A Suggestion: Intrepid, Use the Freedom of being an Indie Dev/Studio

ArynKitty

Hey guys,

I have followed the development of Ashes since it's beginning, and for me it definitely has the potential to bring in something fresh into the world of MMOs. Now of course there are a lot of challenges to overcome before you actually get to release an ambitious project like this. Anyone having backed games on kickstarter will know that often the end product is not able to keep all the promises made before, and sometimes it does not get to take off and soar at all. And the reasons for that are obvious: it is a huge undertaking, and it has to be done by a relatively small team, often with a small budget. I personally only have experience with modding a game, but that experience already showed me what a monumental effort it is to get something working properly and have it appear in the game the way you envisioned it. Now scaled up to building a whole MMO you get a task that seems almost impossible to achieve within a reasonable time frame all the while keeping the interest of the fans/community that backed this vision.

On the other hand you get something in return by being an independently funded and self publishing studio: the chance to do it your way. You don't have to follow any expectations and rules coming from a marketing department that only cares about the bottom line. Nobody telling you how you have to deal with the community, how you have to develop your game or what assets to use. That is some tremendous power and freedom you have right there, of course the trade off is having no big budget publisher/investor behind you and no huge team size to work on many areas at the same time with dozens of people.
For indie studios there is a great untapped resource pool though that is rarely used to the extent it could be used for: the community they got invested into their game.

And that is the issue, in my opinion, that makes it so difficult for indie developers to realize their game. Because the development process is still done a lot like the industry giants and mainstream publishers do: in a vacuum, in isolation. They have their big teams, but the success of their project will still be decided by that internal group and how they manage themselves. And as we have seen in recent times, even a big budget and team does not mean miscommunication and mismanagement won't occur.

And that brings me back to the true strength of the indie game development, and to Intrepid specifically: that independence. That freedom. You don't have to play by the rules. Just like you try out new ideas and concepts with your project/vision, you can also make new rules in regards to what can happen in game development. How much you can open up the development process to others outside of your studio. To what degree you can involve and engage your community. How much can you use the untapped potential of the many talented individuals that want to see your game succeed and play it just as much as yourself.

Now obviously the additional help and support from your community would have to be voluntarily, and anything created or worked on by them, would be something they freely give up to you for you to use it in the game you are making. Just like you agree to give up any rights or claims to your creation during official contests with the chance of it ending up in the game later if it gets picked as the winning contribution, it would be the same for tapping the community pool of talent in a more open and co-creating development process.

What I mean by that is having something like a forum section where your devs post current issues they are working on, or are stuck with, and where you simply don't have the manpower to get it resolved quickly. As an example: let's say there are issues with the networking code. Or you are trying to figure out how to optimize the code to allow massive battlefields with hundreds of players running around, without the servers melting down. There could be a post then in that special forum section, like a bounty going up at a mission board: Dev X: "Guys, check out this code section, there is an issue here that keeps doing things we don't want it doing. Can you find it and fix it?" Or Dev Y: "We currently have this issue with getting the Unreal Engine to do this and that and we haven't quite figured out yet how to get around that problem. Anyone have a suggestion?"

There are many talented people within the community who even sometimes work in the same profession as the ones you employ. And they all want to see the game being realized. So maybe in their free time, when seeing such a post come up, they ll take a look at it. Maybe they find a solution. Maybe it is the one you have been looking for. Maybe it does not work at all but it gives one of your devs the idea or inspiration needed to find to the solution themselves. Think of it for a moment, what a difference it makes: an isolated work process where you have maybe a dozen people trying to figure out something. Compared to a more open, more deeply engaged co-developing process with the community, when after a post in that special forum section you suddenly have a few dozen contributions or ideas floating around, from people who spent time with that issue too and even if they had not much experience in the professional field, maybe they offered a new way to look at it. And that is something all it takes to find that solution you were looking for.

Now I am aware that some might ask now: "But isn't that crazy? That's like them saying: develop our game for us." I would say: "Yes. So what? Do you want to see this game happening? Are you invested into the game? Then why not help make it a reality." Besides, it is more like them saying: "Can you help us with developing our game/vision that we all want to see realized?" And at the end, if the game gets finished quicker, or at all, then people will already feel invested into the game because they helped making it happen. Even if Intrepid legally owns the game and all its assets, it is now truly a shared world and experience.

So... maybe I am just delusional and what I suggested is not possible to do, but I at least wanted to share my ideas and where I see a huge opportunity within the indie game development to use that freedom they have, both in terms of what to feature in a game, but also how to develop it. In the end, we all want to see this game being realized and we want to play it. Maybe this could help see more games getting to that point.

I wish Steven and his team all the best and may your dreams come true

Noaani

So you're suggesting that Intrepid swap "marketing" department telling them what to do, for a community of 100,000+ voices?

I'd expect a better, more coherent game to come from the former than the later. A single deparment within a larger organization will at least come at you with a single opinion, 100,000 MMO fans will come at you to with 500,000 opinions, most of which are mutually exclusive.

The REAL strength of being an indy developer is the ability to make a single game from a single vision.

