There are showing signs though and if you keep brushing this aside as an inconvenience when it’s brought up, it’s more likely to happen.
What puzzles me is that all concerns are met with excuses and explanation by INS, rather than a commitment to some kind of corrective action for the future.
My only fear is that they get sidetracked overhauling things that are not essential for an initial release. We all know they like to redo things until perfection.
I think they are and were pretty honest about the developement, so I don’t have complaints. As long as some patches are released once in a while I am happy.
For corrective action we’d have to agree with you there’s a problem we’re able to correct. We don’t believe we’ve been dishonest, in fact I think we’ve been much more honest and transparent about what we’re doing than most other game companies. We only raised the minimum Kickstarter and what we’re doing is basically a perpetual crunch death march for the entire team. That means timelines and estimates are difficult to predict with accuracy at times because any little unexpected problem has a significant impact on our schedule. If anything happens to Flavien or I such as unexpected illnes, one of us gets hit by a bus while crossing the street, anything it will have a severe impact on this project. We simply don’t have the resources both in people and money to quickly compensate. We’re doing our best with everything we have and, god willing neither of us get hit by a bus, it’ll get there. The game will get done. It may just be a bit later than we had initially hoped but we’ve been judicious with our expenditures and currently have enough money to cover our delays.
This is definitely a concern of ours as well, it’s an easy trap to fall into, we’re trying to remain vigilant against this.
@satanfreze No one here is complaining about delays.
What @cybercritic is talking about is a perceived lack of any improvement to the accuracy of the estimations even after the months of experience they have had of their estimates being inaccurate.
As Keith says, they are doing a lot of R&D and there are a lot of unknown unknowns.
The fact that they know there will be unknown unknowns should prompt them to increase their initial estimates in anticipation of those unknowns popping up.
Personally I’m not currently concerned.
My 0.02$ on the deadlines subject:
When you’re tryin’ to obtain quality for a new product, the time schedule is just there to set the rhythm and organize the process. This applies to any domain, not just programming. It’s a specific trait of any creational process, involving trial and error, corrections, redesign and so on.
There are good reasons for which large companies never make their design schedule public, and only announce a release date when they’re just polishing up the final product.
This system of presenting regular updates is only specific to crowd funded projects, so that people know some work is being done, but it actually works against the creative process, as it adds pressure, which eventually ends up lowering quality.
Also, asking for realistic deadlines, most times leads to larger delays, because of…well…the human factor. I work in design, and when I announce a relaxed deadline to a client, I always end up losing myself in polishing less important details along the way, and I do the most important work during the final days or weeks. When I set shorter deadlines, I know it’ll be a bitch to meet them and most of the time I don’t, but the whole project gets done within a reasonable time span, and at least with reasonable quality.
So (this is for the devs): I’ve met very few clients that can digest following up a very detailed development schedule. A gaming community, being composed of a large variety of people, is definitely not capable of doing it. Set these deadlines only internally (as they actually ARE internal deadlines) and only post the important ones, like alpha release, beta release, final release. In my language we call this “keeping our kitchen closed”.
That being said, them birds really do look good.
How can you not see that your prediction estimates are wrong nearly all the time and that you need proper project management?
We can see that they’re frequently wrong, the key difference is that we have all of the information as to why. Sometimes it’s due to unexpected problems and sometimes it’s because we suddenly re-prioritize a set of items. Project management isn’t going to change any of it. You can’t manage your way out of unexpected problems with a team this small and everybody is already working more or less all day every single day while trying to juggle relationships and, in some cases, side jobs.
This isn’t some big company with all these hidden inefficiencies you just need to dive in and get sorted out. It’s 5 people and everyone is working at their absolute maximum.
I think we all now need to step away from this discussion! All points have been made and responded to, including information from Keith and Flavien themselves. So now let’s look forward and concentrate on being supportive!
I-Novae need to keep doing things their own way, because they are pushing the frontier of technology. They have done so far and it’s been going fine (considering their manpower and financial limitations).
This is getting uncomfortably close to trolling the devs.
Ripples are felt the most when the strings are tightest. Delays are inevitable, and they are to be expected with a small team. It is completely unfair to level such pedantic criticism at INS instead of directing it toward the actual product we pledged for (ie. when Alpha arrives). We do not have any financial stake in the internal operations of INS so it is more than enough that they are keeping us informed.
Enjoy your thanksgiving holiday, Keith!
Wow, this thread went downhill since I last saw it. Let’s see if we can’t shed some light on what’s going on.
I think most of this stems from these couple of sentences:
So basically there’s some low level work that we are just now hearing about that they need to implement.
Along with Keith’s most recent reply:
In this case, i’m guessing its the “re-prioritize” part.
