Everyone should read this:
http://forum.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=11509
!
About developers, and producers
Moderator: Moderators
Edmon wrote:And thats the problem. People are biased towards their own understandings of what things are like. The "correct" way to play, what things can and cannot do.
Classic examples of this are Elitists who feel ranked is the only way to play. It isn't. Games developers have to cater to the tastes of as many players as possible. You can never, however, please everyone.
Yeah you are right. But it's not that simple as you think, they are still humans.tooleh wrote:Yeah, to be honest - when you pay producers money, they owe you a working game. If the game is broken, they are indebted to you.
If some workerman makes mistake in your house, and that needs repairing in the future, of course he repairs it, and it will take some time, BUT repairing a broken floor is much easier than repairing a bug in a game.
You dont come to say to the workerman how to do their jobs, or when to do their jobs, or when they should finish their jobs. Maybe because you meet them personally, (and maybe if you fuck with them, they will fuck up your house
)People expect that game programmers are just machines who just makes a game, and are like gods and they can do anything. Unfortunately all you see is the output, you dont know what happened between the process. You dont know how hard it may be.
Repairing something like broken floor is much easier than repairing a bug in game. You are trained to repair the floor, you dont come to repair the floor if you dont know how to repair it, you dont come to the place and sit for two hours and think how to repair it. Programming is like the opposite: you need to think lots of things before repairing anything, if you dont, it just leads up to new bugs.
Creating something as complex as a game is not just like baking a bread in the oven.
People must understand this.
But it wont never happen, because... 1) people cant see the process of making the game. 2) people cant talk with the game makers (for a reason explained in the original topic). 3) people cant meet them personally and see them actually doing their jobs.
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BlackLiger
- Posts: 1371
- Joined: 05 Oct 2004, 21:58
While it is often said, somehow I feel it doesn't work that way. I mean, how much something should be fixed doesn't feel like it's only proportionnal to how much you paid it. Because sometimes I get stuff with budget price, or even for free, and am still mad that it doesn't work. Of course, that the developper or provider of something (not only videogame, that would even apply to leaking pipe) doesn't owe you anything if he gives his stuff for free kinda violate the tenets of our capitalist society. I haven't quite figured out what makes you the dev owe something. I guess it could proportionnal to the time you spent with their shitz, or something of the effect. It can't be proportionnal to how much they promise it'll work, since then everybody would just put "no guarantee it'll work" everywhere.tooleh wrote:Yeah, to be honest - when you pay producers money, they owe you a working game. If the game is broken, they are indebted to you.
And posting that was probably a very bad move, since by now every Spring dev will hate me. As I just posted that the more Spring dev spend their free time coding stuff for free, the more they owe me wasting even more of their free time to fullfill my owe egoistic needs, and I'll get angry if they stop being my free slaves. Quick let's find a way to defuse this, cause I can't permit myself to alienate them. Maybe some reversal? Hey guys! Sometimes I promise people to give them awesome scripts, or to fix their script! And then I feel bad when I don't deliver. Or I release a mod and it's broken. And I feel like the most people are getting my stuff, the most I should fix sooner than possible. Even if all my scripts and stuff I do for free.
So, to sum it up, contrary to the common conception, I feel like money is not the sole factor that makes me feel people owe me a working game, but haven't quite figured out what it is, since the capitalism we're living in has been ingrained our mind so deeply we stopped being able to imagine any other ways.
And now people will think I'm a hippie or a communist. I'd like to prove that not, but I'd better stop that writing before I give more reasons for the rest of people to hate me.
And people wonder why I'm not talking about what I'm doing, this time... right now, it'd just be vaporware and empty promises about features I don't have complete. It's not like NanoBlobs, where I could add a new unit and new gameplay, and just be like, "here, it's version X". This time, it'd better match people's expectations, or it will just be a horrible disappointment. I keep everybody's expectations low by keeping the amount of hype as small as possible, and keeping my head down...
Having released a lot of mods for several game engines, my experience has been mixed. When I release stuff that is mainly for technical / teaching purposes, I tend to keep people actively connected with what I'm doing- after all, it's stupid to release a "product" that is about helping people learn something, if you just present it all of a sudden, without keeping people informed why you're bothering. Feedback tells me what's not working, and why.
