Concerns About Community Condos

continued from: Announcing Community Condos


you don’t focus on one thing at a time though

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can you give an example of that? if you are talking about nightclub and woodlands being worked on alongside fishing, thats probably because the fishing store was already done and the people who do all of the mapping stuff had nothing else to do.

Yeah here’s some examples:
Starting new things when there are other things that have already been started and not finished, like the Odyssey Minigolf Map being worked on for about a month before getting nothing for over a year and a half, and then finishing the Event Horizon map in like a month. There’s also Planet Panic: Beta Release that hasn’t been worked on for 5 and a half months, instead working on the Lobby 3 and Fishing. And then remember when the Shared WOM Jackpot was supposed to come out with the 5.0.0 Update, and was pushed all the way back to the 8.0.0 update? Because I do.

What I’m trying to say is, the devs jump around from one thing to another a lot, and I don’t believe that they focus on one thing at a time, because if they did, there’d be a lot more things released.

EDIT: Look at when this thread was started, and think about how much unrelated things have come out in that 27 month period.

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It really comes down to priorities and what each developer is doing at a particular time. Event Horizon came out relatively quickly as I had been working on Lobby 3 for literally MONTHS ON END and no break. God forbid I go and do something else to wind down from it. Odyssey is being worked on by Johanna, and shes had to put the brakes on certain things like Odyssey for higher priority things (as lets face it, Minigolf has a butt ton of maps already).

While our priorities change perhaps a little more often than people would like (and we weren’t so good at concentrating one thing at a time before) we generally try to focus on individual updates a bit more now, which is why Fishing has been such a huge focus more recently, and now onto Arcade. Some other devs (like myself) however don’t really have anything to focus on within those big updates. Therefore we will be working on other future things, including Accelerate, map upgrades, whatever we feel the community may like.

Also to end all of this. Burnout is a thing. Sometimes switching projects helps relieve it and therefore actually produce more content in the long run. I know ive sat around staring at my map for several days practically doing no work because im burnt out. We have feelings too you know, we’re not your slaves.

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People in this thread really be sounding like a crying child when their mothers wouldnt buy them a chocolate bar from the supermarket, not appreciating what the developers do, instead kicking and screaming because they are not getting their own way.

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Yeah, video games take a long time to make, especially with a limited budget and 10-person team. If you’re worried about whether or not we still care, I guarantee you, we would have crashed and burned a looooooong time ago. We’re in this 'till it’s done.

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Ain’t nobody crying, I’m just pointing out how the devs don’t focus on one thing at a time.

I don’t have anyone wrong with you Will, you’ve been doing the best job in my opinion.

It’s just a good thing to reiterate from time to time. People tend to lose sight of it.

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Yeah but Mac claims you guys focus on one thing at a time and it seems counterproductive to jump around things. The trailer for the Kingdom map on minigolf has comments saying ‘RELEASE MORE GOLF MAP’, hundreds of those comments over and over again. Arcade has the highest amount of likes on the roadmap and it has been pushed away for so long.

Like Lifeless said, priorities can change. It’s much more productive to jump around because it keeps our mental health in check and allows us to work harder. We do focus on one thing at a time, and every now and then we work on other stuff when we feel like we’re slowing down.

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I don’t care. I don’t need people telling us how to do our jobs. We’re a limited team, and we can’t just necessarily do everything the community wants exactly when they want it. You wouldn’t even know we were jumping around at all if we weren’t as open as we are. If you don’t like how we develop things then that’s fine, because we’re not even close to perfect. But im not gonna sit here and apologise for just wanting to enjoy our jobs without wanting to quit it all. Because the thoughts have been there, for me at least. But I stay around because I want to finish this, because I do enjoy my job most of the time, and it would be unfair to all our players to just drop it.

Things will come out. Eventually. We just need time.

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they did that since they had to do other stuff first in order for it to be worked on you know, cant do it without needed things otherwise it literally cant work
same with accelerate, they needed to do vehicle base, they did the RC stuff just to get it working, now they have that they can use it to get the car driving properly

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I never told you how to do your job. I said you guys don’t focus on one thing at a time. You guys have more artists than you do programmers, and it’s unbalanced.

