It's interesting to compare the development time between Starbound and Terraria

We're on London time. And yes, we do play lots of Divinity: Original Sin in the office-- after working hours. Some people stick around to keep working, others stick around to play video games until way-too-late-at-night.
We have fun during office hours, but not thaaaat much fun.

We focus on Starbound for at least 8 hours a day, every weekday and often people come in of their own accord on the weekends. What more do you expect from us?

That's not a rhetorical question. I'm honestly asking.

 

Meaningful content updates, a reliable release date and the possibility of refunds would be nice.

 

The meaningful update will happen. Sorry it's not as fast as you and others would like it to be -- but it doesn't mean it WON'T happen.

You should already know why a reliable release date can't be given for a project of this scope. It only takes one line of code among thousands to utterly damage a game when it conflicts with itself or other code. And if finding out which line of code and fixing it set the date back -- then you need only look at the history of what happens when another deadline is missed.

You can get refunds through Steam -- the process is just a pain. The door has been shut via other avenues though.

 

Cross-posting this explanation from elsewhere:
We tried to stick to daily updates and even weekly updates, but the pressure to create a substantial amount of content in each of those updates felt like it was interfering with our main goal: finishing the game. It forced us to work in sort of separate teams-- content and progression. In the end, we realized we were far better off focusing on progression and putting out big updates when we'd really gotten a significant amount of stuff done. Then we moved into the office, which slowed us down for a bit as moving anywhere (much less to another country) is a stressful and time-consuming process, but productivity has been awesome for the past couple of months now that we're here.

To compensate somewhat for the lack of stable builds and to show the community that we haven't abandoned the game, we've been automatically uploading nightly builds to a separate branch. If nothing else, it's tangible proof of the progress we're making.

We're really not able to give you guys a reliable release date. I mean, at this point, would you believe us if we tried? Predicting the speed of game development is hard. All we can reliably do is do our best to work as fast and efficiently as we can, and that's what we're doing.

We did give refunds before and, to a certain point, after releasing the beta. It's been 7 months now, though. We realize it's a beta, but it's a bit much to ask for a refund on any game you've had for 7 months.

Finishing Starbound is more important to us than it is to anyone else-- it's our first project as a studio, it's our careers, it's something many of us on the team have moved to another country and made enormous sacrifices for.

 

Here are the complete happenings as of July 15th :
http://i.imgur.com/p8kyXes.png
Please excuse the language, as it is not made by me.
This may be open to debate and personal opinions, but that does not seem like much work at all, especially when compared to most developers out there,even the ones that are way understaffed and don't have the budget Starbound has.

This would be alright,in theory, if the game had actually changed significantly in the past year and if you hadn't failed to meet the release date promises of 2012, 2013 and 2014.
Legally, any customer is entitled to a refund if he or she has pre-ordered the game during the 2012-2013 period.
While I'm not looking for a refund myself, I sympathize with the people who have had their refunds denied (here are some actual cases, along with relevant information:
http://imgur.com/a/wIsZY ).

I appreciate the effort but I hope you can understand how some people may be dissatisfied with the actual lack of content in these nightlies(I am unsure of whether this is supposed to reflect the progress of the upcoming update or not).

I can only hope that Starbound eventually turns into the game it has the potential to be, despite all these shortcomings.
I'm not trying to attack anyone personally, just to provide feedback on the current state of the game, along with my dislikes and hopes concerning the game and how it has been handled.
I don't even want to go into the many controversies surrounding intense censorship,breakdowns,double standards and things of the sort, as those are irrelevant to the game development process


Here is also a list of goals that Chucklefish has failed to meet along with relevant information:
http://pastebin.com/jAWKJnHy
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TLyZCI1a9i5q0slPXzAdO37qfd6QjLs5s5ALg3op4qs/edit?pli=1
Youtube


Again, I apologise if any of this seems rude or harsh, I have only tried to gather some information in order to provide some criticism.

 

The calendar is quite interesting. It's not even remotely neutral, and is made from the perspective of someone who does not understand how software development works. This isn't saying "omg u dum!" btw. I suspect that most people that play games do not understand software design, because they don't need to in order to enjoy games.

However, software design is like an iceberg. Customers only see the portion that sticks out of the water. Does this mean that the other 90% of the iceberg doesn't exist? No, but it means that it's difficult to explain to a customer in a meaningful way, they just wouldn't understand it because it doesn't really matter to them.


Imagine it like this, when I see a road, I just think "Oh, good, they put on a layer of tar or blacktop." However, that was just the final step. Someone had to go through and pick a spot of land that wasn't too close to any large trees or houses or hills/valleys, the flattest part of land. Then, they had to make it actually flat and make sure that the material underneath the road was stable (no sand or swamp). Then, same thing for the area around it (no one likes driving through swamp). Then they came through and probably did 2-4 layers of concrete or stuff in order to get a really flat surface that will survive for many years. THEN they put the blacktop down, and then I can drive on it.

