Would LOVE to see the wiring in a dungeon setup with traps and such, already love / hate the Labs with the electric walls and platforms ^_^ can't wait to see this!
Maybe missions are story-related. Also, the roadmap is no longer an accurate representation of progress.
When was the last time the roadmap was updated though? I think it kind of fell off once the unstable builds came out.
I'm glad that someone else noticed the massive lag spike on that one screen. I was worried it was my system for a little while, until I realised it only happened in the vicinity of those blocks. Otherwise, it was a lot of fun! But fix the lag around those platforms <grin>
So you know that glitch/apex door that instead of sliding up and down the wall slides backwards into the background (see glitch ship pre-nightlies)... I'm imagining that one going in and out, possibly even turning on its side, to be both a long running jump platform on its side and a super skinny platform in its regular formation. and them just going in and out lol disappearing from the wall.
So its safe to say that the roadmap was simply a mock up? Neat. I would figure even, as someone who has not made a game, that the 50% would be more than the bare bones. As a story is a multitude of quests that means either that the roadmap was false to appease people who rage or it was true and they are needlessly redoing things. Just throwing this out there because it is needlessly inconsistent. One can view the Roadmap as the heart of the project. To write it off as unneeded/inaccurate means they have been neglecting something that can be simply updated and it leaves me with a feeling that something is a bit off. There is a word for what I am thinking of but it deals with design plans or something maybe, project goals?.
The roadmap was an accurate representation for a while, but it took too long to update to make it worthwhile. They moved away from it in favor of the daily updates.
I... I thought it stopped updating when beta came out O_O At the very least though, Bartwe's on that map so it's at least ~4 months old. Before the whole move to the office thing.
They stopped updating (unofficially) before the Beta arrived, and long before daily updates. The roadmap as it currently exists (http://playstarbound.com/roadmap/) has percentages that are completely inaccurate to the game's overall progress now. Especially with the number of times tier 1 and 2 have been reworked.
They already talked awhile ago about having planets with like shields that make blocks unplaceable and unbreakable
Yet, that 50% means that there would be more than 'bare bones' even if they updated some of the engine. Why would they not have someone work on the roadmap? Kind of like they have people looking for games to publish? Just saying the Roadmap was the heart of the reason many bought the game. Because it represented how much of the game was finished. Again to simply toss it away like it was a used paper because it took 'too long to update' means it was simply a ruse to bait people into buying the game. If they have enough time(in working hours) to have people play PR when they are not the designated PR then they have enough time to update their roadmap. Its the closest thing that some of the community know about starbounds design direction or goals. PS: Thanks!
I imagine it's a matter of priority. There are likely much better things to do instead of update a single display of progress that they have since made the decision to not continue updating. They're an independent studio with limited staff and resources, after all. And to say the roadmap was "a ruse to bait people into buying the game" is absurd. They had genuine intentions to use it as an indication of process. Just because they later changed their minds doesn't make it a conspiracy.
Jonesy my boy, updating the roadmap should, logically, have taken less time than typing up a daily progress report. Instead of typing up a paragraph or five of summary, the devs would only take the few seconds it should take to change a number, which would likely already have been scripted to attach itself to bar progress, and write 5 sentences at most about where a given feature is at the time.
Sounds logical on paper. But if that were the case, wouldn't they have kept using the roadmap? I imagine trying to gauge how much of a percentage any one element of the game is complete would also be rather difficult.
Why would they even make it if they would not use it past a certain point? Why not go all the way. They have people playing PR when we already have a PR person. Why cant they stop doing so to update small. They had a system to do so before release. It was one day per month. Even someone with a busy schedule can update simple numbers. On the second matter Its not an actual conspiracy if companies actively use that tactic to get people to buy games. I mean go look at any trailer for any game. Its a bait and switch many utilize as a marketing tactic. The system they had showed much more progress than what is currently shown in devpost therefor it was a marketing ploy. Actually it would be quite easy. As an example the 'bare bones' can be taken as 15~26%. Think of it as a creature, each part comes in quarters. 1st quarter is bones, 2nd is muscle, 3rd is guts(or otherwise insides) and the last being the skin and other outer parts.
That's where there is indeed room for interpretation. When in doubt, underestimate. For example, today's issue of quests. The roadmap had 50% listed, and as the flavor/explanation text read "Quest generation is one of our next big goals with development. The quest and shop UI has been designed and is ready to be placed in the game." If the ONLY portion of Quest generation they had done at the time that was written was the quest and shop UI, then 50% is a gross overestimation. If all they had at that point was the UI, then I would say 10-15% should have been an accurate guess. As for "...wouldn't they have kept using the roadmap?" It may not have been thought through enough to have everything as interconnected as I said. It's quite possible that Chucklefish created the roadmap in such a way that they needed to open a photo editing software and go about making things extremely difficult for themselves when updating the roadmap. Another option would have been to, instead of listing percentages, list which stage of development each portion of the game was in. "Conceptualizing" "Prototyping" "Implementing" and "Completed" would have likely sufficed.
That's the problem right there.Trying to put a definitive meaning onto a percentage is a bit presumptive, even for the developers themselves. When they talked about why they weren't updating much anymore, they cited other games that had done similar things, only to get stuck at 99% and find out they actually had a lot more to do, or decide to redo something and tick people off who "thought they were making progress" etc. It was more of a marketing gimmick. And it worked pretty well too, it seems. Still, I'd say it was more of a diversion and hype-maintainer than an actual reason to want the game. >_>
Maybe you should actually ask them about it. At the end of the day, I'm just a mook that minds the forums. I could tell you what I know until the cows come home, but I don't know most of what happens inside the company.
I have to say BIG no to this. These are far too much like your average soulless MMO quest. Also, as it stands, finding certain types of weapons (especially guns) can be very difficult, so players would not only have to grind away at the # of enemies bit, but also potentially finding the correct element/weapon type.
