So, is this game even actually progressing? (Long)

I most likely will get banned for this, considering the state of this community and their mods. I've been a long time fan (ex-fan) of Starbound. To think back in late 2012 I actually found a game that I want. A game where I can explore space, build on planets, fight monsters, meet civilizations, and become incredibly deep.

None of that is actually worth wasting your time on in this game. The fact that this game was promised to (and I quote, directly from Tiy) "It will come out 2013 no matter what." Well, it's the end of 2014. Still no progress. Not out of the first phase of beta yet.

My problems with this game:

The progression system is trash. Why do we need to fight bosses in order to progress in the tiers? That's stupid. I understand the penguin, it's tutorial, but everything else is just plain dumb. We should be able to have multiple paths of upgrading. I don't want to fight a lame ass boss. I would rather upgrade my tech using my ship. Another thing related to this.

Pixels. Need I say more? Why the hell is it a currency and a tool used to upgrade your items? It's bad design. All I need to say, you guys know the rest

Combat. Click. Click. Click. Click. The same thing over and over again. We were promised a deep combat system with incredibly smart AI. This should of been done a year ago. What are you guys doing? Finish the damn thing already!

Biomes. While they look nice, they are the same thing over and over again. Diversity please. Heat and cold is the only thing separating these things.

And worst of all: The Devs.
Yes, I said it. And I'm sure many others have.
What are you guys doing exactly.
Just what?
You got $2 million in funds to make this.
Other indies would be done by now with that kind of money. But nope. Sidetrack. Problems every where. Modders go at a faster pace then you guys, and they are usually a 1 man team! With no funding! Tiy does horrible PR. Get someone else to do it who doesn't F*ck up every few minutes. Here I am thinking you guys are working on core features. Nooooopeee. Stargates. Horse AI. The F*ck? Stop sitting on your asses and try to finish up the core features first. Perfect it before you work on these side projects. You take too much community input, it's killing you. You even treat other members better than others because they are diehard fanboys who will do nothing but defend you guys. Yes, Goonbound. It's pretty public. And here we have mods saying that they don't remember what Goonbound was.


TL;DR: Face it everyone. At the rate this game is going, Stage 3 beta will be starting by 2016. Stage 1 isn't even over yet, hell, it's still in it's infancy. By the time this game has it's full release, it will be nearing 2019. And that's without anymore sidetracks. I had high hopes for this game, but I'm looking to other games, like No Man's Sky and others. Me and many others will be long gone by the time Starbound is done. Terraria has more progression in a year and it is a way smaller team. I'm done. I know I might get banned for this, but it's worth it.

 

Congratulations. You're badmouthing the game, on the game's official forums, and making wild, unsupported claims about how long it will take to get to release. You win the internet.

 

Thanks.

EDIT: Admittedly, they are somewhat progressing. But it's going at a snails pace. This isn't acceptable at all.

 

While his wording might be harsh , there's alot of truth to what he's saying. And as i just posted in another thread , the way it's going here atm they will be losing players before having even finished the core game.

 

Multiple paths of upgrading are already planned and have been easy to find information on. They might even be in nightlies already, though I don't keep up with those so I don't know.

There's a specific example, but in general it looks like you haven't paid any attention to the game and are completely off. There's the main branch of Starbound, which rarely gets updated. Then there's the unstable branch, which gets updated more often and has more bugs. Beyond that is the nightly branch, where they upload whatever they've done every day and it's frequently broken but shows off all the things they're working on. You should check out nightlies before complaining about game functions.

 

You probably weren't going to in the first place

They've long rescinded on that claim and I suggest you do too

Can't say much about this, as I haven't played the game in a while. You probably have a point, though.

Oh boy, here we go again

Take a look at this

Starbound is a game with a pretty big scope. The claim that "other indies would be done by now" is kind of an unfair comparison, because maybe their game isn't as big as this one.

Modders also don't have to code and create assets for an entire game

What PR? You mean his personal Twitter account where he's not really obligated to talk about the game?

That being said, they should probably remove those from the Developer Tweets and just limit it to the official Starbound Twitter account @StarboundGame.

Maybe they are working on it? The updates on the main page usually show off the things they consider most exciting, not everything.

No they don't? Also, is it a thing now to call anyone who doesn't agree with you (or your tone) a diehard fanboy?

