The Indie Stone is the worst development team...

[Croak]

...I have ever dealt with.

Build 30 Dec 2014 - Claims of main features being rolled out by Q2 of 2015.
http://projectzomboid.com/blog/2014/12/turbo-to-the-finishing-line/

Build 32 Aug 2015 - NPCs won't be in this year.
http://projectzomboid.com/blog/2015/08/bank-holiday-apzdisa-mop-up/

I was willing to believe in these ass hats but after 8 months for 2 builds of minor content (YES, 3 skills with a handful of interactions and a couple items in this type of engine which already has a built foundation is MINOR) they have convinced me that they just don't care and don't spend any actual time developping this game. I could put out as much content as they have over the past 8 months by myself in a month, maybe 2 given the system and tools.

If you're reading this and haven't bought the game yet, don't buy it, and don't support these developpers. In the end I will either look like a raving jack ass or a wise warning for what came. I truly hope that it's the prior, but I'm thoroughly convinced that's not going to be the case, at least not for another 3 years minimum. These guys are no better than Chucklefish and look like absolute jokes compared to the ARK team, which pumps out chunks of content WEEKLY on a game engine FAR more complex than this.

Indie Stone,
Get your act together, set deadlines for yourself instead of your pathetic "No ETAs" policy, and put something in the game your old fans actually wanted before they quit. Do that and I may even come back to make a public apology. That is, if your forum hounds don't perma ban me first for talking back instead of ignoring repeat posts and generally letting the forums be a mess cause you don't want to drive away new players, aka victims.

[Gonzo Max]

See, this is exactly why ETAs aren't given. I appreciate the frustration, and as a player I feel it too, but throwing baseless insults around isn't really going to speed up the process or make things easier to deal with, is it?

Also, for posterity, in 2015 so far we've seen way more than 2 builds of minor content, see for yourself. Loads of stuff going on, and loads of stuff still to come:

http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/forum/35-pz-updates/

I look forward to playing your amazing feature rich and fully polished game by the end of September, assuming you're starting development today.

[lemmy101]

Sorry you feel the way you do, and I know we've let people down with the NPCs. It's far from ideal, but I have to say that if we're the worst development team you've dealt with, then you've been supremely lucky. I've always refrained from name dropping specific other dev teams, but to make a comparison I will do in this case.

There are two routes we could take with the NPCs. Release whatever we have due to the amount of people calling out for it, or stubbornly hold it back amidst anger and frustration. We chose the latter. Another Early Access zombie survival game that's been around near as long as we have is The Dead Linger, and recently they released an opt-in build amidst much pressure to release after months and months of delay. Frankly after such a long wait what they released, even for an opt in, was extremely buggy and unplayable, and the reaction? Well, it wasn't too pretty. Releasing before it is ready after a long delay does nothing but give you the worst of both worlds. You're slow AND what you produce is low quality. People can forgive either but not both.

This is a trap we will not fall into. We may be slow tortoises but it's better than being hares. Slow and steady wins the race. Very few dev teams of our size can be both fast and polished with every feature. We're holding it back not just out of pride, but out of consideration for those that have been waiting for it. Starcraft 2 was held back a decade not because Blizzard are a crap development team, but because they wanted to make sure it was good, knew it would disappoint if it were released as is, and had the rare luxury of money to fund development and keep it back until it was good. In hindsight once the game is done and out, that's a million times better than them releasing it after 3 years and it tanking, everyone hating it and being massively disappointed. Even if you were the most angry and disappointed person in the world during the game's development, years after the fact I bet you'd not change a thing. We're in the same stable situation and we want PZ to last decades and have a great legacy behind it, and in many cases a lot of this rests on the NPCs, and like Blizzard (though in a different league) are in the rare situation that we have enough funds to continue to fund it and hold the NPCs back until we can deliver. We'll not compromise. Frankly in the early days of the project we promised a lot for the NPCs, more than we should have, and it's taken years because:

1) It's extremely ambitious. I'd say with a straight face its one of the most ambitious NPC systems in the history of games. I say that not to boast but to say that we got over zealous with our early day enthusiasm. There's a very high bar for success we now have to reach to fulfill our promises, and we're getting there but it's tough.

