Does Uber have vision

Or have they started something that they haven't thought through yet.

I am not really sure if this is supposed to be an honest question or a hate thread.

If it is an honest question then look at the kickstarter.

Its not hate its love.

I see Uber's development of Planetary Annihilation much like raising a child,

You create it, you mould it, you do your best to raise it into the vision you imagined, but when all is said and done it becomes what it is and you love it all the same.

Lol. If it is a good idea, you can easily fake it until you make it.

The point is, right now it is turning out great. No foreseeable problems. Lots of work left, but no problems on radar.

Everyone is trying to have a good time playing at this point, so I don't see how vision or lack thereof is important. That being said, Uber isn't psychic and even their kickstarter didn't portray huge surface curvature that they ran into right off the bat upon building the game, but how CAN you see that coming until you do it? It isn't a problem anyway, it is working out splendidly. Nothing, including vision or problems or worries or mountains of work, is going to really stop this from working out at this point.

Most think are like that when you build them.... You have this perfect picture in your mind and.... then you have the actual product of your work..... I'd say there perfect picture isn't perfect but is drawing ever so close to what the had envisioned!!!!!!

KS trailer was the vision.
It was the visual footstone.
The scale.
The brass heavy orchestral.
The colour pallete.
Cartoony yet violent explosions.
The unit cannons.
The planet smashing.

There's the vision/direction/goal they are pushing for.

Not thought through? That would require making the trailer by accident.

You must not have read anything about PA.

I suggest you go do some reading about PA, or at the very least go watch the Kickstarter trailer.

Of course they have vision. The creators have been wanting to do a RTS game for quite some time and dreamed up and planned out most of the game before they made the Kickstarter trailer.

Sheesh.

Stop trolling the forums dude.

There are two extremes in game development.

Overthinking:

• This form of development is where you spend so much time in design documents, meetings and planning, you end up with impossible to maintain documents, plans and schedules, and never end up making the game, or do so very slowly.
• It loses flexibility, as once stuff is down on paper, people have a much harder time staying flexible about what can change.
• I can enumerate quite a few other problems with overthinking, but you get the idea.

Underthinking:

• You end up iterating much more because ideas aren't quite baked enough. Not always a bad thing, but if you do this, it's something to do early. By the time you have a full team up and running, if you don't have enough solid ideas about what's in place, it can result in a little bit of extra time trying to figure it out.
• Honestly, that's the biggest risk from underthinking a design, so long as you have a fairly clear idea of the game you're trying to make - especially if you've made lots of the types of games in question before.
• Taken too far, of course, underthinking is a disaster. If your design is "I have a great idea for an app!".. you're doomed.

Obviously, we err more toward underthinking. Documentation for documentation's sake is bad, overplanning designs before you see exactly how they're gonna work is bad. We took some huge risks on this project - chronocam is a much bigger technical hurdle than I think most people realize. Multiple planets and round maps is a huge departure for standard RTS gameplay.

Do we have vision? I dunno. Mine's 20/20, but only due to lasik. Joking aside, I think the players ultimately will answer that question when the game is shipped.. and even then, it will continue to grow and evolve after that, so.. I'm not entirely certain of the purpose of the OP. It feels like trolling, given the amount of detail provided, but regardless, there's your actual answer.

TLR: Verdict is still out, in my opinion. Vision usually isn't recognized at the time it's happening, but only through the lens of introspection and time.

I sure hope the final answer is yes.

I like that people ask for both innovation and an assurance of eventual quality, while forgetting that you don't get to have both. If you want someone to provide you with something that's genuinely new and different, you have to accept that no one, including the providers, can really know how it's going to turn out or if the idea is even viable at all, by definition. It's new. It's the unknown. If you're on this site, you already know what the vision is - what you're really asking is whether or not the creators can find a way to effectively realize their vision, and that's something that simply can't be answered. We, including the devs (if I may be so bold), are just along for the ride, hoping and striving for the best. Isn't that the nature of any creative act?

You want to see what a rock-solid guarantee of a certain, predictable level of quality looks like in a video game? See Call of Duty. If you want anything more innovative, be prepared to swim in unknown waters, with all the risk that implies.

