Um, I contributed to this?

There obviously is a design here, to say otherwise is completely wrong in so many ways.

 

Design as you go = bad design
It really is that simple.

 

I think they have changed some things as they go...but they do have a plan and they have followed it pretty well. Look at what we saw on the kickstarter and what we have here...it's pretty close. Yes, things will not always work out but they have had a plan...things have to be fluid in game design though if you find that your original idea doesn't work.

 

original idea does not work = bad design
And I disagree: It is not pretty close. If kicksytarter was right the game would have appeared in October. Fully finished.
Of course many of us knew it was unrealistic. Now, how comes many of us knew but they did not?

 

I agree, 6 mil is not very much in today's industry. But the KS did not claim they needed to raise 6 mil. They more than met their goal, and have not delivered what they promised, when they promised, for the amount of money they claimed it would take.

I mean, it's fine if they spend more money and make a better game. But, that's not what the KS said they would do. Asking the community once they had the money, probably was not the right thing to do either.

Just sticking to facts, not opinions of what should or shouldn't happen.

 

Agreed with the 1st part, but the last paragraph, I seriously doubt they've only spent 1.5.

 

A target release date is not a set in stone promise. Had they not raised any more money they probably would have hit that release but only with the features they could get in. More money.. more features.. more time. This ought to be common sense. Not only are they delivering what was intended.. they are delivering that much more.

For all the things people may claim they said they would do during the kickstarter, they did NOT say the release date couldn't be adjusted as needed or that they wouldn't add more during development if they could afford it.

 

Wrong. Especially in the case of video games, but is true for a lot of coding/design.

Unless we are talking about very strict disciplines like say utilities, security, etc or more broad categories that aren't software, like say architecture, ideas will evolve. Some things will turn out to be impractical, others will be made better.

This is exactly the stage SotA is now. The feature list is not finalized (that happens during the Alpha testing phase, we are pre-Alpha) and coding of planned features is taking place. I've yet to meet a video game designer nor hear of a game where the planning could flawlessly predict interactions of fairly complex systems.

Pre-Alphas typically do not include testing phases and the above is one of the reasons why. Releases are snapshots of code during construction and will be messy.

To use a real world equivalent, the devs are making a stew and prepping separate ingredients. You came in, tasted the uncooked stew with let's say half of the ingredients actually there, which leads you to the conclusion that the entire stew is poorly prepared and furthermore if the chef adds more salt, pepper and decides that one of the fillings does not complement the taste of the stew, the chef sucks.

If sweeping changes were made post Alpha, then poorly planned/chaotic would make sense. But at this stage, especially in video games development, things will get shuffled around, cut, re-added, or modified.

If what I quoted was true, then every video game designer I've ever seen talk about his work or seen work or took part in the work on a few rare occasions would be a bad designer.

 

I am reading this thread and while perhaps the amount of money it's needing or costing or not needing to make this game could be interesting, I'm not seeing the point. It's really a downer in my opinion.

I'm not saying to not have your point of view, of course everyone does, but how is this constructive? and how is this helping? I'm just curious where this is going. I know it's only my opinion.

I am more interested in getting the game made with the features that I hear being mentioned here. I am interested in the magic I hear getting created on these forums being put into the game.

I am interested that those who have great ideas get to express them, and that the development team gets caught up in the magic of what is possible, and that those ideas take on a life of their own in
being put into this game. I don't see this helping. It is going to cost what it costs. If the development team will put the features in that I and others want in the game to the best of their abilities it is worth it to me.

So just a thought ocurring to me while reading this, and I am not putting down anyone for their knowledge or whatever is coming into this thread, just voicing what this thread brought up for me.

I love this community and this game. Again and finally we can have a game, a game that is ours and unlike others in so many wonderful ways.

 

Thank you!

 

It's even got a name:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development

SotA team in particular have picked up a lot of this:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(software_development)

You might recognize this
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-up_meeting


What you are experiencing is the "minimum viable product for test" stage.
Ie a mock up with place holders for future functionality.

 

Yep, I was just going to mention this. I think its actually a good thing the entire game wasn't designed up front. I've developed software on teams that have designed everything up front (waterfall method), and developed software on teams that have more iterative approach (agile method). Waterfall method seems pretty prevalent still at engineering companies that build hardware, but has pretty much fallen out of favor like 15 years ago at software companies. I much prefer the Agile method, and I think overall the SotA team is doing a good job executing it. The iterative development that's promoted by the Agile method allows the dev team to respond to the customer's expectations better as the product evolves.

I do share @Joviex's sentiment though. I think the dev team could be doing a better job responding to their own plans, and responding to *some* of the questions and expectations of the community. This part of Agile, where customers feedback is used to shape the product, I think the dev team could be doing a little bit better communicating goals and expectations. The quarterly schedule @Darkstarr posts is not enough in my opinion. Many companies provide yearly and multi-year road maps as marketing material to interested clients. I'd love to see this. Also, I think using the forum is a horrible way to track expectations, and goals. I wish there was a way for the community to vote up or down features, that drive expectations and goals. And I wish there was an easy way to track these goals with the dev team's current thinking. Having to scour the forums, web articles, and hangout videos for information is painful.

