Today I had an idea for the planetary documentation and I hope I am not too late with it to be considered. Except for a mention in the live streams that you have one guy working on it I do not recall anything else about it being said. It would be great if it could cover how a publisher would have influenced the project in regard to: Budget Would the effective budget have been higher than what you have collected with kickstarter+early access (I fully understand that you will not want to talk exact numbers here, but some relative hints would be nice) How much of the theoretical extra budget would have been consumed by the constant request for status reports/meetings by the publisher and hours of talking sense into the publisher. Game features Which features would have been killed and why? Would the publisher have forced features on the project (e.g. things like facebook integration) Audio Orchestral score realistic or not worth the effort from publisher view? Do publishers actually care about music/sound effects and influence them? Visuals "Comic style" (what do we actually call it?) visuals for the units are not typical in the genre - would a publisher have allowed it in a retail game as visuals are often selling points. Technology/tools How hard would it have been to convince a publisher that developing a new engine from scratch is necessary? Or would they simply have demanded to not do spherical maps? Which technology would have been forced? How do these forced tools affect development, e.g. DRM? How and when would a publisher have influenced the system requirements? Theoretically the game runs on 32bit systems, but practically the game will probably only be fun with 64bits and a sensible amount of memory - what would a publisher have said to this? Development methodology Typically clients/publishers have a hard time understanding iterative development cycles and therefore demand ETA's on features. How does this demand affect development efficiency/productivity? PR What do publishers typically demand from developers in order to fuel their PR machine and how does this affect your work? I mean things like forced interviews, visits by gaming magazines, providing photoshopped screenshots, demo material. Which restrictions do publishers impose on developers when talking to fan/press? E.g. Forums, Live streams, reddits, blogs, technology demonstration, internal playtesting, alpha/beta/gamma versions - which of these would not have been done? How easy/hard was it to create and maintain awareness in the press after the kickstarter success and how much did e.g. the live streams replace traditional communication? Publishing Which aspects of self publishing the game did you not expect? For which parts of self publishing did you miss a publisher to take of it? Misc How hard was it to deal with community critisism in comparison to publisher critiscism? What would you do differently the next time you had this kind of project? How did the public bug tracker improve identifying and killing bugs in comparison to closed testing? How much of not being required to give a f*** about reviews, press did make your life easier and free your mind, knowing that the game is already a success before actually starting with development. These are just some ideas of what could be covered. I believe that the answers to these questions are very interesting to the community and could also be a statement about the industry in general and an inspirational message to publishers of how game development could be done differently These questions could be done as a separate chapter or be part of the interviews that I assume you will be doing with the project members. I am myself a professional software developer/architect and although not being in the games industry our clients are practically what publishers are for you. It expect that many problems that publishers cause are identical to what I experience with my clients. Sometimes it feels like raising a child that does not yet know what is good/bad and you constantly need to talk sense into them and protect them from themeselves - this is especially the case when the client is technically challenged or is driven by political requirements.
Ok let's have some fun. It's really hard to say because I don't think a publisher would have signed up for it. Certainly the game would have been in development for at least 2 years before you saw anything with a publisher. Likely the focus would be on different things. Very theoretical. Basically with a publisher the game doesn't really exist.... Really hard to say. Realistically if it was a big budget production some features would be added and some removed. It really depends no the publisher and their particular view of the universe. It just depends on the publisher. SupCom didn't do orchestral and most games don't so that would be a data point. It depends on how it was pitched and what the budget and market is. Probably the biggest issue is that publishers want to sell millions of units and we are content to sell a lot less than that. So the focus would be mass market. For example like in the latest C&C where the directive was "LoL with tanks". Plenty of publishers still seem to be pushing on Dota/Moba games for example because they see the money league brings in. New engines would be a difficult pitch. No idea what they would force. Really these questions are too theoretical. It means we have to spend a lot more time on dog and pony shows and special builds. Also getting paid based on milestones which cause the emphasis to be on meeting the milestone and not what's best for the game. Overall it adds a significant drag. We would be jumping through a lot more hoops for things like screen shots. As for the forums it's unlikely we would be allowed to talk to you directly. They want to manage the interactions. We are used to self publishing to there hasn't been anything unexpected. We don't do things like retail distribution so we partnered up for that. The community is a lot easier to deal with than someone that can hold back your paycheck. Not much I would do differently other than maybe not put so many hours in. But I always say that. Bug testing is still an issue for us so I can't say we have that figured out. I'm not sure people are that interested in the business side of this stuff. It's really only interesting to people developing software.
A great deal of the community struggle with this too, and regularly demand ETA's, does this ever result in "dog and pony shows and special builds" for us?
Nope. What it results in is a lot of frustration and heartache for the team when they bust *** on stuff and still get flak from the community about not doing enough, fast enough or good enough. ETA's are the devil. We build stuff and we release it. Last week after we released the new lobby I posted a thread to try and resolve the design to everyone's satisfaction. From that post came a plan which was then implemented and released in a couple of days. There is no time in here for dog and pony shows. Hell we barely have time to even make any kind of promotional materials. Certainly no time for dog and pony shows.
And this is why we can't have nice things. People who moan that "this this and this" aren't in yet, and that the devs aren't concentrating on the right things, would do well to remember that these are real people, working their faces off to implement feature after feature. Stay strong Uber, it's going to be EPIC.
Good. Just remember there's plenty of us who do appreciate what you've achieved and how quickly it's been done. A lot of criticism offered at least attempts to be constructive and that which doesn't is more often born of ignorance and not malice. Try to fight that human nature of focusing on the negative when on balance the positive outweighs it. I remember in my old part-time job during University how one bad customer in the supermarket could ruin your whole day if you let them, despite the fact the vast majority of people I dealt with had been perfectly reasonable, and not insistent I was trampling their consumer rights because they couldn't get a refund on an empty yoghurt tub 3 weeks after purchase because it tasted funny before they went on holiday...
This was a super cool read. Thanks @neutrino Thank you too @banthor for the thread. It is super awesome that the devs can actually communicate with us as fans and consumers. Well done Uber
We give you flak because we love you and everything you do. Essentially when we do give compliments, it's really well deserved.
You should build an awesome commander and only release it to people active enough (posting and voting) on the bugtracker. Also promote it more in general, sometimes i feel like SXX is the only one going on about it.
That might get more activity on the bug tracker, but that might not be a positive thing. You will get people who don't know what they're doing who end up cluttering the bug tracker and adding noise just so they can get the incentive.
Hi, just want to thank you for taking the time to answer the questions and let you know I have also been itching to ask these questions. Thanks so much for your candidness!
