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I don't think anyone is *blaming* our customers for anything, specifically. Did you read Lemmy's post? I feel he was pretty understanding considering the extremely caustic attitude of the OP.
But beyond that, you're still looking at it wrong- when you buy EA/alpha/beta games, you are paying for what you're currently getting, not what you expect to get in the future. You may not *view* it that way, but that's still the idea behind the whole EA concept. Don't get me wrong, TIS has every intention of continuing PZ until they feel it's the best damn zombie game ever (as you can see from Lemmy's post), but unlike a publisher/developer relationship, nothing is really owed to you except the game you got the day you bought it. Now, that being said, I don't the TIS dev team feel that way at all- as you can see by their absolute, unwavering dedication- but that doesn't mean people need to act like they deserve content at their own schedule.
Not disparaging your feedback; no doubt some parts of development have not been as quick as TIS or the community might want, for sure, I just don't feel your comparison was an apt one.
People just don't understand. Even if the NPC's aren't added, which at this point I don't care whether they are or not, the game has more of a soul than anything I have ever played. I say Terraria is my favorite game of all time, but nothing comes close to the amount of heart that the developers have for their fans and all the effort they put into this under-recognized masterpiece.
In most AAA games, you can't even enter every building if it's freeroam, and there are sometimes pathetic and stupid lazy invisible walls all over the place. In PZ, every building can be entered and can be completely destroyed/expanded. It's the simple things like this that the devs are never given credit for. If you want to even compare this game simply to other ZOMBIE games, then fine. Let's take Dying Light. Dying Light, otherwise known as "Generic AAA Game That is Only Famous For 1 or 2 Features #5892", is a game that will and HAS died quickly because, despite the multitude of features, it's just another AAA title that is only famous because it took some already-done-before features like parkour, and crazy night zombies, and put them into one game. Most games die quickly, but Project Zomboid will be history-making when it's NPC's come out. The promised NPC's aren't your generic stupid "running in circles until recieving stimuli" NPC's. They have been promised to be dynamic, persistent, and evolving.
Think about your neighbor NPC Jim down the street who you've been avoiding because you saw him shoot an NPC in the head over a can of food late in the apocalypse who finally notices that you are starting to fortify nearby when he's out on a run and breaks in, attempting to kill you if you don't give him resources and move away. THAT'S the kind of brilliance that they've got in mind when it comes to NPC's.
Also, I didn't know until reading Lemmy's essay (which, by the way, gets a solid +A in my book since he simply responded to someone like you) that they are making the game from scratch using no pre-made engine. That's ridiculous. Croak, I want you to imagine taking an old build of the game and coding the NPC's they promised FROM SCRATCH (with a team consisting of you and a couple of buddies, literally...) using PZ's engine as they've been trying to do while having hatred spat in your ear ON A DAILY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BASIS as you try to deliver the promise you kept to the VERY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ WHO ARE DOING IT. Get the picture now? Good. ♥♥♥♥ off, coward.
We're not blaming anyone apart from ourselves, and I'm fairly (absolutely) certain I used the exact phrases 'We let you down' and 'I apologize' in the post you're responding to. While I dispute his reasoning and it didn't make for pleasant reading, I'm actually pretty sympathetic toward the OP, more so than most in this thread are, so I'm not sure where you got the notion I'm blaming him or anyone else but our own missteps in planning and announcing and hyping NPCs earlier in the project. I'm just explaining why the NPCs are delayed, and reassuring that they are definitely coming, explaining our real need to avoid talking too much about it until it comes, and warning about the risks of taking too strong an action against us jeopardizing the chances of the OP getting the thing they want considering I know they WILL get what they want if they hang on, yet still accepting the OPs right as a consumer to steer people away if they choose to continue, even allowing him to continue to do so on our own forums as long as he's polite. Being open and honest about exactly what the situation is. The good and the bad. Is that not what you want? Where am I blaming the customers for their impatience? I fail to see where I'm being in any way unreasonable or even in opposition at all?.
Now onto a particular bugbear of mine, I hope you'll forgive another wall of text as this gets particularly under my skin and I'd like to make a general address to all that say the things you said in your post. As Rathlord says, Early Access is not the same as a publisher relationship, not in the slightest. Do you know what a publisher actually does?
