i wish CDDA has like “moral-impacting storyline” in the future, like storyline that makes the player feels like emotionally involved.
CDDA is not story driven and there is very little interest in a larger audience.
Regarding a larger audience, I think one of the things that makes cdda work so well is that we’re not trying to reach an audience. Ultimately we’re making the version of cataclysm that Kevin thinks is cool and that we the core design group are also sold on. Having no market or money involved means we can be pretty much completely uncompromising on that, and implement all kinds of things that are what we want to play, regardless of the perception of mass appeal. This seems to be doing what we intend as the game’s player and contributor bases have increased steadily over time despite having a very idiosyncratic style.
I disagree that cdda would never be story driven, ZS, but it’s never going to have a single central plot.
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I think Erk here sums up pretty well the answer to the original concerns. Not accepting money and not promising anything leaves you free to do whatever you want or Kevin wants or like you put it, be “uncompromising”.
Zhilkin says there is very little interest in a larger audience, by which I assume you mean you don’t believe very many people would be interested in this game. I actually think that with a little more flexibility a lot more people would be willing to adopt CDDA. Despite the shortcomings, it is an objectively good game in many senses and could be growing a lot faster than it is.
Or perhaps Zhilkin meant that among the developers, there is no interest in pleasing anyone else or gaining any larger audience (which probably is the right interpretation now that I read both the posts again). I was hoping that wouldn’t be the case. It’s a shame and so much lost potential if new players don’t matter at all.
Either way, I think I’ll drop the issue for now. Thanks for the work you’ve done so far. I’ll check back some time later.
Most people like when others make use of what they’ve produced, so I doubt it’s a matter of not caring. However, there’s probably little incentive to go far out of your way to please others by implementing something you don’t care one whit about when you could have spent that time doing something you actually find interesting.
It’s not black and white, however, so when external interest is sufficiently large and the effort is sufficiently limited, time can be “wasted” on satisfying others (and that does have a bit of reward as well, for most people).
Regardless, the best way to get the parts of the project you find interesting fleshed out/expanded is probably to contribute to that yourself or interest others to do so (by interesting some of your nerdier acquaintances that may have more time than you have).
We’re already one of the most popular games in our highly niche genre, and one of the most active projects on GitHub. You’re acting like this is a tiny project being slowly forgotten in its little corner of the internet.
What I’m saying is that “appealing to more people” as a design goal would probably actually reduce the things that draw people to cdda in the first place. Our way of making a good appealing game is to have a clear vision and build it, and if others like it, then awesome. That plan has been working very well so far.
As an actual goal, we have no reason to seek out a larger audience than we currently have. For one thing, it doesn’t benefit us at all, it’s nothing more than bragging rights. For another, our audience is already consistently and steadily growing, so there’s no need to make great efforts to change what we do to capture more players anyway.
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Thanks - that’s a better description.
There are exactly zero reasons to care about this.
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I feel as if quests as they do and will stand are more stories around indiviudals, or factions trying to persue their aims, rather than a larger spanning ‘main’ story.
Before any larger scale quests that leave more of a mark on the world politically exists with permanent scars, there simply needs to be more infrastructure.
I suspect in the far future a lot of quests will be faction goal oriented, and will have more of an impact, but small self contained stories are lovely in the mean time, they are however a lot of work.
For now quests are largely more smaller personal stories, or specific groups asking for tasks to be done that don’t really affect others much.
Random quests from random NPCs also don’t really do anything, you find x or y, kill z, but the NPC’s life doesn’t change, you get a reward and they like you more.
You aren’t say, building a safe place for them to stay, build themselves up, because they aren’t really smart enough to utilize that (even if the infrastructure is getting there slowly), they aren’t forming groups on their own, ect.
The short answer is lack of volunteers, and volunteers with time.
If I made a quest it’d likely be another small self contained story, but some people have put a lot of effort into larger questlines.
The long answer is a lot of quest depth depends on mechanics that aren’t quite there yet, factions exist but don’t really do anything to further their own goals, they just kinda exist and the player can make them like them more through quests, or be hostile to them through hostile actions.
Random NPCs don’t really do all that much yet on their own, they don’t form groups, join factions, have more long-term goals.
This makes quests as a whole more of a ‘flavour text’ type thing for now, while they can acomplish far more than they used to through expanded dialogue systems and such, the real meat, I feel will be in repeatable quests helping NPCs, factions achieve long-term goals, leaving an impact, the rest is largely fluff.
But again, even the infrastructure for this is a HUGE effort, beyond most contributer’s ability.
Kevin’s work alone on NPC’s heirarchy of needs has been huge in this infrastructural stuff, and a lot of work, but that is still a drop in the ocean of what’s needed to make the world feel alive and less reliant on the player, have quests mean something.
So, apparently it’s elitist to say, but:
- people are welcome to submit their own over-arching storyline quests
- people are welcome to submit code to make NPCs and factions better
I have and will continue to volunteer some of my time to implement requested features for NPCs and factions, as well as write guides and answer questions to help new contributors make their first contribution to CDDA.
I’m not sure what is elitist about saying “here’s our sandbox, here’s some guidelines on making stuff in our sandbox, you’re welcome to make your own stuff though it may get rejected.” That’s pretty democratic: everyone is welcome to contribute, and we’ll generally be willing to nurture you if you’re willing to make the effort.
I’m also not sure what other answer I’m supposed to give. “Well, your idea sounds like something that you are way more invested than I am, and I’m more invested in some ideas of my own than your idea or than you are on your idea, but I guess I’ll not volunteer my time to work on my projects but I will volunteer my time to work on your projects that you don’t want to work on.” So maybe “go add it yourself” is an elitist answer, but expecting another answer is definitely a very entitled idea. I’m adding the stuff I want to add, I’m not asking you to do more than work to add the stuff you want to add.
(Sorry to dissociativity, who gets this, and just happened to be the last person in the conversation and ended up being the recipient of my rant. You’re cool, and I didn’t mean to unload on you.)
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I think it’s the missing expression and accentuation of the written word that leads to the misinterpretation of that sentence.
Apparently, what I’m getting from reading the answers, some get a hint of “Piss off and get on our level if you want to add to this game!” out of that, instead of taking it - how it’s, in my opinion and to my understanding, meant - literally and with no undertone.
Agreed. But maybe we’re just too straightforward and should “decorate” our answers so it doesn’t leave much space for misinterpretation (yes, I’m serious and I don’t mean that ironic)?
Maybe something along the line of “Hey, sounds good, but at the moment we’re/I’m working on something else, so it might take a long while until it’s implemented. But we will welcome your contribution if you have the time to implement it on your own.”…?
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Sure, that’s a pretty reasonable framing and I’ll try to use that in the future.
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Sounds like a nice idea. I’ve often fantasized about making a cataclysm fallout mod so could probably try wrangling a few idea I’ve had for quests and npcs from that and try to work them into actual cataclysm. And I should probably get back to working on amputation again. Made for very interesting personal challenge runs but was never anything close to an actual feature. Wonder how much the codes changed since back when I was fiddling with it.