Okay 505, Holiday's over. Time for some answers. (Linux/Mac)

fightingcomelightly DICO hasn't been directly mentioned in a Kickstarter Update since September 14th, 2017.

I'd think if you were really that concerned, you should've asked them about it early last year. (I noticed that you registered on these forums back in June 2017)

Can anyone tell me a reason for some peoples' sudden concern about the involvement of DICO? I mean, yeah they haven't been mentioned so should we not expect that they're working on it as usual, as in, there was no reason to mention them because nothing about their involvement has changed? Has there been anything official hinting at a departure of DICO? And how would information about any of this help? I really don't understand...

 I get what you're saying, and I totally understand this sentiment.

 Some of the updates have not felt very substantial, to put it mildly.

 However, I can also understand why this is, and it's basically these three reasons.

 1. The game's proven to be way more difficult and costly to develop than anticipated.

There are several reasons for this, but I'll mainly address just one here: way too many platforms and stretch-goals in the campaign. Game developers are notoriously overconfident when defining the project scope for their games, mostly because that's the way they want them to turn out. IGA had never developed for that many platforms (probably thought middleware would make things easy, when it only makes things easier), and I don't think he'd ever done so many features in a single game, either. So the difficulty in creating the game - and by extension the time and budget were greatly underestimated.

Now, this is is actually rather par for the course in game development, but since it's a Kickstarter, they can't very well drop any stretch-goal without incurring significant backlash, so they don't drop anything other than platforms (and we're seeing how well that's working out). So in this sense, Kickstarters are more difficult than regular development, because there is a PR backlash for one of the most common practices in game development, dropping features and delaying games (I'd be willing to bet most games don't meet their original target release date, and that they go over-budget, too).

So, what does this have to do with the updates? Well, having so many features means you have to spend lots of time working on the game's back-end, i.e. things that won't show well until you have the finished product in your hands.

Picture it:

September update:
"We've made huge progress on the dev tools, guys, now our planners (game designers) can polish this feature to a shine without waiting for new builds! Aren't you excited?"

October update:
"OK, so after weeks of testing, we think we've found the right balance between performance and memory consumption for this area. It's gonna look the same as before, but it'll run a lot better on the weaker hardware."

November update:
"Finally managed to fix that bug that was causing the game to crash when you beat the game in Boss Rush mode. It was only happening with a certain specific hardware and driver configuration, but it was just unacceptable. Also, automatic enemy placement has been incorporated into the dev tools, and the ai scripting features have also been significantly improved."

This is what actual game development looks like: lots and lots of coding and testing to create an environment what will let you implement and fine tune all of the features that will ultimately show in the final product. But most people probably don't want to see that in an update, so... the devs go mum.


 2. The developers have opted to listen to and implement our suggestions as if they were Kickstarter campaign promises, even though they are not.

And just when you thought you'd finished updating your tools and graphics engine, the community finds it "lacking." Oh, boy. So  now you go back to updating your tools and engine. And you don't show any stuff until it's absolutely locked. Why? Remember when you showed off a prototype with Zangetsu and the demo then looked really shitty when compared to it? Well, maybe the final game won't look as bad - you did disable the shaders just to get the demo out (mostly) on time - but you might have avoided that sh!tstorm if you hadn't shown off a non-final version to begin with.

The effect that backer feedback has had on delaying the game and increasing it's scope beyond what was originally promised should not be underestimated. The game looks the way it does because of feedback. The game is going to look better now because of feedback. They could easily ignore this feedback and they are not ignoring it.

What I'm trying to say here is that we've been encouraging IGA throughout all of the project to go back to the drawing board, precisely because they've shown us quite a bit of the product - just not through updates. And every time they we make them go back to the drawing board, we extend the period before the next substantial update.


3. With some games, there's no easy way to show progress until the game is close to finished.

Bloodstained is one such game. A retro style game with assets that are relatively easy to create can be shown off quickly and without much trouble, and while the same can't be said for a big budget AAA game, those have... other means to do PR. Like, you hire a separate team to work on the demo. Or you use high-end dev PCs to show off the game and then get a separate team to work on optimization so the final product looks close enough that people won't notice. Or you photoshop your screenshots.

Bloodstained does not fall into either of these easily PR-able categories. They are on an extremely tight budget. I know this because the game has been in development for more than twice as long as originally planned. They also can't have crazy high expectations for sales. So they can't spend money to make the game look good before it actually looks good, like they do with AAA games, and the game is not retro-enough that it looks fine without much effort.

So, there's that.

Now, can these obstacles be surmounted? Sure, but it's not easy and... to be honest - and this is just conjecture on my part - there's probably another factor at work here: Japanese devs don't really feel comfortable showing off works-in-progress. They don't like talking about how the sausage is made. It's a cultural thing. Add to this the fact that the publisher is 1) a separate company and 2) not Japanese and ... there's probably communication issues working against the staff, internally, that somehow manifest externally. Not as in "they don't get along," but as in it's more difficult for them to get on the same page sometimes, because they have different assumptions about what is not said in meetings, even with multicultural bilingual team members.

If you want to see an example of Japanese devs having good communication with the user-base, the only one I can think of is FFXIV's Yoshi-P. I'm sure lots of people would disagree with me, but trust me, that's as good as it gets. The reason communication flows smoothly and quickly between the devs and the player community is because Yoshi-P is not only the game's main PR guy, he's also the game's main decision maker, being  both project manager and creative director. And he's one of the company directors at the publisher. So unless you get that kind of combination in a single person, there's always going to be some difficulty communicating with the user base, because all messages have to go through everyone. Different people might have different ideas about how to address an issue, and these things can be magnified by cultural differences.

Anyway, sorry for the mega-long post. There's just a lot I think I understand about this situation that I feel I need to share.

dareka I believe you are completely right about what you said. I'm not a developer, but you explained in a way that is very easy to understand.

The stretch-goals are something i think most can see that it was underestimated. Some of them were quite easy to grasp, some are completely limbo ("New Boss" what that means?) and some of them were completely gigantic ideas. IGA himself said that some stretch-goals were thought in as single night, because they needed to keep the money coming in and they needed something interesting as a reward for that.

We can easily say they didn't planned most stretch goals in the most careful way they could.

Sorry for the delay. One of the people I need to speak to was supposed to be in the office this afternoon, but it looks like they are not going to make it in. I am going to address the topic as soon as I am able.

...*ahem*... like I said...


Unless you're the creative & administrative lead & one of the company directors and the publisher at the same time, i.e., unless you answer to no one else (like Yoshi-P), you always have to go through all the people concerned with the matter in the your organization before you give the user base an answer on controversial questions.

Thanks for the update, Question ! We'll wait.

Likewise. Even if I didn't have technical experience, I'd still be in the camp of "the more open people are being, the more I'm willing to trust them and cut them slack."