What's your royalty cut? What's your marketing spend? Will we get surround ads on Eurogamer? Will you get us a PewDiePie video? How many booths at PAX Prime are you paying for? 2, 4, 8? Will you pay for a porting house to do us an XBone and PS4 version? Send us some dev kits? Maybe make Robert Kirkman or Simon Pegg aware of our game? Since you're our publisher in a way, and you're clearly concerned about the NPC delay, please could you possibly fly over a team of programmers to help us get them finished? It'd help a bunch. How big's your QA department? How about localization? Get us a TV spot? Help us break Japan? Submit us for awards? License music? Manufacture physical copies? Negotiate with Walmart? Administer our servers?
No, you have and will do exactly NONE of these things. You made a one off payment of £9.99 (potentially less) for access to a game you wanted to play, just like customers for non Early Access games do on Steam every day. This seems a little closer to a dev/customer relationship than the dev/publisher relationship I describe above, doesn't it? What publisher services have you rendered exactly?
You purchased our game as a customer at an extremely low price compared to the majority of survival games on the market, with arguably more features than a lot of them (of which I'm aware of few with NPCs, for that matter. Isn't State of Decay the only one really? And that's more an RPG than a survival game)
Admittedly you paid for our game in an unfinished state (yet we are confident in the polish and feature set of the game despite being unfinished is good value for money, priced lower to compensate for the fact it's not feature complete) and unless you start contributing in all the ways publishers do I'm afraid you're 100% customer, 0% publisher. A customer we appreciate the support and patronage of, and one that we're morally duty bound to complete the game for as we promised, but a customer non-the-less. You're annoyed at the speed of development, or the delay in specific features, and that sucks and that's our failing, but the stuff yet to come is free extras, and if you buy based on them then you're not following Valve's own advice on Early Access:
The price is going up £5 once NPCs go in. That's how much we've deemed the game worth once they are added. If we've accidentally charged you that additional £5 then indeed we have ripped you off, haven't delivered features you paid for, and deserve harsh repercussions for that. Otherwise, if you didn't pay £15, then you paid for what you got, and while we will honour every single feature not yet in the game, we have not taken any money from you for NPCs. We may have let you down with the delays on features, we may have screwed up in the past, and you are justified in leaving a bad review and telling people we suck, as is your right. But you've been let down not getting free bonus features, features you avoided paying for due to the lower price, in a timely fashion, you've not been swindled out of features you've paid money for. You got every last feature you paid for the moment your download finished after purchasing. This needs to be made clear, as apologetic and shamed as I may be for the NPC delay.
Admittedly a few Early Access games out there put their future features up centre and push them to try and sell their game, or price their game based upon features not yet present, and I find this a big problem, but if anything apart from listing them on the store page as 'planned features' below a quite expansive list of current features, we do as much as possible to keep quiet about those future features and it would be unfair to suggest we were proactively using NPCs to get people to buy into the game now. Hell, we even chose to say on our own store page "we will admit to a few long waits between updates in the past" and we state that long before any mention of NPCs or any other gameplay feature planned or present.
So I have to ask, to you and the OP: When did you buy the game? Was it on Steam?
Because if so we were pretty open, upfront and transparent about our failings, and what risks were involved in buying Zomboid during Early Access, we specifically warned you about this exact potential issue, and we put that information on the store page everyone who has bought the game in the past couple of years should have been reading. How many devs do that? Be honest. Go browse the Early Access category and find me one that flat out warns customers upfront that they have suffered delays and have been slow in the past. In fact, there are almost as many words pertaining to our reputation with some for being slow on our store page as there are about the NPCs. - It's like saying 'Warning, may contain nuts' and then getting blamed for someone having an allergic reaction. It's not fair NPCs have been delayed so much, I grant you. It sucks and its ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and its our fault entirely. But surely you can appreciate it's equally unfair we should be dragged over the coals for something we specifically warned people very clearly about on the store front itself before any money could possibly change hands, and that store page disclosed failing has been pretty much our only real failing since being on Steam.