Planet Panic beta was just announced, it was never set to be done instantly when announced. A lot of technology needed to be made before the Planet Panic beta is made such as the new vehicle base (which is why RC cars were a focus first). So it’s been waiting for technology. And other games haven’t so we focus on what we can get out and most importantly, what people voted on. If you look at our community polls, Fishing and Arcade and Workshop were the top desired.

Lobby 3 was sorely needed to fix the design issues of the original map and optimize load times. We absolutely needed to spend that time to keep putting out updates without being slogged down by the map taking actually ages to load or buildings not being found by new players (what’s the point of Laser Tag if no one can find it, etc.).

The WOM jackpot needed backend changes and we have been busy working on the back end servers for it. It got pushed multiple times because frankly it wasn’t that high priority and the backend was not ready for it. After the achievement update the backend finally was ready and now was just finding a good time to develop it. So it was decided to get it done for Fishing update.

We do things in a very specific order and there are reasons why some features get pushed and others don’t. Sometimes it’s burn out like Lifeless mentioned, other times there’s very real technical roadblocks, and most times we are extremely busy as this game is very large and takes a very long time to develop.

Over the course of developing this game, we have learned we as a team should only focus on one major feature at a time.

But there are very real technical roadblocks and scheulding issues you may not know about which factor into our decisions.

As said before Community Condos needed serious backend changes (that have taken months) and lots of core code rewrites. It’s still a massive update and physically it’s not possible at their time for us to work on both Arcade and Community Condos. There’s just too much work to be done and not enough time in the day.

When we announced Community Condos we had an idea for what it would entail, but it’s a lot more work than expected and lots of things needed to be made before it could come out.

Games take time develop, even if we are very careful and spend hours working everyday on the right things.

But also, as Lifeless said, we are people. We work all the time on the game, but we can also easily get burnt out on a specific feature or get stuck (technical issue, bugs, design problems, or a dry spell). We also know what we need to develop first for our game. We pick based on what our community wants of course, but in the end we have to make things in a specific way and it’s not always clear why sometimes.

We are also indie. We don’t have a lot of funding and we don’t have an investor or publisher. We have a small team and we have the right team. Everyone on the team is extremely important and needed and often do more than their job description.

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Right after I began working on Odyssey, I was sort of unofficially transitioned from a side content developer who works on new maps and models, to a developer that works on more integral stuff (Lobby 3, Arcade, Nightclub, Dueling Arena, etc). As such, development on it fizzled out as I began to take up more important duties on the team. It’s a map I will get back to, and will likely be the final and most extravagant minigolf map. I always intended it to have gameplay elements and gimmicks that were featured in all of the other minigolf maps, so it will be a fitting way to finish off minigolf one day.

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I just like the game a lot, and I hate seeing the slow development. There’s a reason why that on the Survey Results that under ‘How often do you play TU’, the least two chosen options are ‘Once a day’ and ‘More than once a day’. And the one below that says 'What aspect of the game do you enjoy the most, and 45.6% (the most chosen) is gameworlds, and yet lobby is focused on more. Under 'What game world do you enjoy the most) 76.6% of players chose Minigolf as one of the answers, which would maybe imply that people wanna see a new golf map. Under ‘What game world would you like to see more maps for?’ Minigolf won. However, people do wish to see more of plaza activities, and maybe that is why they like the game worlds better, because the things in plaza are not there yet.

I’d like to see a new survey this July so we can all see how things are at this point.

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If we could get features out faster, they would already be out by now. Fact is things actually take months to develop. To put out updates of completely new content and gameplay with artwork, design, sound, and code requires a lot of time and effort.

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We need to work on plaza because we need to finish the game that we set out to make from the beginning. We can’t (and don’t want to) stagnate the game’s development and our careers to become minigolf map slaves.

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I have no clue why you would be upset at them making the plaza a better place to be in. It’s seriously been improved SO much with the addition of things like Fishing and it’s only getting better. Then, with the addition of more Plaza activities like the Arcade, Nightclub, and Duels, the Plaza will be even more live because people will have a reason to stick around and do stuff instead of just leaving to go to gameworlds or their condo. The plaza has already felt so lively to me since fishing has come out and it’s a wonderful thing to see.

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