Zitchas' Vision for Endless Sky development (and their thoughts thereon)

[Zitchas]

Many people have been asking me over the past year or two what my thoughts are on what development for Endless Sky should look like. So this has been percolating for quite a while. As a foreword, I would just like to thank all the people who have taken the time to talk to me in regards to what they would like to see in Endless Sky's development, the problems they had, and what they wished could have been, the things they enjoyed, and successes they saw. Some of them are still in the community, many of them are not. Even more are sort of tangentially still around but no longer contributing. While their thoughts and ideas have informed my opinions, I will emphasize that, for better or worse, what I post here is my vision, spoken on behalf of myself only. In this, I do not speak for anyone else, although I hope that most (or even all) of it resonates with you. Likewise, there is no compulsion or requirement that anyone accept or follow it, or even agree with me.

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Zitchas' Vision for Endless Sky Development

By Zitchas (obviously)

Goal: To help the community collaboratively create a game that contains a wide variety of stories and gameplay styles that reflects the diversity (in all forms) of the community.

1. The development process needs to be permissive, rather than restrictive.
   - All PRs should be encouraged and supported unless detrimental to the project goals.
   - This includes giving appropriate trust to a pertinent Reviewer's judgment.

2. Development must prioritize those items which have the greatest impact on the player’s experience.
   - Functionality (stability & accessibility) is highest priority.
   - Fun (gameplay and story) are second.
   - New mechanics and capabilities are third.
   - Fixes (non-stability impacting fixes, typos, code style, etc.) are fourth.
   - Balance (that does not fall under gameplay) is fifth.

3. Endless Sky is a game in Alpha, not beta, and priorities need to match.
   - i.e. Polishing a piece of glass does not make it a diamond. The game needs to actually be filled before we spend a lot of time worrying about fine tuning details unless it is directly impacting priorities 1 (Functionality) or 2 (Fun).
   - Polishing details often cascades to requiring more polish on other things, ad infinitum. It creates more work for itself and drains effort from everyone, especially when it is comparative and must be repeated every time something new is added.
   - When polishing impacts stories under development these changes have a negative impact on the development of the game, as they pull attention and effort away from writing the stories.

4. Telling diverse stories requires diverse styles.
   - The intent is to have different stories that cover different topics, themes, and ideas. These different stories will best be presented in different styles.
   - While reviewing and editing are extremely valuable, it should be with a view to improving the story and its presentation, not trying to make it feel like everything in the game was written by the same person, theme, or style. It is very hard to make every story in the game be told with the same "Voice" while also having many different stories that tackle different things. It is even harder to write in a voice that is not our own.
   - We should recognise that trying to enforce a common voice is counter-productive, and that having diverse voices is a strength.

 

Zitchas’ Manifesto on Endless Sky development

(This is largely a supporting document fleshing out the vision, and may ramble a bit)

I believe Endless Sky should be a community project with a focus on creating a game that contains and enables a wide variety of stories, storytelling styles, and types of gameplay.

1. Community contributions are extremely important and need to be encouraged and supported.

2. The main priorities for our work and effort should be “Function” and “Fun.”

3. Diversity of styles and individual artistic integrity are strengths that we should emphasize.

4. I believe when a contributor contributes something, be it a ship, an outfit, a story, a mechanic, a faction, or even an entire campaign; the default response should be "Great! Let's see how we can get this into the game." This is not to say that everything will get in. Some things just will not work. Rejection and dismissal should be the last resort after significant effort has been put into trying to make it work. And that includes significant effort on all sides: Contributor, Reviewers, and Developers.

5. I believe that in order for game development to progress smoothly, we need to establish a set of priorities in what we look and work at. In my view, the first priority is "Function", with the follow up priority being "Fun." New mechanics and capabilities come third, with fixes coming fourth, and Balance explicitly last. In this case, I consider "Function" to be improving the ability of everyone to run the game without crashes, technical bugs, or accessibility issues, and includes improving its stability as well as ease of use. “Fun” is the lived experience of regular players playing the game, with a focus on people on their first playthrough. Generally, I divide this into two intertwining areas: Gameplay, which has a focus on the mechanics of spaceflight and combat; and Story, which is the roleplaying tale of their adventures and immersion. Fixes come in two varieties: Ones that impact the ability to play the game, in which case they fall under “Function,” or ones that don’t, such as typos or code style, which fall under the “Fixes” term.

