Scope Matters

I'm not gonna sticky this. Even my own tremendous ego can't handle the thought of making a sticky post of my personal blog. But I had written this a month ago, and only tonight finished my editing of it, and decided to post it. I was reminded when the topic of space battles came up. Again. I figure if it bores you all it'll be off the front page in a day anyway.

So, from weather to space battles, if you want some good insight into how game devs think about new features, and a good checklist to think about when you're considering a new feature for your own game, have a read. Comments, telling me I'm full of crap, or whatever you want appreciated. Though.. be polite or I'll just ignore you.

Some day I'll get it hosted so it actually works correctly through flailingdino.com, but for now, you can read the latest update here:
http://flailingdino.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/scope-matters/

*Bro-fist*

Mike

Working on projects/games makes you better at giving feedback. This was a good quick read on tempering enthusiasm with design considerations - not to discourage suggestions but rather improve them.

Great blog post! And good timing right after my rant hehe. ;D

Thanks for the good post. I'll readily admit to suggesting a couple of those ideas...I know that not all of them are feasible, but I, in my non-developer mind, love asking myself 'what if?' Sometimes the "this is why it shouldn't be" isn't always apparent to me, and when I do find out, I'm happy to have my idea thrown out, cause there's lots of other stuff out there.

I think you guys are doing a great job of managing yourselves, and understanding what you can take on. Just enough "Awesome!" and just enough "Let's be realistic here."

(Reading all these coding issues almost makes me dread deciding to finally take a class in Java at college...but then again, I'm excited enough that the dread kinda just disappears ).

I can't wait to join you all in the alpha.

Can we make this part a sticky? Something labeled with:

"OK You HAVE AN IDEA: What to do now:''

ZOMG, best idea evar!
(let excitement subside to non hyperventilating levels)
.. before you post, please answer the following questions:

1. At its core, what is the idea, and what impact would it have on the game?

2. Does that impact positively influence the core gameplay loops of your game?

3. Does that impact add complexity to the design? And if so, is it an acceptable level of complexity?

4. Even if the answers to those questions turn out to be yes to 2, and no or yes/yes to 3, do you have the people to deliver this feature?

There are a lot more variables to take into consideration, but this simple pass will stop most seemingly great ideas from actually taking your entire project off on a tangent.

oh wow pawz, if you liked this you would love extra credit
depth vs complexity <- tangential to this topic
http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/show/extra-credits

And those aren't just good guidelines for developing games. It's a good idea when developing most pieces of software too.

Bigger is better
Always

Who gives the homeworld example exactly? When I say space combat what I mean is combat on the orbital layer similar to orbital wars for supcom. Just a high altitude air layer with different set of units that can move to other planets if they want to.

People should be forced to use those bullet points as headings when suggesting new ideas, just to keep the silliness to a minimum.

How are you going to balance that?

Every experienced RTS player knows that air is incredibly hard to balance. What you want to do is add a new level (being able to move from one planet to the next on their own) that is even harder to balance.

Those units would be either so expensive that they would be gimmicky at best or so overpowered that there would be no reason to build anything else mid to late game.

Aye, a big issue with such an idea for orbital is that it ends up either as:

- airplaines IN SPACE

or

- naval combat IN SPACE

Which is both not that interesting (and a pain to balance) when we have those at a ground level allready.

------

As for the topic, good points though I've to add, that point 4 is almost impossible for the lay audience to answer. Knowing how much work some features take and how much manpower uber has available is inside knowledge most of us don't have.

I know, a lot of people here have done some works on mods and thus have some knowledge how much work adding even simple features can be, but for the general populace its just not something they can even accurately guess.

Just as a reminder to some people here that expect everybody else to have their knowledge about software developement.

Your post doesn't even make sense in relation to what I said.

If you say so...

You're full of crap... wonderfully interesting beautiful crap.

I think your weather balance examples were over the top; all of the problems you brought up seemed like worst possible implementation scenarios that were generally easily solvable. I wish you would've focused less on the gameplay problems presented by weather and more on the amount of time it takes to solve these problems + explaining how weather doesn't really fall in line with the core goals of the game. You had the one paragraph but it needed to be, like, 3 paragraphs with a bullet list and exclamation points.

Overall a great read. Thanks for this!

P.S. Settings > General > Tagline.

Ok (and thanks for the critique!) and yes, they were a bit over the top.. but.. have some fun. How would you solve them, while meeting the criteria I set in the bullet points? Most importantly, how would it make things more fun?

Have to agree with pants. Most of the weather argument was the same "worst possible implementation" mindset that you guys use to defend controversial announcements. You already have a system that hides unit readability (fog of war), and I don't think most are asking for random gameplay encounters.

The only real question is: "Is the time and money worth the aesthetic gain?". I'm guessing you guys have already decided it's not internally.

I always imagined that weather could be purely visual similar to how spore did it: the atmosphere/clouds is only really visible on the peripheral of the planet, thus meaning that vision isn't impaired, but it still adds to the 'atmosphere.' How would it make things fun? Well. Hmm. I guess it's akin to the fun of pretty explosions: it looks nice