2) It's involved a lot of learning about AI from the dev team. Our very early predictions was that multiplayer would be the really hard and long task to complete, and we were over confident with the NPCs. We released something that was broken and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and people complained endlessly about them. They were a rotten base that if we developed on would just end up a complete mess, so they were stripped out at a point they would require a lot of work (the change to the big streaming map) and planned out from the start to live up to the initial promises. Despite being seasoned game developers, we were admittedly a little naive to the challenges we'd face in AI, and had to learn a LOT to get to the stage we can deliver. Now, ironically, if you google 'behavior trees' (the popular AI system most modern games and engines use, that our NPCs also use) on google you get my own article on how to work with them as the first result, so now we have the reverse problem where in many cases the resources to learn from don't exist, people are looking to US for advice, and we're in somewhat uncharted territory. Consider exactly what we're trying to do with these NPCs, how many other games ever made do the same successfully, and it should be clear why they are such a challenge for us and how they could get delayed repeatedly or take much longer than we'd expected (admittedly it should have been more obvious to us, but I've admitted we screwed up in that regard).

3) Because people have been waiting so long, if we release something ♥♥♥♥♥♥ our user score would be promptly hitting the sub 60%s and our fans would be angry and disappointed. A billion times more disappointed than you are right now. If we released at any point this year, then you'd be angrier than you are right now. Simple as that. Is this what you want? We'll release when your reaction to it would be 'Finally!' and not 'I waited for THIS?!' - it makes no sense for us to turn one type of anger into another. We've just got to ride out the angry posts and reviews like this and deliver what we promised. And we WILL do that, it's just not clear when it'll be. But as the linked post in EG's reply says, the rest of the game will be better for it as it will force us to develop the game longer than we would otherwise to give our customers other new stuff to play in the meantime.

4) Because NPCs are the sort of gameplay system that uses every other gameplay system, so while NPCs are in development, other features regularly drop into the game that require new NPC code. It's a case of NPC development catching up (which it is doing, gradually) with all the other gameplay features that go into the game.

I've refrained from slinging mud and never ever mentioned another early access zombie apocalypse survival game in terms of comparisons, as it feels ♥♥♥♥♥♥ to do, but honestly, we've made many mistakes in the early days but have learnt from them and I would hope that the attention we've put in the rest of the game, and the fact that the game is very playable and feature rich, moreso than the majority of survival games out there, would have scored us a few points to take us out of being 'the wost dev team ever'. The dev team making NPCs now are not the same ones who promised them, we've come a long way and changed a lot, so you're judging us based on those early mistakes despite what we're doing now, ever since being on Early Access, being the right move for us, the game and community. The legacy of over enthusiasm and nativity this more experienced and world wise team today inherited could not have been handled with more care and consideration as we have, and if you look at what has become of similarly naive or over enthusiastic teams on Early Access you will find we've done a damn good job at rectifying our early mistakes, and two bullet point features aside (that are still coming) we've delivered everything we initially promised (except running the game in a browser, that no one wanted). The reason we haven't mentioned NPCs unless explicitly asked (in an AMA) is because we don't want to hype up a new group of people to something that's still some way aways and make a new generation of new angry people like you. We already have way too much to deal with from people like yourself being disappointed without perpetuating the hype and creating more.

We let you down with our initial promises being too ambitious, but we're keeping our word by delivering those super ambitious NPCs even if it kills us, and my life over the past couple of years has suffered greatly by those early day promises and my resolution to keep to them. We will deliver, we promise, but we're not going to deliver earlier than we should to satisfy those frustrated, and I'd hold it back as long as is necessary as to deliver what we promised and not some shonky box ticker. The pressure for NPCs is immense, but we won't buckle for the good of the game.

