An Observation on Crowd-sourced Game Development: And Advice to SQUAD

[Synapse]

I've been playing a number of crowd-sourced games recently; Prison Architect, KSP, The Forest and a few more.

What I've noticed is that in general the development of these games seems to stall or become distorted after the initial buzz around the games' release.

To take an example, The Forest was pitched as a SP immersive survival game and it was clear from the beginning that the developers had no plans for multiplayer. However several releases later multiplayer is taking the majority of development time. On the one hand this is what sells; a multiplayer sandbox like Day Z is easy to hit the market, but as a result the original vision, that immersive oculus-rift SP experience, has been lost.

Hence when I see people asking for multiplayer development on KSP my heart sinks a little at the idea that the original game might almost be 'abandoned'.

Now let's look at Prison Architect. The Kickstarter model of funding where players could become prisoners in game is great, no doubt about it. But the last few updates of PA has focused on adding new features including snitches, logic circuits and mod support. Now logic circuits was primarily pushed by some Minecraft players, but its inclusion in the game is sloppy and doesn't fit with the simple premise of Prison Architect. Snitches seemed unnecessary as well. Overall the focus on these crowd-developed games is on new features to satisfy a bored playerbase, rather than polishing a game.

There are advantages and disadvantages to these additions. Let's look at mod inclusion. Mods are a great way to revive a bland game or keep players (investors!) interested, but they don't actually impact on quality of the game you are selling. Some mods break the game or render it completely different. Each mod appeals to different players giving you choice but also no consistent "KSP experience." KSP has a very mod-friendly sandbox type physics model and the modding community is healthy for the game's survival but not for its overall development as a product. As a modder I can tell you some games are easy to mode, like those using Quake engines. But the original games were the cause of their success not the modding utility, which was largely accidental. I'm thinking of games like Jedi Outcast, Max Payne, Grand Theft Auto. There are exceptions like Halflife 2 which was largely successful due to the modding community. Is this the direction that games are taking? Is it good or bad?

My request for SQUAD is to focus on fixing what is there before working on new features. The career mode needs work and I've detailed some ideas in another thread, and there are loads of ideas about improving the gameplay. I was very pleased with the SAS fixes but the textures of the sky for example are grossly outdated and the music could do with work. Multiplayer is a bad idea to respond to the multiplayer thread, and I don't think "there's a mod for that" is the proper response to problems. So I am a little disheartened when I read about resources and new systems, when the basic career and the overall game (textures, parts) needs so much work.

Those are my observations anyway I'd like to know what the community thinks.

[vexx32]

If you take a look through previous devnotes in the Daily Kerbal section, you'll see two things:

1. (more recent) the game is currently labelled as "beta", meaning all major features intended to be 1.0 are completed, and they're working on refining them and bugfixing.
   
2. (probably a fair ways back now) multiplayer, while having been assigned to a single developer for now (though I'm not sure what happened to him, I don't think we've heard from him in a while), is not planned until after feature-complete, hopefully mostly-bug-free v1.0.
   

I hear your worries, but don't for a moment think that Squad will be scrambling to implement multiplayer in a hurry just because some people are asking for it again -- they've been asking for it for as long as I've been here... and I've been here for a very long time. There's no reason for them not to take their time with it, and if the past is anything to learn from, they aren't likely to change that anytime soon.

If the most recent devnotes are anything to go by, 0.91 will focus mainly on going over the game's aerodynamic modelling, which should hopefully fix (at the very least) the persistent infiniglide glitch that has existed even before spaceplane parts existed in the stock game, if I recall correctly. Beyond that, they've been reluctant to share too much about what is going to be worked on ahead of time (mainly because this community can get somewhat fractious if some things announced do not come to fruition, on occasion), but I believe the whole point of announcing 0.90 as the first Beta version was to indicate the intent to get cracking down on the incomplete features and the bugs.

[Tuareg]

you want to say ksp is feature ready? what a shame... the sandbox havent got anything in the past 2 years and so many nice "promises" have failed to make in. but well, i've told 2 years ago that this will happen, not surprised at all...

[mattinoz]

you want to say ksp is feature ready? what a shame... the sandbox havent got anything in the past 2 years and so many nice "promises" have failed to make in. but well, i've told 2 years ago that this will happen, not surprised at all...

I think from what the developers have said it's more "System Ready" more than "feature" ready. I'd imagine the next few releases will bring more and more features on top of those systems in order to scope complete the game.

[Synapse]

Well it looks like Squad is going ahead with Multiplayer and choosing the route of entertaining the market over producing a good niche product.

[klgraham1013]

How are you getting the impression that Squad is focusing on multiplayer? From my perspective, it seems quite a ways down on their list of priorities.

[vexx32]

They've not once said anything about focusing on multiplayer. It's on the cards, but by all accounts it's not coming for a while yet.

[Bill Phil]

I think from what the developers have said it's more "System Ready" more than "feature" ready. I'd imagine the next few releases will bring more and more features on top of those systems in order to scope complete the game.

You know "system ready" is scope complete, right?

In 0.90 KSP turned scope complete, with everything there but not finished.

[longbyte1]

How are you getting the impression that Squad is focusing on multiplayer? From my perspective, it seems quite a ways down on their list of priorities.

I doubt they will even do multiplayer at this stage, unless they take some of godarklight's code and hack it in.

Likewise, a modding API was announced for Minecraft a very long time ago, but was never followed up on. So no modding API.