6. I believe that in order for the community to be healthy we need to focus on accepting diversity and respecting differing opinions. By diversity, I do not just mean different cultural, racial, gender, linguistic, or societal backgrounds; but also diversity in styles. There is zero need for it to look like it was all made by the same artist. Nor is there any need for it to read as if it was all written by the same person. Things that are taken for granted in one story need not be even relevant to another. Requirements that are imposed should be minimal and restricted to aspects that affect the overall game. For instance, things that affect Endless Sky’s legal availability in various countries, prohibiting omniscient-narrator-provided absolute truths, etc.

Example from EVN

For example, in Escape Velocity Nova there were Six major storylines that were largely mutually exclusive. These stories had significantly different feels to them, as if they were written by different people. Different assumptions, different portrayals, different styles. I consider this to be a huge strength for the game; and there are correspondingly a lot of people who love some of the stories, but hate others, and are OK with the rest. Not just the stories themselves, but how they work, how they flow, and how they *feel*. This is healthy, and I consider it to be awesome. It's not just "this story if I'm feeling nice" and "that story if I'm feeling like being nasty", but rather entirely different stories that sometimes cover some common elements, but with vastly different expectations, methodologies, and deliveries. If all the stories were the same, then everyone would fall into one of two camps: Either love the whole thing or hate the whole thing. With the stories doubling down on the differences, it opens the door for everyone to find a story they love in the game.

From a developmental perspective, we are a large community of contributors spread out over the entire world. We are in almost every time zone, virtually every continent, in countless different stages of life, and from innumerable backgrounds. We have two choices: We can try to force everyone into the same mold with the same styles and feel and everything; or we can capitalize on our differences and both accept and embrace them to reach a much broader audience than we could otherwise. Major corporations with specialists in managing those differences often fail at merging everyone into a single cohesive culture, even with the not-insignificant stick of controlling paychecks and livelihoods. We have neither of those. No-one is forced to be here; the only compensation is being able to contribute to a collaborative project and have others appreciate our work.

In my opinion, we are more likely to cultivate the environment of acceptance and friendliness if we accept those differences as positives, and encourage the writers of every campaign to adopt their own style, whether it be personal or impersonal, fast or deep, comprehensive or linear. Our space is literally endless. We can not only afford to have stories of vastly different styles; we are better for having them. We should be letting the writers of each campaign dictate their own style, and allow them the freedom to complete the stories they are writing with minimal interference. Writing while simultaneously being corrected, edited, revised, and having to defend one’s ideas from revision by those who don’t know the story is incredibly hard on authors. Each one of those breaks the flow of creativity, and increases the risk of writer’s block. As such, stories should be allowed to flow to their conclusion, and only subject to in-depth revision once they are complete and the entire story can be seen.

Methodologies for achieving this Vision

A. Imperfect sources

As established by MZ, I feel that we should stay away from establishing universal details. So long as it comes from the individual perspective of a character, then many problems can be avoided. Even supremely powerful characters can be wrong, have irrational fears, lie, misdirect, and provide information that is less than 100% on the "truth" scale. As soon as we start just providing information that the pilot has absolutely no way of ever knowing or provide omniscient 3rd person narration, we start running into problems.

B. Avoid overlinking the narratives

I believe we need to take a step back from the efforts to corral all (or as many as possible) of the stories into sequential steps of full-game story. Trying to create a single linear story that encompasses all the factions is going to be a monumental and probably well-nigh impossible task that requires an intense amount of coordination and probably having a single person with final dictatorial authority over the entire story of the game. I do not believe that it is a good idea for us to require that level of coordination between story writers, nor do I believe we should have anyone with final dictatorial authority over everything. Both of these I believe lead to us not having story, and are contributing to the current dearth of meaningful story development.

Instead, we should be allowing the writers for each campaign to write their campaign as they wish, and use suitable branches or substitution in the dialog to take into account changes that may be present wherever feasible. The flip side of this, however, is that campaign writers should be careful in how they reference things in other campaigns. Some interconnection is good, but it should be optional or alternative content, not required for the main story. Mutually exclusive campaigns can definitely be a thing. If someone writes a Navy campaign that ends up with humanity somehow taking control of the Coalition; well, that's obviously going to be mutually exclusive to the Coalition campaigns. This is not a problem; but it also isn't something that should be done lightly. Campaign writers should not be invalidating (and thus blocking) another campaign merely for completeness or to completely wrap up loose ends - instead only doing so if it is important for the story and the player's experience. Each pilot will not be able to experience every campaign.

