It’s not optimism which drives me to argue this point, it’s actually a deeply-rooted cynicism about both the nature of people, and the nature of gamedev (particularly Early Access.) I don’t want to drag the tone down too much here, but I can summarise my views this way:
“The more rapidly that people invest in the creation of a product/goal they have no direct influence over, the less satisfied they’re doomed to be when they finally receive it. The more that people band together to expedite said product/goal, the less and less helpful they become.”
You’ll notice this applies only to the people who don’t have direct influence over the product – aka the supporters, the backers, the people who want it and who are prepared to supply funds and ideas but who aren’t directly working on it. Obviously the same is not true for the actual dev team, in fact the rule runs basically opposite for the direct creators of the product. But for other stakeholders who spend a lot of the time waiting and watching but not much time directly contributing, the road stretches long into the distance and there isn’t much to do while watching and waiting. This leads to impatience, and impatience is anathema to game development.
The other key point of the “rule”, though, is that it deals in relatives not absolutes. So it’s not to say that backers and supporters investing in the game is a bad thing; rather, it’s hasty investment which leads to broken dreams (that are oft-misconstrued as broken promises.) People tend to see a proposal/pitch and decide then-and-there that they want to support the game based on that pitch, without understanding that the very nature of a pitch is transient. It’s ironic, many other homonyms of “pitch” (e.g. the sticky tar substance, or the playing field) refer to something which is resistant to change, and the idea of a marriage proposal is that it’s the start of something which should last forever. But when we talk about pitching or proposing an idea, we need to understand that ideas change, and they do it quite readily. If we keep that in mind, it has a tempering effect on the excitement generated by the pitch; but it means that any pitches we do decide to back we’re choosing to back because of an abiding merit rather than a flare of excitement.
Now, none of that is to say/assume you chose to back Stonehearth on a whim; I’m talking in generalities about what I’ve seen in the Early Access marketplace before. However, I would bet quite a lot that even if you did thorough research and “due diligence” before investing in Stonehearth, the first thoughts which spring to mind when you think of the project are the first impressions you got from the kicksarter video. And the reason I’m so confident about that is because it’s _entirely normal behaviour for human beings._Our first impressions don’t get replaced by later impressions, and they’re tenacious enough that they keep showing up in our thinking even when we have good evidence that they’re no longer accurate. This is a negative for both the consumer and the developer – for the consumer because it means we’re more likely to pin our hopes on something out-of-date and impossible to realise, and for the developer because it means that a negative first impression is extremely difficult to change.
So, I’m going to assert that your idea of Stonehearth is probably still based on those early images, and that those images are still the lens through which you view the more recent dev work. Viewing the work through that lens, it’s hard to see how the two images fit together – I know this because I’ve tried looking through that lens myself, and I didn’t like what I saw. It wasn’t until I stepped back and borrowed the perspective offered by the Desktop Tuesday article on the new roadmap that I started to see something I liked again. There was a time several months ago where I was fairly quiet around the forums – shocking, I know – and that was because I didn’t have anything constructive to add to the discussions at the time. I had opinions, sure, but I couldn’t see any way to voice them in a way that added to the conversation; everything I tried to write only contradicted the previous statements or led to a paradox (e.g. “we need to see how X turns out before we can talk about Y, but X can’t happen just yet and the idea for Y is my proposal for a stop-gap in lieu of X.”) At that time, I was starting to worry about Stonehearth too – not about it’s direction exactly, but about whether it could survive the length of the journey ahead of it (this was also, of course, the same time that we saw a serious dissatisfaction with the rate of progress.) Even though I knew that the devs had more going on in the background than they were able to show, I worried that when the reveal came it might be too little, too late.
I know what it’s like to be dissatisfied with how a game is turning out, I know how terrible it feels particularly when you can’t just step in and provide a solution which seems so simple and obvious from your perspective. And, for what it’s worth, I know that sometimes those simple and obvious solutions actually would make the difference, I’ve seen it happen before and I’m sure it’ll happen with Stonehearth before we’re all done here. However, the thing I’ve learned the hard way through that process is that it doesn’t matter how satisfied or dissatisfied you are with the game, all you can do is either add to it’s progress, or take away from it. Every action you make as a backer is either going to provide further support, or run in a different direction to the main push. Sometimes we need pioneers to run in a slightly different direction and open up a new path to us; but that job falls to the dev team 90% of the time, and most of the time when we do it as backers we don’t actually find a new path worth taking.
Whenever we suggest new paths to take, we call out to other backers to join us – it’s simply the nature of the forum environment. However, the thing to be aware of with that is that those backers are presumably aiding the main push before they peel off to explore the side-path we’ve pointed out. If too many peel off from the main push, it becomes hard to communicate with everyone at once. The devs have to keep their focus on the main push, so the backers and players who are off exploring alternatives will often feel like they’re recieving less attention – and the sad reality is that they necessarily are, because the dev team simply can’t be everywhere at once.
So, if the path that the main push is on doesn’t look like the best one from your perspective, it’s usually much better to talk to a dev directly – i.e. go to them instead of asking them to come to you – and show them the issue you’re seeing from your perspective. That means more than just pointing out the issue, it means pointing out the context which makes it an issue, and what you’d consider a happy resolution to it. Now, I’ll give credit where it’s due here, because I’ve seen you do that before; but it’s not something you always do. It’s also very easy to slip between giving your full perspective and giving the more direct “this is the problem, here is the solution” statements… again, it’s something I do a lot! However, another thing I’ve learned the hard way is that it’s all too easy in that frame of mind to forget that other people reading it probably don’t share the same perspective, so what looks like a clear and obvious solution to you may not make sense as a solution to them, or it may look like a viable solution but a really terrible alternative to the current plan.
There’s a lot of threads flying loose in this post so I’ll try to wrap them up before I get tangled in them, hahaha! My core point here is that disagreeing with the main push of the development cycle generally isn’t as productive as it seems it would be – and not for lack of good intentions; simply because a game-in-progress is an unwieldy thing to try and steer, so trying to change direction mid-push is generally a really risky move. There needs to be a massive, literally game changing benefit if the devs are even going to consider that; and if they’re going to consider it, then the suggestion needs to be based on more than a “negative assertion” (e.g. “I don’t like the way this is going, how about we change it?”) If you can suggest a positive change with clear steps and a visible end-point, it may gain some traction; but simply going against the main direction will only take traction away from the work currently in progress.
That’s why I only post “in line with” the current direction of the game – I haven’t come up with any better ideas, and while I do have some things I’d like to see more than what’s currently in progress, it’s not worth risking the progress we’ve made so far to try and push for those things I want. That’s something I’ve seen happen time and again – the worst case scenario isn’t just the game suffering, it’s that someone can kick up enough of a stink that they get what they ask for but it’s still not satisfying because the rest of the game has suffered, and so everyone misses out. And I know from painful experience that when that happens, it’s not because of people being complete assholes; it’s a lot of minor actions piling up and creating a precedent, which then becomes a norm, and so it ends up with a bunch of people pulling in different directions until someone finally gets their way – and then everyone collapses like a giant tug-o-war because after so long pulling against each other, they’ve forgotten how to stand on their own.
When we pull in the same direction, if one person falls the rest will drag them back up. When we pull in different directions, someone falling can collapse the whole group. And in this case, “falling” can simply mean running out of patience – I’ve seen that happen more times than I like to count.