And if you bought before Steam and thus missed that warning? Well then you only paid half the price Steam customers paid for it to compensate for that fact. If you bought pre-Steam, you didn't pay for multiplayer, you didn't pay for trapping, farming, you didn't pay for the huge streaming map, you didn't pay for the 3D models or anything that's been added since it's come on Steam. You got it all for free. Soon you'll get Creative Mode for free. Soon after that you'll get free vehicles. And you'll get NPCs for free too, eventually. You bought the game for the cheapest it will ever be for years, a third of the full 1.0 price, and further we've limited all sales during Early Access, at cost to ourselves, to ensure it's never available cheaper as a show of gratitude for those early supporters. It's honestly hard to envision a way we could be more honest and fair about it all, beyond somehow magicking the extra resources and time to instantly finish NPCs for you, and yet we still get so much crap from some accusing us of being bad to our customers, lazy, dishonest and all the rest.
But that's the price of being in Early Access and we try to meet these kind of accusations and insults with as much grace and understanding as we can, and hope it's just that those particular people haven't been around all the times we've stood up for customers, and called out shady practices on Early Access, defended and applauded the Steam Refund system, capped our sales to respect early adopters, implemented online multiplayer in a month, refused bundles and the million other ways we try our damndest to treat you all right and be principled in our business practices, basically all the stuff the rest of the people in this thread tend to speak up about. That goes out the window because we ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up and never got the NPCs out in a timely fashion, all the good is erased and we're the worst developers in the world.
I accept that's just because some people are disappointed and frustrated, and after four years of ups and downs I've made my peace with it all. But it's bloody tiring non-the-less, especially when I come onto the forums to agree that we messed up and apologize and explain in the least combative and most diplomatic and understanding way I could muster, and then get accused of blaming the customers when I do so. :/ again, par for the course. We come to expect it, we accept it, we even understand it, and its frustrating but I'm well enough compensated to justify me sucking it up, I wouldn't change it for the world because there is still way way more good than bad as this thread clearly attests, but I'll tell you this straight, a dev/publisher relationship this is not.
Publishers also tend to have a more diplomatic and respectful way of encouraging the developers they work with to hit deadlines than the few of our customers that fancy themselves as our publishers or bosses. A completion bonus perhaps? I've never been called an asshat or a complete joke, or for that matter received death threats or wishes I would die of cancer by a publisher before, let's put it that way. I make it a point not to villify people who troll or insult and understand that the person behind it is probably just pissed off, but still, don't for a minute try and compare the crap we get over NPCs with a publisher hurrying us to the 1.0 line. A publisher would probably legitimately help hurry us to the 1.0 line, where the nasty ♥♥♥♥ we get over NPCs has resulted in more 'can't bear to look at NPCs today' days than I can count. That's legitimately days and days and days throughout the entire of NPC development lost. There's a line where it ceases 'pushing you in the ass' as you put it and demoralizes you into an unproductive slump. I won't be hyperbolic and claim NPCs would be out if no one had ever moaned about them being delayed, but I'm certain they would be closer as like it or not developers are human beings and subject to such things as morale and emotions, and this ain't AAA with legions of community managers and PR people to soak up the hate, and a six inch steel barrier keeping the developers away from it all. I co-run this business, I'm not sat in some cubicle able to shut out the world, I need to communicate with the community, read feedback, track google alerts, keep track of our game and customer's reactions, and its impossible for us actual devs, the people who are spending hours a day working on the stuff you want us to get finished as quickly as possible, not to get absorbed in both the positive and the horrifically negative words, and it's impossible for those words not to have a big impact on our moods, motivations and morale, and sadly,a s much as I wish it wasn't the case, the human brain can see 40 positives and 1 negative and it's that one negative that will stick around. So many wonderful things said in this thread and there are only two posts that are burnt into my mind. Guess which two.
