Why is game dev so slow? Subnautica is just as old and now it has full release

I fear you do not recognise self mockery when you see it :slightly_smiling_face:

The worst that can happen is more posts and Team StoneHearth doing the ports when they intend.

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This is a really sticky issue. On one hand, I’m not affected by it, personally, being a Windows user. On the other hand, I can definitely imagine what it feels like to support a product for a specific feature that ends up being cut or repeatedly delayed. The only excuse I can offer on Team Radiant’s behalf is their small size. With 20 people, I think I would consider putting a dedicated dev towards squashing the “thousands of little issues” between Mac/Linux/Windows. As it is, they’ve got 15, and we all know that players have been complaining about the slower speed of content updates. But I definitely understand your frustration and sympathise a lot. TR bit off more than they could chew, which isn’t uncommon with Early Access titles. Which leaves us where, what can we do? Should TR start refunding Mac and Linux backers, making it less likely to finish the game at all? Do we hunker down and hope for the best? Part of me, as much as I also sympathise for Stephanie for having to deal with this stuff, believes that what you’re doing - complaining - is the exact right thing to be doing. Sure, it’s not great for the devs to hear, but it keeps their promises in mind.

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I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kickstarter money has long been gone because stuff costs a lot. Had Riot not stepped in, Stonehearth probably would’ve been just another failed attempt at a game. Which happens quite often. For that matter I would never expect a refund for a crowdfunded game because unforeseen problems happen. And you haven’t pre-purchased a game but funded development in order to get a game when it’s done.
From a marketing perspective it would be wise to not make too much fuzz about that as long as development goes on. And as long as that would maximize chances to actually finish the game I wouldn’t blame anyone. What counts is that the project is still running despite the Kickstarter money probably being gone. In any case Stonehearth remains a pretty unique project within the industry and I’m looking forward to what the future might bring.

According to SteamSpy, one or two people have bought the game while in development.

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Fair point, totally forgot about early access. Same applies there, too, though. From Steam’s info page:

"When will these games release?

Its [sic!] up to the developer to determine when they are ready to ‘release’. Some developers have a concrete deadline in mind, while others will get a better sense as the development of the game progresses. You should be aware that some teams will be unable to ‘finish’ their game. So you should only buy an Early Access game if you are excited about playing it in its current state."

Honestly even if the team were to slow everything down in favour of getting concurrent multi platform support, there would still be endless complaining about AI, buildng, open world, multiplayer, optimization, etc… The one thing you might notice about ‘naysayers’ is they all have their own idea of what the team should focus on.

The best thing i can suggest to the team is to work on the campaign promises and push them out one by one until they’ve all been fufilled, and only then start adding more. And furthermore, don’t go into threads and try to placate people. because all that’s going to achieve is your community manager saying something that’s going to get screenshotted, taken out of context and placed next to a paragraph of text telling everyone to riot.
Did sean murray try to argue with people when no man’s sky came out to complete critical downfall? No, we got patch after patch until the game finally got to a state resembling the original marketng narrative. As a company, that’s all you can do - you don’t get to decide how your community behaves.

That’s not to imply going silent - if a thread remains civil then it’s okay to respond. Otherwise don’t give people some monument they think they can dump their frustrations on.

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If they feel they have to change direction to make a better game, they should. I don’t think they should just tick off the list of Kickstarter goals so people will get on with it. They’ve explained multiple times why they decided to do what they’re doing. Folks are within their right to express their opinion, but also need to either get on board or move on.

Your next point is tricky, because it’s a double edged sword (especially in this particular instance). If the devs do not respond then those folks use that as an example of how the devs aren’t listening to the community, that they ignore any and every bit of criticism, and that the devs only want a bunch of yes men on the forums. If they do respond then what they say is twisted to start an argument. Damned if ya do and damned if ya don’t.

I’m hoping what you said there was an example and not a fact. That would be the equivalent of a bully complaining about being bullied because someone called him out for bein’ a bully. I don’t care who you are, a person should only have to tolerate so much poking before they are within their rights to kindly tell someone to jog on. It’s not hypocritical, contradictory, or counter-productive and nobody should feel guilty for saying “that’s enough”.

sets a timer Let’s see how long it takes before @YetiChow dings me for tone again…I tried Yeti…I tried :glum:

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actually I agree fully with that post – although I’ve tried to avoid words like “either find something helpful to say or don’t say anything until you can say something (you at least reasonably think will be) helpful”, it’s very much how I’m feeling.

