http://www.hazeron.com/ Obituary written in barely visible font with no solid color background against random game images. I know a lot of people in the Empires community played Hazeron, and I'm sure a lot of you enjoyed it as much as I have. Hazeron was truly and amazing concept of a game. It was amazingly ambitious, a persistent massive multiplayer online game with an ever expanding procedurally generated world. The game featured an economy system that focused on commodities and currency, civilization building, and starship exploration. Everything could be operated manually or automatically. If Hazeron was ever more polished and more popular, there was so much potential for interesting group play. Hazeron was also a piece of shit that constantly lagged and bugged out. It had hilariously basic art and music so bad, I had to mute all game sounds when I played it. The website looked like a 90's geocities site, and there was no clear plan for monetization. Development was a total mystery as well. We know that Haxus was the lead dev, and I believe he was probably the only dev. Hazeron had connections to Software Engineering, a software company noones ever heard of, and with a website as bad as the Hazeron site. Based on the wiki, Haxus allegedly was the CEO of Software Engineering and had sold the company to develop Hazeron fulltime. It was also around that time Haxus decided to move to a farm and live a rural lifestyle while at the same time developing a video game. Upkeeping Hazeron was not cheap. Haxus built his own datacenter to host Hazeron, pictures of which were avaliable on the updates site. The game seemed to be built on a level much lower than any other game developer would sanely consider. The system was silly and kept unhashed passwords in the database, which was broken into. How does one man build the most ambitious 4X game using nothing but the most basic libraries and fund everything himself while living on a farm, doing farm stuff? I remember once I messaged Haxus a suggestion in game and he implemented it in the next patch. On the page it says the source code is saved incase anyone with a real development budget and resources wants to take over. I doubt anyone will. I have a few ideas based on Hazeron's concept, but it'll probably amount to nothing.
Aw FUCK! Why didn't he try with kickstarter? He has a functioning version of the game, not to mention anyone can try it. That makes a BIG difference on kickstarter. He could have used the cash to get a few extra people to help him. Fucking Will Wright would have done so much PR for him when EA murdered spore.
I don't think he ever thought about money, or just assumed it would work out once the game was done. It felt like a vanity project. Also the game looks shit in pictures which wouldn't do much for it in kickstarter.
It looks like shit because the game is still considered an alpha, for we know if he hired an artist with kickstarter money it may not look like ass. Super hot is the best example, they got money for the game, developed it, well now look at that. Not everything is a polygon anymore and has a sound track designed by a guy they hired with kickstarter money. Prototypes means EVERYTHING on kickstarter, because half of the projects are some shit birds in a room pitching something. With no work to show for anything other than pretty pictures. This was the game that made spore what it should have been, the potential is pages long.
I tried it once, but it was so laggy i abandonned soon. It would have been awesome if it wasn't that laggy!
This sounds real familiar but I don't think I ever played it. I am having a hard time thinking about how this game works as a 4x when it is a big multiplayer game at the same time. Which also sounds real neat.
UPDATE: " August 20, 2014 Shores of Hazeron is morphing into a different game. It may be back sooner than you think, sort of. Ship designs and DNA may play a role. Lots of juicy code needs to be distilled; we'll see what remains. Check here once in a while for updates. "
I was hoping this game would pick up a "proper" development team. It had so much potential. Let's hope that message on the homepage does actually lead to something.
For a while i though i clicked the wrong subforum after seeing this page. Also, yey for ukg not being dead.