Progressbar for development

Fear not, I have the answer!

Bacon.

Tell us how many bacons you have for critical bacon mass. Since the probability of bacon decay is unknown, it's the perfect system. Every week add a layer of bacon, and when finished, blow it up.


->


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Problem solved.

Well, there is the concept of road map. Not necessarily specific dates for each, but developers might be able to showcase whenever one of these items is done.

The stages in game development are far too iterative for a progress bar to even make sense.
It might be at 10% one day, but suddenly going back to 1% or something because they've discovered something that needs a real good fixin'.

They are no where near even being able to put up a progress bar. Game development takes time and it would be a waist to put a progress bar up no if they ever do. Because as you add features you could go one step forward but 2 steps back with bugs that then have to be identified and fixed and when fixing bugs you can also create more. Its a time consuming process and it can take a while. Thats why I believe that the best estimate for an Alpha is around 6 months. But a progress bar will not help because many features are created at the same time but take different amounts of time to finish and iron out. This will take a while guys and we just have to have faith in the developers to complete this amazing project.

I say they post a progress bar, but emulate a Windows progress bar as much as possible.

Development time remaining: 6 months, 13 days, 47 minutes
Development time remaining: 6 months, 7 days, 17 minutes
Development time remaining: 87 months, 33 days, -4 minutes
Development time remaining: 2 months, 5 days, 61 minutes
Development time remaining: 5 months, 4 days, 3 minutes

[Progress bar then displays 100% for the next couple of months]

Hah, yes

Just hope our progress bar doesn't look like this:

Perhaps more like this? It demonstrates progress, of a sort...

That's one heck of a keyboard! I bet you could just rinse it off in the sink and it'd be fine xD

Mike

Pinwheel of doom run away!!! LOL I remember looking at that thing at my highschool. Thats why I started bringing a laptop.

Obvious I was not at all clear about my thoughts. I will try to clarify my self.

First of I'm a developer and I currently do this on day to day bases. Yes, its some pressure to actually finish but then again if you hit an major problem that you didn't foreseen. The release of that part just get pushed to the next sprint. And you learn from it and also note you feel proud during the presentation. (We have a release demo and blog post )

The parts that are in each sprint is up to the developers/graphics designer/sound people and so on. They setup the goal of the sprint. How many sprints and when alpha/beta/RC/final release will be is unknown. Time will tell. But to a beginning an approximate time can be set eg Alpha needs these features and we should be done around Mars 2013 (just as an example!!). An during the beginning of next year you should have a better clue if that is feasible and maybe adjust. And as you getting closer to Mars with more and more sprint done. You can better tell the date.

There will be many part of this PA that some depend on other and some can be done in parallel. The parts that can be done in the following 2-4 weeks is the sprint and preferably these parts can be under one goal. These goals are the one that is presented on the blog page. Important note here: PA can only present what they did in the previous sprint and the goal for the next. Not ALL sprints and all goals!!

For me as end user I don't relay care if there are 30 of 50 different part of PA but I'm interested in the progress. Therefore one progressbar is very good. Say that you in the beginning can identify 25 components and when one is done you have done around 4%. (I know that components seldom are equal in size, but it give you an indicator). When done you put the progressbar at around 4%. (No numbers to begin with, no need). If you later find a couple more components (and you will) then you adjust the progress accordantly.

In the blog post you you can better describe what is happening. eg "Well this sprint we found out XXXXXX and so we need to add this and that so we need to add 2 more sprints to be able to finish PA."(Hope you get the point)

Mostly the blog post will contain achievements like: "This sprint we finished of zooming and rotation of a planet. See this video". As many followers of PA are interested in Technics you can likely add nice details of the solution especially Technics that are important for later mods of the game.

Also note previous estimates say july 2013 that means only 12-20 sprints from now...

/EgU - hope I made my self a bit more clearer.

Perhaps a mix of all of these posted ideas would also work. They could just have a progress bar of awesome made up of bacon, where whenever they finish something they make the piece of bacon longer. And instead of limiting it to say out of 100% or an ETA it could literally be an image of ever extending bacon. Why limit ourselves to percentages etc?

They also talked about working on this game and adding content after release, and they could continue adding more bacon to the bacon strip/bar.