I can't buy this game

[keith.lamothe]

With 1.3 (and beyond), honestly I don't plan any major overhauls.

Hahahahahahaha.

I would dig up the part where that was said about 1.0, but there wouldn't be a point

But, yea, the overhauls should at least be in other areas, and possibly even smaller in scope.

[x4000]

Yep, well.  It mainly boils down to what issues people raise; at 1.0 our pool of people was much smaller, and so the changes that came after to exposure to a larger audience were correspondingly larger in scope.  Will we do that again at some point in the future?  I'm sure.  But by the same token, I feel like there's enough to explore for now that unless something unforeseen comes up (which it usually does), I'm not planning any major overhauls.  It's kind of like AI War -- the first expansion didn't reinvent the game, but it added a lot more of what was already good about it.  The third expansion came right after a major reinvention in general, and so it too was mainly about refinement of what had just been reinvented.

Usually it seems like a sine wave with reinventions -- a lot very intensely for a while, then pushing content and existing concepts as far as they will go, then more reinvention intensely with what was learned, and repeat.  My take has been that we're heading into one of those more-stable troughs of extension rather than one of the less-stable peaks of reinvention.  But I could be wrong; happens all the time.

[Maledictus]

Illuminating stuff.

I never thought that this ship had no captain, I simply feared that perhaps the community may have too big a say in where the ship goes. But the well written post by CP has nullified the fear. Thanks for that excellent bit of insight.

I suppose my love for the design doc comes from the fact that I'm a developer myself, though in a completely different setting. In my game (data recovery) the rules are pretty much set in stone and the only feedback we use from people is with regard to errors in the software and improvements to the interface. Everything else is basically determined by the way data is stored and how it can be recovered, so I dare say that for us things are perhaps easier.

I can see that something as creative as a game can benefit from the Arcen way of doing things and so far it has indeed payed off. I suppose the "wait a while for the game development to settle down" is solid advice and I will do so, though I fear I will succumb to the power of the buy-now button way before that, if only to support Arcen.

[keith.lamothe]

I never thought that this ship had no captain, I simply feared that perhaps the community may have too big a say in where the ship goes.

Oh, ask anyone who's been around here for a year or two: we devs can be stubborn bleepity bleeps

(I'd have made the last 4-5 words of that sentence links to the last few years' several threads of discussions/requests/demands for overhauls of the AIW energy system; none of which happened, but since the most recent one might actually be closing in on an actual step forward...)

[nanostrike]

Honestly, the "Evolution" is what makes indie games unique.  The game literally keeps developing itself.

And having you be able to post a bug and get a reply that it'll be fixed in the next version within a day is pretty amazing, even for an indie dev.  Hell, at least a dozen of the features added (And a TON of the rooms) have been suggested by the fans themselves.

[Mánagarmr]

Honestly, the "Evolution" is what makes indie games unique.  The game literally keeps developing itself.

And having you be able to post a bug and get a reply that it'll be fixed in the next version within a day is pretty amazing, even for an indie dev.  Hell, at least a dozen of the features added (And a TON of the rooms) have been suggested by the fans themselves.

Yeah, I find that to be the most enticing thing about indie games. While I know AAA devs really care for their games too, too often they are tied up behind sixteen layers of publisher bureaucracy and we never see them, and patches are delayed, yadda.