C. Role of the Reviewers

I believe that Reviewers have the primary responsibility of getting things into a state that is good enough to merge into the game. This includes verifying and helping improve functionality, how fun it is, how well it fits into the game, and approving the final state as ready to merge. Developers have the responsibility to ensure that it is merged cleanly and that the appropriate reviewers have checked the work. In these matters, I believe that a reviewer specialized in one topic has a greater say in whether something gets into the game or not than a developer not specialized in that particular topic.

D. Endless Sky is in Alpha, so we should treat it as such.

Endless Sky is, practically speaking, in Alpha. We are still adding mechanics, our AI is terrible, combat variety is poor, and we still are not even in full agreement as to what the full set of mechanics should be or look like; and the campaigns are few and mostly incomplete. At this point, the focus should be getting everything into the game necessary to get it to Beta. That means getting it to the point we can deem the engine “feature complete,” doing whatever it takes to streamline our writer’s efforts to write stories, and ensuring that all the pieces are in place.

Given that Endless Sky is still in Alpha, I believe that "balance" should never in and of itself be a reason for changing anything, ever. All changes to existing statistics and rewards should be based in two questions: i) How does this change improve gameplay? and ii) How does this change improve the story? If a change cannot be directly and clearly seen to be improving immediate gameplay and story as seen by a casual player, then it should be left for the Beta stage.

I view balance for the sake of balance to be an active negative for development. Balance changes suck the energy out of writing. As a story writer, having the statistics of things contained within that story changed is akin to being an artist doing a painting in the park and having someone walk up and tell me “this blue isn’t the right color, it should actually be aqua green” and then replacing my paint without asking me. They don’t know what the painter is doing, or how they planned to use it. Likewise, interrupting them to tell them that and try to do so distracts them from doing their painting, potentially for long periods of time. Few artists are going to keep painting while the discussion is ongoing as to what blue it is going to be. Few are going to keep painting that painting at all. The best course of action is to wait for the painting to be complete, and then, if necessary, color balance as needed.

Beyond that, how can statistics be balanced and fit into their proper place when we don’t have all the pieces to compare to nor the story they fit into? Statistics are neither automatically tied to everything else, nor are they isolated and distinct from the story they are a part of. They are brush strokes for enabling gameplay and telling the story. Until we have all of those in place, statistics should be nothing more, nothing less, than general ballpark values that are sufficient to convey the story intent.

In short, what do we want? A story that helps us achieve a finished game that we can then balance as needed, or a perfectly balanced Alpha that never gets any story because every time something new is added (and I do expect every story will add new things) it gets sandbagged in attempts to make it perfectly balanced?

Summary

Endless Sky has a long ways to go before it even reaches Beta stage, and is supported by a community of contributors with an immense amount of diversity. I have been immensely privileged to contribute a significant amount to it, and I believe that it is in the best interests of both Endless Sky and its community that quite literally everyone interested in contributing be encouraged, supported, and enabled to do so. I consider this to be a fundamental responsibility and core duty of our developer and reviewer team to enable this. This diversity is a huge strength to our game, and something that can set us above so many other games if we embrace it.

If we all work together, then we can achieve an awesome game in which everyone can find a story and gameplay that they enjoy. A game that thousands of people can point at and say with pride “I helped make this game, here’s the part that I did!” And that is worth every effort that achieving it may require.

edit: fixing the drop down box hiding the EVN stuff.

[AvianGeneticist]

Tbh the only thing I disagree with is balance being at the bottom.

The problem with ignoring balance is that it's a foundational problem: If the game is poorly balanced, the future content added will be poorly balanced, and thus it will take more work to rebalance it in the future.

Even worse potentially, is that we keep balancecreeping further and further away from the actually balanced elements, because new stuff is compared to new stuff rather than the old stuff that the game was originally balanced around.

While I can understand the mindset of "balance doesn't have to be rock-solid, because it will probably change", that's not an excuse to not balance what we have now for the game we have now; quite the opposite. We should balance even more carefully now, because how we have things established in the here and now will trickle down into everything that comes after (for example, the way the Lunarium Refueling Module has effectively benchmarked for fixed-fuel-generation outfits).