You're putting this stuff directly in the head of the guy who's trying to write that code you're waiting for. As a thought experiment, whatever you do for a job, just imagine having a really bad day, have been tasked with one of the most difficult, high pressure and time consuming challenges of your career whatever that may be, there are a ton of people waiting impatiently for you to finish, you are trying to do that job well and as quickly as possible while someone is stood next to you spitting venom and hate, swearing in your ear and calling you a talentless hack or a con artist, and that you'll never manage to get it done, the more stressed you became the louder and more vicious the insults. Would you be working at 100% productivity? How about 50%? 25% productivity? Be honest. Then the more demoralized and slow you got, the more abuse you got. Would you feel it fair that you be criticized for being slow or finding it hard to motivate yourself?
It ain't easy, but we keep at it because we want to deliver the awesome game we set out to. If your goal is you give us a kicking and make us feel bad. If that's what you feel we deserve, then go right ahead. I get it. I totally get why you may feel that way. But please don't for one minute think or claim you're helping motivate us or helping the game's development in the remotest sense, as you're doing the exact opposite. I'm not condemning you for it, I get it, I'm just being straight as to what it really means when you boil it down in case you're genuinely under the illusion that you're helping keep us on the straight and narrow..
It's ridiculous whenever anyone plays this 'we're your publisher' card for a multitude of reasons, as should be clear now, and it needs to stop.
I'll bleed to get this game done, as will the rest of the team, but I'm doing it for the good of the game and our community, and our reputation, and because it's right and my responsibility to do so, not because you or anyone else are my boss and have authority over me or my time (I literally had to hide my steam profile as I discovered members of a forum were studying my play time in games and wondering why I wasn't working around the clock). By my salary as of my last employment in the games industry prior to going indie, I'd have already earned 4x the money you paid for our game in the time I've spent responding to you on this thread. Forget the four years of game dev, based on that salary, your money has already gone, along with the OP and several others just by virtue of me replying in this thread. How much of my time do you personally feel entitled to? You paid £9.99, I'm 1/4 of the company, there are other expenses shaved off before it even gets to us, and I've been at this for four years. I'm worth more than, at maximum, 43p per anum salary as a coder, I've worked hard for 15 years to get here, and no one who's paid me £1.74 gets to tell me what to do for four years. That's massively insulting. More so than anything written in the OP by a huge margin.
I'm here to make the game, as me and my colleagues see fit, and I'm here to make a game the collective majority of our customers are satisfied with. That's my responsibility as a developer of this game. And look at that steam review score. Read the reviews. Read this thread. Despite our failings, the times we've dropped the ball, the times we were slow, this is exactly what we're doing and if it weren't useful for the moderators to link to in future, and to save time restating the points I've made in this thread time and time again, it could even be considered a disservice to those customers to spend this amount of time responding to you and the OP. I don't feel that way personally, but please don't forget you do not speak for the majority and yet have already had more exclusive one on one developer time than the vast majority of our customers have. Not that you asked for it explicitly, but you may as well with that publisher comment ;) And this time is worth way more than this apparent publishing deal between TIS and yourself has netted for us. Ask yourself honestly whether I would honestly prefer the (at the most optimistic) £3.48 from you and Croak, or if I would prefer not having to read the negative words in this thread, if I had to choose between them. You think I wouldn't take an 8% paycut in a heartbeat to have 100% upvotes on Steam and never see an unhappy post again? Like a shot. That's one reason why we are so upfront on our store page. We wanted to scare away those who would be dissatisfied. Sometimes it doesn't work. God bless Steam Refunds. If only they were a thing from the start.
You paid for the game, you got the game, and you'll get much more game than you paid for by the end, if you haven't already. You didn't pay for me, my time, my code, my life. You didn't invest in the company. You didn't publish our game. As Neil Gaiman said, George R.R Martin is not your ♥♥♥♥♥[journal.neilgaiman.com]. I appreciate your support and the faith you placed in us, and am sorry if we didn't live up to that faith, and I will continue to strive to make you happier as a customer in future, but that's as far as it goes. I owe you nothing except my moral obligation to finish what I said I would, and that obligation is one I impose upon myself, not something you have imposed upon me.
If you would like to offer us some publisher services listed above though, please get in touch and I'll gladly reconsider your status.
*Scrolls down*
Well, i guess you call that fighting fire with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sun.
"The Indie Stone is the worst development team...
