A Mad Week, Deadline coping Plans.

nice work updates pretty stable atm :D

BAM small wall of text ​

 

Not really. The way they're developing the thing is almost through trial and error. As in they add stuff and THEN think about what they just did.

The end result is a lot of fools work done that could have been done much better and more efficiently by allocating some time to plan it out properly before actually making it. They have spent considerable time iterating their systems and correcting silly mistakes simply because of the nature of their development style. Its quite wasteful and inefficient. The only upside is that there is something that you get playable builds very fast, although at a severe cost of quality and consistency.

Btw, saying that I don't anything about game development or programming without even knowing me is kind of rude. I'm not going to judge you because I don't know who you are either, but I am very experienced when it comes to game development. If I would have access to see how MM and Geti work right now (or any developer, really), I'd be able to analyze and predict quite a lot things before they even happen. It can sometimes be very scary how accurate I can be.

 

The neat thing about their development style is the community aspect. We regularly see the work-in-progress and get to test, suggest and complain. If they knew exactly what they wanted, this might seem inefficient. Since they want to give us what we want, this is probably the best way to do it.

 

Given the non-assertive nature of my post I thought it might be obvious that the sentence at the end was directed at myself ;)

 

so how much of fire is finished for you to work on this? or anything of that matter?

 

just say i can burn houses down

 

Can we, or can we not, burnanate the peasants? The countryside?

 

Gotta wonder how many people got that joke AKF, but i too am wondering how much has been done, and would enjoy a quick list on stuff that has been worked out, or planned for release of 1.0, other than angled blocks and maybe a machine.
I really would like the wind and fire that has been mentioned before x)

 

True, it does fit the whole experimental nature of their development.

Though personally I'd prefer laying down a well thought out plan beforehand, rather than let it be driven by complaints and suggestions, but doing so requires considerable experience from both developing games and playing them.

@AnRK: Ah ok. Sometimes you cant be sure what the other person meant when communicating on the internet.
...or maybe I'm just paranoid.

 

Does that mean grassfires are gonna be a thing? :D:D:D
Cutting the grass now has meaning! ^_________^

 

I love how everyone completely ignored everything that was said about 100% customizable workshops and immediately centered on the flowers.

WTF DEVS, Y U WORRY BOUT FLOWERS WTF


It'd be great to see if people actually focused on the major points of posts rather than the complete irrelevancy; in this case, the fact that Geti used a "flower shop" as an example to what can be done with workshops and scripting.

 

I apologize for being blunt, but my aim is to try to help you improve the game and your sustainability/growth as a company, not to show off my ego or make you feel miserable. I clearly see loads of room for improvement and know what could be done about it.

Since I don't have a real work to show to the public just yet, the only thing I have is my knowledge and experience from playing games, observing projects rise and fall, collecting knowledge from articles, blogs, people and common sense, modding, and finally working on standalone games (which I'm studying programming for currently), but all of that isn't tangible to anyone else but me, so it makes me look like a nobody yelling in a tinfoil hat until I release something.

Still, time doesn't wait for anyone. Releasing something worthy takes time, but by the time I'm done, you would have already done new progress. I've closely followed MM from link-dead to KAG and know for a fact that he may not always know what he's doing design-wise. As such, now is the best time to act to give suggestions and critism, no matter how blunt, despite myself having no credibility besides big words that you yourself may choose to trust or not.

You two (Geti & MM) are one of the very few people that are making something that is truly worthwhile or atleast have the potential to do it, so thats why I care so much.

 

Might as well keep your "critical" comments to yourself. Like Salami said, it's degrading for a team - even a individual to hear that "they don't know what their doing". I really think you should apologize for being rude and not being thoughtful to consider one's feelings - especially after all the hard-work MM and the whole KAG team have put into this product. To me, your comment was really stupid,jealous-hearted, and totally uncalled for.
</br>--- merged: Jul 23, 2012 6:16 PM ---</br>

That's your opinion. But let me give you some criticism . Here's my opinion:

You like doing things by writing it out? No problem. You're hardcoded. Not Dynamic? I think that's bad as a game designer. Why?