In short, they knew they needed to implement this before the game shipped, it just hadn’t become a priority until their most recent coding excursions.
So why is everyone getting all worked up?
Because this is the first we’ve heard about this particular issue.
I would assume, hopefully correctly, that Keith has a physical list somewhere with all of these things that need to be implemented or conditionally implemented for the final minimum viable product to ship.
Does he need to share this with us? No
However, realize that when the community doesn’t have the full picture, we are going to form conclusions based off of what we do receive. This will inevitably lead us to false conclusions, and ill-formed criticisms. This will likely happen no matter how open they think they are being about the development process, simply because it’s not viable to tell us every little behind-the-scenes details, especially with how small the team is. Time is precious.
In that light, they can only tailor the style of how the updates are communicated. I think this is something that most people on this thread are saying in one form or another. It really comes down to the wording used. I’m sure Keith groaned right there because that’s the last thing he needs to spend time thinking about. It only makes the updates take that much longer to write.
I think Topperfalkon’s suggestion is probably the easiest. Just tell us what is being working on. If there’s a delay, they can give us a few tidbits on what’s causing it, whether its a slew of bugs or it was realized that something had to be re-prioritized. Get out of the habit of using terms like “Unfortunately [stuff]” and “Hopefully [stuff]”,
Keep making internal completion estimates to keep the project on track, but don’t let us know. The only big deadlines end up being alpha, beta and release, and that’s mostly because we already have estimates on the kickstarter page that need to be accounted for.
Beyond that, everyone just relax, enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday and just put down this thread already.
Just want to underline that I have the opinion of the matter @hrobertson layed out and in no way any of the other layed out explanation for why this criticism came up now.
[quote=“INovaeKeith, post:39, topic:4501”]
That’s because creative endeavors and R&D aren’t known quantities.[/quote]
“R&D” is a budget line item, not an engineering discipline. Development is supposed to be a known quantity. Companies that mix the two - such as game companies - more frequently fold. Because they are taking a risk on not knowing what the heck they’re getting into.
Which is what you’ve done. By the way, that would have been a good addition to the “Risks and Challenges” section of the Kickstarter.
You’re doing high end research, followed by development once you’ve got it figured out. The distinction is important, and it would be clearer if you guys would just break down the project schedule into small tasks.
Ultimately, the suggestion to avoid statements about the future is undoubtedly the best way to go. Just let us know what you’re working on and what you’ve 100% completed. Be enthused about that. Describe the research problems that you’ve solved. Not in great detail, but to say “Having 1000 simultaneous connections turns out to require a funky switchboard component to ensure timely delivery of all packets.” With a line or two about what the switchboard thing is.
If someone asks you about the schedule, let them know what you know. “We need to push the networking code to be able to handle 400 packets per second for 1000 connections and we’re currently at 283 per second. There’s also a need to get polygon throughput up another 15%. Plus we have 4 weeks of work on the UI.” Or whatever. Precise where you can be on development tasks and vague on research tasks.
Nope, you guys have been great about communication. Very forthright and honest, and it’s very much appreciated. If you weren’t being that way, I doubt you’d get the comments that you’ve been getting. Just hate notes.
have a good Thanksgiving guys.
I myself aboslutelly hate having dead lines…so i understand.
Perhaps using just sentences like
“We are working on X”
“We have finished working on X”
“We plan to work on X”
that cant offend anyone. 
It’s always a bad idea for the people doing the work to also be the people managing the work.
Dear Indie Devs: Get A Producer!
Are are you suggesting that we take an amateur producer part-time ? That’d probably hurt us more than anything. Or are you suggesting that we hire a professional producer ? Then with what money ?
I wouldn’t get flustered by this talk Flavien. Your team is too small to get a producer off the bat. You need to be able to go full time first, and get another programmer second. All of that likely hinges on additional funding, which we’re currently waiting on the lawyers so you guys can open it up.
Everyone needs to calm down, because nothing is going to change unless more funding comes in.
That article assumes that the company hires the perfect person to “do the thing” efficiently. At this crucial stage, it would be a huge time sink and may cause unnecessary stress.
If there is enough funding from pledge upgrades, then maybe it’s possible, but I would assume a producer would be better applied to the later crunch stages to help get the final game across the line.
Really quite astonishing to read so many rants on what they are supposedly doing wrong and need to fix, all without having any real clue what actually happens behind the scenes. 
The important thing is to have someone performing that role of project manager. As I understand it Keith is doing this role as well as coding which is fine as long as Project Manager Keith is aware that Developer Keith tends to be optimistic.
I felt I needed to make this heard again. Having devs respond as these guys do, is a privilege, one that currently is being abused in this thread.