Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Pages: [1] 2 3 4

Author Topic: No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?  (Read 13392 times)

Forux

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 3
    • View Profile
No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?
« on: October 24, 2019, 02:49:17 AM »

Hello,

Can you please share status - when to expect the next version, final version?

What do you plan to do to speed up the process?

How we can help?

Thank you.
Logged

Tartiflette

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 3529
  • MagicLab discord: https://discord.gg/EVQZaD3naU
    • View Profile
Re: No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?
« Reply #1 on: October 24, 2019, 03:01:13 AM »

Oh those are easy to answer.

When?
According to this dev time chart we are at least 1 year away from the next large update, assuming a similar scope from the previous ones.



Speed?
What would be the benefit to speeding up the process? We get massive and highly polished updates at a admitedly slow pace, but any mean to shortening the dev process either involves lower quality, less coherence or vastly higher costs.

I understand the impetus, but really this has been talked about for a long while already and really the end word is, this is what work best for Alex, and right now there isn't really a compelling reason to change it.

That being said, I would like a few more blogposts, even small scale ones (except if it's another economy reforging)
« Last Edit: October 24, 2019, 03:12:10 AM by Tartiflette »
Logged
 

Grievous69

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 2980
    • View Profile
Re: No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?
« Reply #2 on: October 24, 2019, 05:40:59 AM »

Since I started following this game, there was rarely this big of a gap in blogposts. I'd appreciate anything. Speed is not really a problem for me, but not knowing what is being worked on for a large period of time is kinda annoying. Even if Alex drops by on some thread and says "hey guys i'm doing x and y currently", that would be swell. Twitter posts are nice, but most are just QoL fixes and minor features.
Logged
Please don't take me too seriously.

AgentFransis

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 65
    • View Profile
Re: No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?
« Reply #3 on: October 24, 2019, 07:19:42 AM »

You guys sound like every project manager I ever worked with.

Soon you'll want access to Alex's task tracker so you can prioritise the work items  :)
Logged

Dread Lord Murubarda

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 105
    • View Profile
Re: No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?
« Reply #4 on: October 24, 2019, 12:59:40 PM »

imo u should put the game on steam, it is 100% worthy, get someone to advertise it, someone with free time, someone from these forums maybe.

I'm sure it will have great success, use that publicity to raise money and finish it. trick is to have someone else do the marketing, as I understanding the dev team is 3 people?, so doing that is only gonna make u *** up in other areas.

make a sub-forum for the volunteer marketing team. find someone you trust 100% and let them handle it so it's completely and 1000% out of your hair, so u can focus only on the game.

I dunno about kickstarter and how much they charge or what their rules are. you could just post a bank acc number with a counter on your website and a funding goal. add some perks for people who give a lot, like special ship skins, stations named after them, ships named after them, major story NPC's, etc. simply cosmetic stuff which has zero impact on the game.

JUST DO IT! DON"T LET YOUR DREAMS BE DREAMS!!!!
Logged

TheDTYP

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 136
    • View Profile
Re: No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?
« Reply #5 on: October 24, 2019, 02:32:23 PM »

I've been with the game since before Hyperspace was even a thing - believe me when I say this is pretty par for the course. And being that this is likely the final update (or at least the "release") I'd say the wait is going to be even longer than usual. My money is on Fall next year, if we're lucky.

That said, I've admittedly been itching for some more info on the next update. Blog Posts are always a welcome read and are super tantalizing. Though I'd imagine most of what is being worked on right now is content-related, and I can see how it would be tough to make a Blog Post on that sort of thing interesting and spoiler-light.

My point being: if you have another game you want to play or follow, I suggest you do that for the time being. This will take a while.
Logged

SCC

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 4112
    • View Profile
Re: No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?
« Reply #6 on: October 24, 2019, 02:35:43 PM »

imo u should put the game on steam, it is 100% worthy, get someone to advertise it, someone with free time, someone from these forums maybe.

I'm sure it will have great success, use that publicity to raise money and finish it. trick is to have someone else do the marketing, as I understanding the dev team is 3 people?, so doing that is only gonna make u *** up in other areas.
Alex is the main dev and handles... Nearly everything. David is art and some lore. That's it.
The issue with putting the game on Steam is that you can't release it a second time. At this point, it's better for Alex to finish it and then finally take the best shot he can.

Megas

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 12118
    • View Profile
Re: No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?
« Reply #7 on: October 24, 2019, 02:42:23 PM »

What has changed is the lack of blog posts.  Until 0.9a, there were blog posts every month or two.  Now, there is almost nothing.

I would not expect the next release to be final, especially with new content to be tested and maybe broken.  Maybe next release could be the first beta or the one before it.
Logged

Yunru

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1560
    • View Profile
Re: No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?
« Reply #8 on: October 24, 2019, 03:55:04 PM »

[snip]
It's not about money, this is just how games are made.
Look at how long Minecraft took to go from Alpha to Launch, if you want a blindly obvious example.

Alex

  • Administrator
  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 23988
    • View Profile
Re: No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?
« Reply #9 on: October 24, 2019, 04:00:42 PM »

Can you please share status - when to expect the next version, final version?