ArynKitty

Well, a marketing department is of course also important to have. But we have seen in the big companies that it sometimes does interfere with the development process, and not always in productive ways. If you have a platform, an open forum where specific tasks can be posted by the devs to be looked at by the community to help them out, it is something they can do for specific situations, not for everything of course. Say they hit a wall or bottleneck in development, and it would help if they simply had more than their current team having a look at it. So even if you have many opinions, some more some less grounded in experience, and some contradicting themselves... you then have a pool of different perspectives that may or may not contain the solution to what the current issue is.

It is basically, at the very least, a: 4 eyes see more than 2. And a few hundred minds may come up with something more likely than just a dozen.

Noaani

ArynKitty wrote: »

Well, a marketing department is of course also important to have. But we have seen in the big companies that it sometimes does interfere with the development process, and not always in productive ways. If you have a platform, an open forum where specific tasks can be posted by the devs to be looked at by the community to help them out, it is something they can do for specific situations, not for everything of course. Say they hit a wall or bottleneck in development, and it would help if they simply had more than their current team having a look at it. So even if you have many opinions, some more some less grounded in experience, and some contradicting themselves... you then have a pool of different perspectives that may or may not contain the solution to what the current issue is.

It is basically, at the very least, a: 4 eyes see more than 2. And a few hundred minds may come up with something more likely than just a dozen.

I'm not sure what you do for a living, but in my experience, someone that has been doing something for 10 years will always come up with a better solution to a problem specific to that field than someone that has not worked in said field.

If Intrepid were being staffed with people with the same game development experience as Steven, I'd probably agree with you.

Thing is, Intrepid has some of the most experienced MMO developers working there, and I'd honestly rather that they just leave it to the professionals.

If they come up against a wall they can't get through - with all their training, experience and expertise - the rest of us without that training, experience and expertise literally have no hope.

Atama

The old saying is that if you give a million monkeys a million typewriters, eventually they will randomly write the collected works of William Shakespeare.

It’s probably easier and faster to just let Shakespeare do it.

I’ll take professional experts over crowdsourcing if it’s ever an option.

Undead Canuck

The problem with crowd sourcing, especially computer code, is that in order to help out, someone would need to see all the code.
In all programs (and especially MMORPGs), there is not one bit of code that does something. There are many bits of code that all work together to do some specific thing.
To use your example of having people look at networking code. If I was going to help, I need to see how that code works with the base code, how it works with animation, combat, environment, etc. Also, what parts call this code, and what parts do this code call? What parameters are passed, or are the global? And then we need to see how this all works with virtual servers.

The only way to help coding something this massive (pun intended), is to work for the company.

Yes, I call on the crowd to help my game production sometimes. But I am a 1 person shop and can use the help. Also, my code is many thousands (or millions) of lines less than Intrepid is using.

Dygz

Boaty McBoatface

Atama

Dygz wrote: »

Boaty McBoatface

Hah, perfect example.

ArynKitty

I very much agree that what we from the outside could do will never be replacing anything a professional in that field working for the studio can do. But that was not the point really. What kinda sparked my thought process was pretty much the situation we -as gamers backing projects like this or wishing them to succeed- have seen so many times now. We can follow the information given to us, maybe participate in some contests, but other than that it is a lot of waiting and hoping.

Now I was wondering if there is not something we could do for projects like this. Like... anything other than this waiting and hoping for the best. It should never replace or devalue anything the devs on this game and the studio as a whole does, that never was the intention. Thanks to the Undead btw for the insight into coding. I have not much clue about that, so I was wondering what would be necessary for someone who is working in that field but is not on a project, to give substantial help.

So in essence, my idea was to introduce something like they do with open source projects. Have a platform/forum where they post things they are working on. Maybe put up specific tasks, looking for solutions, and then people who feel like they can come up with something, post their concept or idea. Basically like a problem bag you can pick a problem from, and offer a solution. On a much smaller scale and less open and involved than that of course.

Again, this is not intended to say that we could do the devs work as well as them, or at all even. This is just pondering if the many struggles and failed attempts we have seen in the indie gaming development could maybe be prevented if the community got more involved in helping out. And I would not underestimate the talent that is hidden and gathered in the gaming community. This suggestion here is born out of the frustration that the usual involvement and process from a gamer's/backer's side is pretty much like: back/support it, follow its development, hope it gets finished, at some undefined point in time. And in between there is not much you can do but wait and wonder.

So in short: I very much would like to find a way to increase the chances of projects like this succeeding. There were a few games in the past I very much would have loved to see succeed, but for one reason or another, they did not. And it seems it is more likely that they come up short, or fail completely, than that they are realized and also successfully so. So the question was: isn't there anything that could be done to make a success more likely? Big Budget games and studios have resources and the manpower to work with. Indie gaming has the freedom to do their own thing, and a very passionate community that is very engaged in the development process.

Atama

Give them your money. Buy a riding bear or a boat or something. Money helps.

Undead Canuck

Again, it is hard to help without getting access to everything. How can you help one thing unless you see how it connects to all the other pieces? Otherwise it has to be fixed again.

