One person's perspective on the development life cycle

I have no issues with opinions, but when you ask presumptuous questions in the line of that you don't even think the devs will finish the game, its plain trollville.
If you don't see that then man... ill just leave you be

Yes? I didn't state my opinion whether it was the right way to do things. But the majority went for it.

 

I also like this idea. Specifically, having perpetual online development and a fixed offline when the story is complete.

 

and did you just compare adding PoTs to slavery? that's pretty epic lol.

Id use "majority stock holders" as a better reference point than slave masters.

 

This kind of dialog that most of you are having is very strange.

Being a besserwisser it really itches to point out all the errors and misunderstandings here. But since I see that most of this comes from an emotional response to late news about this game in particular and not from a rational analysis of Waterfall vs Agile methodology in general I think that would be a waste of time.

So instead I thought I'd turn this around. I work in a rather big company (>100k emloyees worldwide). We are not in the gaming industry. I have cooperated with over a dozen software development projects directly and about another 40-50 indirectly.
I've seen waterfall and I've seen agile/scrum. I've also seen a lot of waterfallish and scrum-buts as well as a lot of non-methodology projects. I've seen european projects, indian projects, american projects, chinese projects and of course nordic projects. (Culture being a major factor in methodology adoption success).
I've seen failed and successful waterfall projects, I've seen failed and successful agile projects. I'm very good when we have our "will this fail?" betting pools with colleagues.
On top of that I have lots of friends in development. So I've knowledge of software projects for banking, hospitals, car rentals, accounting (large scale), large scale e-commerce, some porn and military industry. Now I have friends who has worked in gaming industry as well but they rarely have a methodology which follows either waterfall or agile so those have less bearing on this dialog you have here.

Now. Those who say that either waterfall or agile is "bad" don't know what they are talking about. Those who say that one must follow one of those methodologies to be successful don't know what they are talking about.
Instead they are good at different things, in different cultural contexts and for achieving different specific goals.

However, the trend is clear. More and more software projects are switching to more and more agile methods. Its rare to see any textbook waterfall outside of the military these days.

Most software projects are not even aware of this change since they are not adopting agile for their software department but rather their companies' business models adopt more towards User Centric, software-as-a-service, or more next gen Kanban stuff like Lean or similar. To accomodate those types of business models the software department adjust accordingly not caring about giving that new approach a name or even thinking about methodology or process.
So it is common to talk to developers who think agile is "a stupid fad" but when you dig deeper into the changes in their own development processes the change is already there although they would still name all their agile processes as being "waterfall" when they clearly are not. For instance, most modern UX stuff relates to agile, not waterfall. This since the R in R&D is getting less and less funding and the D is getting more and more.
That said it is also rare to see software projects/companies really embrace agile completely.

So if you have any questions please feel free to fire them my way. But please note that I have a very low threshold for black/white fallacies or blanket statements without caveats.
The world is grayscale, even when we are only dealing with the digital.

 

Guys, can we keep this from devolving into personal attacks on one another? The issues should not be between the players; we should focus on the game itself. Yes, there have been changes, and are likely to continue to have changes in the future.

As said before, until the game is finished, it's impossible to judge it accurately. Portalarium has taken a good step with firming up their schedule, and outlining the upcoming releases towards what people have asked for. Let's give the benefit of seeing how that plays out. Ultimately, there is no way to completely please everyone with such a wide variety of opinions and expectations. I'm strongly hopeful it will be a game I can enjoy playing, period.

 

Yea sorry guys. I was just trying to help.

take it away spoon

 

I never played the Ultima singleplayer games or Ultima Online. I know both have dedicated fans and imho, it seems that a dividing line is created between some that are hardcore fans of one or the other but not both genres equally. I happen to have an equal interest in both the mp and sp components of this game.

I never saw SoTA as a true themepark mmo with all the content one may expect from it. I assumed this game would have a great sp campaign while also incorporating a multiplayer component to play with friends. Because of the scope to include both game modes, I assumed the multiplayer would basically be a sandbox with mainly player driven content.. like social events, a robust housing system, crafting and selling, and also a few dungeons and other group content thrown in.

I'm not a developer and I have very limited access to information like available finances. The OP brought up some interesting concepts that I did not know so I appreciate that.

I think we need a forum for just people that want to play SoTA and have zero background in UO or Ultima................... J/K

 

There are ~250 POTs.

