21/05/2014 - What are we working on right now?

Sorry to be a party pooper, but why are you focusing on cosmetic changes when sculpting, gameplay, and sense of power are in need of such attention. It seems to me as if a surgeon has turned up to the operating theatre with a first aid kit.

First of all, this is awesome of you guys. Finally we are getting some sort of information of what is actually going on inside 22Cans.

The first thing that catches my attention on that page is that you are apparently planning to release a Godus update on the opening day of the world cup. I guess it doesn't make much difference, I just found it noteworthy.

Then I am wondering about this confidence thing. On first glance it appears to be a slider that I could set to indicate my level of confidence in whether or not you guys can make the update happen within the scheduled time frame. But apparently it is the other way around so displaying your level of confidence as a team to be able to deliver the update according to schedule.

The next picture deserves a bit of explanation. For example, what is the Bug Fix Rate indicating? What is the Velocity? Well, basically the whole chart needs to be explained to me because the only things I understand so far are the dates and the names. :S

The picture of "humans have achieved incredible things" has a mobile phone on it. Now let there be no doubt that a mobile phone is a pretty incredible achievement considering we used to live in caves. I just think it's funny that with all the outcry over the mobile release lately you guys choose to have a picture of a mobile phone as the start of your introduction video for the game. Is that a dig? Perhaps a picture of a communication satellite in orbit would be less controversial while still hinting to a mobile aspect.

I see where you guys are going with the whole scene to tutorial thing going into the game but I honestly think you are making it more complicated than is necesaary, even for people who never played before. You don't need to go into the sculpting dialogue box and then subsequently into the sculpting tutorial. If you just have the two people drowning in the water repeatedly yelling helpum it is clear enough for anyone that you are supposed to help them. Even if it is not immediately apparent, people will get annoyed by the yelling and want to do something about it. You can give the player freedom to move around the world to have a look around while learning the camera controls, there is no reason to restrict the player at this point. Soon enough the player will realize that the game isn't going to move forward unless they do something about the drowning people. I say people on purpose, not followers, because I think they only become followers after you have rescued their lives with your awesome god powers. (Sidenote: Wouldn't it be awesome if at this point you already had some god powers at your disposal like for example lightning bolts? You could terrorize the people in the water by striking them with lightning a couple of times thereby immediately establishing yourself as an evil god right in the beginning of the game! You could have a couple of buttons without labels so you don't know what they do and then the player would have to learn by experimenting. "Hey little fella. Oh you drownin'? Here let me help you out by pressing this button and... ZAP! Oops! Sorry, didn't mean to electrocute you, honestly." Anyway, I digress. /sidenote) If the player doesn't rescue the people within a certain amount of time you could have a little indicator pop up saying "Drag land". I think that's all you'd really need. The whole way I see it structured in that page just sounds patronizing and I think it is limiting the players creativity and more importantly it's denying the player the joy of finding out how the game works which is actually in my opinion a very important aspect of a game. And I'm sorry but that part about "they want to find the promised land" just feels very bleh. What did they do, swim across the ocean to find the promised land??? If so then why can't they handle the last few meters themselves? Plothole! I can get the followers in the water drowning if say they had been surfing and been knocked over by a giant wave or something like that, but just to people drowning right off the shore which apparently came out of nowhere doesn't seem very plausible to me. Why do I have to navigate them to the "promised land", they should be intimately familiar with the surroundings already since the only logical reason I can think of for them being there is that they grew up there. I don't think they fell out of an airplane or fell overboard from a ship because that would not stroke with the whole stone age thing that's supposedly going on. Perhaps they were abducted by a UFO from somewhere else and then the aliens wanted to have some fun so they dropped them off into the ocean right in sight of a nice little island. I think I'd better not go into the last part of the tutorial for now as I think I've said enough to demonstrate that this is all a bit nonsensical. Sorry, I hope I haven't offended anyone.

I don't want to talk about stickers right now.

I see we're getting a happiness bar. I hope this isn't going to be like in Sims where you have to make sure that your little puppet gets some entertainment every few minutes and some food and a shower every couple of weeks and enough sleep and a better car and whatever... As I read it the happiness of your people will decay faster and faster as you get more and more people. As I see it that would mean that I would have to spend more and more time wiping my followers asses. I hope all of this is meant for the mobile version rather than the PC version.

