Game Development: Ghost Apple Gelatin

[sebacame]

I haven't tested the boulder mechanic at all, but from what I gather from Loftar's post:

The boulder thing pretty much invalided all clay/metal made prior to this patch. Uncapped stones/ore from boulders are significantly better, and maybe not right now when axes are Q500/600(still noticeably lower than topQ ore), but will usually make any ore that actually gets mined instead of chipped from a boulder kinda worthless. I don't rly think you should undo it this world, because people will have already upgraded their industry by now if they care to do so, and would kinda be at a big advantage because of it.

If you intend to keep toolQ softcapping ore, I think you should change it at some point, though. The notion of mining and dropping all your Q 400 ore on the ground just to cart up Q 700-800 boulders really does seem cancer to me. More cancer than the seemingly very high chance to dig out a boulder you need to remove every 10 seconds for no reason.

I like the idea of boulders being better than mining, but you make a good point, maybe up the boulder quality a bit, or just modify the formula for chipping it, softcapping it while making the tool quality less relevant. I guess the best outcome would be to make you feel excited and rewarded when a high quality boulder drops but not make it feel op or mandatory

[jorb]

We're very open to discussing or taking feedback on anything. We have thick skin. This is not a "heavily moderated safe environment", lol.

If there's anything in particular anyone would like to see discussed, you can always make a thread and/or PM me. I try being somewhat accessible. Early last year I tried having an answer-everything policy on Discord for a spell, but that implied spending three hours on discord every day, which I do not want to do. I try to answer PMs on here, and I am grateful for any input. Even if it's not immediately actionable ideas for whatever reason, I can still take general points with me, so war-stories without further comment are perfectly fine.

We can't run every idea we have before a grand council. The latency is too high, the noise-to-signal ratio is way too high, it makes us too reactive and input driven, and it spoils the fun of discovery. We have tried stuff like this in the past, councils, feedback requests, even test servers, but our experience is that they generally fail to capture problems arising in the minutiae of actual implementation. The quality of the feedback, in my experience, increases significantly if we simply push changes and take feedback. I am not saying we could never do something like this again, but I am saying that it isn't some free panacea.

Idk. Generally, if you give us good ideas well formulated, we do try to act upon them. There is very little prestige or w/e involved in our internal process, and our discussions are nigh on exclusively centered around formulating good mechanics.

[jorb]

The boulder thing was a very minor change. Perhaps it is somewhat bigger than we gave it credit for, but that doesn't really change my accessment of the scope of the change. It would not be good for development if we felt we had to run every little thing like that through the opinion machine before changing it.

[shubla]

We're very open to discussing or taking feedback on anything. We have thick skin. This is not a "heavily moderated safe environment", lol.

If there's anything in particular anyone would like to see discussed, you can always make a thread and/or PM me. I try being somewhat accessible. Early last year I tried having an answer-everything policy on Discord for a spell, but that implied spending three hours on discord every day, which I do not want to do. I try to answer PMs on here, and I am grateful for any input. Even if it's not immediately actionable ideas for whatever reason, I can still take general points with me, so war-stories without further comment are perfectly fine.

We can't run every idea we have before a grand council. The latency is too high, the noise-to-signal ratio is way too high, it makes us too reactive and input driven, and it spoils the fun of discovery. We have tried stuff like this in the past, councils, feedback requests, even test servers, but our experience is that they generally fail to capture problems arising in the minutiae of actual implementation. The quality of the feedback, in my experience, increases significantly if we simply push changes and take feedback. I am not saying we could never do something like this again, but I am saying that it isn't some free panacea.

Idk. Generally, if you give us good ideas well formulated, we do try to act upon them. There is very little prestige or w/e involved in our internal process, and our discussions are nigh on exclusively centered around formulating good mechanics.

Maybe you could make some of your development related documents like the legendary notepad++ file public. Release it once every now and then or start keeping it in some network linked storage.

[vatas]

I think current world is in state where radical changes and experimentation is more okay than in early world*. I do understand if people don't like that all their metal stuff was just suddenly made obsolete by a change, especially if they've adamantly kept up with quality grind since world start.

*One example I can think of is the kebab from first month of w11 that had to be nerfed next week

[Cayur]

I think what a lot of people want is just some more communication.

Or even starting Dev streams again. It would be nice to know where you currently see the game, what future plans are etc. I feel like you guys really underestimated how enjoyable the dev streams were every month, it was a really cool way to get some insights into your development plans and also immediate feedback to any ideas or questions. And even if I couldn't watch it live for whatever reason, I almost always went back and watched it on youtube at some point, even when I wasn't playing at all, it was nice to see what was going on in the game. You could even use that time, as you have done before, to do some development and talk as you do it (Remember you made a hat and pushed it to the store in the same dev stream/ Made a new sausage etc). Showing a small bit of the development process is fun and it also means you're not "wasting" 2 hours of your day just running around on a freshspawn.

[jorb]

Or even starting Dev streams again. It would be nice to know where you currently see the game, what future plans are etc. I feel like you guys really underestimated how enjoyable the dev streams were every month, it was a really cool way to get some insights into your development plans and also immediate feedback to any ideas or questions.

Very kind of you to say so! They will be back as a regular feature. Pinky swear.

[strpk0]

Or even starting Dev streams again. It would be nice to know where you currently see the game, what future plans are etc. I feel like you guys really underestimated how enjoyable the dev streams were every month, it was a really cool way to get some insights into your development plans and also immediate feedback to any ideas or questions.

Very kind of you to say so! They will be back as a regular feature. Pinky swear.

Neat

Also,

You could even use that time, as you have done before, to do some development and talk as you do it (Remember you made a hat and pushed it to the store in the same dev stream/ Made a new sausage etc). Showing a small bit of the development process is fun and it also means you're not "wasting" 2 hours of your day just running around on a freshspawn.

I feel like this is a good suggestion, also maybe when just talking and not working on something you could instead spectate players that agree to be spectated on stream so you don't have to focus on the game and the stream at the same time. Just my two cents.

[shubla]

Or even starting Dev streams again. It would be nice to know where you currently see the game, what future plans are etc. I feel like you guys really underestimated how enjoyable the dev streams were every month, it was a really cool way to get some insights into your development plans and also immediate feedback to any ideas or questions.

Very kind of you to say so! They will be back as a regular feature. Pinky swear.

Please also show your base so you can test siege mechanics by yourself

[SnuggleSnail]

We can't run every idea we have before a grand council. The latency is too high, the noise-to-signal ratio is way too high, it makes us too reactive and input driven, and it spoils the fun of discovery. We have tried stuff like this in the past, councils, feedback requests, even test servers, but our experience is that they generally fail to capture problems arising in the minutiae of actual implementation. The quality of the feedback, in my experience, increases significantly if we simply push changes and take feedback. I am not saying we could never do something like this again, but I am saying that it isn't some free panacea.

Fair enough if you've tried it before and it was more cumbersome than occasionally retreading the previous week's patch. Still, if there's something you guys are unsure of the implications of, you could literally pop into the discord for three seconds and say "thinkin' 'bout beans" with no context, and come back an hour later to 5k lines of rabid autist arguments over if beans are a good idea then ask for somebody to summarize it all to you in 11.5 word or less.