A game's success depends on it's fan-base - correct? The more people you get interested in your game, the more successful it becomes. Let's say they don't like a feature you plan on implementing. Majority of the community wants to take Plan A, while you want to take Plan B. Lets have another example. Your at a restaurant and majority of your customers want Salad A rather than the Salad B on your menu. You'll lose customers if you don't conform to their suggestions and feedback - after all they are the one's making your restaurant a success. Let's go back to the game example. So you have a decision to go with Choice A or Choice B. Since you like to stick with the "plan" and not receive feedback from your fan-base, your decision will reflect negatively on the customers.

Main Argument: I believe that the person who is able be to dynamic when developing a game rather than be '"narrow-sighted
has a bigger advantage of being much more successful than the person who takes no feedback at all, and rolls on his own dime.

Oh and Indie Game Development is community based and unlike some AAA game developers we care about our community.

 

Even if you do release a game and get rich off of it, Know this:

People will respect you with the same amount of respect you treat them -
Common Sense

Having fame, being rich, and all that other materialistic stuff doesn't boil to being as powerful as being respected amongst your peers(IMO). If you want my genuine advice, I'll say this:

Dont be an ass. You don't need to be an unrelenting, cruel person, to be respected or to be a genius. That kinds of BS is icon-alized in America If you want examples - I recommend you read Steve Job's Biography by Walter Isaacson. It should give you a taste of what I'm talking about.

 

so on this shop business does this mean we can make shops that sell different things like:
-editorial powers within that server for a period of time
-lives
-upgrades (moderations to variables)
-special skins
-(insert random idea here)

 

Whoa, hold up. How did you manage to percieve my messages as a personal attack?

They certainly are not such and that argument of mine is solid fact, which I'm simply pointing out.

I apologize again if I was too blunt, but if you've followed the development close enough and know how game development works and what challenges/limits are there, you'd notice it yourself.

I'm not talking out of my ass and I'm quite sure that MM himself knows about it deep inside and even agree with what I said. Maybe he might find it even useful and strenghtening. As a customer and fan, I'm just pointing out what could be better and suggest what to do about it.

Its not that simple.

A game's success depends on how good it is or atleast what potential is seen in it by the people who find it. The latter option's sustainability depends on how much of that percieved potential is realized or appears to be realized during development.

Initially, the initiative to create a project comes from the developer ultimately, not the fans. The fans come in afterwards and if the developer is either unsure of his work (not having enough knowledge, experience or data to make the better design decisions) or does the project for others as a personal challenge to attempt to make his work please others than himself for the purpose of delivering something people have been wanting and voicing about it openly, for money, fame or fun.

By going the route of doing something through ongoing feedback, you get to experiment and use other people to think for you to make the design decisions. You better hope your fans know their stuff and are generally one-minded and you as the developer know what to do and what not, or your project will burn to the ground.

And since having such open channels where literally anyone can come in to give their input, mixed opinions are a given. Make a wrong choice in that environment and kaboom... shitstorms, people leaving, flame wars explode very quickly, turning your project into either a failure or a compromise that will never live up to what anyone hoped for. No one. This happens on almost a daily basis everywhere, even in the AAA industry. This doesn't just apply to video games either, but in any creative mediums too.

You can always try to fix mistakes, but when you cross the line and make that mistake, the damage is already done. People are lost, trust is gone, the potential is wasted. You may then end up wasting lot of time redoing the thing you messed up and if you have no idea what it needs to be, the developer is stuck in a loop of frustration. Not a fun experience to go through, yet it happens all the time.

Again, the alternative development, which I advocate, the "plan-ahead" style is not going to work for you unless you have lots of time, know what you want to do exactly and have enough experience and knowledge about how to make whatever you're doing be good. If you do have mentioned things and know exactly what you want to do, you can make a project far superior than any fan driven can ever be, but the downside is that it takes much more time to achieve and you don't get to create anything tangible until your designs are complete. Despite this, it is absolutely worth the effort and can steamroll any other projects with its sheer quality and robustness, granted the design was made properly.

Absolutely. I agree.
I do respect others and never treat others as I don't want them to treat me.
Please read my reply to SirSalami on this post if you still havent.