We make a lot of good suggestions to Stardock on things they can do with the game. A lot of stuff we've talked about in the community has made its way into the design and they've profoundly shaped the direction of the game. Major changes have been made to the way things work as a result of our direct input to Frogboy and others.
This kind of open beta is really unique and has allowed the community to really have a role in the development of the game and Stardock will get a lot of respect for that.
Unfortunately we've also made a lot of really stinker suggestions, like suggesting they switch to hexes in the last three months of development or demanding the option to have turnbased AND realtime battles, making them write two combat systems and two AI sets.
Terrible suggestions don't just frustrate us, they also frustrate the dev team at Stardock:
The problem (And a growing frustration of mine to be honest) having no idea what is hard to do and what is easy to do. - Frogboy
Why do we make terrible suggestions?
- Some of us have never written a single line of code in our life.
- Of those of us who do write code, a lot of us have never worked on any games.
- Some of us are not the sharpest tools in the box (I'm one of these).
- Sometimes we're just making a "wouldn't it be nice if," suggestion that we don't reasonably expect to be implemented
- And some of us have no clue about what's "reasonable" and what's not.
- Some of our suggestions, while good, don't fit with the intended direction of the game
How can we make better suggestions? We can research what we want to say and carefully think it out. We can talk to other community members and "test" the idea with them. We can work on our writing. A short, well-written post describing what you'd like is worth a dozen rambling, stream-of-consciousness mumblebabble posts. The best tip for this is: reread your post before hitting submit. Go back and fix sentences that are difficult to follow.
Some of us can also just stop making suggestions, especially if the suggestion involves turning Elemental into King's Quest or King's Bounty or whatever. Yes, put down the keyboard sir.
Our suggestions will continue to be terrible.
Yes, we can improve the quality of things we suggest, but at some level we're going to continue to make bad suggestions. There's no way around this, and even the most experienced I-eat-code-for-breakfast-and-wrote-half-the-games-you-played-growing-up grand master is going to make a couple of stinkers now and then.
Why?
Because the amount of information available to us is very limited. At this point we don't have access to any of the python or xml and can only hazard guesses about what is and what is not a fast change. We do not know if the number of special units in a faction is limited to one due to hardcoding or if it's just a matter of adding another XML field. We don't know how much of the random map generation occurs in C, whether or not we have VBscript from the dxpacks. Is the random name generator written in C? Python? A list of names in an XML file? No clue.
They are going to get better.
When the Modding Beta is released, we're going to have a whole new slew of information to work with. We'll know the capabilities of the game from the XML. We should be able to use most of the in-game editors. Just from seeing the XML our ability to make timely suggestions is going to increase tenfold.
And for the first time members of the community are going to be able to answer questions about whether "X" is possible. Not only are we going to have good information, we'll be able to try out our ideas first in a real game, experiment and report back our findings.
Let's be realistic: feature lockdown is July 16th. The window to make feature suggestions will be narrow. We'll definitely be able to make UI suggestions, balance suggestions. And we know this game is going to have some legs - the features we suggest can make it into the post-release patches and upcoming expansions. Importantly, good suggestions will also make it into community mods.
Don't fear the feature lockdown. It actually means we'll be able to get more information and offer better-informed comments. Once the features are nailed in place, it is unlikely the format of the models will change, meaning we may receive the .hkb model exporter. All of a sudden all of the model artists out there are going to be able to contribute to the discussion, spot errors like missing specular maps.
A feature lockdown also means no new code is coming in, except for possibly AI. Stardock may choose to start releasing the python code, and we'll be able to spot errors and suggest new algorithims to calculate things that improve speed and reliability. We'll also be able to temper our expectations about what the game is and is not capable of before release.
A feature lockdown also means the development speed will pick up. There'll be fewer differences between the public build and the internal build of elemental. The polish of the game is going to pick up. There'll be, paradoxially, more time to talk about new features, features that we can hope to see post-release or in an expansion.
So the next few days should be exciting. I'm looking forward to giving the tires a good kick and reporting back my findings.
Happy modding!