The hell is that, even?

Well, I'd hope not. Also, I think it's silly to make estimates like that. Game development can be all over the place.

Terraria was also in development before Starbound

Yeah, you'd be a real martyr.

 

When I was talking about Terraria, I was talking about this years update. It got a large update and reworked some core features in a year
Starbound hasn't
And that whole banning thing, lol. I heard doing stuff like this gets you banned because of how the mods have grown to become. So just putting that up there, just incase I do get banned, I have a point. I'm not sure if you are in the act with the whole goonbound secrecy thing, so I'm not gonna comment on that.
If the core features were being worked on heavily it would of been done by now. Doesn't take a year to do so. I've seen a bigger game with a smaller fund get finished before Starbound. Can't say which one it was now, but I could look it up later. And the fact that they changed the phase portion doesn't mean anything. It has a trash development speed, and a large amount of money will go towards the office and the dog after years of developing. And PR is PR. Why not get a person for it instead of devs handling it? All of these claims are just some shit thought about in their head and put dates to them knowing damn well it wasn't going to work out. Infact, why wasn't the core features finished in 2012? It has been 2 years and these core features are not even done yet, which is sad for any dev team.

 

Whether it be 2014 or 2050 when the final product for Starbound is released, it's all good with me so long as the game ends up being fun by that point.

Also, comparing development times between different games is like comparing **** sizes between different species.

 

I was steering clear of Starbound forums due to this kind of crap. The day I decide to venture back in, and one of the first posts to be seen is this. For hell sake, lay off the Devs. They are working their butts off. So sick and tired of self-entitled people.

 

RE-Logic took a game that was feature-complete, spend nearly an entire year (perhaps more) to add......what?

Jungle Temple
Hardmode Dungeon
Two Bosses
Three Moon Events
Fishing
Bee Nests
Pyramids
Living Trees
Ice Biome
Crimson

.......and that took a year. With the core game already being feature-complete. Starbound is, as you guessed it, NOT feature-complete, it is missing giant gaps of code (read today's news blog; they just added a new functionality to the game that will let them add new stuff in the future).

You can't compare a 1.2.x patch to a 0.x patch in terms of development time.

It is easier to build on a game that is complete, than it is to add stuff to a game that is still lacking big chunks of functionality.

EDIT: Actually, I'm combining several patches together. From 1.1x to 1.2.0 took a good year+. I remember it was Officially announced early year and wasn't released until late summer IIRC and the rumors had been flying around before even then, so at least 9-12 months just for that 'first' patch. The 1.2.0 patch did not have Fishing; that was added in a patch after that one. And I believe some of the other stuff I listed was not 1.2.0, but was after that.

 

The mods are just doing their job man. :/

You only get "banned" for posting things that intentionally flamebait and or just sound rude overall. They've made mistakes, yes, but they aren't some cynical cult out to silence every Chucklefish naysayer. They aren't bots. Someone's gotta handle the dirty work around here, and often times that gets shit blamed at them.

 

I'm just wondering how long until the "Fanboi" term gets thrown around, and it makes me think:

Those of us speaking in CF's defense are all being nice, and reasonable, polite, and offering real reasons as to why things are the way they are.
Those speaking against CF just spew random hate.

But yet, those hating on CF (this happens on nearly every other game's forum too, mind you) accuse us of being "blind fanbois". Just who is blind here, the people posting logic or the people spewing random hate because they're not getting their way and they're oh so mad?

 

I like how you judge these devs like you have tons of experience with how long it takes to make a game. We all know you've made tons of indie games to really judge how long it should take to make a game. In fact, you should take over all of Chucklefish, and develop Starbound solo.

 

@TheTimeLord Just wanted to drop by and say a couple of things

Firstly. This thread won't get you banned. It's a little aggressive to be sure -- but I don't see anything that really breaks our rules. I think at best your post could fall into our "Being a jerk" and "Losing your cool" categories -- but those would only be warnings. And I still don't think the post warrants any sort of official warning. (take this as your verbal though to keep cool).