Not liking the fountain thing. Another one of those mobile mechanics. Return here every X minutes to click on this thing otherwise your followers will become whiny bitches.

I welcome changes in the way abodes look as it tends to look like someone churned out blocks of completely identical buildings to save money on architectural costs. Also the way their placement is determined makes it look rather unrealistic and boring. So I'm curious to see what the art department can come up with and how far the changes will go.

I think this is an excellent first step in the right direction, thank you for sharing this with us. You have now communicated to us what you are going to be working on. I doubt though that you will be taking any feedback into account from the backers regarding all this stuff during this sprint. So, what would be even better is if next time you'd give us a page like this one that shows us what you intend to be working on in a FUTURE sprint so that we can all look at it and discuss it and offer you ideas and suggestions and then if you think there are good suggestions that could be incorporated you would still have time to change the planning of the sprint before you actually get to it. How does that sound?

Velocity is a pretty standard agile thing. It doesn't really mean anything to us, since we don't have any historical data or access to their backlog, but it's a way of estimating how much work a team can get done in a sprint. Basically, you estimate how much effort each task is going to take, and then you track how much you actually get done at the end of the sprint. After a while, you're then able to get a pretty accurate estimate of the amount of work you'll be able to accomplish. (worth noting, the numbers themselves don't mean anything at all – what's important is their relative value)

I think it's supposed to be "Help 'em!", although "Help!" Would probably be just fine.



At the risk of opening a can of worms... why ebonics in particular? I feel that didn't need specifying; I imagine (as someone who is as white as the driven snow, please feel free to correct me) categorising AAVE (known informally as ebonics last time I checked... which was just now. ) as "ridiculous asinine words" would be seen as highly unnecessary when dropping the term would have gotten the point across just as well without making it a potentially charged statement. Especially when it's not even correct as far as I can tell.

I mean especially as you go on to say English works well, does that mean non-English languages are ridiculous as well?
All language is made up gibberish, until it catches on and then it's accepted as being language.

EDIT: I'm not gonna try and drag that out into a long shouting match or anything, just felt it was worth pointing out.

Ahh, so it does! It seems 22Cans are trying to do something like "Simlish", except that wasn't jarring because it didn't sound anything like an existing language.

This is where someone points out a language that sounds almost identical and I look silly now.

My only point was that dismissing AAVE, particularly because of a word that isn't even AAVE as far as I know, as nonsense seems a bit of a dick move. It's a part of many people's identities, not everyone's, but a considerable number I'm sure (this is based on what I have seen second hand, I can't find any hard numbers.)

It is informal, but last time I checked I didn't see "normal" English informal language being so vilified, as per the example above. English is changing all the time, and our English now is much different from English, say, 100 years ago, or 50, or hell maybe you could argue even 10.

Using it an interview? Probably a bad idea. Using it in a game? Nothing wrong with it, so long as it isn't being used to insult the people who do use it on a regular basis, such as making them out to be less intelligent for doing so. And this entire point is moot anyway, because as I've said I'm pretty sure it isn't even AAVE.

I just have to wonder if the reaction would have been the same if it was something unintelligible in the same way The Sims does it. But it's not, it's a word that sort of sounds like an English word, but isn't, and so was called AAVE because it sounded like nonsense. That was the issue I was trying to point out, you can take issue with words sounding distractingly wrong without throwing a widely used way of speaking (certainly wide enough for schools to consider teaching it) for many people under a bus.

Okay, you've used the "I have a *insert* friend and they do/don't agree" argument, we're done.

Look I'm all about being able to go off topic and all that but I think that this might be going a bit too far off base so if you want to discuss the merits of AAVE or the American school system that is just fine but I might have to split your conversation into another thread as this no longer has anything to do with Godus.

"Help me" would make more sense, it that a follower is praying for your help. "Helpem" insinuates that someone else is keeping track of when your followers need help and letting you know, you need to go take care of them. Each time I hear "helpem" I start thinking...No, let them die. LOL