It happens everywhere, large or small...

[LinkoVitch]

I read this article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23754311 and it made me think of how similar can happen in small hobbyist communities like the jag.

 

Announcing a title too early can be quite a pain for the developer, and lead to too much interest from the fans, leading to too much pressure on the developer which suddenly turns what was a fun thing to do, into some high pressure thing. Especially if you don't want to disappoint anyone. I have spoken to people who have regretted announcing their plans as soon as they have done in the Jag community, I myself have regretted my own announcements, especially as very few have seen the light of day.. (Warballs.. ahem... )

 

Just thought it an interesting article, especially as it reflects things I have seen in my own little community

[sh3-rg]

Homebrew stuff in general on any platform is a tricky thing to get right when it comes to this kind of stuff. Many people who set out to produce stuff have no idea about taking a concept through to completion and end up making it up as they go along... anyone who has made a game or two knows how disasterous this can be. It's not so easy to judge the scope of a project without experience and some people have obviously been really tempted to show off what they can do or tease it well before they should as soon as they have the bare bones of an idea half working. Hinting or boasting about what you might be able to do with early announces but producing nothing but vaopourware or false promises only makes you look silly and shortsighted in the end and leaves you feeling dejected and demotivated. This is why it's always best to start off small and build, rather than aiming to pwn the world at the first attempt.

 

Some people just don't consider the scope of what they plan to achieve before opening their mouths and promising what to all intents and purposes is impossible in practical terms. For as much as your ego tells you your technical coding ability or game design genius is unparalleled and that you can simply go from A to B to C and it's job done, the everyday practicalities of life and all the other things that come along with producing a game can and will slap you about the face day after day and wear you into submission as you drag your feet and stumble on through the alphabet. Where lots of game designers go wrong is planning. They might think they've made the best plan of attack there is and might think they have all bases covered, but often they've been completely naive and unprepared for the bulk of the challenge, never mind the final polish/balancing/touches that really make it a game worth playing... the same kind of thinking where someone has a bare-bones engine and thinks they've pretty much done the hard stuff and the rest is just a matter of time, when in reality engine stuff is not even the start of making a game of any depth in normal circumstances. This is why demo coders very rarely make good game coders and very rarely produce anything other than flashy fx with half-arsed games tagged on to them.

 

Look at a real game design document and see how much time should be invested producing the engine tech vs other major parts of a project... it's a tiny fraction most of the time. When you consider a homebrew might be 1 to 3 people strong, it only multiplies the effect.

 

I prefer the Typo method, he's a shining example to homebrew coders and also to Jaguar coders of the past end present - say nothing, drop bombs.

 

Doesn't sit very well with all these egoist coders though and that's why there are often more promises made than games released and why there's often way more expectation than most can reasonably deliver, especially in the case of something like the Jaguar that rarely lives up to the hype of the hardware.

[carmel_andrews]

Shame that someone even tried copying his work.....how sad, perhaps the person doing the copying can explain to the community why the original author isn't doing the game anymore (or perhaps he was too lazy to try coming up with an original game himself....the person copying the game code that is)

[Willard]

i don't really understand his approach to the situation, the copying of his code might be demoralizing, but refusing to work on a game just because it gets a little attention seems weird. especially if it was a game he was excited about making. i imagine whatever he puts out next will get alot of attention regardless of what it is.

[Karyyk]

Let's face it, Notch doesn't ever have to do anything for money ever again (if he's smart, anyways). He can do what he want, for whatever reason he wants. I honestly don't get the rationale at all, although I would assume that the pressure of developing an actual follow-up to Minecraft (a game I don't understand the appeal of, really) is basically too much. Anything he says, no matter how vague or baseless, is going to be exaggerated and blown-up to huge proportions.

[LinkoVitch]

Having a plan, even a simple one certainly makes working on a project a hell of a lot simpler (for me at least). What I am tinkering with at the moment was just an idea and I was all kinds of lost as to what to do to make it happen.. Spent a few minutes scribbling a to-do list, breaking it up into key sections and those into the components they needed. Once that was done I simply started at the top and worked my way through, ticking things off a list and seeing actual progress helps focus the mind, stops you trying to think about problems 10+ steps away and get what's needed done now.

 

Having quite a bit of fun with it when I get a few hours, having a breakdown of stuff to do also helps to work on the project when I know I only have a limited amount of time too, if I know I have only 30 minutes tinker time, I can check the list, assess what I can possibly get done in that time and focus on that.. or perhaps just have a think about what's on the list and refine it a bit more ready for the next chunk of dev time.

 

Did think it interesting that Notch suffered with rabid fan issues pushing him away from the game, which is more what made me think of the Jag scene, as I have seen a few projects collapse under the weight of their fans. I was hoping that in future fans may think a bit before constantly demanding updates from someone etc, hopefully they may realize that this does nothing to help them get what they want or support the dev, even if they are waving fist fulls of cash at them.