There were ~22'300 KS backers.

There are ~58'600 total backers.

My math indeed is rusty, if I don't see how 250 is a majority for either group, honestly.

Oh, you can trust me on this: HE (and many other perma-critics) was there! Oh, if he was there!!!

Actually, screaming that they didn't want them was not an option. Nobody knew what would entail, nobody had a forecast (not even devs, to their defense) how much dev time would cost, nobody knew how far behind they were (if at all!) for "wasting time on side projects". Some argue the POTs should have been delayed to Ep3+, some argue they were creeping featurism in its purest form, some thought that only certain deep pockets could move the studio interest so much and so far. I ran some numbers with prices. The entire POT feature moved more money than many stretch goals. In a way, it was the never announced (because never planned) only stretch goal that won the inclusion in Ep1.

I'm glad they're here. They're very nice and spurred great interest and formidable community events and moments.

I'll be a bit less glad when more important stuff will be pushed and/or slashed because that devtime went elsewhere.

 

Agile and Scrum are not methodologies. Agile is a philosophy (and even that is being kind) while Scrum is a framework. Neither are prescriptive enough to be a methodology ala 6-Sigma (and some debate about that).

At this point, they have become little more than marketing and branding aspects

Unseen

 

Appreciate the clarification because I'm far from disgruntled and quite happy with what Port has done.

What I see personally is some unhappy with what they perceive as a lack of timely progress, and particularly that being with work on sp offline. I've always felt that much of the work Port has done with mp has a direct correlation to the sp offline component of the game. Things like fleshing out the overland map and the building of zones/scenes along with other game mechanics.

I don't know what the grand plan is or how the development cycle is or has possibly changed in the developers eyes. Sorry I'm not following that stuff that closely but maybe I should hehe. I'm invested in quite a few crowdfunded games and tbh, much of the complaints, if you look at it from a person with NO Ultima whatever background, is very typical of any game in development. I agree that Port has done a tremendous job at managing funding. Like I said, the store is a very important thing because it helps to continually generate funding to make the game better so I fully understand. But you still have those people (not me) unhappy with either lack of features or the progress of the sp offline component. Personally, I don't separate the game modes, as I see many of the online features having a direct relationship with developing sp offline.

To me, the game is coming along just as I would expect it to.

-Build the store to help continuous funding which only makes the game better.
-Build the online framework to test mechanics and create the environment. This is never finished and continually improved and expanded over the 5 episodes.
-Build the story-driven campaign.

Maybe I got this all wrong but I think Shroud's development has been pretty darn awesome so far. Now that I think about the op, I guess the whole process is agile and understandably so.

Cheers!

 

I don't think there is a lack of progress at all. In fact, I see a great deal of attention being spent on the tiniest details. It makes me think that the scale of feature details may be more than what is possible is the next couple years. I don't want them to release "EP1" short of content, so I support the idea of incremental online content, so that more people will want to play and we won't run out of money before it reaches the threshold when it is where they want it for EP1. Keeping the community engaged has to be a major priority.

I know everyone wants the game boxed up at EP1. So, like was suggested earlier, it might be a good idea to hold the offline mode until the EP1 threshold is released. We have to wait and see whatever they decide to do.

For the record, I did not create this thread to cause a big stink. I figured, some would read it and it would go away. I did not say anything opinionated in the OP.

 

Your post did what I believe was intended. It provided some information on development which I and likely, many others will find informative and valuable.

For that my sincere thanks!

 

I'll just leave this here : http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.html

 

I think that the agile/iterative design and development process failed the developers on this project. I don't know whether it is due to the "open"/crowd sourced aspect, the size of the project, the implementation, or a combination. This causes confusion on the team, and as we've seen, on the part of those of us who are observing the process. Of course it's as open as any large project we've seen, but it's not completely open (the stand up notes are probably as close as we get).

 

Just posting some stuff I tend to agree with. Your rebuttals are excellent and I don't intend to take you on a case by case basis but I just posted that after reading the above.

Everyone has different experiences and I'll leave it alone as this thread is getting too hot

People should make their own minds up, just wanted these links here in such a discussion.

 

Enterprise software actually maintains static specific end goals though the development cycle? I would say such cases are the exception not the rule for major software releases in my experience.

 

It's supposed to, but yeah, it so rarely does

 

Interestingly, Starr is giving a talk on the Agile process amongst other things During SXSW Interactive 2016