A lot of the misconception of our bans comes from users who feel slighted. Anytime we DO have to ban someone, we usually see that same person crop up in some other form on another board (usually, but not limited to, Steam) claiming: "I did nothing but criticize the game and I got banned. F*CK U CHUCKLEJERKS". But those rants usually leave out the juiciest tidbit of information was that they got banned for something WAY out of line that they did. I remember banning someone for some sort of death threat -- and they popped up on Steam an hour later claiming I was a biased something or other that banned criticism. We've also had some hiccups in the past -- but new guidelines have been helping us out. It's just a learning process for some of us.

But yeah. Moderation get's thrown under the bus a lot. And we're always doing much to improve. But we're always going to be the ones to fear or point fingers at because we interact with the community more AND because we enforce the rules as much as we can.

Secondly. The scope of the game is massive. Chucklefish, I think, bit off more than they could chew IMO when they announced some dates and deadlines. They're sorry for that. The development is going to take a long time. And they're working hard. I know they still socialize and goof off a little bit (esepcially after work hours). But I also know that they, too, put in time on some of their weekends off to continue working on Starbound.

So (and this goes for everyone)... just chill. be patient. it's being worked on and it will be completed. you can voice your criticisms so long as you can do so respectfully and calmly.

If the thread goes south, I'll have to lock it up. But I'm trusting you guys can handle it.

 

I know I will get banned for this, but jonesy is actually a ular. Also I too wished the game was done but then again waiting is a fact of life and we have to get used to it. We pay 15 bucks and get access to something that takes years to make without having to even code one line of it.

 

If anyone asks why Serenity was banned, I've highlighted the reason.

 

In my opinion I think the biggest problem is that Chucklefish basically had a prototype of the game in place... And now... They're basically rewriting the entire game from the ground up again. Another problem I've seen is some of the excuses/reasons/logic the developers have used to defend their decisions fall flat to me. For example... people were asking why they didn't hire another programmer to speed things up, and their justification is that 'it takes time to train people in our code, yadayadayada' If every business went off this logic, no one would ever be hired period and businesses would all stagnate. It's been SIX MONTHS since we've had any sort of stable update. "Time to train" a person would have been done and over with by now and then the speed at which things would have been developed would be increased. To me, that justification/reason behind not hiring additional people is not only ridiculous, it's flat out stupid. The other excuse they say is... 'We'd need a bigger office'. This is the age of the internet and technology. When it comes to programming and code they can collaborate across the globe even. So this justification ALSO fails. I have used remote access/presentation software and stuff to not only fix people's computers remotely, but to help them with scripting/AI scripting for NPCs on Morrowind and so on. If I can do that for simple projects like that, there would be no possible reason they could not do the same with other people. Re-Logic hires people in other countries for example, since people brought up terraria. So OBVIOUSLY it COULD be done for starbound as well.

 

Topics like this make me sad.... As a programmer myself I have a completely different perspective of these things.
It makes no difference if it's video games or business software - the problem is non-programmers simply have no understanding of what programmers do and that makes them afraid.

Non-programmers don't seem to understand the issues we programmers deal with. They tend to think instead of working we're sitting at a computer internet browsing or watching adult-materials instead.

Think of it this way....... Would you beg a painter to finish his latest masterpiece sooner rather than later and expect it to still be a masterpiece if he does? It's a ridiculous concept.
Nobody seems to realize this but programming is less of a science than an actual art form. This is not just philosophical fluff - it is factually similar.

As a programmer you spend less time typing things out than visualizing them and trying to mix the right kind of objects/functions together.
Much like a painter spends more time visualizing his masterpiece and mixing the paints than actually making the brush strokes.

And video games are an art form. And they don't just have programmers, but also lots of artists, for graphics, sounds, levels, and etc. It's not just programming that takes time.

You have to give it time if you want it to come out right. You can't rush it.
Expecting these people to rush what just isn't done yet is like asking a painter to hurry up and finish his painting - pointless, absurd, and blatantly ignorant.

 

You sir.... Hit the nail on the head.

I dont get it....

http://doc.playstarbound.com/

Give that a browse and then sit there and tell me that it doesnt take time to adapt to new code/systems... Just as AstralGhost said: You all with no programming background have no bloody CLUE the amount of work it takes for this sort of thing.

Your statement about why they cannot work from different times zones has been anwsered time and time again. people missing meetings, or holding up for big engine changes that requires tons of input, or person X waiting on Person Y to make a change but person Y does not get up in another 7 or 8 hours, after Person X is already done for the day. Use your head mate.