An open letter to the Starbound community.

Quoting you because the information in that link is very nice. Yes, it's one dev's perspective but it's still a peek into a scene not many give a single thought about, much less two. I encourage more people to read it because, while not exactly eye opening to me, there's information for the impatient gimme-gimme's and Veruca Salts to digest. If they're even patient enough to sit through it without requiring a TL;DR. So here's the meat of it:

Emphasis at the end there mine.

So let's quit pickin at that scab now, shall we?

 

Out of curiosity, how many game titles (counting expansions or other major updates) have you released? I'm curious to know if you're speaking from experience here or merely speculating.

 

This is akin to claiming critics aren't allowed to critique art/games/movies/whatever because they don't make them.

EDIT: I mean really, it doesn't take a great deal of experience to compare the development cycle of one game with that of many others using the all powerful internet to compare Chucklefish's release date consistency with that of others.

EDIT 2: To go even further, he could work in an office with project deadlines and still have the experience to make this kind of criticism. I'd understand asking if he was speaking from "experience" if he started criticizing the base code of the game but he isn't doing that in the slightest. To draw attention to his game development inexperience really serves no purpose here and doesn't make any real point.

As I've already stated any experience with promising to deliver a product could apply here. Video games are not unique in the problems their development may face.

 

This is nothing like claiming critics can't critique art. He is claiming that there is no reason why the devs can't give better estimates on their deadlines, not that they've made a game he dislikes. It would be like a critic saying a piece of art was being painted too slowly, and that there is no reason the artist could not speed up.

In response to your edits, this is exactly why I asked if he had experience; because it's easy to make a false claim like you did here if you haven't got it. It's easy to look at other development cycles online and draw your own conclusions, but if you've never worked on a game before, you're going to have a skewed view of how it works. Like anything else in life, it's entirely different reading about something and actually doing it. There's no substitute for actual experience. As for your comment about him working in an office with deadlines, this isn't going to hold true in most types of offices. Setting a deadline on something tangible (like on what date you're going to finish production on 2000 pens and get them shipped to Walmart) is very different from setting a deadline at which point you think a new game that you're creating from scratch will be finished. Perhaps they don't sound too different to you, but again, that's because you haven't worked in game design...

 

That's why they're called estimate. Just sayin'

Personally I would like to see an estimate even if it's accuracy is not that good. It could be 5 months off and I wouldn't mind. I just need to know when to stop fishing for community contests and pre order it myself. "My" estimate is probably around oct/nov. I hope it's beta day is different from X & Y releases.

My schedule now is 1st Oct play Terraria for nearly two weeks then 12th Oct get Pokemon X and battle until my thumbs fall off. Then around 25th Oct to 15 Nov Starbound comes out. Note that if it comes out later I have two games to play and if it comes out tommorow than yay I guess.

Keep in mind that this will never happen:

 

Its not at all uncommon for a game to end up delayed for a year, or two, or even more. Titan, Blizzards big upcomming project had such restructurings that its going to end up delayed about two years. Gw2, a big triple A MMO was actually suppose to come out years ago.
And the list continues.

Delaying a game by a year, or two years, from initial estimates is not a sign of incompetence. The only mistake the devs made was anounce their schedule, in the vain of being transparent. They shouldnt have done that and kept a tight lip on that. Their mistake. But, they know it, we know it, everyone knows it. At this point we're just beating a dead horse everytime for bringing it up, the mistake has been made and no amount of threads or posts about it will undo it. Its a lesson for the devs, but also for the players.

So i gotta ask, again, whats the point of bringing it up? Its not about constructive criticism anymore, thats for sure. Are you bitter and now trying to spread that feeling because you're own expectations were dashed?

 

*ehem* Half Life 3, Duke Nukem *ehem*

 

like everything else in life you need a plane and you need to stick to it. planes can change over time but if you dont have one to start of with and a set goal you will never finish a project.

i think starbound has both of these i just dont think chuckalfishe is being honest about what there plane and goal is.

ofc this is just my opinion.

 

One of the biggest problems I've encountered in game design, and the one that makes it hardest to estimate dates for me is the fun test. Sometimes you come up with this amazing idea that sounds like it will be a blast to see and to play. You spend a bunch of time writing up how it will work, then more time implementing it and balancing/polishing it. Finally everything comes together and you sit down to play it and it just isn't fun. You tweak it a bit more to see if you just didn't have something set up right, but that's not really it... the whole thing just doesn't play out the way it sounds like it should, or the controls end up being too unintuitive, or... sometimes it's impossible to identify exactly why it's not fun.

At this point you can try to rework it, or you can scrap it and begin working on something else. Often times, no amount of tweaking is going to save it, and you're forced to start on something new. Even if you manage to tweak it into a fun state, you've just spent far more time on it than originally intended. As such, this isn't something that can be specifically planned for. You can certainly overestimate your time, knowing that some projects won't pan out, but it's always going to be an estimate (usually a bad one).

