The plan.... still there?

The problem here is the devs seem to have this vision of being able to please everyone that plays the game. In a perfect society, this would be possible; however, in today’s society, that’s just not plausible. You’ll never please everyone. There’s always going to be people on both sides of the fence. There’s those that don’t care about the non-existant communicative stance the devs have now, then there’s those of us who are vocal about it, and would like status updates on things that have been announced. Just saying nothing about it doesn’t magically make it go away if its something that was announced and just couldn’t work out in the vision they had.

That reminds me of my very first job as at 16 years old. I had a micro-manager supervisor who required an email at the end of the day with an account of what I had worked on. It was brutal and felt ludicrous. As much as I like your idea, if I were a dev there is no way I would subject myself to that kind of scrutiny. Can you imagine all the people that would start complaining about their priorities or what little they accomplished?

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I’m sad to see the things in that vision that didn’t come to fruition. I’m also glad for the things not mentioned which we do have. It’s clearly an evolving game, maybe the back-burner items become available sometime, maybe they don’t. Fact is I’ve spent tons of time loving this game and Gleambow Racing is one of my favorites. I’ll come back again and again for it.

This Dev team is cool. They have historically posted a lot of roadmap stuff and responded to many questions. Not letting them off the hook, though. More info, more often really would go a long way toward player satisfaction. I feel there is a growing sentiment, imagined and unwarranted as it may be, that this game may not last a lot longer. That content updates may dwindle away. Allay our fears, I say! Also hold our hands in the darkness, for we are weak sometimes.

LOL My 2c.

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I’ll admit I am curious what the art team @minyi and @jesshyland do when the devs are working on stuff which doesn’t require art for 6 months. I’d think they’d work a parallel track to make new blocks and such, or do modeling for new monsters.

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If only… :’(

Why is it that I make a post like this I get flagged by the community and you get 12 likes :joy:

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Here’s what @jesshyland is working on! Turns out you just have to ask her and she shares :wink:

I mean… i do have a beard.

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I really like that description of what their idea of titans is, floating fortresses that you attack. That is cool, and you can make your own floating island eventually. I wonder if this is still their plan?

If you’ve not seen it I believe there’s a proof on concept teaser at the end of this trailer from…5 years ago.

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Some of our community would do really well with more information from the devs and be able to understand when ideas are changed or are pushed back. Others, not so much :man_shrugging:. Unfortunately, the devs can’t treat the two groups differently, nor should they.

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Oh SNAP!!! That’s tight! Didn’t know they had an actual concept of it already.

But I wish the game was as social as those trailers actually portray. Other than meteors, player made events, or friends building together. There isn’t much cooperation or social interaction going on.

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Can you explain what you mean by “do really well”? And what you mean by “other, not so much”? Makes it seems like some folks would appreciate more info on past explorations of ideas and what’s in the works and that having such info would harm or otherwise negatively impact others. Was that what you intended to say there?

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Has nothing to do with how much we appreciate it. I’m talking about how individuals react when things don’t meet their expectations. We had people complaining when they didn’t add shields less than three weeks after they posted the pictures. Imagine what would happen if they gave us all the information we all wished to have and they decided to scrap something? You and I might be understanding, but there are vocal individuals who would not be.

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Oh I’m definitely sure that all of the information I want isn’t something that’s feasible. But I think there’s an attainable balance somewhere between all of the info and none of the info.

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I always wonder about this:

image

When I was a noob i tried to trap some creatures into my builds but they despawned on me ofc.

I’d love to know if tamable, or at least “keepable”, creatures are still anywhere on the horizon.

Other than that the thing I’d most like to see from the old promo vids/images is the variety of tools or weapons they have in different sizes, I think they’re basically the “lance” art?

I think it’s fair and would help with some of the people constantly ready to jump out of the woodwork if they would just flat out say so when something is determined to be infeasable, or abandoned for whatever reason.

A bit of momentary disappointment is one thing but years and years of “maybe” appears to have created some sore spots.

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We had a new Chief Technology Officer come in to our company and put out a company roadmap. We are a tech company and have had troubles with commitment in the past (we are also a large company).

I had a meeting with the CTO and talked about what I thought was obvious, “Finally a roadmap to share with customers, must have been easy…why did it take years (before he came on board) of fighting and issues and he sweeps in and we have it in months?”

Answer - Money!

A roadmap requires a team to meet with developers, devise communication strategies, organize processes for developers to ensure at what ‘stage’ something is and at what point it is able to be communicated. Reorganization of dev structure to allow for this type of insight.

The reality is, a real roadmap, requires time, money and organization.

I don’t know what the workplace is like in Wonderstruck. However, if they have a more hands off…dev’s create and make this game cool…kinda vibe (similar to oldschool Minecraft office or other indy games) then it might not be a conducive structure to handle a roadmap.

That means it would need to become someone’s job (or hire a new person). This isn’t just writing down what the dev’s are working on, there needs to be insight into if it will hit…and devise how to communicate it and when.

It is more work then it seems.

I would love a road map! However, I don’t want to take from Dev time to get one and if their dev structure doesn’t facilitate easily this type of communication then it would require re-org to figure it out…that just sets things behind.

I hope we get to a point where the dev team has $$ to burn on community communication about upcoming features. That would be dope.

Right now it seems they are focused on improving the game.

Feedback is good. I think they hear that we want a roadmap. Just have to wait and see I think.

(sorry if this was a bit ramble ramble!)

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I’ll be honest. I would gladly trade prestige for minable oort and titans. Prestige is just a measurement. And for some, it’s a johnson measuring contest. :see_no_evil:

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I’d agree that a roadmap is a monumental effort for a large company. Wonderstruck is relatively small as far as studios go. And roadmaps don’t necessarily require a full team or an outside resource to make happen.

I can appreciate the experience you’ve had with the one for your company. My two main jobs in my adult life have been working for a large healthcare software system and working for a hospital that uses said software. With the former each application team had to constantly come up with and present their own roadmaps to clients annually. It was just part of the job, not something we hired external resources for. And sure deadlines weren’t always hit. So we communicated that out and explained why. Sometimes ideas changed because we wanted more resources on another project or wanted to redesign something. So we communicated that out and explained why. It’s truly not rocket science. Then again, we were very much using agile so constant communication and partnership with clients was the whole idea.

For the second job I now take the roadmaps my old team gives out and use it to design the roadmaps for upgrades/implementations for both that system and many other 3rd party software systems for the largest hospital network in the state. COVID, as you might expect, has delayed many projects and has made us entirely halt our main software upgrade. So can you guess what we did? You got it, we communicated that out and explained why.

It’s truly not as complex a concept for all companies as it was for yours :smile:

Edit: Also this whole post has been about looking for the state of things shown in the past, not necessarily about a roadmap for the future.

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