However, with games that are just meant to be games, I feel like it's in nobody's best interests if I spin and hype a lot before I'm ready to beta-test, frankly. There will always be rough spots in a freeware production, even with a talented team working with me to get content produced and integrated into the game engine. It's best, imo, when working on a game for gaming's sake, to just concentrate on doing the best job I can, instead of arguing with Internet trolls and other forms of loser, or participate in lengthy, pointless debates about gameplay, when in the end, I'm going to do what makes me and my team happy anyhow.
After all, I'm not being paid. I have no incentive to debate stuff, or tell people why I'm doing Thing X, when they cannot possibly understand the context (technical problems, game-balance issues that aren't apparent from a screenshot, whatever). People say the most outrageous stuff about things they haven't actually seen or touched, or gameplay which they've never actually experienced (or have only messed with for five minutes, hardly enough time to really get it)... which I find amusing... but not nearly amusing enough to allow me to get distracted. It's one thing, when I can build something wildly experimental like NB (was) and declare failure when I'm bored with the whole thing (well, that, and I suddenly had something else to do that seemed like a better use of my time), but it's another thing entirely when I fully expect several thousand people to download a game, and it'd better be pretty much like I want it, or people will moan and whine if I fix stuff later, since I was supposed to it right the first time.
As that forum poster pointed out, rightly, the people who are 100% happy are the very people I never hear from, unless they're fellow modders who want to know how to do <insert technical trick here>. The only real thanks I can get is the obvious one- people actually playing the game.
And, of course, there's the inevitable burnout factor. It's much harder to get to that point, frankly, if I don't feel too much like I'm just doing a job, instead of burning time in the pursuit of excellence. If I were getting paid to do this, it'd be a different thing entirely, because then I wouldn't have to worry about waking up late because I'd stayed up until 2AM the previous night, getting a chunk of difficult code working finally, or cleaning up models, or whatever needs doing. I'd work on things all day, with a team that was also working towards our goals, and, well... I guess I'm probably entirely naive, but I'd like to think that I'd really enjoy that. This project is almost certainly my last Spring game, so I feel under enough pressure as-is, let alone if I had random people poking me with sharp sticks
My last project for the Freelancer community put me under terrific pressure, due to the sheer number of things I decided to take on (modding that engine entails working with gigantic numbers of interwoven text files, obscure file formats, and other hazards to one's mental health- Spring is comparatively cute and fuzzy), and a lot of other people were counting on me to either solve technical problems for them, or to use the ground-breaking tools they'd developed... and I just wore myself out over a six-month development cycle full of not-sleeping. It wasn't worth it, and Spring had finally gotten to the point where I thought I should start working with it.
After I get done with this, I am really going to have to make decisions about whether I try to finally get a job doing this line of work, or just quit doing this stuff and do something that's more profitable. It may seem pretentious or whatever, but I have at least a couple of good books in my head, and at least I'd make some money at the end of the day- for that matter, I could return to the tabletop wargames market, apply what I've learned since then, and probably do a lot better than I did the first time (Silent Dark, for those of you who've perused my website out've boredom, earned me about $5000, after reaching distribution- not exactly a lot of money, considering the amount of labor that went into it).
I'm not a college kid, and working on games has been a love affair that has cost me a lot- I have a Real Job, but I'm hardly rich or anything, and I have no free time, ever. I've been extremely tempted to try to find investment capital and start up a small house, so that I could maybe, just maybe, get to make the games I actually want to play... however, there are a million reasons why that's unlikely to happen, starting with the chief problem, which is that I am a born designer and can handle the roles of producer, animator and artist, but I am not a serious engineer. Almost all development companies are started by engineers who want to dabble in design, and they farm out art jobs, etc. if they ever get beyond the garage stage. I would like to think that I could work with engineers and produce games that were better than anything you've played lately, but getting people to agree with that proposition is tricky
... bleah... enough blog-nonsense. I guess that, basically, I'm saying that I'm not talking about what I'm doing, because I want to get it done without burning out. I hate not finishing things, and I want to be able to say, "yeah, I'm done" and walk away from Spring feeling like I did what I needed to do...
