Today

Though that 15 minutes or an hour requires said community manager to run around, talk to all the other people doing work, ask them what they're doing, have it explained, then work on getting that information processed into an interesting/understandable form, then be able to spend 15 minutes or an hour to talk to the community. I mean I appreciate the nice simplicity of your argument, it just seems unlikely everyone knows what everyone is doing, (e.g. how garat above said he needed to go talk to the modding guys to be able to get us more details about the nitty-gritty of how modding tools/distribution will work out) and that "15 minutes to an hour" talking to the community is very much not the same as "15 minutes to an hour of time"

Ok. Let's take it to more of an extreme then.

So no one has the time to take a work day, or an afternoon?

Keeping the community informed is a great way to keep hype up, increase sales, give the community information to do the marketing for Uber, keep us engaged, and prevent drama from unexpected blindsides.

Other games do exactly this. My favorite example is Limit Theory, developed by one guy, who takes time every day to tell the community what he's been doing.

What if every team member took 15 minutes to write a short paragraph about what they're working on? Maybe an hour or two for the community manager to proof read and filter out some stuff that isn't ready for public release.

Point being. If Uber wanted to, Uber could do it with practically no impact on the release date. Even if it was just once every few weeks.

Thank you, I just started typing out something similar.

I'd like to add that while Brad knows a lot, he can't be expected to be completely knowledgeable every specialised field of game development. All of which required the people involved several years of training + experience. So he'd have to keep go around asking them. And Garat who's the project manager and one of the few who actually oversees the whole process. Diverting their attention away from their work. Which is all fine now and again. But not on the level you demand it to be.

Also, don't forget, there are only so many hours in a work day. And when your attention gets diverted when you're heavily in thought, it might cost you hours to get back up to the speed you were on before.

They could, but: at this point in development projects, they are usually doing at the very least a few hours of overtime a day. So that's an extra 15-20 minutes taken away from their private life, families and all that. And that private time is very important for these people to be able to regenerate a bit and bring more than a 100% 0f their intellectual selves back to work the next day.

What new aspects of modding (a fledgling, but immediately available feature) may or may not make it into the 1.0 release of the game? It's an interesting question.

Currently, we're deep in creating the infrastructure to support them and investigating various APIs we can release. The thing to understand with modding work in general is that it's a deeply involved process that can severely break the game at any point. We want to limit that so we can put out the most polished 1.0 build possible. Now to your question: we don't know precisely. There's a chance we can finish some APIs, but we're not close enough to know the answer right now. When we can give you an update, you betcha we will though.

Then you will realize how isn't 30 people working on PA at the moment, 'cos Toy Rush has a better Return of Investment.

Anyway, this doesn't disappoint me. What does, it's that apparently there is no road map for PA.

Nope. Uber employees don't really have the time to sit down and write about what they're doing daily. That's just not a realistically attainable goal from a consistency standpoint.

This kind of rumor-trolling isn't productive, dude.

I do not understand where you get that conclusion from. Not exactly knowing when a feature will be polishable publishable does not equal a lack of road map.

It's a little disappointing that the community doesn't deserve 15 minutes of a developer's time once a month.

To clarify, I don't think Brian was suggesting this be a daily thing - fortnightly would probably be ample to keep people satisfied; even a quick 2 sentences summarizing their week written after Friday lunchtime. A la Kerbal Space Program.

You miss the point.
You may not know how the software business works, but you usually can't afford these additional distractions when you have a deadline and you have to load software in Production (read 1.0)
It's not about taking the time, it's about taking it NOW !

Then what are we getting now, in this thread?

Yeah, funny how it came through exactly like that.

Anyways, I think we simply have a drastically different understanding of things. As an events project manager I approach things from the operational point of view first and foremost, as the top priority is getting stuff done. Always.

So I can understand Uber's position quite well.

Don't get me wrong, of course actually developing the game comes first. Uber are best placed to know what they can and can't achieve, so if they say "we can't give you these regular updates" then I take their word for it. They know how much we want it so they wouldn't deny us that for no good reason; it wouldn't be in their interests to do so.

However, I'm a broker in my day job. I spend literally all day trying to get parties with different and conflicting goals to work together. So that was me trying to broker some sort of happy medium on the communications front

As a dev, it does not in fact ever take 15 minutes to interact with the community in any capacity. Every time I make a post it is because there is either a simple, direct answer that can bring resolution to an issue, or it's because I have spent the last 2 hours reading the forums. Then I spend another hour thinking of my response, making sure that my response cannot be taken out of context or abused, editing my response, possibly getting it reviewed by another, and then realizing that the response is actually unnecessary and delete the entire message. Realizing then that I've just wasted several hours of my work day that could go to making awesome new features, or fixing bugs that desperately need to go out.

I know I am one of the more quiet devs on the team but I probably do this about once or twice a week because I feel strongly about this game and about the time I am putting into it. But I also refrain from posting because I know that any post I make will be in an official capacity and instead of it being a guy on the forum posting this stuff, it's an Uber Employee posting this stuff.

When you see a post like this from me, or one of the other devs, it was not written in 15 minutes as a thoughtless, shorthand response. It is because I stopped working on a game I love long enough to do my research, think my response out, and be as civil as possible in such a way that Uber didn't waste the money that they paid me to make this post.

True dat.

In the cause of transparency, I just deleted two posts. One was just a response to the main offender, so it was just a casualty. There is a post, that hasn't been deleted, that is on the verge of outright libel. I'm leaving it. Some folks will be able to figure it out for themselves.

I like this discussion, it's interesting. But if you make absurd accusations, you better come equipped with facts to back em up, or be prepared for the consequences.

yea for us, this is easy. Write it, post it. As a company there are standards to uphold.
Although, as a citizen of the earth, we kinda have standards to uphold too...

It's great that we get as much community interaction as we do, and @brianpurkiss, i think we get a lot more than 15 minutes out of all dev responses per month.

And here we go again, wasting Ubers time to comment in the forum instead of working on the game...

There are other Kickstarter games out there where the communication between backers/community and developer is minimalistic... Uber is a great example of the opposite and still it is not enough... now time is being spent on explanations, picking on words...

No wonder Uber might post less, since every word is being dissected... for future statements they need to hire a lawyer. ^^