The easiest way to piss people off, most of all being your own dev team, is to present-pre-produce. That is, to present the idea before it's anywhere near ready for demonstration. I understand the OP is a "leaker", but supposedly they had your permission,
Wrong. It was a joke that was taken seriously in which led the OP to post it. Nice assumption, though.
What you've given is us a Trello board with a couple tick-boxes checked and some Blender-tier screenshots. The screenshots don't actually demonstrate the breadth of the work that you're saying you've done.
This is actually for our own personal use.
If anything, I'm actually more confident that there's some major levels of bullstuffting involved, especially because you only created the Trello cards at the tail-end of August. There's no way that you completed that much of the core-system in about a month.
We create cards before it's done, as future plans, if it's not already been worked on. We were working on the game a bit before we even bothered with Trello. And we have gotten a bit done, we dedicate a lot of our time to this project, as it's our dream.
As people have said, there's some major issues with the originality of the project. This isn't some "loving fan-game", designed to resurrect a dead franchise or improve upon a concept done poorly by the developers. This is straight up, blatant misappropriation of somebody else's quality work. While the jury is still out on the legality of this (I don't think Badspot could actually sue you as game mechanics cannot be trademarked, but on the other hand the visual designs of the bricks are 1:1 (and possibly taken directly from Blockland)), the point is that if you people were as good at making games as you say you are, you wouldn't need to rip off pre-existing ideas. Blockland already exists. There (apparently) exists mods to play with maps. This was completely unnecessary, and opens up questions over how much people can trust you to understand the security issues that Badspot has had to dealt with.
We're not stealing anyone's idea, we just want a game similar, but not limited to Blockland's game-play style, with some cool features to add in. Plus, we wanted a game like it with an UPDATED, MODERN engine. (At least that was my reasoning to being a part of the project)
What is the point of this game, and why wouldn't I just continue playing with the copy of Blockland I bought for $20 that has an established user-base and years of tweaks and security fixes with a developer who has a known, positive reputation?
The point of this game is, well, a game. If you don't want to play the game, fine, stay on Blockland. That's your choice. Blockland is a whole other game from what we're making. If you compare every other game to Blockland, because it " has an established user-base and years of tweaks and security fixes with a developer who has a known, positive reputation", and that makes you want to play only that sandbox game, then whatever, we don't care.
This leads to questions that Conan raised about sustainability and viability; there's no discussion on the distribution model of the game, on how the online service will work, how you plan to keep the player-base more active than Blockland and so forth.
You're going onto something we haven't even planned yet. We're just making the game to make it. We're just putting what we want in a game, because it's just something we want to do. There's not a problem with that.
There's no details over who the target audience is, exactly, and I feel that if this project was ever "finished", it'd fall flat on its face because of how late you guys are to the party and how small you truly are in the game design world.
Of course there's no details, the game isn't even one third bloody done. It wasn't our idea to release the news of the game prematurely. And we don't care how small we are to the "game design world". Every indie designer has to start somewhere.
Games aren't just released via a download link and everybody plays them.
Well, duh.
There's a serious art to the idea of promotion, but the more people you get the more potential security risks your exposing to the network when working on multiplayer games, and I'm still getting a vibe that you haven't got a grasp on how to protect your game from people who will find ways to exploit it.
We'll work on that later, for now we're focused on the base game. It's not too hard to make it non-exploitable, as everything on the server is server-side calculated, where the client plays no part in such. I agree, though, that we'll need to look into that eventually. For now, we'll be working on base codes.
Your average MMO can lead development costs into the hundreds of millions quite quickly, due to the amount of content and network security features which demand for highly paid professionals to ensure accurate delivery. You're not making an MMO because your servers will not be capable of handling that load, nor will they be able to protect against the most basic exploits/attacks.
We'll see. Good point, though. It still won't prevent us from actually making the game.
I also enjoy the "more features than Blockland" bit. Show, don't tell. I haven't seen anything that Blockland (or I) is incapable of doing yet.
Well yeah, of course not, we haven't personally gave out any true progress updates here. And it already has more features than Blockland due to the newer engine.
They're called "placeholders", not "decoys". Real game developers know that.
Fine, placeholder. Whatever, doesn't matter, it's there, and works.
Once again, show, don't tell. How about instead of arguing on an online forum you actually get around and do some work? Your attitude is just pathetic, and it's enough for my to throw away any reserved feelings that this may actually be good.
I'm not arguing, I'm explaining. There's a difference. Attitude? Again, explaining. I'm not angry over any of this, I'm getting a kick out of it. And as far as I've seen through your post, you're the one with the attitude. Is that dandruff in your hair? Oh, that's just salt. ;)
You can't say "these features are down" and then say things are "WIP". Down implies those features are in and working correctly.
And for the third loving time, SHOW DON'T TELL. The burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that you're not firing stuff out the arse.
You seem to take everything so seriously. This isn't even an official update page. Take it or leave it.
And I personally have known the whole time it's possible for modder support. That was Anthony's word, not mine.
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