There is a TON of work that goes on in the background, that customers/users/observers simply don't see. If you don't know something exists, it's very reasonable to assume that it doesn't, but that's kinda why some people are telling you that the things behind the scenes do exist, and they take 90% of the time. That's why "some stuff about ship AI ****" is received negatively by developers, because there was a ton of work that went into it, yet some person just condensed it to six words and dismissed it as insignificant.

 

I understand that some of the material I have posted is biased, I am simply pointing out the slow development process in comparison to other, similar projects such as Edge of Space. I am currently studying Computer Science so I can't say I'm completely alien to programming or game design.

Either way, it's up to this major update to make or break Starbound, at least for me and if the nightlies are any indication of the current state of the major update, I am not seeing a very big difference.

 

Well we all know the reason we were eager to get something.. When the devs (Back when the forums was at its peak of awesomeness) said it would be a 2013 full release, and we had to wait after that, then after that, and a bit more, I think everyone got a bit impatient lol.
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Back on topic, to me, SB development seems awfully slow. When Terraria first came out, I purchased the game, and was amused for a good 200+ hours (starbound=37 hours). With SB, its been in development for a long time, but not a lot is in the game yet. I understand that everyone moved to the new office, but that was like, 2 months ago? I can wait, as it has been sitting dormant in my game library for a while. I just ask my friends that play if anything new was added every so often.

In the end, I think Terraria's development was a lot faster.
SB's is a lot bigger though, but that doesn't mean everything takes longer. Even if they add little things at a time, it would make me keep coming back to the game.

(Pardon me if I repeated something, I am very tired ;-; )

 

I understand that the development process has not met the expectations of many people. I suspect that included in those "many people" is the entire team at Chucklefish. Especially since there's been a long period of time since the last Stable update. It sucks when there's a game you really enjoy, but you've finished it and you can't really enjoy it anymore even though you want to, and you wanted it to be so much more than it is.

As you go through the CSci program, you'll hopefully start doing small projects, medium solo projects, big team projects, and hopefully even some refactoring (fixing up) of other peoples' projects. You will learn a lot about how long software development takes, and especially how many things can go wrong. For my senior project, we had the class split up into teams of 4, with everyone being tasked with making a Calendar system (think Outlook, minus the email and online stuff). After awhile, teams of 4 would pair up and a team of 8 would pick one of the two programs, discard the other, and try to finish it.

My team had a "wonderfully elegant" solution, where the code was commented, laid out nicely, and organized pretty well. Unfortunately, it also had memory leaks that we couldn't figure out, which caused it to run slower than molasses. The other team's program was... Well, I had nicknamed their code "Ogre" because it was freaking ugly. One file would have parts of four different programs, but it had to be combined with other files in order to actually finish one task. You couldn't just say "Oh, you want to add an appointment? Look in File A!" It was "Well, part of it is in File A, but then you have to assume that finished 30% and then handed stuff off to File B, which calls functions in File C and File D. Oh, and the variables are declared in File E on someone's hard drive...they weren't checked in, so the entire program won't even compile."

And yet, we picked their code base to finish up, because ours had a critical issue that couldn't be fixed. Their code was horrible, it was like they hated us and wanted us to live in pain, but it ran faster than ours, and we didn't have enough time to investigate and fix the huge memory leak in our code. So, all that time we spent on our commenting and organization and design? ZERO RESULTS!

This is software design. You can do a great job and spend a lot of time, but until it's done and tested you have no idea if it will actually be used, because something could happen that makes it all thrown away. And all a user would see is "Ok, I can put my dentist appointment on the calendar." Yeah, that didn't make us happy to hear that our month of work was summarized as "Yeah, whatever."

 

That may be true as I have seen Kyren and Omni re-writing each other's work every now and again.


My main reason for purchasing Starbound was the fact that Terraria devs were moving on to make another game(well, only Tyi apparently).As such, I got into the beta expecting the Terraria beta and I was disappointed to see how the core aspects of Terraria, digging and exploration, were done in such an unsatisfactory way. It's absolutely no fun to dig or explore in Starbound at the moment in my opinion, it feels almost like a chore and it has only gotten worse with updates(pickaxes that cannot mine ores that are more than one rank higher than the material they are made of) and that is the main reason behind my 8 hours of game-time.

As I have been constantly comparing it to Terraria and it's development schedule, I found it somewhat baffling how a game with a larger team, a larger budget and much more potential can take so much time with so little progress. I want this game to be good just as much as anyone else who bought it.