...I have ever dealt with."
This is ridicilous! Just look at this thread and the 2 lengthy and detailed reactions of the dev-team. This tells a totally different story. I wish others would do this in a similar way, but in fact in most forums the devs wont reacct/interact at all or with those cryptic/minimalistic "Be patient, We will look into, Thats the plan, When its ready" and so on ...
I really support the way they are doing this stuff (quality over haste), there are few things worse for me than playing a release whose annoying or game-breaking bugs make the hours invested just a waste.
In some things the devs here are really the best out there! Name me another team that has made their policy on price and discount nearly as clear as it is here!
I bought on that day and wish other devs would follow this.
Well, it's important for them to show that they care. I mean these kinda posts are gonna hurt sales.
Thank you, but I think think you misunderstand. This thread turned my guts to water a few days ago. Not only mine, there was at least one other dev on the team I worry about seeing ♥♥♥♥ like this, and the effect on them they can sometimes have, and this thread was a pretty unpleasant place with a lot of negative feelings associated with it. We also don't over moderate, so it'd have been floating around here on page one for a week just as surely even if I never replied. We still get all of the bad, we just don't' ever get the opportunity to actually counter the stuff thrown at us. What if none of our supporters make the defense or explain the thing I feel the need to explain?
I feel massively better and more positive having engaged, civilly defended the game, apologized for where I feel we have gone wrong and let people down, and people have on the whole very positively responded to it all.
if I hadn't replied, it would be keeping me up at night. I'd still have read it. I can't avoid seeing this stuff one way or another and all I'd be doing is mutely pleading 'oh come on' into the screen and have no kind of release. The damage you're concerned about me replying is done LONG before I ever start typing a word in reply. The replies are the cure, not the symptom. :) I'm managing to see this thread as a really positive thing on the whole due to engaging it head on instead of the usual corner of eye attempt to blurry vision glaze past them and the gut punch of temporary betrayal of your own curious mind focusing on the mean words. And for that matter, consider that we've all been angry, perhaps unreasonably angry, consumers before. How do we know these people cannot be reached, or reasoned with? It's happened before in the least likely of circumstances. I hold out little but some hope my walls of text will reach a few.
Thanks for your concern, but no judging from how I feel right now, I need to do more of this in future not less tbh. Within reason and on occasion of course, since it's a tad distracting, but I highly doubt this time would have actually been spent NPC deving given, well, everything I've explained in these posts.
And this is all on my head. It's NO ONE else on the team's fault. I may say WE out of habit, but it's me and me alone you have issue with here on the NPC front. The others get to suffer by it, every day, and you think that doesn't weigh on my conscience? Or when people refer to the entire work of the other 3 programmers over the past year as being small and inconsequential additions and the thing I've failed to get finished being the only thing of worth. I'm sure that's a wonderful thing for them to read. And more guilt for me. Yippee.
Stark admission time: I've literally not managed to write a line of code on NPCs since that Mondoid went live. It's Wednesday evening now. It's not because I don't want to. It's not because I don't need to. It's not because I shouldn't be. The code just won't come, the inspiration well dry, the NPCs are a dark cancerous thing that make me want to climb into bed. The bugs, the problems, the tasks still to do, that mountain to climb 'THEY WAITING THEY'RE ANGRY THEY WON'T LIKE IT YOU'LL FAIL THEY HATE IT THEY WILL HATE IT THEY ARE WAITING, THE REST OF THE TEAM ARE WAITING TOO, THE REST OF THE TEAM ARE GETTING HURT TOO AND ITS YOUR FAULT HURRY YOU'RE LETTING THEM DOWN, EVERYONE IS WAITING THIS WILL ONLY GET WORSE THEY WILL ONLY BECOME MORE NUMEROUS AND MORE ANGRY AND IF YOU DON'T GET IT DONE YOUR GAME IS DEAD BEFORE LONG THIS WILL BE A REVOLT OH BUT MAKE SURE THEY ARE BRILLIANT OR IT WILL BE EVEN WORSE'
....... for some reason the progress isn't being made, I wonder why? and I tell you this straight, it's not because I'm lazy. Try telling my fiancee that I'm lazy and I'm not working enough, and I know what she'd tell you. I rather suspect Steam would turn it into a lot of these -> ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ - I'm a serious workaholic. Luckily I enjoy my work but its something I spend a massive portion of my life doing, 7 days a week barring weekends away for years now. It's not that I'm incompetent. I've been doing this a long time and I know what I'm doing. Strangely enough I can turn my hand to any task and make fast uninterrupted progress, other team members and the testers remarking at the crazy super fast progress I've made, systems popping up from nowhere, and huge amounts of code I can belt out in the zone in a single evening, but for some unknowable reason NPCs seem to get my blood pressure up as soon as I see the three capital letters in sequence. Even if they are not even related to Project Zomboid. My ability to progress on NPCs, even factoring in their difficulty, is slower than in any PZ task I've ever put my mind to since day 1. Why could this be, I wonder?
