A Tentative Release Window for the Settlements Revamp

Why is there no Chinese translation? Turkish, really? Why this language and not the dozen other languages that are spoken in that region? It's not like a large percentage of the world population speaks Turkish.

Give so few actual rendered text items I'm sure its more a matter of the helpum sounds that are the translation pain. I look forward to the English (UK) translation, hopefully that will remove helpum...

The lack of providing a definitive date was, as I'm sure you might surmise, intentional. In most cases the deadlines changing around aren't a "whoops, we estimated wrong" but more of a "well, this one unexpected thing came up here and there and we'll want to sort it out". Sadly, there's many development studios rigidly stuck to their milestone deadlines (by rigid I mean to the day and sometimes even hour) and, come rain or shine, they typically hit these milestones regardless of whether the game is ready or not. 22cans, in a way I suppose, has the benefit of being able to say, "We had this deadline in mind but sliding the date back a bit will let us do what we wanted to do with this update." Usually when we're tossing around a date with the community it's just because that's what our current estimate is and we typically like to communicate that information as we get it from the rest of the team. But sometimes that changes and sometimes things happen. When things do happen, we update you on that as well. The alternative, I suppose, is that we keep mum about most of our projected time frames from fear of missing them by a little or by a lot. But meh, I don't like doing that when we can avoid it so we usually try to keep you up to speed on any time frames we're aware of, tentative or otherwise. Even if it means we run the risk of things changing down the road.

Putting myself in the shoes of a coder, I would hate the question of "how long do you think it would take you to finish this piece?", or for that matter a remark like "you have X hours to finish this piece." Because unless it is something really simple that sort of stands on its own it is quite likely that at least one thing would pop up that messes up your planned execution.

You would probably say that you can anticipate on this and build in some extra time in the planning, but when you're talking about a long sprint where lots of people work together that each have their own little tasks, there are a lot of things that could cause delays.

I think it is a good thing to strive to not only get the job done in time but also to have a bit of time to spare. Keeping that in mind it makes sense to push the deadline forward a little bit so that you can strive to reach that deadline but even if you don't quite make it you would still have made good time in the end.

I'm not surprised that projects don't make their deadlines in the software industry and in particular in the gaming industry. I remember a long long time ago I read in a games magazine about a project called TFX. (Tactical Fighter Experiment) It was in production and looking quite awesome at the time and it was just going to blow every other game in the segment away. It was expected to be released at such and such time. The time came and nothing happened. A year went by and sometimes you would read something about it but there was no game. I think it went like that for 3 or 4 years after the predicted release date. I'm not sure though, it might be faulty memory on my behalf. I'm actually not sure if the game was ever released. Let me quickly see if I can find anything bout it on wikipedia or something. Ah, here it is. A quote:



Quite frankly I don't really care when a game doesn't meet its deadline. For me it is more important what the product is like when it is released.

Putting yourself in the shoes of a coder - more importantly, putting yourself in the shoes of a business professional.

If you miss deadline after deadline and milestone after milestone - sooner or later a lightbulb should light up and the thought should dawn that 'Hey, we missed it again, perhaps we're doing SOMETHING wrong here?'


Whether it is incompetency on the coder side of not meeting valid deadlines, or incompetency on the planner side of not giving enough time but instead wanting to drive down a release ASAP. Or any other reason. The specifics aren't really important here.
What is important is that if you've missed so many beats, you would imagine that you'd learn from that and adapt rather than trying to repeat the same old tune over and over?
"Do you know the definition of insanity?"

Simply refusing to give out any timeframe isn't the solution here. A business that can't keep a schedule is going to run into problems. Even if those broken schedules aren't made public.
Just look at The Sims 4 for example, rumors are going around that the removal of pools and toddlers is so they can "scrap" a bunch of code out of the primary release because the AI just got too complicated. (And removing the whole interaction with water and the toddler phase means removing a LOT of animation and interaction).
Which leads to thinking - what is Godus going to need to "remove" to make up for lost time, or how many more delays are you going to be looking at?
Since as a business, you can't indefinitely keep delaying, sooner or later the money runs out...

Given that I am such a coder, irrespective of what I care about being asked the question, 'da management' having given a public announcement should still be able to issue something. The developers are still checkin in whatever is code complete allowing any old random tag to be used as the settlements push.

I'm in optin and frankly the 'we decided to add more vajazzle' statement makes we thing, whatever - give me the un-vajazzled version in optin then.

More to the point what is the point of the non-optin, which is 123 builds behind the optin.

To be honest I was expecting this for September 2013, we're nearly one year on from that date and now we get a 'revamp' which I'm not even sure is going to deliver on the issues and feedback we've been giving you since way back in the day.

8 months? Why, that's right in the 7-9 month timeframe 22Cans claimed the game would take on Kickstarter!