Since there has been a lot of talk about developer communication style, and a sort of tongue-in-cheek poll, I thought I would do a poll about how people prefer to receive developer communication.
Let me give some details to define what these options mean.
Share concrete information when it’s done
In this style, the developers would be effectively radio silent on what they are working on until it is in final polish stages. They would then make a big update announcement with all details and release date all at once.
This could mean there would be weeks or months between completion of the update and it’s release, since they will have to have nearly 100% certainty that they would hit the release data.
If they need to do testing, it would be done similar to the current method, with testing happening as needed with patch notes, and then once major testing is done, the developers would go radio silent about the update up until they are done and can announce a release date.
Open communication
This is the “We’re all adults here” option. Many work-in-progress items are shown/teased, with explanations of where they are in the dev process. Estimated release dates are announced, and when issues arise that cause delays, the reason and expected delay time are explained very briefly.
This method will mean that the community will see a lot of features that never come, or take a very long time to come, but should expect explanations of why things were dropped or delayed. It is important to understand that the most common reason for delay is likely to be “We determined that feature B is higher priority than feature A”.
This could be implemented with weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly dev streams or dev blog posts.
Share concrete information when it’s done, but teasers are good too
Same as “Share concrete information when it’s done”, but twitter teases of prototypes & concept art (with context of how far along the process is) are a good thing that makes you happy.
Keep it the same
The devs keep doing what they are doing now, which is somewhere between “open communication” and “Share concrete information when it’s done”
Share concrete information when it’s done
Open communication
Share concrete information when it’s done, but teasers are good too
Aren’t the devs already doing teasers? I’m not sure what’s different between your 3/4 options.
I think coming back to & providing context for old teasers that haven’t yet made it into the game would alleviate a lot of concerns of “wtf are the devs actually doing they demoed this years ago”.
Yes, they do teasers, like they did with the upcoming anniversary event, but their current style (at least with this update) also includes early communication about upcoming features. “Share concrete information when it’s done, but teasers are good too” would have meant something like the first information since the close of rented world testing would be this week, announcing a release on Sep 29. This style would allow them to post twitter teasers about the celebration and maybe some UI teasers on the rented worlds, but no info post.
Didn’t even bother to answer this one. Just play the game or don’t. Why we always harassing devs about how they should communicate or not communicate. If everyone thinks they can do better. Maybe go and develop their own game and communicate on it. Lead by example. Let’s see how easy it is. The pressure of thousands of people always watching and ready to pounce on every word. I couldn’t do it.
Sadly we are not all adults here. (And I don’t mean by age.)
Besides that, both extremes seem to have their flaws. What’s the point in communicating experimental features that will never make it, at the same time months of radio silence also make no sense and ppl will start screaming the game is dead.
I miss an option for a middle ground, regular blog posts about features that are mature and very likely to be released and general design challenges. I like reading these on other games like Factorio. (360 blog posts over 7 years, it’s almost some form of entertainment in itself, but one that connects you back to the game.)
But game developers who do these blogs also revealed that it takes a considereable amount of time to create them. So there is no easy answer here. But it might be worth the invenstment to grow the community around the game. The community is the most important asset of an indie game.
This is definitely not meant to be harassing the devs. Helping provide more concrete and discrete information on people’s individual personal preferences of communication can help the devs understand their community better, and if they are listening to feedback on this subject, it could potentially be helpful.
In this case, I think that the results of this are more valuable to the community than the devs, though.
There is roughly a 50/50 split between the two primary communication preferences I presented. This means that, generally speaking, there will likely be about 50% of the people in this forum disagreeing with whatever communication style the devs choose.
I think this would have been a better thing to put in than the “Share concrete information when it’s done, but teasers are good too” option. It’s possible that this is what people choosing that would prefer, but it’s impossible to know at this point.
