It’s sad to see that the Arcade and Fishing, probably two of the most interesting pass-times planned for the game keep getting pushed back and back in favor of features like achievements and community condos, when initially it seemed like these things (especially fishing) were slated for an earlier release. Their fate worries me a bit.
That isn’t to say that achievements, community condos etc are bad features, just that the fate of the Arcade and Fishing modes getting constantly pushed aside is a bit concerning.
I can see the reason for a push for community condos is that it really encourages people to play together even more, which means a higher player count (which is obviously good for the game). As for fishing, I imagine that something like the achievements themselves would be a reason for them to push it back. It seems like fishing would be an obvious ticket for achievements, so they’re likely working on implementing the groundwork first so they don’t have to go back and fix fishing all over again.
Arcade and Fishing are still, once again, being developed. The order of the updates aren’t stopping or slowing down their development. It is simply just when those other features will be released and what order they will be. In other words, Achievements and Community Condos is getting far along.
Again, we have multiple developers working on multiple things and they’re done in an order that makes sense for our game. Achievements are important for fishing as well, there’s a piece of achievement code that fishing needs to function so we need achievements first.
Same with Arcade. Highscore stuff is very important to Arcade and the achievements stuff (leaderboards) is part of that. So it goes out first.
Right, I thought that at the beginning of the year/late last year the team had opted to focus on more singular tasks, hence the concern. But it makes sense that the Achievement system would be the backbone of the arcade/fishing.
I think they are trying to focus on updates that will increase player retention and in the past we’ve seen simply adding more stuff to do hasn’t typically done it. With achievements and milestones we get long term goals to strive for. With community condos we get a greater sense of permanence in the game to return to. While condos already do that to a certain degree I feel that fully hosted ones will boost that. Not to mentioned the community aspects of it. I know plenty of people that are interested but would rather share a condo with friends than have an entire one to themselves.
Also Fishing/Arcade dropping with milestone/achievement features would be a big bonus to them.
I think that, although I understand the frustration in how constantly plans for really big stuff like that changes, you shouldn’t take the Trello as an official development timeline. There’s a reason it says “(estimate)” and development of a game of this scale with only a handful of developers is going to make the timeline become very volatile. I’m 100% certain they do the best with what they’ve got, and not much is going to change that without more developers. Yeah, it can be a bit annoying, but it helps to know that it’s not like they’re just intentionally delaying features, but rather trying to juggle development with the resources they have.
Yeah on the roadmap it shows Arcade as the most upvoted item on the timeline, but little progress is being made on it because I assume there is only 1 person working on it.
I thought the Workshop Update would bring this game back big time but the player count is nearing what it was before the WS Update again.
I believe they’ve said before that they want achievements/milestones in place for the arcade which is part of the reason they are making a big push to release that feature now.
