When to announce?

[Enerccio]

What about the preorders? They are fairly common in the real of real games, so whats wrong with VNs?

[Aleema]

Lying was suggested, in the phrase "start a WIP pretending the game isn't yet finished." That's what I replied to. In this environment, it is easy to tell when someone is lying about progress on their game because you are releasing your updates among other developers who know realistic completion times. We're all making the same type of game, we know how it goes. Saying your artist just completed all the game's sprites in a day would be a flat out lie, and we would know it. You don't have to be psychic.

NOT pretending your game isn't finished coupled with steady teasers of your game close to release date is perfectly fine. Whatever works for you.

[papillon]

(Having addressed kinougames's post in a rant elsewhere)

Telling detailed false stories about how you worked without sleep for five days straight to create all the CGs for the game in that one week would be unethical. Saying the game just "isn't finished" when you haven't released it, if you're no more detailed than that, is TRUE... as there's a strong chance that you're going to discover a last minute fix you need to put in before release. "Nearly finished" is more accurate, though.

[Wintermoon]

It's possible to give the impression that your game is further from being finished than it actually is without outright lying. Looking at a couple of WIP threads (damn you for making me look!), it seems to be the norm not to explicitly state how close your project is to completion. Just post a typical WIP thread with a steady stream of updates and let people be (hopefully pleasantly) surprised when the game is released the next week. I don't see that as unethical at all.

[Jake]

In this environment, it is easy to tell when someone is lying about progress on their game because you are releasing your updates among other developers who know realistic completion times. We're all making the same type of game, we know how it goes.

I'd say this is pretty unrealistic, really. Everyone works at a different pace, and lots of us are drastically better or worse at things than each other, and/or have different amounts of free time. I have a full-time job, so I can't work on my game nearly so much over the course of a day as someone who's unemployed or still in school and has much more free time than me. On the other hand, I'm pretty good at programming so I'm likely to finish programming tasks most people on this forum would consider complex in a much shorter timeframe than a lot of other people here. You say it's unrealistic to suggest an artist could finish all the character sprites for a game in a day, but frankly I probably could finish a game's worth of sprites to the average level this forum produces in a full day of work, just because I've been drawing for longer and I'm more used to it. There are people out there who produce stunning digital paintings in just a few hours that I'd take days or (more likely) weeks to get even close to.

Which is to say that sure, if someone pops up one day and says "I'm just starting to make a game" and then the following day says "it's finished" and it's a fifty-hour epic with all kinds of customisation and flash graphics, you can probably bet they were lying the day previous... but it would be pretty damn easy to lie about your project progress in such a way that a community of developers couldn't really reasonably have a clue whether you were being truthful or not.




(As to 'defending lying', I don't think anybody did any such thing before that accusation flew; that I saw, the people who could be said to be defending anything like DaFool's suggestion qualified what they were talking about... whereas Topagae's accusation and moral high-horsing seemed totally uncalled for, to me.)

[Aleema]

To what end is lying about your progress supposed to do? Why? You say that it's ethical, because it's different from real world lying, because it hurts no one -- but is that true? I am a developer of the same type of games as you. You say you made a fantastic game with bullshit time. That hurts me and my fellow gamemakers, still struggling to make sense of this hobby. Is it just an ego stroke? Is it marketing?

Big businesses are called heartless for a reason. If you aspire yourself to be like them, fine. But I'll stay where I am, thanks.

[ashewalton]

It seems like this topic has spiralled out of control with everyone flinging their opinions left and right and getting angry when one side doesn't agree with the other...

@aleema: I don't see how the situation you mentioned hurts "you and your fellow gamemakers" - even if someone actually did manage to create a fantastic game in a completely unreasonable span of time ... for the most part, the user doesn't really care how long it took for a game to get to market, they just want to play it. So whether you create a fantastic game in three weeks or three years, it's the same to the user once it's available to them. And it's important to note, that whether or not the game has been said to be completed within a short span or not, the developers put just as much effort and time into it as you have! So I'm still unable to see how it hurts other gamemakers, as everyone should realize their circle or studio will have different release times, and that's okay!

