Please tell me you guys might also digitize the rest of the -Span family

[flygonite]

I love bird game and would also like to play dragon game and fish game in exactly this style, without the need to have access to multiple flesh-and-blood humans existing in the same space at the same time :>

[AronFJenks]

Wyrmspan is very popular so I expect it will be digitized. I'm hoping Board Game Arena will do it. They are very thorough with bugs and play-testing.

Finspan is not even out yet, I don't think? But it's a Stonemaier game, and their games always seem to be very highly ranked, so I expect we will see that in digital form at some point.

I'm hoping a different company is involved. I'm disappointed with how little has been done to improve Wingspan. The steam version and the BGA version both have advantages and disadvantages, so I'm not sure either one is clearly superior to the other.

[flygonite]

I can't comment on the BGA version at all (because I didn't know this place existed lol) and I know there are qualms with aspects of the Steam version, but I really love how it *feels* playing Monster Couch's take on Wingspan. I genuinely want literally this aesthetically, tactilely, aurally, etc etc, just with dragons and fish!

if it was a possibility to just graft wyrm and fin onto this game base specifically with no changes beyond mechanics I would be so on board

[Steinar]

If we ever get a digital adoption of Wyrmspan and Finspan, then I beg Stonemaier Games to heavily consider Monster Couch. The quality on Wingspan Digital is so good, and they made a great choice in music producer. :)

[AronFJenks]

Origineel geplaatst door Steinar:

If we ever get a digital adoption of Wyrmspan and Finspan, then I beg Stonemaier Games to heavily consider Monster Couch. The quality on Wingspan Digital is so good, and they made a great choice in music producer. :)

I honestly cannot tell whether this is serious, or satire or irony.

[Steinar]

Origineel geplaatst door AronFJenks:

I honestly cannot tell whether this is serious, or satire or irony.

It's serious. :) Monster Couch have done a great job with Wingspan Digital (and Calico), don't you agree?

[AronFJenks]

Origineel geplaatst door Steinar:

Origineel geplaatst door AronFJenks:

I honestly cannot tell whether this is serious, or satire or irony.

It's serious. :) Monster Couch have done a great job with Wingspan Digital (and Calico), don't you agree?

No, I do not.

They did a good job bringing it to market at first. But they have gotten increasingly sloppy and indifferent to obvious flaws.

This is just unacceptable:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1054490/discussions/1/597390757221963482/

And numerous other blatant and easily fixable problems.

[flygonite]

Ooookay so from personal experience, bugs DO happen in unexpected places when the devs adjust other things, and when the game has a bunch of possible interactions it's entirely possible for the playtesters to not encounter every single one that was freshly introduced. I'll guarantee you there were many more that you've never seen because they were patched before getting pushed to a live build.

In order to NOT have bugs crop up with a new patch, you would need to have playtesters systematically check every possible player and card interaction in every possible circumstance, every single time a new build was made available to the testers. And for that to be feasible... you'd need a lot of time, manpower, or money going just into the QA team. And I'm going to suspect that a modestly sized indie dev simply isn't going to have those resources available. I have no idea what Monster Couch's process looks like on the inside, how many testers there are, whether anything could be better organized... but please don't take an instance of an update having bugs as an indication that the devs are incompetent. Players are inevitably going to find more mistakes than any devs ever could simply by sheer number of eyes.

[AronFJenks]

Origineel geplaatst door flygonite:

Ooookay so from personal experience, bugs DO happen in unexpected places when the devs adjust other things, and when the game has a bunch of possible interactions it's entirely possible for the playtesters to not encounter every single one that was freshly introduced. I'll guarantee you there were many more that you've never seen because they were patched before getting pushed to a live build.

In order to NOT have bugs crop up with a new patch, you would need to have playtesters systematically check every possible player and card interaction in every possible circumstance, every single time a new build was made available to the testers. And for that to be feasible... you'd need a lot of time, manpower, or money going just into the QA team. And I'm going to suspect that a modestly sized indie dev simply isn't going to have those resources available. I have no idea what Monster Couch's process looks like on the inside, how many testers there are, whether anything could be better organized... but please don't take an instance of an update having bugs as an indication that the devs are incompetent. Players are inevitably going to find more mistakes than any devs ever could simply by sheer number of eyes.

Yeah, I know how to write code, and your post is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

A veteran player of the game who spent two days playing the game over and over would find these bugs. When bugs come up LITERALLY THE FIRST TIME A CARD IS PLAYED, the excuses you are offering do not hold up.

It's the same tiresome ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ excuse I keep hearing. "Well, it's tough to find all bugs in a game with so many interactions."

NO. Just, no.

When literally every raptor that eats cards is bugged and cannot be played without spending a rat, THAT'S NOT DIFFICULT TO FIND.

