Posts moved from DEV thread drift

Well mrdrpink has been doing community stuff at 22cans longer than I've been there, he's the one who has meetings with production and management about community relations and that kind of stuff. He's in a far better position to do anything then I am really. When I say I'm not going to talk about this stuff it is because I can do very little about it. No one at 22cans is particularly interested in what I think about the community and kickstarter backers because it's not my role. I have no more influence over this than fabs did, less in fact as he's far more important to 22cans than I am. I think there is perception of me as taking over Peter's role for Godus. This is not true and I suspect the confusion arises from the way Peter identifies himself as a designer. His actual role is far more that of creative director and studio head that just happens to also do design work. 

I guarantee you that both George and mrdrpink (and Sam before them) have raised these issues before and will continue to do so. Anything related to that I don't have the authority to comment on in an official capacity and won't in a personal capacity for what should be obvious reasons.

I've chosen to try to involve the Godus community not because I need your help ( if I did it would indicate I was unable to do my job), but because I thought there may be those among you that may appreciate the chance to to get a taste of what design work is like and have a chance to present their ideas in a way that might actually have an influence on design. And maybe there will be an idea or question raised I hadn't already thought of that could be of benefit to the game. If nothing else I can use you as a sounding board when the feature sprints start and I can reveal what is currently being worked on.

If this is no interest to you, than that's cool, but it's all I can offer.

Possibly, I'm not sure what you mean? All I'm trying to say is that my engagement on these forums can only be for a specific purpose and I don't expect everyone to be interested.

Well with the way we do it at 22cans the general rule of thumb is show, don't tell and cover all contingencies and edge cases. We tend to make step by step graphical mockup screenshots (keynote or powerpoint is especially handy for this). This works very well when systems are very simple and the chief concern is how it will look and behave in game. Also the best way to to present it if the design involves any kind of new GUI elements (buttons, menus etc). For more complex systems flow charts may be handy or even simplified pseudo UML (I'm a fan of UML myself, but few people bother to learn it so I've rarely seen it used.)

Essentially you are trying to remove the possibility of misunderstanding and interpretation and communicating how you 'see' it in the game. I'll see what I can do about digging out an appropriate doc for you to see. Of the top of my head I don't know what I am allowed to release in this way. Also I tend to refer to functions and data systems we use in the game that will be gibberish to you lot.

I tend to stick to simple use case, activity and state machine diagrams where appropriate. Easy to understand for those unfamiliar with uml.