If this makes us the worst dev team ever, then so be it, and I apologize, but that's the way it'll be for the long term good of the game and players, and ourselves even if it doesn't feel that way (for any of the aforementioned) right now. In short I'd say we've definitely messed up in the past, but we've had our crap together for years now and are making the right choice with regards to holding NPCs back and keeping quiet until they are imminent (this is a case in point, would I have had to deal with writing this reply and the emotional upset of stewing over this thread for the next few days, if I'd just not added that question to this Mondoid? This is what we get for mentioning NPCs, and you wonder why we don't give regular solid updates on them? I'd love nothing more than to post regular videos and updates, but it'd do nothing but cause us grief and hurt us in a multitude of ways so we're forced to stay quiet)

I'll tell you straight that yes, most dev teams would have released something by now. I agree. I just disagree with the reasoning. I've put myself under a lot of unending pressure when all I'd have to do to alleviate it is release something that 'technically' did what we promised, and call it a day. After the last year, and reading stuff like this, nothing would give me more relief. But I'd be doing it for me, not for you. You'd be disappointed. I'd be free of all this responsibility and pressure and sleepless nights, and you'd have NPCs 1/10th as good as we said they would be. I'm extremely extremely proud, not ashamed, that I've resisted the urge for an early 'get out' despite threads like this and am going to deliver what was promised and nothing less. Damned if I do, damned if I don't. Except if I don't that makes the NPCs better and make PZ the game it was envisioned to be, so I'll pick being damned that way and continue to do so until they are what we promised. One angry post or a million angry posts.

I hope once NPCs are finally out you'll change your mind and appreciate the immense time we're putting into getting them right.

In the meantime bear in mind that the game is funded by sales, has a good review score and thus plenty of Steam visibility, and right now is completely secure and NPCs are 100% guaranteed in future. On our present course I can honestly guarantee you the NPCs you're waiting for at some point. Feel free to warn as many people off PZ as you feel is your responsibility, that is your right as a disappointed customer. But know that all it is doing is contributing a tiny bit to the only scenario NPCs will not be guaranteed, and that being the game stopping selling, money drying up and pressuring us to start a new game before they are finished. Negative reviews are not going to be an extra kick up the ass for us, we have plenty of those (too many) and at this point we're getting kicked down onto the floor, not up off it.

But if you're that certain they will never be released and feel it your responsibility to steer people away, feel free to continue as long as you're polite and as honest as you can be with the information you have. I totally get your skepticism, its not baseless, but it's completely incorrect. They are coming, NPCs ARE coming, and this attitude is doing nothing positive to help them come quicker or more certainly (it's brought my development to a standstill today, at the very least) and if this attitude spreads and starts turning people away from PZ in droves, it is ironically the biggest and only real threat to NPCs out of anything. I need to make that clear so you can consider what your goals are with all these posts. I know we've evidently lost your trust but what is in this post is complete, from the heart, unvarnished truth.

Also....

"Get your act together, set deadlines for yourself instead of your pathetic "No ETAs" policy, "

We do have internal deadlines. We just don't tell anyone in case they slip. And since you're quoting one of our earlier incorrect ETAs, and a lot of anger out there is due to those incorrect public ETAs, I'm not sure how that is evidence for how we should give more public ETAs.

Finally, I'd like to make the point about this:

These guys are no better than Chucklefish and look like absolute jokes compared to the ARK team, which pumps out chunks of content WEEKLY on a game engine FAR more complex than this.

On Steam store page, ARK's development is credited to:

Developer: Studio Wildcard, Instinct Games, Efecto Studios, Virtual Basement

Please consider that there are as many DEVELOPMENT TEAMS working on Ark as there are actual programmers working on ours. It beat our game's entire 4 years of sales the same day the first build was released, as did Rust, as did DayZ, as did 7D2D, as did pretty much all of them.

If we'd sold 24 million copies[steamspy.com], as well as made our game near twice as expensive, and likely had a team 20x larger than ours, and had started development when Unreal 4 or Unity were an option, I imagine we may have had more of a shot at getting NPCs out for now, if we had made about, erm... *opens calculator* $419,832,000 or so money to fund it. They have made well over 200x as much as we have in a fraction of the time (do they have NPCs in Ark btw?), and so comparisons between our game and Ark seem hardly fair. Sadly despite strong sales compared to many indie games, and being the absolute first survival game I can think of apart from roguelikes, we've not been a fraction as successful as every early access survival game I can think of apart from the aforementioned TDL, probably due to our isometric nature. We can only develop the game as much resources as we have and despite being immensely proud of our sales figures they are extremely poor in the 'survival game' genre. You can't compare the development speed of our games with four programmer with a AAA title with probably 100 developers or so.