The problem is there seems to be a lack of overlap between:
1) The develops writing the code and
2) Developers writing the code WHO UNSDERSTAND THE GAME.

Give me 48 hours and access to the code, and I'll find and fix every damn bug. I'll do it for free if they pay my round-trip plane fare and lodging and food and transportation. Give me a break.

When you and other people write this nonsense, do you not realize that the people writing the code can literally deal themselves whatever cards they want, play through the entire deck, and repeat until they have tested all 300+ cards? Or, do you realize this but just think other people do not?

There is no excuse for this garbage. Programming 101. Test the code, find the bugs, fix them.

Sure, if there's an obscure bug that happens 1 game out of 50, and it gets missed, so be it. But we are talking about 9-10 powerful raptors that literally DO NOT WORK AS INTENDED, with no other required interactions necessary to recreate the problem.

Writing code for a game is not complex. It's tedious, yes. But it's basically just a lot of "if/then" blocks. We're not executing loops that require millions of iterations.

Any competent programmer could fix the raptor bug with a few lines of code. They obviously are not given enough time or money to do so, and their supervisors are okay with that.

We should not be okay with that.

[AronFJenks]

Origineel geplaatst door flygonite:

In order to NOT have bugs crop up with a new patch, you would need to have playtesters systematically check every possible player and card interaction in every possible circumstance, every single time a new build was made available to the testers.

No.

First of all, what was the new patch trying to fix? How in the hell did the patch break the card-eating raptor birds?

Why are they even releasing a patch for whatever unimportant crap it supposedly dealt with, when they should be fixing the game stability issues, the asynchronous starting cards selection, etc. ??

[flygonite]

Origineel geplaatst door AronFJenks:

When you and other people write this nonsense, do you not realize that the people writing the code can literally deal themselves whatever cards they want, play through the entire deck, and repeat until they have tested all 300+ cards? Or, do you realize this but just think other people do not?

So I just want to address this part specifically, because I promise you dude, I understand both how it feels to be the player wanting it all fixed and the person in the team trying to catch everything.

I'm very aware that you can debug anything you want. And in absolutely perfect circumstances, you could have every single aspect of the game checked every single time any changes are made in the code.

The limiting factors are resources: time, money, personnel, organization. I have no idea what things look like behind the scenes for Monster Couch; how big is their QA team? Are they paid or volunteer? Do they have a system in place to make sure they have checked every single kind of card or interaction without forgetting anything? Is it even feasible to check every single kind of card or interaction for every new build you get? Can the QA team afford to spend the time and/or money to do so thorough a check in the off-chance that something unrelated to the intended patch was affected, or do they have to focus on what they've encountered as the biggest problem spots with what resources they have? If you've checked everything via the debug build, will that definitely correspond to everything working on the intended release build, or do you need to check everything again there too?

It is entirely possible that Monster Couch has flaws in their internal structure that leads to bugs like this getting through whereas a differently organized dev would not. And situations like this are what makes a developer have to examine what went wrong and try to correct them in the future, if it is within their means to do so. But unless you have the size and standards of literally Nintendo... I can all but guarantee you that any other indie dev out there is making compromises in very, very similar ways.

[AronFJenks]

I hear what you're saying. I actually think we're mostly in agreement. Mostly I was just explaining to the commenter "Steinar" why I no longer am willing to use the word "great" when describing the work Monster Couch has done with the game.

I do understand that they cannot realistically fix everything, catch every bug, and make all the desired interface improvements.

I just believe they could and should be able to do more than what they have.

For example, the structure on Board Game Arena, regardless of which game it is, seems highly favorable to bug-fixes and improvements. When people run into a problem, they can post the game number, the move number, and explain exactly what happened. These posts then get reviewed and marked as "Not a bug", or "confirmed bug", or "could not replicate", or whatever the appropriate response is.

For whatever reason, likely financial, games on steam seem to mostly follow a different model: Publish the game, filled with bugs, ignore most of them, and crank out expansions. But, people keep buying the expansions and other unnecessary DLC, such as different backgrounds, so, the model seems to be working.

[Waschbär42]

Origineel geplaatst door AronFJenks:

For whatever reason, likely financial, games on steam seem to mostly follow a different model: Publish the game, filled with bugs, ignore most of them, and crank out expansions. But, people keep buying the expansions and other unnecessary DLC, such as different backgrounds, so, the model seems to be working.

IMO it is kind of a race to the bottom: With enough potential customers, there are seemingly always enough ppl to buy poorly made games. With enough poorly made games still selling at least decently, the overall quality standard decreases over time since it becomes less and less economically viable/reasonable to invest more resources than needed to meet that standard.

Obviously there is way more to the full story and I don't know the whole context (neither for Monster Couch or Steam or any other game here for that matter).
Also there are still lots of fantastic games with passionate devs and year long free support and patches here on Steam, so there is that. :)