bubbles series that has a spin with some very basic gameplay. We didn’t get into animated girls yet though, it’s a lot of work and the artists we currently work with are more adept at still images.
We’ve got a game coming next year with some fairly intense and more fleshed out action gameplay, also with some nice women images. I don’t think the gameplay idea of that game has been done before, but there may be some obscure game(s) i’ve never heard of who did it before.
In between those, we’ll still release an avalis or temple of dogolrak like release here and there…
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/01/04/xbox-live-indie-games-get-increased-file-size-reduced-prices/
Looks like your excuse for pricing is gone now, guys. You can stop looking for ways to intentionally inflate the file size now.
Also, wow, your “game” is pretty terrible. I thought Kairi Vice was being unfairly harsh because of her disdain for the target demographic, but damn, even speaking as someone who pre-ordered both DOAX games (and yet somehow manages to not be creeper, thanks Kairi), that demo just lost you a sale. The worst part is that was most likely the best part of the game, the part you knew people would see and have to decide on, and the rest of the game is likely somehow less polished. I can’t even wrap my head around how bad that might be.
You may have grown up with a love of games and making games is what you want to do with your life, but can you honestly say these are the kind of games you were just dying to play as a kid? With a straight face? I’d be ashamed to put my name on it let alone try to defend it on the internet.
I don’t understand why it has to be so hard. There must be some open source games out there you can re-purpose, just grab something like a free pre-made chess engine from a programming tutorial, attach your art and have it display whenever you win a match, and blam, instant “strip chess” softporn game that might actually be worth 240 points.You’re suddenly the darling of the XBLIG red light district.
Be honest. It’s pretty clear you’re jaded now after being ignored on XBLIG and are just trying to trick perverts out of their money to make up for lost time. You’re asking for 240 instead of 80 because you doubt you’ll be able to trick those same pervs an extra two times sight unseen.
If you’re truly hoping to just do this and nothing but this for the foreseeable future, I hope you REALLY like it, because no developer worth their salt will look at these games on a resume and give you the time of day.
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Personally, I agree with illest about men who are aroused by pictures: a little imagination is all it takes to turn April O’ Niel into jessica alba, or Tank Girl into Lori Petty. It takes a real lack of creative juices to be unable to bring a 2d character to life. Hell, to be unable to judge the look of a drawing on how appealing it is would really warp a person. The fact is that many people are not visually wired for turn-ons. I believe there is a gender divide on the biology of this: men being more visually stimulated in general. Looking at 2d is no different than looking at penthouse. it also does not make you a pedophile, unless you are looking at 2d children and getting hard. that is without getting into the fact that actual pedophiles are pathological and driven by urges beyond the norm. they are actually exclusively attracted to non-pubescent children. of course, the guy who has the box set of ‘magical girl something or other’ on his shelf should be reported asap, but condemning anime fans who are beaing it to Mokoto from gits or any of the other ‘buxom’ heroins is just a pervert, and should only be pitied.
now that my rant is over, this game, and all like it are trash. I would like to thank all above (including madame reviewer) for calling out Team Schlok (or whatever) on the abortion they spewed onto xbla
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