You have to wonder how much progress might have been made this week, if I'd have had the good sense to omit all NPC questions. Further, if they were that fun and exciting wonderous thing I've always wanted to write, and want to consider my biggest accomplishment some day?
I miss those days. NPC dev was so fun and there was SO much progress. It was a joy. That joy has gone, at least for now. It'll happen again. You just need to wait for those big explosive evolutionary leap forwards, and hope the next one is enough to take it over the finishing line before my morale and motivation get eaten away at by angry rants and insults, and I feel the need to do something else for a while to keep myself sane and feel productive again.
You have to wonder if the next Ice and Fire book might be a bit closer, out even, if George RR Martin wasn't hearing a cacophony of angry Ice and Fire fans floating around him and screaming into his psyche 'HURRY UP GET IT WRITTEN BEFORE YOU DIE!! BUT MAKE SURE ITS AS GOOD AS ALL THE OTHER BOOKS!!! THE TV SHOW IS CATCHING UP HURRY THE ♥♥♥♥ UP GEORGE YOU'RE OLD AND ARE GOING TO DIE SOON! BUT MAKE SURE IT'S A GREAT BOOK OR YOUR LEGACY IS DESTROYED' every time he picks it up to start writing it.
It's the same thing - people call him slow, but he produces high quality stuff when it does finally show up. But if he rushed it and released something ♥♥♥♥♥♥ I'm sure all those angry at the wait would be much much angrier after 5 years of waiting of having the 6th book in the series being poor and spoiling the entire series forever. You gotta decide which you want, you can't have both.
It's something to very seriously consider in general. I'm not asking for special treatment, I just think people have to generally reconsider what the effect of trying to hurry art and creativity is and that applies to all art and creativity and all artists and creatives.
It's a bit different with Early Access for sure, with so much potential for devs who give up the game before the end. HOWEVER, there is evidence in spades, no matter what you think of our ability, that we refuse to give up, pick ourselves up when we're knocked down, and are sticking with the game to the bitter end. We've had so many moments where I honestly believe many teams would have given up, not least of all the burgalry and everything around that. It's blatantly clear, or it should be, to anyone in our community, who's paid us any attention whatsoever that we aren't giving up. We'll keep at it and nothing will make us throw in the towel. Given that, it really is, like Winds of Winter, just a frustrating and agonizing waiting game. It is coming. This is not 'let us get on with it and we'll get away with not doing it'. If you feel that then you've not looked sufficiently into our company, the people and its past. Out of anything this is the one thing you could never criticize us of.
And yes, I need to get better at handling all the NPC hate. I do. I'm getting better, and me tackling it head on and just giving the honest, from the heart truth is a big step toward becoming bullet proof to it I hope. Too often the response is 'you need a thicker skin', but we got in this business because we love making games, are good at making games and want to make games. There is nothing in the job description of game developer that ensures a robust thick skin. We're game developer nerds. Geeks. You know, that group not exactly stereotypical renowned for their thick skins and social confidence. If I was running for government it'd be a lot more reasonable to expect me to inherently have a thick skin and an ability to brush off this stuff, and to find it unreasonable that I'd pursue that career without that particular skill. But you don't want politicians or PR people making your game, you want the geeks making your game, the ones who may have gotten good at stuff like this because they weren't as good at dealing with hostility and spent more time sat in their bedroom coding on their C64 because of it? There's a weird expectation for any game developer who has any, perhaps unexpected, success suddenly to have the confidence and resilience of a trained PR specialist or public figure and if they don't measure up then they are bad developers. It's a shame people feel this way. Our humanity is what is meant to make us better than all the AAAs. Dealing with a real human who cares about the game. That's what you want is it not? Well here I am, human in spades, laying it all out for you. Heart on sleeve.