 

I'm guessing that Starbound wanted every single planet to be a Terraria world. Really. But, because there are infinite planets, they can't draw each of them by hand or populate each biome with the same creatures. They need each planet to be LIKE Terraria, but not exactly. Thus, procedural generation.

Rather than crafting each world by hand, they try to teach a computer how to craft worlds by hand, but also to make each world different. That's really freaking hard, because computers don't speak English and they can only learn what you're able to teach (teaching is really hard).

Imagine that Terraria is a 3-story building. It has a decent foundation, and supports 3 stories of awesomeness. Now, imagine that Starbound takes exactly Terraria but adds 3 more levels. Unfortunately, the foundation was never made to support 6 stories, and the entire building crashes.

If you want a game to be huge and awesome AND not crash horribly, you need to build a huge and strong foundation. Terraria's core engine doesn't support as much modding, and almost all dungeons still have surface entrances. Biomes only have specific enemies with the exact same attacks and behaviors, no matter how many worlds you generate. Items are still the same core, the Bee Gun doesn't magically shoot red dogs this time, it's always bees.

These are parts of the game engine that Starbound needs to worry about, but Terraria doesn't. So, the simple answer to "Why does Starbound take so long when it's so similar to Terraria?" is because Starbound is trying to do a lot of extra things that Terraria didn't.

 

So like. . . Your first class is today, or you've read a couple things online this month?

I ask because I looked up Unturned the first time it was brought up, and you're comparing reprogramming procedural generation for countless monsters, creating generation for new biomes, laying the foundation for an entire, multi-path progression system, and altering balance throughout an entire game, all while maintaining moddability, with a couple very simplistic box graphics and a couple lines of code for ammo, firing rate, damage, etc. most of which can be copy pasted--almost every update had been adding guns and vehicles, the code for which is already mostly in place.

Or, in short, you're comparing adding light content updates and minor bug fixes to designing/redesigning the entire system those things depend on.

Basically, I'm saying that you're either lying, very very early in the program to the point I'd still call it disingenuous to say you're studying it as an appeal to authority, or you're just being disingenuous in your arguments and attempting to get people riled up, aka trolling. Honestly, combined with 'how dare you play video games after work,' I'm leaning toward the last. . .

But, I don't care. Just. . . Christ, man, there's plenty to complain about that the developers will even cop to. You don't have to bring up silliness like that.

I mean Molly admitted right there that they let player pressure hurt development during the faster update schedules (the first half of the first paragraph of her explanation was basically that).

Complain all you want, but if you're not gonna be logical about it, don't pretend to be.

 

That's exactly the point. While I do like the prospect of infinite worlds and endless variety, this falls short when compared to the core aspects of the game such as digging, exploration, combat, crafting, and so on which I find are completely underwhelming and even boring.
Maybe they should focus on these aspects of the game instead of the whole procedural generation shtick. I appreciate the fact that they started to take an interest in combat somewhat recently, but that seems to have stopped and it has only marginally improved combat.The other major areas of the game such as the actual act of digging have gone largely unmentioned.

And yet Chucklefish has not taken advantage of the amazing modding community it has, with only one or two mods ever getting into the actual game and some modders even signing NDA's and then going unrecognized and abandoned.

Disregard the Unturned comparison if you wish, the fact that the 'major systems overhaul' that is taking place currently is very slow with not that many results cannot be denied. Even before the overhaul, the content that was being added was not that much.

 

And now we can talk about short-term vs long-term, hehe. In the short-term, copy/pasting Terraria would be arguably better than what we have right now. It would at least be a finished game, you know? But at the same time, that would take a lot of time, which means that Starbound can't be Starbound, because it was delayed in order to first be Terraria. Anytime you put in a stopgap or placeholder, it takes time. While people are building a road, they don't put in a bike path first.

It's also very easy to say "I don't like what is there now, so anything would be better!" Except, that isn't really true. Anything would be better compared to what we have right now, but anything would not be better compared to what we all want from Starbound. Especially when development starts, you need a good idea of what you want at the end, and try to not compromise it too much. Once you get into the middle/end of development, then you can start bringing "reality" into things, "Well, based on how far we've gotten, what do we think is actually manageable?" Some things will get dropped or delayed (ship combat, novakids, hylotl villages), and some things will get added, etc. That's just how it works.

With software development, the best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry. You just have to be flexible, and be willing to revisit your plans once in awhile, to see if you're actually on track or if you need to consider delays or dropping features.

For right now, they're not finished with combat. I sincerely hope not, anyway! But, combat is not the main foundation of the game. It's a major part, but unless they add features like BlazBlue combos and dust and Killer Instinct combo breakers, any combat balancing/enhancement won't be gigantic changes. It will still take a lot of time, because balancing always does, but it won't take 40,000 lines of program code. It just takes 400 in the right areas, with the right values.

