Just a general question that's about the estimated delivery date of Planetary Annihilation. The original estimation is July 2013. But the pledges have more than doubled the amount of money at this point, along with the stretch goals that come with it. In theory, won't this push the estimated delivery past July 2013 just to add in these features? I would totally understand that. After all, we would get a bigger game on release day. It just seems to me that you shouldn't crunch the same amount at 900k goal for normal release as the 2mil with stretch goals.
well I would say tomorrow is a good date. I guess, they make maybe the game itself till july and the skretchgoal behind the date maybe :s?
I can't find the exact post but I do seem to remember neutrino saying they'd simply use the increased budget to up the number of people working on the project.
While they may be able to up the staff and get the base game done quicker, they still really cannot rush beta testing. I hope they'll do a long beta and the balance will be 95% finalised at release. I HATE when a game is released but the balance keeps getting patched constantly, it just kills a big part of the joy to come up with new strategies when you know it will be nerfed soon after you perfect it. With a released game, change the maps played if you don't like how the game plays, rather than force constant changes on everyone.
I believe they answered this in the Totalbiscuit interview, suggesting that they would use the extra stretch goal money to increase development resources. In an ideal world, as long as they budgeted correctly for the stretch goals it shouldn't impact release date, but being realistic it certainly increases the risks of delays. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqDSh34V ... e=youtu.be
I wouldn't mind a delay...it would actualy make sense to delay it but they probably need to release it fast I guess in order to start making money to keep their company up. Tight situation for them.
I dont really care about some delays as long as they make a awesome rts that will hopefully revive the whole rts genre iam happy.
The thing everyone has to realize is that release dates and plans are all estimates. The enemy always has a way of screwing over your plans Also the idea of a product "release" is completely different today than in the past. The idea here is get the game up and running so we can play. Once it's actually got more than that we open up the alpha and patch on a continuous basis. Then once we think it's in good shape we open up the beta. This all happens as we continue to add content to the game. Once it's all there we "release" which means you can get into the game without a beta key. So think about it as an iterative process. The "old" way would be we would work towards a gold master that goes into the box. That paradigm actually added quite a bit of inefficiency because it had to be perfect (and most games still patched day 0 anyway). So is it possible all of this goodness could push the schedule? Yes, it's possible. We will do have a budget to stick to though.
Heh, I do believe the biggest cost when government projects are delayed that causes them to go over budget is the people they have to pay to finish it. NASA, I'm thinking of you...
As a software engineer I'm going to start with a giant disclaimer. I don't know exactly how all the features are intended. Also even in nice situations you can still get weird cases that can lock step development. That said. Looking at the actual features (assuming I'm not misinterpreting) there is quite a lot of room for parallelism in this project. First up the orchestra can obviously just go off and do its thing. You replace the place holder music with orchestral music as it comes in. Galactic Warfare can be pretty isolated from the main game. Essentially it is generating a graph that in turn makes calls to generate maps and to start games (either locally or via the web). Provided you can give myfunc(){assert("not implemented")} style entry points for functionality you can do a lot without having a complete and working game. As long as you can depend upon that interface being solid (big assumption) you can theoretically just do it. In practice the interface will change and GW will alter but that doesn't mean you have to twiddle your thumbs until the core game is complete. Art work again can be made concurrent. Stick giant boxes for tanks and replace with actual art as it comes in. Long story short. Work can be done concurrently. Because of this they'll almost certainly slip :mrgreen: .
Yay! Game Development! (Been there done that ) I am pretty sure the devs are aware of these things though.
Pretty much a lot of this. We call the box thing "white boxing" the game where you use white boxes for stuff before you have a real model. You do need to have a certain level of stuff done before you can do anything though. The next 3-4 months are the critical engineering time to get all of the base stuff done.
The good thing is that you probably won't really have to rush it like with SMNC, and please before putting on Steam I think it would be wiser to keep it on your servers to not risk another too early release.
And when you've already got a part of the sales money... There shouldn't be any rush to get out of beta before it's very much done.
Not really!!! You throw people early. If you do it late they have a lot of stuff to learn about what has been done, how it was done, how it works (white box). Such learning costs time and $$$ and may result in delays insteads of speedups.
It doesn't matter!!! I want it for yesterday with all features + horny and sexy stripper in the box. They are late already and they didn't say anything about strippers. Who cares now?
