I've supported Star Sector already by purchasing several copies of the game.
(Have it installed on my laptop, work laptop and home PC
Also with regards to Mods - I've played a few of the top-ranked mods and indeed they are very good.
Some of the new ship design and weapons/effects are quite impressive.
There are even small game-play additions on some of the mods, however they only really provide a temporary distraction.
The only ''Mod" I'd be interested in developing is the actual game play mechanics.
There's enough people out there churning out some amazing ship designs, and adding plenty of fantastic content that way. I'm not really an artistic person, but I can code..
My point being, I'd be more interested in actually developing the core mechanics of the game. The place I work we try to use agile practises and principles, and release features early and often.
(Unless you work at a waterfall style culture!
) - We should be moving away from this mind set!
Usually we aim to release as soon as a feature is implemented, passed QA + signed off.. We then hit a button which kicks an automated build script and pushes the binary files out from Team City onto the live boxes..
Agile tries to focus on what's important first, and worry about sugar coating much later on.
The most prominent/risky bugs are usually from the main features/new features not from the tiny implementation details. I guess you could call that the "balancing" - which is important, but wouldn't be as important as say, having the ability to buy a ship, or, being able to initiate combat.
Using techniques such as TDD and continuous integration, you can get the core features of an application out to the customer quicker and with less defects.
In Star Sectors case it's monthly updates. A lot of places are still waterfall and a project can take months to implement from an idea into live software..
Ideally you would like to be pushing out changes early and often, perhaps on a weekly basis in this case.
It's challenging to get into that position where you can push weekly, but they don't have to be huge changes, bug fixing becomes part of a functional release, rather than an entire release on it's own. It's a shift in culture, practises and also remembering what's really important. What's important for your customer, what do they
need? I don't see why developing a game should be any different from the commercial software development we do day to day?
If anything there's less risk releasing early and often a game with a few "tweaking issues" than a commercial app which can potentially bring a call centre to it's knees and cost thousands of pounds of lost sales..
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I do really believe in this game. I'd just like to see a slight change in direction with regards to the focus on what's
really important..
I'm sure it will come, but i just don't want to see Star Sector make the same mistakes as Cortex Command for example.. 10+ years in development and not much to show for it
C'mon we are.. 3 years in now and still early alpha? Let's start nailing this!