Unofficial Development Roadmap

Next question for me is, Do you like playing f2p mobile games? If so, and plenty do, this makes total sense you would like this game. It is something that the alpha backers were told was NOT what Godus was going to be when we asked about it the first time the word "gems" came up. F2p players generally do not back games, they play free ones and only pay when they need to to make the game enjoyable to speed through tedious chores and long timers. 

I had over 660 hours in Godus before I stopped. 

Do you recognize the game mechanics in Godus that people are calling F2p? 

For me, I disagree. Any game that has chores in them that can be bought out of, is F2p to me. 

Why hasn't it been done so far?

Timers can't be more than variables saved somewhere in a database or file, likely as the number of (micro-)seconds. Drastically reducing them to something like the games you mentioned, starcraft and C&C, can't take more than a single day for a single person (which is already excessive for just changing numbers).

Or maybe its a exponential function that calculates the amount of seconds based on something like distance to the starting point. Capping that function for the PC version can't take more than a day either.

I don't mean why it hasn't been adjusted recently, because I know 22cans is currently in a mobile sprint, but why hasn't it been months ago?

My guess is because we are currently testing the mobile version and you use our statistics to calculate potential profit and frustration/jumping rate. For example if less than 3% of players keep playing regularly after a month you hope that maybe 1% would be willing to invest money on the mobile version...

It can't be more than changing numbers or a single formula to adjust timers to something comparable to starcraft or C&C.

Okay, hold up...Collecting is one thing, but how about the waiting? Do you like that part? Because personally I don't mind the collecting either. Do I know it's entirely unnecessary? Yes. Do I mind having to do it? Yes, but not because it's backtracking to swipe over my people's homes. It's more because at the point I have to do that, I've hit the action wall. I can no longer do anything else but hope some of the abodes have generated belief so I can get back to sculpting out land for more homes because apparently that's all I'm supposed to do in the game. I'm an orbital bulldozing real estate agent that gets off more to people thinking about me than money, apparently, which I guess is kind of appropriate for a god.

Nevertheless, when you say dragging, does this include for sculpting? Because for sculpting it's much too temperamental and weak to be enjoyable, if you ask me, but you may have already seen my thoughts on this over on the Steam forums, so I won't repeat them here.

In other words, you agree that the absence of these is problematic and worthy of criticism. However, with inside knowledge, you're not too worried as you know they're coming eventually, at some point and in the old Dust speak, Soon^TM. That aside, I can see where commandments may allow for more than typical black/white morality, but I remain skeptical of how much they'll really change anything, especially provided the existing examples. When you think about it, the commandments also kind of misrepresent themselves, they suggest your followers have watched you and interpreted your actions to mean such and such, but in reality, we're still dictating their interpretations as we don't actually have that much of a say in some of them. At least where the sexism commandment is concerned, we don't, stuff like aligned/curving land, we do, but I think you get the picture.

I think commandments will largely be another superficial element relating to arbitrary stats, in much the same way that abode advancement is now. It may simply be me, but none of the stuff like birth rates/capacity increases/belief rates are all that interesting when they're all feeding into nothing. For them to really seem worthwhile, there needs to be something more to them. Like the commandment regarding land, that should compel your followers to literally try to straighten or curve the land depending on your choice. As to happiness, well, that's definitely a wait and see, but the description seems pretty straightforward and uninspiring. Unless unhappiness leads to heretics, which I know I've blathered endlessly about, but who really wants a utopian paradise to manage?
If you look at it from a real tabletop game perspective, you'd know card modifiers are counters. Sheesh. =P

I think, and I suspect a bunch of other people that backed Godus think, it shouldn't exactly be that sort of game. If you want a relaxing, stress-free experience, you should look to games tailor-made for that sort of thing, like flOw, Flower, or Journey, and maybe to a lesser extent, point and click adventure games. When I go to a game like Godus, I go for what it advertises itself as, a sense of empowerment and mass control unlike what I have in reality, same reason I go for other RTS/4x games. I like building empires from time to time, what can I say? And the fun part is, while they may not be stress free, they're soothing because I get a sense of accomplishment from having held off pirates/barbarians/invading empires while expanding my territory, sometimes all within 15 minutes or for a few hours and I can put it all on pause at any time by saving and picking it up later.

For awhile, they've been my favorite games to relax to as I eat, even. Can't get much more stress-free than that if you ask me.

I think a lot more than 6000 people have bought GODUS and aren't playing it. Id love to see some of 22cans metrics. The problem with GODUS is that Peter has applied a traditional game development process to a EA/kickstarter game. Hence the huge disconnect between our expectations and what has actually been delivered. George is entitled to his views whether he reveals his true opinion or not doesn't really matter to me. In fact George just be honest to yourself and you colleagues that is all I ask. GODUS is too far gone to change it wot change much from here I predict. It's undoubtably a crap game now judged so by professional and amateur reviews. If 22cans want to change that they should start listening to what George is feeding through to them.

Wow, lots of good stuff to respond to in this thread today! Only have a brief amount of time at the moment, though -

I really think this really depends on how the timer is implemented. If anyone played Anno 1404, the final cathedral/mosque took something like 2 hours to build, assuming you already had all the necessary resources. It worked for that game, though, because there was no 'action wall', so to speak.


It will be interesting to see what commandments add. I'm a bit skeptical, if only because commandments were for sure going to be out right after the GDC talk, and then absolutely coming "a week, maybe two" after the AMA. That was months ago, so I can't help but think they were put aside for reasons not good.

Yeah civ has build times but let's look at why those work in the context of civ:

• building decisions are incredibly important in civ. Wonders take the longest but you choose whether to go for those or other quicker buildings/units
• you control time in the single player game. If you want to get your wonder done fast you can speed things up.
• your decisions control the speed, want to shift to a focus on production you can do that
• the game scales well, later you get more production so the build times stay pretty constant throughout
• if you get bored with building stuff you have some relatively clever AI opponents to entertain you
• expansion is not artificially constrained but past a point you'll need to fight for territory
• more cities gives you more choice about what to build

So you see civ has pretty much everything GODUS doesn't at this point - decisions, challenges, meaningful fighting. Better yet all of these are woven into one framework of interesting decisions and challenges. Although I have my issues with civ5 (it actually makes some of the mistakes as GODUS except at a much Lower level) the civ franchise is possibly the greatest in gaming. At this point GODUS could learn a lot from the fundamentals of civ but to date (2 years on) it has learnt nothing. That is a great shame.

Yeah a timer isn't necessarily bad it depends on how it works in the context of the game. We've levelled the F2P charge at GODUS because the timers feel like intentional frustration or crucifixion as Peter puts it that is the cornerstone of that genre. GODUS is still in the design stage in that Peter/jack haven't figured out how to make it fun yet. I think they have made it very hard to find the fun in GODUS because it has to be multi platform and support the FTP mechanics on one of those platforms. The question I'd ask is this "is it possible to take a game 2 years into development and at EA release and find the fun elements through iterative design?" I say no. I believe if you haven't designed the basic fun elements early on, you'll never find them. That's not to say iterative design can't work its just that I'm pretty no game has been released without a kernel of fun and then gone on to find it later.