Something I’ve seen over and over is that intention =/= effect. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Every so often, we need to stop and look at where the journey is actually taking us; not just keep going because we want to make good on a promise and we don’t want to let anyone down.

That’s exactly what the dev team have been doing through 2017, and it’s the reason they’ve settled on the current path. We’ve already seen solid evidence that they want to support mac and linux… the same way they wanted to add titans more than a year ago, the same way they wanted to finish Stonehearth more than a year ago and give us all what we’ve been waiting for.

The gap between the game that the devs want to make and what they currently have is exactly what they’re working to shrink now. It’s unfortunately going to take some time; and during that time the only thing we can do to help speed the journey along is to show support. That is the nature of Early Access – there are opportunities to make a more tangible contribution (i.e. suggestions and constructive criticisms), but most of the time it’s just waiting, offering welcome, showing patience, and giving encouragement.

If a question/concern can’t be answered/addressed adequately, there comes a point where banging on about it doesn’t help anyone. And by the way,

unfortunately I’ve seen first-hand that this isn’t the worst-case scenaro. In fact I’ve seen multiple times now that these kinds of repeated “dead-end critcisms” (i.e. ones with no currently actionable solution) can draw energy away from challenges that actually could be worked on, and they often create disputes which polarise the community (as everyone has their own idea of what’s most important, and everyone clamours to be heard.) Left unchecked, such disputes quickly spill over into other matters; and the whole community suffers as a result. I’ve seen such disputes over priorities fester until they actively prevent any work on either priority. Robocraft is a perfect example of this in action recently, the tension between different player priorities reaching the point that most of the complexity and uniqueness was stripped out of the game in a vain attempt to make it appeal to more players… as a result the game is much less appealing overall, Robocraft’s player join-up rate is the same but player retention is tanking.

There comes a point where the devs have to decide what they’re doing with their own game, and the rest of us have to just deal with that. Some of us will like where it’s going and some unfortunately won’t; but nobody in that latter group will benefit from “crusading” to change the status quo. Suggestions and actionable criticism are great, but when they cross over into endless arguing or contrariness then nobody is benefitting from that. That’s the time to take a look around at the path being travelled, and make sure it still leads where we want to go.

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If the rest of us hadn’t had to fund this to make it possible in the first place, I’d have much greater sympathy with your position.

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I know it’s a slow built game, but I hope they do finish it. I really love this game and the way it plays. It’s a pretty unique game I believe and the only other one that comes close is another early access game that’s even less developed. I loved subnautica and did multiple playthroughs of that game and now it’s released, I love rust and that game is coming out of EA, I love this game and play it all the time so i’m gonna keep my hopes up that they finish with a well polished bug free game.

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Also if they’re lucky as well, mate - more platforms means a bigger audience/market. If they can’t pull it off, it’s less longterm resources for them as well.

Yea. Having the engineer able to make things like bridges and elevators would be amazing! But also means having to be held off until water dynamics and the building constructor overhauls respectively. I generally love engineers/artificers, but Stonehearth’s current Engineer does feel like more of a proof of concept that was demanded for than fulfillment of potential. Then again, I haven’t lost faith in what the class could become; while I’ll admit to having not thoroughly perused all the A23 files yet, last I checked there were still outstanding class features not implemented for the other classes as well (and that’s intentionally ignoring the classes not yet added at all) - so it is still entirely feasible for the Engineer to be re-addressed again later. Be it by the team, or an ambitious modder.

And I don’t have any qualms with modders picking up the parts that the devs don’t, especially seeing the development team does frequent the forums and thus sees everything modders are up to; they could even take and incorporate community made elements if they chose to do so.

I would like to point out this is being stated in a thread whose title begins with “Why is game dev so slow”…

From a development standpoint, though, seeing I have taken formal education in it and still work with people doing it… the choice tends to end up:

a) Do we split the team to work on both platforms concurrently, thus getting less actual progress on both?

b) Do we get as much done with the main build as possible, so all the problems with things that have to be changed for the new platform are faced at once?

c) Do we just throw together a quick port so the people waiting on it are happy to have anything at all available?