Critics are going to say, "Well that just means you're a bad designer. Good designers wouldn't have to scrap systems." That sounds reasonable from an outside perspective, but you have to remember that game creation is more akin to art than science. And I have yet to meet an artist that does not hate some of his or her own work. In fact, the really good ones tend to be even more critical of their work, and will frequently scrap the stuff they don't think holds up to their own high standards. I'm not trying to sound pretentious here; just using this to illustrate why hard deadlines are very difficult to work with in a creative industry.

"At what point will your project be polished enough that players find it fun?" You can't give them a date because you aren't going to know this until you've tested it yourself.

 

I feel like you don't really know if your creation is "fun" until you see friends/family/playtesters having a blast playing your game because your always stressing about the fun factor.

 

That's a good point, although I'd argue that if you have fun playing your own game, there must be at least a few other people out there who will also enjoy it =) The main point was that it is difficult to really know how fun something is until it's in a testable state.

 

True. Both of our points are valid.

 

Reading through the last few pages, I think this thread has lost some direction. It looks like people are responding to one another, but aren't really clear about what they are talking about, or what the goals of the discussion are. To avoid off-topic discussion, refer to the OP and ask yourself if you're in the right thread...

(not trying to be rude, just making an observation)

 

No, I'm not speaking from experience; I can easily tell that this isn't the norm because businesses don't regularly do this. You don't have to be a doctor to see a botched surgery. Just because you don't specialize in doing something doesn't mean your argument should be disregarded.

AAA MMO's require a huge amount of work. There really is an excuse there. They have to make 3D models, huge maps, tons of enemies, quests, flavor text, items, sprites, animations, not to mention all the server stuff. They have more legitimate excuses than, "Coding Starbound is really weird" and "This is new technology". Starbound is a 2D platformer. I'm not saying it doesn't require work, but there are so many more variables in the games you brought up.

 

I think the point is that it is difficult to appreciate the work load unless you're on the team. Meaning, if you aren't on the team, it might be difficult for us to appreciate your position on how the team does business.

 

Even so, you've gotta admit that Chucklefish's way of managing the community isn't great. A lot of threads get shut down for legitimate criticism. Any calls for more transparency gets snarky responses from devs (I'm not talking about making pay public, that is ridiculous). A lot of threads get locked despite the conversations being civil. And when they don't get locked, someone takes advantage of the system and flames so s/he can get the thread locked, but s/he doesn't get banned.

 

Yea, i dunno, man. I think he was just trying to say people should chill and work to make quality posts.

I don't really see that as pretentious, considering he's clearly admitting that he's as much at fault as the people he's speaking at.

No, I don't need to admit that. I disagree outright with that statement. I've seen examples of the dev's and the mods intervening in threads that were out of control. I saw the mods and dev's lock a lot of threads that were duplicates of other threads that were unnecessarily clogging up the forum. I also saw them lock threads that were not civil and would have become pointless flamewars if the hadn't intervened. IMO, they've done a great job with this community despite the prevalence of unwarranted complaining.

Again, your opinions on the ways in which the mods of this community handle the forum, and how the developers do business, are simply your opinions.

The goal of this forum is to discuss the game - not how you'd prefer to run the company. As such, I'm not willing to continue this conversation.

 

And I've seen examples of mods and devs locking threads because they assumed they would devolve into a flame war. The conversations at the time were completely civil and they were all pre-emptive locks.

I've seen mods and dev's lock a lot of threads that were not duplicates of other threads but shared a similar title. The content was unique to those threads but they were locked based on an assumption.

This is not a good thing. Locking a thread before it becomes a flamewar because you assume its going to become a flamewar is not good practice. You should allow a conversation to continue so long as it remains civil, when it does become a flamewar you lock it. Pre-emptive locking is not good practice unless the thread is clearly provocative (ie. Calling another community member an idiot or something along those lines)

Hardly unwarranted.

One that I share with him. I think Chucklefish has a great array of experienced game developers, I do not think it has a great array of experienced game publishers.

If you feel this way then you shouldn't acknowledge his posts at all. That would be the best way to prevent this kind of conversation from happening. Personally I don't think its a bad thing that these conversations happen.

 

Agree to disagree

 

There are certain people on this forum who have made it clear from the pattern of their posts that nothing the devs do will ever please them, and who will interpret anything the devs say or do in as negative a way as possible. It's becoming quite obvious that there is nothing that anyone can say which will change their attitude, and so any such conversation is pointless.

Not sure If I can resist my natural urge to try to correct the blatant misinformation that some of them try to propagate, but I'm coming to the conclusion that you're right, ignoring them is the best policy.