That's a really tough one though. If they take a ton of mods into the game, is it really their game? Also, does each mod coexist with their existing foundation, and their long-term plans? Do they have time to support the mod as they change the engine for the gigantic update? Once they take a mod and put it into the engine, there is no guarantee that the original author will update the code to support the new engine/foundation. If they leave mods as mods, there is a good chance that authors will be updating it themselves, and CF can include it once the major changes are done.

There's probably lots of other issues that I don't even know about, since I'm not a modder and I don't know anyone that is (at a level where we talk about stuff like that, since I don't do modding).

 

And they shouldn't have done that much, honestly. The systems those mods rely on are likely to be completely rewritten, meaning they're going to need more work.

I actually agree worth your issues with mining being super boring, and the changes to pickaxes making this worse, not better. I also agree combat needs a lot of work, but mostly in balancing numbers, particularly around ranged combat.

And, you know? I kind of hate the idea of psi-staves in a game that was billed as (admittedly, soft) sci-fi, with minimal/no magic. Renaming it 'psi' doesn't change what it is.

And, oh man, this whole dig to the center of the planet before you can fly anywhere thing? Bollocks, that is. We have a game with space exploration, whose only positive defining trait versus its nearest competitor is space exploration, which does most everything else worse, especially digging. . . Let's not let people explore space until they've spent a good hour digging a hole, during which a death robs them off all progress. Excellent design decision.

But none of that has to do with the speed of their updates, and if you want to make a thread about that stuff I'll back you up 110%.

However, this stuff about not putting mods in when they're still getting the core mechanics set up, and 'they've stopped letting demanding and impatient players who want the beta that straight up said it won't be very playable to be compelling playable to distract development from making actual progress?

Nope.

 

While it is hard to wait sometimes, especially when you get that urge to play the version of Starbound that has been hyped to no end, I suppose it all comes down to patience.

 

That's the worst spelling of "Dance to our tune! Toil your life away in our service! Die at your desk, a hollow, crumbling shell of the person you once were! My ten dollars bought me your soul!" that I've ever seen.

Out of curiosity @Pokerbat - how much did you back the game for and how many hours played do you have? Personally, I paid a tenner and I've got 342 hours logged on steam. Now you might say "how many of those 342 hours were just the server running while you slept?" and I honestly couldn't say, so let's wildly overestimate and say 300 hours were the server running to itself. At ten quid for 42 hours of entertainment, I can say I've got my money's worth already and anything else is just gravy.

 

I'm not really sure how to address the criticism you posted, because the calendar/timeline and screenshots seem largely biased to fit a certain narrative. At the end of the day, what Akado said was true-- a huge amount of work goes into what people end up seeing.

A few minutes ago I heard Kyren say she just finished writing a 1900 line change in an hour or something.

u/Sir_Cuitry on Reddit has been compiling a git changelog for most of the nightly updates if you're interested. It only accounts for changes to the assets and not changes to code, so it's not perfect, but it's something: http://www.reddit.com/r/starbound/comments/2aytgs/nightly_asset_diffs_711_715/

We're still working on improving those aspects of the game. I think a lot will be improved with tier progression. :O
We've added several mods to the vanilla game! One time I missed a PM from a modder whose mod we had planned to use, and things went sour. That sucked, and nobody intended to abandon that person or rob them of recognition.
That's not going to stop us from contacting other modders in the future about using their mods in-game, but at the moment we're focused on the next update.

 

There is one thing Id like people to consider about updates and this is just an informed opinion on my part and not necessarily facts related of this game development in particular.

The fact that there is a significant amount of time between releases compared to previous ones does not mean there is something wrong or that development is lapsing. There are myriad things that can be developed and tested in a short time frame but there others that require much more time to develop and test especially when you are adding to existing content as the game and its systems get increasingly complex it makes sense that updates will slow down for this and many other reasons. I do realize that this sounds a bit apologetic but it is true for most projects, having developed software in the past it is obvious to me that customer feedback is a powerful tool but a double edged one, releasing updates too often can derail the schedule easily as a developer is forced to rethink every step based on feedback. Feature creep can also become a problem when there is too many cool ideas flowing in from the community.

Giving the developers some space and latitude to do what they think is best is much more likely to pay off than comparing development times for other games, at least for now. I'd like to add that the fact that Chuckefish is publishing other studio's games can actually provide long term financial stability so I don't think it is a bad move at all, considering that a solid financial footing is a must for the success of any game studio. Them keeping an eye on the big picture to me is reassuring that their commitment to not become a one hit wonder like so many other studios in the past.