Option C will do little that is beneficial; you’ll go from people upset to not having anything, to people upset about how poor the quality is. No, they will not likely just be happy to have anything at all; you can never please everyone, least of all people who simply want to complain.
(And no, I am not implicating that to be the case for anyone here; that’s a statement about the general human population, not even limited to those on the internet).

Of the other two options, it really just comes down to the priorities, abilities, and comfort of the developers. If they are not able or comfortable with doing it…you’re still going to get an unpleasantly bad product to work with, and the other version might lose quality as well as a side effect. While that might not affect the testers now, that does affect the overall project and long term success.

Waiting isn’t fun. Sometimes it doesn’t seem worth it in the end, or outright isn’t worth it in the end. But unless you can and are going to help do something about it, waiting is the final choice. How you wait - patiently, impatiently, with or without questions / need for more information; that’s on you.

I appreciate @sdee taking time away from the other things she needs to get done to address the concerns of the community; no matter what I think of the content of her responses, positively or negatively, her time is still a resource that was redirected.

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eloquently put!

and yeah, I agree on the engineer – I fully hope to see it re-worked once there’s more tech in place for it to play around with. While it’s not a priority job at the moment, I’m hopeful the team will get a chance to look into it as part of the push for more content in 2018 :merry:

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Team Stonehearth is doing option B

The team said that they wanted to get the core game done then add the game to Mac and Linux. And some of the team in Stonehearth wants to do these platforms. The Wizard :sparkles: is one of them.

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Sorry, but as much as I’d like to say that its in the dev’s best interests to interact with the community as much as possible, I’ve never, ever seen a single instance of a developer or developers interject in a criticism thread that has turned sour (as many tend to do) and had meaningful positive effect. There is such a thing as a civil criticism thread, and it’s here that i’m saying it’s relatively safe to respond. The opposite, however, has happened time and time again.

And just to put some substance to my words here is an almost exact mirror situation going on at this very moment in the Star Citizen community: The community manager has been screenshotted making some very reasonable responses to a QnA that went sour, and hung up on the wall for everyone to tut - tut at. The same community manager proceeds to post in this thread and gets railed on for what are really just completely polite and amicable defenses. You’re right it’s a lose lose situation, but that not the point I’m trying to make. The point I’m trying to make is to take the lesser of two evils.

Folks are have the right to expect what they backed the product for in the first place. I agree that the devs can make other additions as they see fit, but unless they have the full support of the backers that bought in because of a certain feature, then it is actually morally wrong to not include or radically change it.

I’m saying that for an indie development company trying to make their first game, the last thing they want is a bunch of animosity sapping their reputation, support, and morale worst of all. Because the thing that guarantees a game’s downfall is a team who’s heart isn’t in it. I’m sure the devs do have the intention to eventually release all promised features to the best of their ability, but they need to realize that the later it gets done the worse it gets.

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Sorry, no…just no. If they purposely set out to misrepresent what they were doing, then yeah that’s wrong. If they started workin’ on bits and realized that it was a poor design choice, it’s not the same thing. Questioning their morals over something that has legitimately happened in software development from the start is and that every backer should have expected to one degree or another is wrong. Not to mention different backers had different interpretations of what said features would be. So not only is it wrong to hold them to a moral standard, it’s technically impossible for them to live up to it because not everyone had the same idea of what those standards were.

I get what you’re saying, but it basically boils down to the devs keeping their heads down, keeping their mouths shut, and kowtowing to a bunch of folks in an attempt to save face. I honestly feel like this is one of the biggest problems with EA/Kickstarter type things. It’s wonderful that projects that normally wouldn’t be started get a chance, but it’s horrible that the people who are actually trying/working on the project are basically held hostage by the backers. In a business situation with backers, cooler heads would likely prevail, as they’ve usually invested larger sums of money and don’t wanna see that flushed down the drain. But from any person on the net with a few extra dollars and an opinion trying to claim ownership? No Sir.

Edit: Had some wonky wording lol.