Even though he might really have been trolling, I'm not trying to harangue the OP. It's an obvious but subtle truth about creativity and ambition, and one that's easy to forget in an age (and privileged environment) when awesome **** seems to constantly pop into existence for the sole purpose of precisely satisfying our momentary wants and cravings. It's easy to forget that every one of these myriad modern miracles is the descendant of countless daring failures. If this is not to be the paradigm-shifting RTS that revolutionizes the genre forever, maybe it'll set the stage for the one that will.

So. As with all things in life, just be satisfied that the endeavor is being made in earnest, and don't be too attached to outcomes.

I agree with everything you say except they left out some of the best features of they're previously best titles, namely scale. I believe that this game is doomed because what they are trying to achieve is to much in terms of performance.
If they were going to get this to run massive scale then they would be able to generate a lot more planets in one game than they have so far. I've seen enough to realise that the massive scale won't be coming.

timevans999, I don't know what you are trying to do here, but you are not engendering a positive response from many members of the community here. You may want to relax and calm down a bit before slinging insults at people, whether they are intended as insults or not.

Whatever point you are trying to get across, you are not going to do it by antagonising people.

Ok sorry i'll try another way.

From what i've learned about companies, it's that vision is that you "envision" where you want to end up. So the vision is definitely there. Some things more blurry than others but still...

Mostly, it's a matter of going back and forth between over and underplanning: some thing you really need to know well and other things are just a "we'll cross that bridge when we get there" scenario.

So what you're saying is that you can afford Underthinking approach because you all have long experience in the RTS genre ? At the same time you're putting lots of innovation which have never been seen before. So isn't Underthinking approach dangerous even for veteran game devs like you, when it's not only about making the exact same game you did many times before ?
And one additional question : So far, did you learn again something about game dev by working on PA that you had not figured out before in your previous experience ?

Garat only said that they leaned more towards underthinking, so think of a 1-10 scale, with 1 being overthinking and 10 being underthinking, Uber is somewhere around a 6-8.

Mike

I am a developer and I have written lots of code, just not any games. What Garat was trying to communicate to you guys with out getting super technical was cycles of development. Writing software really is engineering and different companies have different approaches, but inside of the industry (At this point I am talking about writing software in general not just games) there are a few methodologies that are widely understood. Like Garat tried to point out one school of thought tends to have lots of pointless meetings and plans and bullshit. These teams tend to have lots of useless personal on them that lord over the actual programmers and it is a nightmare. Consequently this approach isn't very wide spread anymore and I think as a whole it died in the 90's. The second methodology that Garat kind of talked about is what is called Rapid Application Development aka RAD as far as I can tell RAD is the dominate methodology in the industry today. That isn't to say that RAD is the only methodology that gets used, there are alternatives and variants. It really all boils down to the team you're on and the team members.

another name for the "err towards underthinking" paradigm is known as Agile Development.

As the name implies, it allows for great flexibility on implementation. One myth though is that the developers do not have a defined end goal (vision in the terms of the OP). This simply is not true. Almost all software development, including games, has clearly defined end goals. It has to, kemm0 comparing it to engineering is exactly right (that is why software development is often called software engineering). Consider an engineer for a building, what are the odds he is will approve construction if the blueprints are missing for the top 5 floors? not likely. He may not care too much about how the construction company actually builds the building, so long as a safe structure is built in the end (worker safety is a problem for the construction company to deal with).

Uber lacking vision is simply an impossibility, especially considering how far they have come in how short a time. Does this mean they consider what sorts of data structures they are going to use to implement a feature? maybe on a very high level but it will be very loosely defined and can quickly change.


And regarding the lack of scale problem previously mentioned, that is a bit premature. This game is missing a lot of optimization so far, that includes memory usage (which is the primary limiting factor atm).

I can run a 6+ planet system np (assuming they aren't stupid big) on 8 GB of ram. If that is too small for you with the current player caps, then invest in more ram.

Kemm and Mike have it pretty close. We have always embraced a daily scrum standup for the whole company, and more recently, we've started to do agile iterations again to provide a little more time boxing on work. And on that scale of 1 - 10, I'd say we're a 7. Realistically, we should probably be a 6. But we're getting there.

By the time October hit of last year, we had probably a solid sense of about 75% of what we wanted to do, though we didn't have traditional design documents. The other 25% were those questions that you can't realistically even know until you see what the first 75% looks like.

As of today, we probably know, or think we know, about 95% of what we want. There are still a few unknowns that frankly may not even be solidly understood until the game is almost ship ready. But that's why we plan on continuing to work on it.