[Zitchas]

That's actually precisely the point I tried to make in those two sections: There's balance changes for for improving combat and gameplay, and there's balance changes because someone doesn't like how it compares to something in a totally different area; or even worse, a spreadsheet said that something isn't appropriate based on someone's opinion of where the ship fits in. The former is in pursuit of improving the player experience and making things more fun. That's a fairly high priority for me at number 2. The latter, however, is just churning numbers because someone wants it to fit into their own preconception of where it should be in the spreadsheet. Given that the story these things are appearing as part of isn't complete, it is impossible for anyone to have a full picture of how it fits into the game. It is this later category that I consider to be entirely a negative to the game development effort at this stage of development. Once the game has reached "feature complete" and "story complete", of course, this latter sort of balance will be very important to do.

If, for example, we decided that the Dreadnought needs buffing so it is better suited to the role in the story we want it to have as compared to the Cruiser, then that is going to be a highly visible change to the average player; and will quite clearly have an immediate usability impact and directly shape late FW campaign combat. It would thus fall into one or both of priority 2: Namely, improving how fun the game is. Which is fairly high priority.

Likewise, if there was a continuation of Sheragi saga implemented that gave the player a Sheragi Carrier that is to a Carrier what the Emerald Sword is to a frigate; and we end up having this massive ship with a million hp, a thousand cargo, ten thousand crew, and more weapons and bays than an entire fleet, and said ship was made available for purchase... We would look at that and go "That ship is better than virtually every ship in the game at doing everything, it needs to be nerfed a bunch"; and that would also fall under priority 2, since having a ship that overwhelmingly powerful that there's no other legitimate choice to fly in the game is bad for gameplay.

Likewise, tweaking the stats of all the fighters so they perform better in combat; or adjusting the stats of weapons to develop the combat environment that allows for greater variety is also something clearly a fairly high priority as far as I'm concerned.

I will point out that over the past many years we have had lots of art submitted, lots of code submitted, lots of ships, lots of proposals for races and factions; but we have had very little story. There's been a handful of proposed campaigns, some even got storyboarded and/or outlined. None are happening. Every single major story we have in-game falls into one of two categories: (Note, I define Major as campaign sized storylines)

a) Was created by someone that was free to write and commit their story as they wish, or
b) Was merged under the proviso that it is accepted for now, and will be subject to revision once complete.

And at this point there are few in group A that are writing anything, and a reluctance to give authors the freedom to write that is explicit in B. This suggests to me, and is my experience, that the currently "in force" set of priorities and methodology is at best not conducive to writing story, and at worst is actively hostile to it. My personal experience is that right now, people prioritize balance and miscellaneous world building to the detriment of story writing. So, which do you want? A perfectly balanced game without any new story, or do you want a game full of stories that will need balancing once it reaches Beta? My vision is solidly aimed at the latter.

Summary: If it is a balance change to improve combat and improve how fun the game is, then it falls under "priority 2: Fun (gameplay)". The balance changes that I condemn as being detrimental to Alpha development are those changes purely to meet outside assumptions of world-building or opinions on how good (or bad) a faction should be compared to other completely unrelated factions. These are changes that are highly valuable to the Beta stage of development once we have a complete environment to gauge them in, but are detrimental to the writing process while that process is still happening.

This Vision is solidly aimed at enabling and supporting the creation of new major stories as an essential element that is effectively missing from the current development.

[Quantumshark]

I will point out that over the past many years we have had lots of art submitted, lots of code submitted, lots of ships, lots of proposals for races and factions; but we have had very little story. There's been a handful of proposed campaigns, some even got storyboarded and/or outlined. None are happening. Every single major story we have in-game falls into one of two categories: (Note, I define Major as campaign sized storylines)

a) Was created by someone that was free to write and commit their story as they wish, or
b) Was merged under the proviso that it is accepted for now, and will be subject to revision once complete.

I do not believe the coalition intros fall into either of these two categories. You could argue that they aren't full campaigns yet, but as far as I'm aware neither is anything that falls into category B, or most of the things in category A - it's only FW that's a full campaign. So, if we add a new category:
c) Was reviewed, and merged once the author and the developers were in agreement over its state
Then we can see that either there are things in both categories B and C, or in neither.