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It seems equally horrible that developers can take money on the basis of a set of ‘proposals’ and then proceed to change any and all that do not suit them.

You see if a developer says one thing and it turns out to be wrong (for whatever reason) then their credibility has taken a knock. If it appears devs have misled you once, why might they not be doing so again?

As ever, extreme arguments are put forward in forum. I don’t believe that the devs on this project are deliberately trying to mislead, nor do I think a few exasperated posts from backers equates to holding the devs hostage.

As a funding model crowdfunding has flaws. Less backing money was given to video game projects on KickStarter in 2017 than in 2016. Backers are learning to be much more careful with their money. I know I am. Under the ‘rules’ I operate now, StoneHearth would not have got my backing and maybe that would have been better for both parties.

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IF they purposely misrepresented themselves you’re right it is horrible. Have you always been able to follow through 100% with everything you’ve ever proposed? I was expressing a personal opinion, not arguing lol.

Do you consider EA purchasers to be backers too? Cause maybe that’s part of the confusion and was poor wording on my part. Though I did say “EA/Kickstarter type things”. Assaulting a game with bad reviews or smear campaigns to highlight a change folks don’t like (see Fipmips example) IS an attempt by some to hold the game hostage. EA games have been wrecked when the community loses patience and turns nasty. If ya don’t like a change it’s perfectly valid to express your opinion.

Apologies for whatever set ya off. Here’s hoping whatever features you’re disappointed about manage to get taken care of. :merry:

I’ll concede that it isn’t morally wrong to change kickstarter goals. 99 times out of 100 it’s out of necessity rather than dishonesty.

However you’re getting sidetracked and so am I - this isn’t a debate about backers vs developers. Like oldmacman pointed out, it doesn’t just suck for devlopers that are held hostage by the ticking time bomb that is their fan base, it sucks for everyone involved. It sucks for the hundreds if not thousands of backers who get disappointed at the failure of a promising new title, it sucks for any publisher that may have given funding somewhere down the line, and it sucks for the developers that ended up with not only a failed enterprise but also a ruined reputation and an overflowing inbox of death threats and impossible demands.

My stance isn’t on one side or the other - both have their claims. after all, the relationship between developer and backer(of any kind) is one of cooperation. The only thing I’m trying to relay is the method of progression that is most likely to result in a finished product.

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I absolutely agree it should be about cooperation and I apologize for getting sidetracked. I understand you believe that’s the best way to go about it. I respectfully disagree.

They shouldn’t check off points on a list because it’s what people expect just for the sake of getting it done. If they feel it’s best for the game to shift course, then that’s what they should do. I’d rather have a great game that’s late, than one that feels like it’s cobbled together and incomplete. We get enough of those these days lol. :slightly_smiling_face: (just my opinion)

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A: Game development is never simple, it takes time, most games before the “early access” business model came along took years to develop before ever getting released. some of the best games out there took at a minimum of 4 years to get developed, on very rare occasion does a game get made in a few years and actually gets finished before release.

B: You can NOT compare this game to Subnautica because of a multitude of reasons. one of many being that Stonehearth UNLIKE subnautica is running on an in house made game engine, Subnautica is being made using Unity, a premade engine that is used by many game developers most of which are unfinished open world survival games these days, oh wait that’s what subnautica is.

C: And on that note, Subnautica is also a completely different type of game to Stonehearth. Stonehearth is a type of game that’s never been completely done before, town building combined with minecraft mechanics and RPG/RTS mechanics all at the same time. It’s very hard to point out any single other game that does this that’s either been released, in development, or planned in the near future and already announced.

It’s far far easier to build an open world survival game these days because of how many there are to look at for a point of reference, many are built using already existing games as a base using their source code, and like i said, many are built using Unity Engine which has an abundance of premade purchasable scripts to build the game with little to no effort on the self proclaimed developers end. These of course are what we would refer to as “asset flips” when little effort is put in and all you do is buy the pieces of your game. I’m not saying subnautica is going to be that or is that, but if they are using premade assets to build their game than in MY opinion Stonehearth has a massive leg up on them because Stonehearth isn’t built in a premade engine, with premade assets, it’s made with in house software, in house assets, with a ton of effort to boot.

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