"Why don't you just hire more people to..." - Remember the ARK comparison. We're the least successful out of every prominent open world survival game out there with a good steam score I can recall, and yet we've been going longer than any of them. It's a lot easier said than done to rustle up talented AI programmers, let alone afford them, trust me.
Get us a couple of million sales and we'll shower you with pro NPC devs. Otherwise we can only do so much, and can only afford so much. We're secure at the moment but if we expanded the team and we hit any snags at all, we may not be secure long. It's a gamble that could mean no NPCs at all and a game dead before 1.0. Slow and steady wins the race. We cannot possibly run out of money before NPCs are done as long as the game doesn't descend in review score enough due to the NPC anger to affect our visibiltiy. Over-expanding is not wise and is responsible for the majority of game devs going under. As I said, we've got our ♥♥♥♥ together, we've worked all this out, and we're doing what's best to ensure you definitely get the NPCs you want, with no risk, at some point and as soon as we can possibly do so.
"Why don't you get the others to help you...?" - I wonder what these forums would be like without those 'small trivial additions' the others are adding, the mountain of 'trivial' bug fixes they make. There wouldn't have been a single version released this year at least.
No, the others are the only thing stopping this being apocalyptic, and they are the ones buying the time for us to get the NPCs done, and providing the vast majority of stuff people enjoy from build to build. They make Zomboid. It would take longer for me to teach the system and outline where we're going than it would take me to go the rest of the way myself. It's just the way it is. I'd love some help, it's just really not practical at this stage. I'm the one who's spent years researching this stuff too. I hate to sound arrogant but I know how I need the system to work, it's all in my head, all the bits yet to be written, and this is just a journey I have to complete myself. If after reading my posts here, you think I wouldn't welcome any safe, practical extra help that didn't detriment the game or make the company less stable with open arms, then I really don't know how I can reach you.
NPCs ARE coming. Just like winter is. If you genuinely want them to come, then just forget about NPCs, move on, and have faith. If you want to make us feel worse than we do for letting you down with the NPC delay or steer people away to punish us, then continue as is, as it's a very successful way of doing it. I understand either way, but just make sure your actions match your goals is all I'm saying.
Sorry i disagree. Not everyone like playing as the sole survivor so yeah. IMO dealing with people are just as much as dangerous as dealing with zombies. I think the obsession is also because they have mentioned that they have very high ambitions on it and that the longer they take the better it will get. Hence, the longer people wait, the higher the expecations and the more impatient people get.
Also, the low graphics in this game opens up alot of posibilities in the npc system. Dead state has awesome NPCs, i wonder how the ones in project zomboid would compare. The multiplayer is a good example of the right direction project zomboid is heading to as well.
Now quoting what they said, "You could argue that what we are attempting to accomplish is something that’s very rarely seen in games, if seen at all."
I also think it would help with dynamism. The overall dynamism with weather, human npc, random migration, random events etc would what make the game more alive than what it is! The game turned out to a crafting/farming game to me earlier.
The truth is, it's great to see most people supporting the devs. But you do need a few minorities to make sure they remember that people are human, we all have different level of patience. Most in this community might be willing to wait a decade but some dont.
Oh and also, like you said, omitting questions about that blood-pressure raising word is definitely a great idea in the wake of this friggin thread. ;)
EDIT: As of writing this, Lemmy is still editing his post, and I am getting a real sense about the darkness behind the development of Project Zomboid and those cheery, witty Mondoids.
I ninja the hell out of everything until it represents exactly the point of view I want to put forward. That's how they become walls of texts. Doesn't matter how many times I reread before posting, that post is never quite right. :D