You keep calling them an indie studio, but they have more financial backing than most AAA games get. With the big companies, they have budgets. @Steven seems to be a little more focused (obsessed?) on getting it out to everyone (and him) than a lot of those companies.

ArynKitty

It depends how you define indie studio and what you associate with them. But to specify: independent of a publisher or any other outside party, so it is indeed pretty much Steven's project, and he has the resources to finance this project, which is a great thing. Allows him/them to innovate, and bring in game mechanics and systems that feel different from what has been offered for a long time now.

Ashes has been on my radar for a while now since the whole node system and how a player can contribute to it and invest into the growth of a node, is an awesome way to get people invested and tied to the game and its world for a long time. An aspect I feel many other MMOs have been lacking, so I really want to see Ashes getting realized. To show how important it is to get players long term invested into your world, outside of loot and gear progression. And in that regard I think Ashes plans to do a lot of things right.

Anyways, what I suggested might not be feasible, but the point I wanted to make is that I believe that a kickstarted project like this, or in general, has the advantage of having created a community right from the start that is very invested in that project. And compared to games usually being developed in isolation, I wondered if the community a kickstarted project has, can not be used to greater effect to see the project realized. If the answer is a simple no, then so be it, but it certainly is an interesting thing to ponder

Noaani

ArynKitty wrote: »

So in essence, my idea was to introduce something like they do with open source projects. Have a platform/forum where they post things they are working on. Maybe put up specific tasks, looking for solutions, and then people who feel like they can come up with something, post their concept or idea. Basically like a problem bag you can pick a problem from, and offer a solution. On a much smaller scale and less open and involved than that of course.

Again, for a smaller project or a project being run by amateurs, I agree. I mean, I'd love to help - specifically designing some raid content - but I know my "help" would simply hinder the professionals.

The thing with the above here though, is that almost every system in a complex thing like an MMO has other systems built on top of them. You can't just put a problem to one side and hope people come up with a solution to it, because that problem needs to be solved so that other problems that are built on top of the solution to that problem can be arrived at. If you bench one problem, you are benching every part of the game connected to that problem.

The kind of thing you are talking about would only word in the modding scene or very small indie game development. It wouldn't work in a game with even 10 developers, let alone a game with 100+.

Sitting back and waiting - and perhaps hoping - really is all we are able to do outside of specific tests Intrepid want us to assist with.

Wandering Mist

From my experience, roughly 90% of players are completely clueless when it comes to games development. They make demands that are unreasonable and start hurling abuse at the devs when those demands aren't met. That's why you have pokemon fans who complain about how unbalanced the game is but still demand the devs keep increasing the number of pokemon for them to use.

On top of that, most players don't stop to consider the long-term effects of what they are asking for. WoW is a good example of what happens when the devs try too hard to please the players. Flying, group finder, easy access to catch-up gear. All of these were things that players demanded without thinking about how they would affect the game in the long run.

And even if this wasn't the case, the players have very limited information to work with. We are told a tiny fraction of what is going on, and what is being planned (this is not a bad thing!), so how can we make informed decisions on the game with so little information? The answer is, we can't. There are so many suggestions posted here that more than likely wouldn't work simply because they would clash with other planned systems. It's not just about taking something you like and shoving it into the game, you have to think about the bigger picture and look at how your suggestion would impact the rest of the game. For example, a lot of people have suggested putting the in-depth mount system of GW2 into WoW. Yes, Blizzard could do that but it wouldn't work nearly so well because of the way the world is designed. The mounts in GW2 are designed specifically to interact with the world and fit into the explorer playstyle, something that doesn't really exist in WoW.

TL:DR You can't expect players to do a good job of suggesting things right now.

ArynKitty

My own experience is indeed solely coming from modding a game, for and with friends that all contributed to the project. It was a complete world conversion mod for Mount&Blade, privately done for fun to turn the game into a version of a campaign setting we are often RPing in. It was a really educational experience for me, since I got to deal with many aspects of a game's various mechanics and systems. Programming/Scripting, how meshes/textures work and are applied to ingame models, quest design, loot/item tables etc.

And within my group of friends and acquaintances I had a few who were really experienced in some of those aspects, so that is where I experienced how to get input/contributions from various sources and then it was up to me to put it all together and make the mod work. Was quite beautiful when it all came together in the end, and I was able to share it with them. But you are right of course that this all happened on a very small scale, and not professionally.

This here was not so much about feature suggestions, and more about wondering if there was a way players could help in targeting tasks or problems coming up within an development process while making the game. Because I agree, feature suggestion is maybe nice feedback to see what players think would be fun, but in the end the integrity of the dev's vision has to be maintained and they know best how their various systems interlock. After thinking about it, and what I experienced in my own modding work, that is indeed the main issue when trying to give constructive suggestion about a game mechanic, or trying to help with fixing something within the various systems at work. They are all connected.

I think talking about these things is still interesting though, since game design is fascinating. I personally come from a writer's/narrative designer's perspective to this, since storytelling/writing is my field of expertise. That's why I love to hear from others who know a lot more about the tech and other processes behind game development, since that is something I only have basic knowledge about.