[Aleema]

Because you lied to make yourself look better, is why. I didn't say it necessarily hurt the consumer, though it might -- you'd have to ask them. As a developer working side by side with you, it's a dirty tactic to make your production times seem faster, because it will make others' seem slower and like they are the ones who put less effort.

[DaFool]

What. The. Hell. I never knew a bad choice of words would incite another argument.

As a developer working side by side with you, it's a dirty tactic to make your production times seem faster, because it will make others' seem slower and like they are the ones who put less effort.

This happens in the field of academics all the time. See those party-goers in college? They don't want you to think that they actually study really hard.

[Jake]

To what end is lying about your progress supposed to do?

There are many potential reasons, and to find a definite answer you'd have to ask someone who actually engages in such practices. I can take some guesses, though. Since the context of the question is a commercial venture, maybe they want to announce their project because it builds awareness and makes people anticipate the product, which makes them more likely to buy it when they're finally allowed to? Maybe they realise that they need to do some more testing, and don't want to have to deal with people who don't understand the software lifecycle ranting that they're "keeping the game from us" for whatever reason? Maybe they want to eke out the last few sales of their previous product by making people interested in their next product? All of those things have happened before and will happen again.

Why? You say that it's ethical, because it's different from real world lying, because it hurts no one -- but is that true? I am a developer of the same type of games as you. You say you made a fantastic game with bullshit time. That hurts me and my fellow gamemakers, still struggling to make sense of this hobby. Is it just an ego stroke? Is it marketing?

You are a hobbyist, you're doing it for fun. The hypothetical commercial developer in the context of this discussion is a commercial developer who isn't doing it for fun, they're doing it for money. They can thus probably deploy greater resources to their project, spend more time on their project, test their project more thoroughly and so on. They quite possibly have much more experience in the field than some random hobbyist. You shouldn't really be hurt and insecure because someone who is expected to do better than you does better than you. If said commercial interest realised that you would be and did it on purpose then of course it's unethical and immoral.

(And suggesting that I said "it's ethical" is a melodramatic misrepresentation; I didn't. I said that I don't particularly see it as unethical, but I also don't believe in black-and-white boundaries between the two. I'm fairly ambivalent about it, ethically speaking: I don't think it's a good practice, but since it doesn't really hurt anyone I can't bring myself to see it as all that bad either.)

[Topagae]

"Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..."

[Jake]

There are a lot of "But everyone ELSE is doing it" arguments I see in this thread.

That does NOT make it right, no matter how many other people are doing it. That doesn't make ANYTHING right in fact.

It's true, it doesn't. But I think most of those arguments were directed at people saying "this behaviour generally isn't acceptable" when it's quite clear from available evidence that generally nobody thinks twice when people or (especially) businesses do stuff like that.

[Ren]

It seems to me this topic is going in a bad direction, really. The original question is "When to announce?", not "What info should be disclosed about the level of completing of the game."

I'm all for branching in new directions for topics, if it brings interesting new points to the conversation, but it seems to me that this thread is just going to become a heated discussion about a post that possibly wasn't even meant the way it was perceived and uncalled-for personal judgement on other users' morality.


I think it was Samu-kun suggesting that announcing a project to push oneself may end up not being the motivator some people think, and become just an ulterior disappointment for the creator if for any reason they can't finish it. The way I see it, if you have at least the whole story (not the script, even, but much more than just a "cool idea") finished, you're at a good point and may attempt to post an announcement. I see threads here potentially useful for finding collaborators or feed-back; but I'm not so keen on the idea of getting an ego boost from people. A lot of threads that never landed anywhere seem to have had that as a goal, and I think that's the reason they failed so hard.

[Topagae]

"Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..."

[Charuru]

Dah. It took a turn for the worse. Personally I think the best time to announce is once you're solidly out of pre-production so you can start getting a feedback loop going with your customers.

Oh man I don't know. Art can't be focused-grouped.