[Suggestion] Cool idea/feature, but not got the time or money? (KS Update #26)

[RGS]

KS Update #26 was an interesting an honest update IMO. Great to hear the truth rather than just ‘good stuff’ - Exactly the sort of updates I want to hear personally. I hope (and believe) that the audience of this game is mature enough to take it. Unfortunately there will always be some that don’t and moan (look at Star Citizen’s recent delay of AC; only a few days over and the forums exploded with whiners…), but hopefully the majority of us aren’t that way inclined. Anyway, on to my point:

My take on the matter of the extra content/ideas for which there is currently no time or money to implement is to keep them organized into groups on a database with certain values added to each, such as:

• Perceived value to the player (big or small addition; how ‘fun’ is it? etc.).
• Time to create (in terms of artists/programers/designers + time to prototype).
• Dependencies and implications on other game mechanics (+ ‘synergises well with’).
• Category/Group and sub-category (mini-game, visuals/immersion only, overarching game mechanic etc.)

(I’m sure there are plenty of others too, just some quick examples)

This will then create a substantial and informative list which can easily be sorted and ranked. It may be that some of the ‘top’ items are deemed ‘so damn cool’ as to justify the time to implement, alternatively they may not be worth it when viewed against the big picture. The majority will probably fall in between; into the space of ‘we’d love to, but just don’t have the resources.’

These items could then possibly make it into a DLC, or be shunted into the next Act (in many cases becoming retroactive in the first). The important thing is that they’re all there to see, can easily be considered and ‘weighted’ in a ‘resources to impact’ ratio.

Another thing that’s extremely important is to not make any decisions in regards to the implementations of confirmed features/mechanics which would actually stop a good idea from being made possible in future. There are many examples of this type of thing, but just for e.g. let’s say the tiered clothing system (which I know we’re getting). It would be far harder to implement ‘down the road’ if the characters and outfits had been created a different way (massive amounts of re-working of assets, to the extent that it would very likely be completely unfeasible budget-wise had it not been designed this way from the beginning). Same will go for attachments, customisation and whatnot and any number of other things.

All I’m saying really is that future possible plans should be borne in mind when creating work, in particular systems and the technicalities of the way things are setup. For a task which takes one month, two extra days for creating the systems in a slightly different (more flexible) way might well be worth it in the long run. If nothing else it’s at least good to be making properly informed decisions; “We can do it like this and for now it’ll look the same as if we do it the other way, but going forward you can completely forget about implementing ‘inset feature name here’ and that also means ‘inset feature name here’ would be out too.”

Anyway - Just some thoughts.

Keep up the great work guys. Looking forward to future updates!

[YuusouAmazing]

I backed lots of games and as far as I can tell many of them are way behind their original schedule. But this is okay. We as customers barely get to know the status of the game until it’s officially announced by the publisher and / or developer. Until then the game has been in development for several months so we don’t know of any drawbacks during this period of development.

I want honest updates on the development. One of the games I mentioned in some posts is TUG which now goes the wrong way. You only get updates on the development once they push a new version of the game to the download servers. However you don’t get much of the background. I just checked the update and still nothing about the Beta. They’re about a half year behind the original schedule and early 2015 was the main release date. The guys of Warhorse know what it’s like to work on an own engine and it seems like the guys at NerdKingdom (devs of TUG) didn’t expect this amount of work. You can have the brightest guys in the team but this doesn’t make the games run smoother or generally speed up the development. Therefore the argument that Warhorse has AI specialists of the Charleston University doesn’t impress me that much. It’s not meant to be an offense, don’t get me wrong. Even if some PhD’s of the MIT would develop some awesome engine, I wouldn’t be impressed. Just because someone has the title in a specific topic doesn’t result in a genius that can be used for game development.

It is not enough to have just one mind for a certain topic. No person has the same experience and even the lack of experience might result in creativity to overcome certain problems during development which a routinier would solve with pure logical and long-term brainwork. There’s some idiom in German which goes like this: “If Siemens knew, what Siemens knows, it would be unbeatable.” That means even a designer might solve a coder’s issue and vice versa. You need to combine all the brains to get the best out of your team. Sure everyone is specified in certain topics but the best ideas initially come from people who barely have any experience in this topic. Some proposed ideas might be plain silly yet lead to conclusions and great ideas for improvements.

I don’t know how the process for ideas looks like at Warhorse Studios. It is possible to work with the idea that everyone can contribute to every topic. Just like the community in the forum is doing it: sharing ideas without knowing how it’s going to be implemented. The one who implements the idea is sometimes not the person who initially had this idea. And if I talk about ideas, it’s not only about features, it’s also about processing and workflow optimizations. But for all of this you need resources and I hope that the resources are sufficient now with all the new people.

[213]

no. it’s good that you have this attitude, but you’re also forgetting first and foremost, this is warhorse’s game, we just helped get it funded.

secondly, we were never promised bartending. there is a list of features they confirmed to be in the game, and i suspect that’s only a fraction of all the things we’ll see in the final game. so, behind the scenes, they are going to be adding, testing, and removing features we won’t even know about.

warhorse clearly could have not mentioned cutting the bartending game, but i suspect they understand that it is in the grand scale, not important to the actual experience they are tying to deliver, and they understand that we know such features will not all be included in the final game.