I think the Stretch Goals serve as a great example to this point. The goals were pretty much an educated guess as to what the community might want to throw money towards. In retrospect, I think the dev team would have been better off asking the community to help decide what feature ideas make it as a stretch goal, what exactly the goal would entail, and perhaps even how much it might cost. This is common in negotiating features and support with software contractors. And by the way, some people might want to know where we are currently with the Stretch Goals. If I recall correctly, it was mentioned in a dev hangout that the verdict is still out, but that the dev team wasn't confident that the approach was well received by the community because the rate of funding the goals are slow. There's no way to know this unless you watched the video, or happened to read it on the forum.

Ideally I would like to see community ideas and questions bubble up to the dev team, that get answered in a more structured way. I like the petition system the White House uses; 100,000 signatures gets a response. It's even open sourced. I'm sure there are community members, myself included, who would be happy to set this up if the dev team said they would use it regularly as part of their development process. I'd also like to see how all of the goals/expectations/requirements, and current status/responses, organized and managed better as part of the Agile process... I suppose some ambitious community members could at least track known goals and responses on the sotawiki, but really would like to see this communication flow have active involvement by the dev team as part of the development process.

 

There is some room between flawlessly predicting everything and not even trying to predict anything just winging it.
In that middle ground all successful projects live. With this project I have the impression they are just winging absolutely everything =)

 

The issue with the stretch goals is that the implementation is flawed: There is no benefit in joining early as you purely pledge towards something you receive in the future. One can simply wait and see if it is realistic that a stretch goal is met and decide to jump on when it is clear that it will or when you think you can tell that there might be some demand for the cosmetic items. People pointed this and other flaws out within a day after the goals were announced. Also, the goals were badly communicated and many people initially misunderstood what exactly will happen in case it gets funded.

 

I pledged full packages to three stretch goals to give them extra money to use toward whatever... if the goal was met they'd have to speed up and get that feature set in but if not they can use my money for whatever... That's also what I pledged Duke for... and my player town I pledged to pick what area in the game I get to live in and who gets to be my neighbor for sure... not so I could custom create a hex and have my own custom music and my own private beach somewhere. So, basically, I pledged to give them money.

Not at you Tarsilion but after reading 5 pages of posts here I just have some other feedback... this is at several people who have commented here but more for the general public reading and hopefully some mindset changing.

I understand completely why people are asking for transparency and I get it. It's scary to hand over so much money and get nothing, yet, in return. I just have this small note: have faith.

Fact: As a Duke+ you get to tour the offices and... from a first person view and someone who knows a bit about technology and the field: I didn't see ANY wasted money. Their office space CAN'T be smaller... in fact I think it's almost too small (no personal space at all... none) how small it is now but they do that to penny pinch. There are two to four people in a room that usually would have one. There are three people in the reception area that would usually have two chairs, no desk, and maybe a tree in the corner. Instead they have 3 desks and 3 people. In some of the more cramped offices they only have enough room to get up from their desks one at a time... if two people try to get up at the same time they can't! Their dev servers are all custom built from fry's and newegg and built in-house. The dev servers set on stacked sets of cheap plastic tables because racks are more expensive. They don't have chairs to sit in during their meetings so they have "Stand Ups" instead where everyone stands around having a meeting... why? There might be another reason but the obvious answer to me is: their meeting room can sit about 1/4 of their team IF they brought the chairs from their desks.

They are not wasteful. They're very conscious and careful how they spend our money. I say our money but really it isn't... it's their money. We gave it to them with the expectation of getting a game and some pledge rewards. Since then, for most of us, we've been given more rewards and more alpha play time than we were originally promised. Have some faith. These guys are doing REALLY good. If you have a question ask the community first to save dev time. If it hasn't been answered then ask the devs in public so we can all get the answer. They might have missed their first release date but the game is coming along really nice and we're to blame for some of that... they had to completely throw out the travel and map systems they had and start over after community outcry said to change it. They have to balance and adjust combat when 3/4 of the skills aren't in and as they layer new skills in they need to do a guesstimated rebalance each time so we can test and enjoy a game with more than just flat rates of damage... then do it again next release because they added more skills.

They're busy making a game and we're needing to wait and have faith. It's hard in a world where you get screwed more often than not. I understand and I get it. I'd just say: lets keep the pitchforks in the barn until the release party. Until then, lets go test the game and post bug reports shall we?

*toasts* to New Britannia and hopefully a great release in 2015!

 

They also had some bundle sales.

Their open world is 64 players total per world if I recall.

 

Up to 120 on premium dedicated server, 64 on standard. Also that game is not Life is Feudal, LiF failed to crowdsource so they released "Life is Feudal: your own" which is a multiplayer online version of the MMO they wanted to (and still want to) build. There are quite a few long running bugs and many of the features still do not work. I hosted and played that and enjoyed the building and crafting aspect of it, but the combat is useless and there is a common bug leading to you counting as overburdened even with empty inventory and needed to make a new character. Arrows fired while moving often hover near invisible in mid air indefinitely and deal a million damage if u walk into them. Severe lack of information from that team. It was fun for a little but there is no comparison between it and SotA at all. Which is a shame because i was super excited about it.

 

The community is not to blame for missed release dates. The devs call all shots.

Regards,

 

You reach the conclusion: "OMG! WHY DID I GIVE MONEY TO THIS? THIS GAME IS GOING TO SUX!"

I reach the conclusion: "Looks like SOTA will probably come out late in 2015 or early 2016."

 

Considering we are looking at pre-apha releases that go out to April, with only about half of the magic schools looking like they will be close to fleshed out, and the last release time even HINTED at was June... I think a release time, as Heradite just said, will be somewhere more like the end of this year to early next year, at the soonest.