But you know, things don't always go to plan. We were naive enough from the glowing early feedback and craze interest we received that we had a shot at being the 'next big thing', made our promises based on the way it seemed to be heading, and the burglary put a bullet in the back of that head. We've got the cards we were dealt and I'm immensely proud of what we've done since we've been on Steam with much more limited resources, considering how Unreal and Unity give indie devs such a massive leg up, and we missed that entirely due to starting development before they became feasible or available to use. We had to do everything, completely ourselves. It was and is our only option.

Our NPCs can't use Unity's behaviour tree system. Our animations can't use Unreal's animation system. We have to write every line of it ourselves, from scratch, make a fraction of what these other games make, and have a team a fraction of the size of what these other games have...

...and then get criticized and insulted for being slow compared to these games...

if you call Unreal a 'much more complicated engine' compared to writing your own from scratch, then sadly you're misunderstanding the point of these middleware indie friendly engines, which is to make it easier, quicker and less technically challenging to make a game.

So on the one hand, it's fair to say that the particulars of development shouldn't matter to the end customer. A finished game should be judged in reviews based upon its merits alone, and any production issues are moot when it comes to a customer's enjoyment of a game. However in this case, an Early Access game, the resources, team size, funding, and all host of other factors matter MASSIVELY to what a dev team is capable of, and if you look at Ark and Zomboid and are unable to see the massive difference in budget and resources, then you should probably refrain from purchasing Early Access titles since your inability to judge how likely delays or problems in development are will potentially lead you to the real 'worst developers' out there, and I promise you once you've truly being stung by crappy broken and doomed EA games, you would look back at your Zomboid experiences in a very very different light.

All that aside, we apologize for the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ NPC delays, the frustration and uncertainty it's caused, and I won't lie, that frustration and uncertainty may last for a while to come, and we apologize for that too. It's a crappy situation borne somewhat out of our screw ups right at the start, combined with our massive ambition for this game, our high bar for quality, along with a few calamities in our development that were not our fault. We don't apologize for why we're delaying it though, because its what we need to do to get you the NPCs we promised, at the same time as not killing the game dead before they are finished, and I'm sure in the long run, looking back, you'd much prefer to get the NPCs we promised extremely late, than some watered down ♥♥♥♥♥♥ NPCs on time.

And whatever you may think, they are your only two realistic options.

[Axelord1942]

C-C-C-C-OMBO BREAKER

[StrungSweeney]

Cleary you didn't buy Starforge, these Devs are the best i've been with them from the start. Nothing but quailty in there product.

[Indigo Solace]

The fact that a dev is even willing to come write a freaking essay in response to this crappy post sets them above a lot of the early access disasters that I've had the misfortune of playing. Not every team can be ARK Evolved and push out major content all the time.

[Admiral Paulpatine]

keep up the good work, love this game!

[120 BPM]

well at least there is no shameless censorship like in the dayz forum

[120 BPM]

and believe me, those guys are saints compared to dayz or starbound devs - ♥♥♥♥ those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ( sorry i had to ). id give them some more time before jumping to insults

[Crohns Racing]

Hotline Miami 2 was delayed 4 times so you cant really make an argument here.

[Eagl]

The Indie Stone you are a good developers team. Yes, the game is not developing very rapidly, but is evolving and it shows. I wish you not to lose heart, your game - it's the best simulator to survive in a zombie apocalypse to date. Despite the difficulties that you encounter, you move off in the right direction. I wish you good luck in the further development of the game!
P.S. My english is bad, sorry.

[Wojtek The Bear]

Croak, if you think that Indie Stone's slow but sure implimentation of features makes them terrible devs you are yet to deal with any bad devs. They are not rushing production like Project Cars devs SMS did. They are not sensoring dissenting opnions like SMS or Chucklefish. They are not already releasing a sequel before the first game is fully devolped like SMS or the devs of Towns. They have not stopped updating like the devolpers of Blockscape. They keep us informed of their progress unlike Polyphony or the studio behind Mount and Blade Bannerlord. Now to adress the devs, you guys have made the first game that even early access provides a signifigent quantity of entertainment. You guys have worked hard on this game and it shows.