Hi - as far as timeframes, I'm afraid it's just "soon(tm)/when it's ready", as always. As far as blog posts, yeah, it's been a bit, though the most recent one is from July 8th:
http://fractalsoftworks.com/2019/07/08/skills-and-story-points/

Basically August has been a bit of a wash just due to *a lot* of extra acitivy, support requests, and so on, resulting from Sseth's video - not that I'm complaining! After that, I made a detour into adding 4k support - not something I was planning and not blog post worthy, but it took a little bit. After that, I've been going through and adding more story point uses to the campaign, along with making a large number of QoL improvements and various bug fixes as a result of the recently-increased feedback and bug reports. Also did a fair amount of playtesting with the new skills at some point along the way.

Still have a number of story-point/skill system related things to add; after that it's on to new stuff! Deciding between one of two things at this point; this'll get a blog post once it's a ways into implementation, so unfortunately, it'll be a bit. On the bright side: a lack of a blog post does not mean a lack of progress.

Some of this is, I think, just part of working on content-type things - they're not very interesting to write about much of the time, and it spoils them besides. So that's not something I'm super clear on how to handle; will hopefully figure something out.


How we can help?

Thank you for asking that! The main thing that helps - and that I really appreciate - is everyone's patience. I can't really do this any faster, regardless, so if I was getting bombarded with "when" type questions (present thread excluded!), all that would do is increase my stress levels and probably slow things down a bit. So, I really appreciate that this is not happening, and in fact am actively grateful for it. Also, helping out new players on the forum, answering questions, helping resolve technical issues (especially in the modding subforum) really helps, since it takes some of that off my plate, and I appreciate it a lot.

According to this dev time chart we are at least 1 year away from the next large update, assuming a similar scope from the previous ones.

Oh, good, thank you for putting together the chart! Saves me the trouble of figuring out when to make the next release :)


Alex is the main dev and handles... Nearly everything. David is art and some lore. That's it.

(Just wanted to say that David does more than "some" of the writing! Most of the writing you see in the campaign is his.)
Logged

Florian

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 36
    • View Profile
Re: No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?
« Reply #10 on: October 24, 2019, 04:24:14 PM »

Hi.

I'm surprised about the way you sell this game.
->at the moment, you buy the game one time, at a fair price on top of that, then you have updates for free... but at very slow rate, and not "major" updates from my point of view... So people may loose interest over time.

I was expecting something more like "Stellaris". You buy a game with limited but "ok" content, then, every 3-6 monthes or so, you can buy a minor (story pack, ship pack) or major expansion to the game (reworked advanced diplomacy or trade system). 

I've no problem with one or another way... Just, the second one is more profitable, so it allow for a larger dev team and a little bit more ambitious project... I think Starsector could deserve it.

The first way... well, it doesn't pay enough to hire people... so you're alone (almost).

My 2 cents.
« Last Edit: October 24, 2019, 04:28:41 PM by Florian »
Logged

Harmful Mechanic

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1340
  • On break.
    • View Profile
Re: No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?
« Reply #11 on: October 24, 2019, 07:28:43 PM »

Starsector began as a one-man, part-time hobby game. There was no guarantee it would ever take off well enough to support one person working on it full-time or more than minimal commissioned art, let alone multiple full-time devs.

At this point in the dev cycle, adding more people would slow down development unless those people were already very familiar with the engine and APIs, and even then, onboarding and managing those new people would suck up development time. Alex has discussed, in a vague way, doing an expansion for the game later, but profit was never the point of the game in the first place; it's more profitable to write non-game software for a regular wage, so arguments that X or Y would be more profitable will probably fall on deaf ears.

If people lose interest over time, that's just more evidence that you only get one launch, so you might as well launch when your game is actually ready, as opposed to trying to sustain interest after an Early Access/beta launch. It's better to get to 1.0 and see how the game does as it is, before committing to any new hires or other expenses.
Logged

AgentFransis

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 65
    • View Profile
Re: No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?
« Reply #12 on: October 25, 2019, 12:01:50 AM »

Why not be like Paradox?
You can't just become a soulless DLC factory overnight, it takes years of effort and dedication.
Logged

Hrothgar

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 327
    • View Profile
Re: No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?
« Reply #13 on: October 25, 2019, 12:53:39 AM »

Why not be like Paradox?
You can't just become a soulless DLC factory overnight, it takes years of effort and dedication.

So be like Paradox ? "Make every new game simpler than older one , make 999 dlc for everything from font to pants color of your army/hero/whatever, and dont listen to community. Yeah, great advise. Mayby go full bonker and be like Electronic Arts if you want to ruin Starsector.
Logged

Tartiflette

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 3529
  • MagicLab discord: https://discord.gg/EVQZaD3naU
    • View Profile
Re: No blog posts, no updates for ~6 months?
« Reply #14 on: October 25, 2019, 12:55:57 AM »

According to this dev time chart we are at least 1 year away from the next large update, assuming a similar scope from the previous ones.
Oh, good, thank you for putting together the chart! Saves me the trouble of figuring out when to make the next release :)
The wait for 0.9 was long, so long... Too much time to waste twiddling my thumbs, making charts and watching that las bar slowly grow. (I still hope the next one won't be that long though).

But hey, I'm sure that when the game is a huge release success and the forum is flooded with people complaining that one month between fixes is too long, we'll be able to wear it like a badge of honor. "You think THIS is too long? Let me tell you kid, I was here for Oh Nine and even before that, back then we learned patience the hard way..."
Logged
 
Pages: [1] 2 3 4