However, with games that are just meant to be games, I feel like it's in nobody's best interests if I spin and hype a lot before I'm ready to beta-test, frankly. There will always be rough spots in a freeware production, even with a talented team working with me to get content produced and integrated into the game engine. It's best, imo, when working on a game for gaming's sake, to just concentrate on doing the best job I can, instead of arguing with Internet trolls and other forms of loser, or participate in lengthy, pointless debates about gameplay, when in the end, I'm going to do what makes me and my team happy anyhow.
After all, I'm not being paid. I have no incentive to debate stuff, or tell people why I'm doing Thing X, when they cannot possibly understand the context (technical problems, game-balance issues that aren't apparent from a screenshot, whatever). People say the most outrageous stuff about things they haven't actually seen or touched, or gameplay which they've never actually experienced (or have only messed with for five minutes, hardly enough time to really get it)... which I find amusing... but not nearly amusing enough to allow me to get distracted. It's one thing, when I can build something wildly experimental like NB (was) and declare failure when I'm bored with the whole thing (well, that, and I suddenly had something else to do that seemed like a better use of my time), but it's another thing entirely when I fully expect several thousand people to download a game, and it'd better be pretty much like I want it, or people will moan and whine if I fix stuff later, since I was supposed to it right the first time.
As that forum poster pointed out, rightly, the people who are 100% happy are the very people I never hear from, unless they're fellow modders who want to know how to do <insert technical trick here>. The only real thanks I can get is the obvious one- people actually playing the game.
And, of course, there's the inevitable burnout factor. It's much harder to get to that point, frankly, if I don't feel too much like I'm just doing a job, instead of burning time in the pursuit of excellence. If I were getting paid to do this, it'd be a different thing entirely, because then I wouldn't have to worry about waking up late because I'd stayed up until 2AM the previous night, getting a chunk of difficult code working finally, or cleaning up models, or whatever needs doing. I'd work on things all day, with a team that was also working towards our goals, and, well... I guess I'm probably entirely naive, but I'd like to think that I'd really enjoy that. This project is almost certainly my last Spring game, so I feel under enough pressure as-is, let alone if I had random people poking me with sharp sticks
My last project for the Freelancer community put me under terrific pressure, due to the sheer number of things I decided to take on (modding that engine entails working with gigantic numbers of interwoven text files, obscure file formats, and other hazards to one's mental health- Spring is comparatively cute and fuzzy), and a lot of other people were counting on me to either solve technical problems for them, or to use the ground-breaking tools they'd developed... and I just wore myself out over a six-month development cycle full of not-sleeping. It wasn't worth it, and Spring had finally gotten to the point where I thought I should start working with it.
After I get done with this, I am really going to have to make decisions about whether I try to finally get a job doing this line of work, or just quit doing this stuff and do something that's more profitable. It may seem pretentious or whatever, but I have at least a couple of good books in my head, and at least I'd make some money at the end of the day- for that matter, I could return to the tabletop wargames market, apply what I've learned since then, and probably do a lot better than I did the first time (Silent Dark, for those of you who've perused my website out've boredom, earned me about $5000, after reaching distribution- not exactly a lot of money, considering the amount of labor that went into it).
I'm not a college kid, and working on games has been a love affair that has cost me a lot- I have a Real Job, but I'm hardly rich or anything, and I have no free time, ever. I've been extremely tempted to try to find investment capital and start up a small house, so that I could maybe, just maybe, get to make the games I actually want to play... however, there are a million reasons why that's unlikely to happen, starting with the chief problem, which is that I am a born designer and can handle the roles of producer, animator and artist, but I am not a serious engineer. Almost all development companies are started by engineers who want to dabble in design, and they farm out art jobs, etc. if they ever get beyond the garage stage. I would like to think that I could work with engineers and produce games that were better than anything you've played lately, but getting people to agree with that proposition is tricky
... bleah... enough blog-nonsense. I guess that, basically, I'm saying that I'm not talking about what I'm doing, because I want to get it done without burning out. I hate not finishing things, and I want to be able to say, "yeah, I'm done" and walk away from Spring feeling like I did what I needed to do...