The theoretical role of forum-github liason is actually best filled by as many users as possible. The more people frequent both github and CDDA forums, the less it feels like we’re two islands with one shitty bridge and a lot of yelling.
I agree with Pisskop! I think a good start would be if more non-coders opened up the game files and looked at them. I get it. Code is scary as balls and why read through it if one isn’t going to contribute? The thing is, even knowing the shape of the engine under the hood is a boon when two or more people want to talk about it. I will lie in the bed I have made and go code-diving too, after work today.
As a comment on the very opening topic, I really like a gritty realism survival game, but I also know CDDA was intended to be a weird and wacky zombie/combat/adventure/open world sorta-survival game. The granularity of little details I have to track from the onset means the game starts out ridiculously complex and hard to master as a newbie, but once you get it, the game itself feels almost stagnant. Then if you survive until mid-late game, it is stagnant. I forgive this because the game is incomplete, but it is a problem.
We’re in a period of gaming where the “story” tends to start out simple and ramp up in complexity as you acquire more items, discover more map, learn more abilities, etc. Even portal with literally a two-function gun managed this by adding in the second portal after a couple levels, as well as adding in increasingly more portalling ‘tricks’ or puzzle assets.
We kind of have that going on via the crafting menu and vehicles, but a lot of recent features (apologies, my definition of recent is skewed due to a hiatus on my part) seem to be adding more granularity to immediate gameplay - dirty clothes, tracking vitamins and minerals. I saw a suggestion for making car windshields get obscured by dirt/gore - pretty cool, and I think it’s in part because vehicles tend to be something you work towards and build up in complexity, rather than an immediate feature you must deal with from Day One Hour One.
There was a proposed change to how book reading and recipe learning works, that relied more on having the items with you and learning things over time, rather than recipes being an asset one earns through sheer-force button spam. That’s a good move - again, it creates a sense of increasing game complexity over time instead of front-loading the number of things the player must immediately address.
I still need to read over the game’s code structure myself and try to learn more about how it does it’s thing. I know my suggestions are more related to game pacing rather than the intricacies of individual features, but it is all I can provide at the moment. I am hoping there is a way to continue to add in new features for players who like complexity of gameplay, without also scaring the shit out of those who haven’t been here to “grow along with the game” as it were.
I feel like the above example of ‘dirty clothing’ versus ‘dirty windshield’ is a decent example of ‘immediately annoying’ versus ’ only becomes a problem as the player grows’.