Game development decisions to be more flexible going forward

Sure we would, eventually. This sounds a bit like "you know those quarterly and monthly update plans you have been used to for the past five years? Much like stand up notes, kiss those goodbye."

I'm not saying I am against the thought Chris is presenting here as I don't know a darn thing about programming workflow methodologies, but I think we would have figured it out.

 

Just as a reminder, @DarkStarr discussed an actual Episode 1 story/quest overhaul months ago. As in over six or so. It's quite clear now that isn't going to happen, for a number of reasons.

As for asking @Lord British, I'd love to! Just tell me when he's actually here to respond to questions being asked of him. I don't have the time to watch Twitch streams and the SotACon I did attend, he didn't seem to have much information as to what was going on with the story then, either.

 

Looks like my waiting to play Offline mode just got extended...

 

Well it isn't exactly the situation anyone could predict or ask for but it is what we have. The development team in spite of all that is not as it should be are working very hard on this game. We cannot tell them how to do that given what everyone has gone through crowdfunding this not totally successful game. Going back and throwing stones does nothing. So as always ride the wave or not. We are very lucky they did not give in and have opened the flood gates to try to get a successful game and no matter how it is it is what it is. Keep rallying for what you think is missing or sit back and don't. I truly don't give up easily. I will be continuing to speak up as I see things to contribute and also cutting them some slack. They are human beings not machines and they really are doing their best given this situation. We cannot go back ever only forward. So again imo so take it or leave it always.

 

"Left Brain vs the Right"
While I like and am all for more flexibility, I do trust our Portalarium team's "Left Brain but not so much their Right Brain designing"

What I mean by that, is that, what I see in our development, or what is presented as the making of our game, I think has some inherent problems or dampers within it.

What's "RPG" have to do with it ?

Immersion ...

I see and read allot of "tech stuff" being presented as being important to personal character gaming mechanics, but less emphasis placed or presented about the over all fantasy itself, which goes way beyond mere graphics design. "Does it feel like a world with a story?" <---<<< This is where, from having seen and extensively tested our opening scene of "love", as well as what was produced as Courage, I think our team needs to regain a balance within their game developing brains, or ways of thinking about what they're aiming for.

(They came up lacking in a slew of basic elements, some of which are pointed to with examples in the following link below)
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...future-or-past-of-new-player-welcomes.155257/
But that's not what I'm pointing specifically to in the thread here at hand.

Here I'm talking about the Fantasy, the world and how alive it is. We've heard our Portalarium Team say things like, the new players are wanting to jump strait into the world rather than bother being forced through our opening story-line, "which places more pressure for our world to seem more real or alive than other games within our genre". We can arguably say that our SOTA's housing customization is #1 or very close to whatever game anyone could think is the actually #1. Yet when it comes to how alive it is, I don't think we're failing, but when the player bypasses one important aspect of our game and places their gaming hopes on the rest of our world, then we'd better concentrate a bit more on that particular part of our game to cause it to be just as competitive in that way too.... and in that way, "it's fantasy, it's world feeling alive".

We need some NPC families and some short quest styled or side story-line for them so they become as interact-able with the player as possible. Such families could also move around so as not to become stale, with motive to move when time comes to have them move. A bit of randomization within the timing and some possible player interactions with them and such families could make our world seem more alive. Currently almost every NPC serves the game and not so much the mundane. We're not failing in that department, but there could be some "right brain developer improvements in that regard to remain gaming world immersion competitive".

We have become a game where 15 second bites of info or 15 second player input have become the norm through our dependence on Twitter for direct question, comment and player feedback, which is more congruent with exchanging technical data than it is when attempting to relate more fantasy related or immersive development input for consideration. Deep thoughts or feedback on Twitter must conform to the size of a coffee cup, which is far too limiting when utilizing the right sides of our brains.

The effects of all this can clearly be seen in our current game's entry point designs, which were built with more technical data in mind than world fantasy immersion for our new players to become immersed in or hooked on. This same effect was greatly described in our distant past when players would complain about how confining or, unworldly or less immersive our "instances" were as opposed to an open world design. Our game doesn't need or lend itself well to an open world design, yet our instances with their confining nature (as was seem within our entry points) was not as well received as we'd like them to be.

These were my coffee cup size remarks, because I have a very large cup of coffee and it's flexible ~Time Lord~

 

I will make this short because discussing that is a waste of your and my time: Nope. Never ever ;-)

 

Personally I don’t see any reason to do a rework of the Chapter 1 main quest.

The Love quest is actually pretty good. The quest sequence getting up to visiting Necropolis is a rather jumbled mess though.

The Courage one is basically terrible. The stuff with the Kobolds is cool, the whole affair surrounding Grannus is just poorly done.

The Truth one is interesting. But I enjoyed that one too.

A general good pass at those 3 with a few tweaks here and there would be nice.

I’d rather they work on some really well done quests for Chapter 2.

 

People who have played a long time here and never quit, can't see or experience what the new player sees through their eyes that seek wonder.
The numbers don't lie and the numbers told our team of programmers that there's something not right or not going as planned within our entryways.

~Don Quixote and the Great Enchanter~

I say the Great Enchanter has taken our fantasy and made it more and too much, "a machine" ~Time Lord~

 

The Truth quest is terrible. There's really nothing to do there, and it could be replaced with cut-scene. There's no player agency. It's one missed opportunity after another. It's not that it couldn't be good, but it would require a lot of work.

 

You havent seen my cups, smallest currently is 750ml

 

On the fly decisions for new features in production code does not work. I have never seen any programmer work like that in my whole career..
Normally you would create base lines, schematics on where to go with your program. This needs a lot of "boring" planning and creating blueprints on your classes, methods and desired algorithms.
What he stated in that stream (Not seen it myself) is really a very very bad decision.

 

Hmm My understand was that they would be more flexible for quick fixes, but still be moving forward with the planned content not sure where the rest of these comments get the idea that its all chaos hehe.

 

I really doubt that is what we are supposed to take from Chris's comment, I think what he meant was that they aren't going to lock themselves into making 100% sure that X feature needs to be released on X release, if they realize that Y would have a better impact on the player base or the game, they might put more work on that instead, while not making the player base upset that we weren't given X on the specified date.

 

Because internets

 

Makes more sense, I did not follow the stream so just trusted what I read here.