[+CyranoJ]

Fists full of cash would, in my opinion, just increase the pressure. I don't think we'll ever take pre-orders for just that reason.

[sh3-rg]

Spent a few minutes scribbling a to-do list, breaking it up into key sections and those into the components they needed. Once that was done I simply started at the top and worked my way through, ticking things off a list and seeing actual progress helps focus the mind, stops you trying to think about problems 10+ steps away and get what's needed done now.

 

And it also gets you to start thinking realistically about the project as a whole and gives a few clues as to just how much effort is going to be needed.

 

Another point worth noting is that producing something within the confines of an environment full of restrictions and bottlenecks like 20 or 30 year old hardware, it's not a happy place for free thinking and creative flow when exploring something you've never done before. With more ambitious projects, it probably makes sense to prototype the more intricate or technical aspects of what you want to achieve on a platform where you won't suffer the same way. There you can refine things, make them feel and look right and then scale them back to your target platform. Running head first into making a shit hot load of tech and then not having a clue how you are going to go from there and having to experiment when you've already got your target hardware firmly by the gonads is only going to lead to tears of frustration and apathy. Probably why we always work within the Jaguar and use its strengths rather than aiming for stuff that Atari couldn't even pull off themselves on their own kit with their own sdk.

[+CyranoJ]

Yes, unfortunately a lot of promised Jaguar software is coded in that strange language called Unobtanium.

[LinkoVitch]

Yes, unfortunately a lot of promised Jaguar software is coded in that strange language called Unobtanium.

 

I thought it was Unobtanium++ ?

[Guitari]

That Minecraft geezer sounds like a wise man. But then I reckon there must be countless people who are disappointed.

 

The other component of course is that fans can encourage development if done in the right way. Sympathetic messages on these boards frequent enough to spur the devs on but infrequent enough that the devs don't feel harassed. It's all a balance in life you see

 

(Just looking at it from the end-user view for the sake of balance!)

[+GroovyBee]

With more ambitious projects, it probably makes sense to prototype the more intricate or technical aspects of what you want to achieve on a platform where you won't suffer the same way. There you can refine things, make them feel and look right and then scale them back to your target platform.

 

This is a good idea but in practice it can be problematic. If your "whizzy tech" contains floating point numbers or is heavy on multiplication/division during its execution then you might not be able to scale back far enough when it comes to getting it going on legacy hardware. Similarly the libraries you are using to make your life simpler on the PC (for example) may not exist or be performance optimised (if they do exist) on your target platform of choice either.

 

Developing on a PC with a modern IDE certainly makes developing retro games much easier than it did back in the day but you still have to think in "legacy mode" for the final result to be workable.

[sh3-rg]

This is a good idea but in practice it can be problematic. If your "whizzy tech" contains floating point numbers or is heavy on multiplication/division during its execution then you might not be able to scale back far enough when it comes to getting it going on legacy hardware. Similarly the libraries you are using to make your life simpler on the PC (for example) may not exist or be performance optimised (if they do exist) on your target platform of choice either.

 

Developing on a PC with a modern IDE certainly makes developing retro games much easier than it did back in the day but you still have to think in "legacy mode" for the final result to be workable.

 

All fair points. But might just save a lot of heartache and upset if you figure out certain things and prove to yourself you can follow through where it's more about being creative than technical. Then again not many people are in it for the end result but the journey itself

[kskunk]

In the homebrew community, you can end up with a few dozen polite people who only want a status update once per month. That can amount to a different person bugging you every day. Just imagine a community that size of Minecraft. A lot of very patient people only asking one question per month, could literally consume all of your time, and invade every corner of your life.

 

Public relations is a surprising amount of work, and for an introverted engineer, it's exhausting - not fun. It's way better to lie low while you're building something, so that you can spend all your energy building it. Answering e-mails and private messages and monitoring threads becomes a chore real quick, especially when you have a skeptical and/or pushy audience.

 

The worst part about announcing something in development is that your audience will naturally want to participate. You'll get good ideas and bad from all directions, and you can end up feeling like you're working for a thousand bosses. That's fine if you're in business, sucky if you're trying to do it for the joy of creating.

 

I watched how other homebrew products were going while developing the Skunkboard. People would argue over this feature and that, someone would get grumpy about how long it was taking, or swear they'd never buy one at price X. That stuff just exhausted me to think about. So I didn't say anything until I had boards ready to sell. At that point - it was a lot easier. People made up their minds whether they wanted it or not based on what it was. There was still a ton of communication required, but it would have been a lot more if I'd announced sooner...

 

- KS