[AnglerOfFish]

I think youre a bit quick to judge, i do believe we will see you in the future for a public apology.

[Slimane]

Escrito originalmente por Croak90:

...I have ever dealt with.

Build 30 Dec 2014 - Claims of main features being rolled out by Q2 of 2015.
http://projectzomboid.com/blog/2014/12/turbo-to-the-finishing-line/

Build 32 Aug 2015 - NPCs won't be in this year.
http://projectzomboid.com/blog/2015/08/bank-holiday-apzdisa-mop-up/

I was willing to believe in these ♥♥♥ hats but after 8 months for 2 builds of minor content (YES, 3 skills with a handful of interactions and a couple items in this type of engine which already has a built foundation is MINOR) they have convinced me that they just don't care and don't spend any actual time developping this game. I could put out as much content as they have over the past 8 months by myself in a month, maybe 2 given the system and tools.

If you're reading this and haven't bought the game yet, don't buy it, and don't support these developpers. In the end I will either look like a raving jack ♥♥♥ or a wise warning for what came. I truly hope that it's the prior, but I'm thoroughly convinced that's not going to be the case, at least not for another 3 years minimum. These guys are no better than Chucklefish and look like absolute jokes compared to the ARK team, which pumps out chunks of content WEEKLY on a game engine FAR more complex than this.

Indie Stone,
Get your act together, set deadlines for yourself instead of your pathetic "No ETAs" policy, and put something in the game your old fans actually wanted before they quit. Do that and I may even come back to make a public apology. That is, if your forum hounds don't perma ban me first for talking back instead of ignoring repeat posts and generally letting the forums be a mess cause you don't want to drive away new players, aka victims.

Take a valium,a big deep breath and get over yourself. So a small indie team didn't hit a planned target? If you're so angry with the game feel free to take a break.

Every single one of these posts mentions "Ark" and how they're pushing updates much faster then 7dtd, PZ, etc etc etc. Last time I checked, Ark had a much bigger team working on it, also both games are quite different.

TLDR : stop making an @ss out of yourself.

[Slimane]

Escrito originalmente por Aphotic Atrocity:

The fact that a dev is even willing to come write a freaking essay in response to this crappy post sets them above a lot of the early access disasters that I've had the misfortune of playing. Not every team can be ARK Evolved and push out major content all the time.

Indeed, I'm surprised he would bother after such a flame post.

[lemmy101]

Escrito originalmente por AngryNeeson52:

Escrito originalmente por Aphotic Atrocity:

The fact that a dev is even willing to come write a freaking essay in response to this crappy post sets them above a lot of the early access disasters that I've had the misfortune of playing. Not every team can be ARK Evolved and push out major content all the time.

Indeed, I'm surprised he would bother after such a flame post.

We already have you guys love, and it's massively appreciated, but its posts like this we're most needed as harsh as it is for us to engage with them. I can't let it be unanswered regardless of if there's any chance of changing the OPs mind because it didn't represent the truth of the situation remotely, even if that's how it feels to the OP and despite it all I do understand why the OP could feel the way he does, I'm just appreciative that most of you don't feel the same way and understand the situation. We don't delete posts outside extreme circumstances, so we need to defend ourselves on them, present our side, and let future readers decide. All that aside we need to try and help the moderators out a little, since this stuff takes its toll on them too, is a lot to deal with, and their responses are often met with more skepticism than a dev response.

It's probably not fair to label it a flame post though, as unpleasant as it was for some of us to read, I don't doubt the sincerity. I have to hold out some hope that I can make him understand. We bend over backwards all the time to put our customers first, and that's a big reason we have so much good will after all this time, but some people haven't seen that and in the shady world of some Early Access games its unfair to assume that everyone here has seen all the moments we did stuff right. the delay of NPCs ultimately does come from us screwing up, just not since we've been on Steam, and not in the way he thinks.