Moreover, I'd like to make the point that these categories have not existed in parallel.
A lot of content was added in category A in the early days of the project. Then, we shifted to the approach yielding category B, and a lot of content was merged, but a lot of it caused disagreements later some of which became quite acrimonious. Now, we're trialling category C, and although it hasn't been in place for as long as the other two, and hence not as much has happened yet, there is progress being made. I expect to see #8750 merged soon in a similar manner, with other content likely to follow. If we see more content being merged in the near future under strategy C, and we see fewer arguments about that content than we did with strategy B, that would seem to be a positive result for strategy C.

[MasterOfGrey]

a) This applies to the FW campaign
b) This applies to all remnant content merged since 2020 - which extends substantially beyond just introductions.

This hypothetical category C could be argued for, but it cannot be argued for applying to 8750 as the difficulties being described that apply to this category, don't apply to a narrative produced by a dev.

It can also be argued that the only other substantial campaign piece falls into none of the above categories, and that the arguments you refer to as applying to category B are predominantly associated with this piece which actually was merged under an entirely different scenario D.
Which was a scenario where, after having the narrative substantially reworked to fit the dev review, it was merged under the condition of an iterative clean-up operating mode, which experienced a great deal of productivity until that operating mode was reneged on after a couple of months.
-> and all of the arguments about that have occurred in the vacuum of productivity that has since followed.

So I don't think that the argument of us having transitioned from A->B->C really holds up, when in practice what we really did was A->B->D->C - and all the arguments (that I'm aware of at least) are a result of the ->C step.

[Saugia]

I don't plan on having any big comments here since I believe once we release our Vision Document our direction will be more clear regardless of what it may and may not overlap here, but since my content has been mentioned I'd like to clarify something.

It's true that it's "dev content", but it was made part of the game and the content therein before anything about me being a dev was discussed, so that's not an appropriate descriptor. The Bunrodea on the other hand would be.

Regardless, I don't plan on it taking any priority over more base-game content like main campaign branches (the current FW rework or Synd/Rep introduction), or the continuation of Wanderers. We are planning on sitting down and actually working with content such as this moving forward, but I'll leave the rest to be explained by the documentation, as well as an overall dev team Trello board that will show what we're looking at and what priority levels they have (this is not to say we wouldn't look at things otherwise though).

So the concern of us not addressing other content such as base story content I hope to be slowly addressed as we change gears, but I don't want that to completely omit any time we may look at any balance changes on the side (or anything else for that matter). I believe we have the capability to both, but need to push into gear of the former. Part of it is, in my opinion, how it's approached and talked about, not necessarily the actual content of a balance change, which from my experience can be done a bit better.

[MasterOfGrey]

It's true that it's "dev content", but it was made part of the game and the content therein before anything about me being a dev was discussed, so that's not an appropriate descriptor.

For the context of the specific point being discussed; Yes the Gegno were added before you were a dev, but this specific narrative was not - since it is still un-merged and you are currently a dev. That specific PR now falls into the same category as the Bunrodea (as do any future Gegno PR's).

Having said that, thankyou for providing/re-stating the rest of the clarifying commentary here. That's all good, and worth explaining here and not just on Discord. I know I and several others are looking forward to these things.

[Zitchas]

Moved this over from "Announcements" to "General" by request.

Given the importance of development goals, vision, and philosophies; I would suggest that creating a "Governance" category and moving all these related discussions into that category would be beneficial. Then there is a clear place for it, and we can avoid cluttering up Announcements with anything that isn't related to new releases.

[xX-Dillinger-Xx]

As someone who values the stories and campaigns quite highly, I agree that they should be diverse in their content. The diversity makes each one feel unique and interesting. However, they also need to fit into the canon of ES. I believe there is work being done on creating canon documents. Currently, there are lots of lore documents relating to each faction, but they tend to be hard to locate. A single document descripting the canon or lore of the entire ES world, that is easily accessible, would go a long way for future development. As an example, if someone took a Star Trek story and tried it place it in the Star Wars universe, it wouldn't fit. The same should be true for all stories within ES.

I also agree that the immediate focus should be on finishing current projects before starting new ones. As long as everyone keeps starting new things the game will never reach a finished enough state for Endless Sky v1.0 . The problem is working on old existing stuff is boring. One possible solution involves people being willing to allow other newer faces to help finish up these existing unfinished areas. A fresh set of eyes and perspective can make a world of difference, but only if the original owner of said project is willing to be less possessive of their work.

Github is supposed to be a place of collaboration, but it can also be a place of division. By it's very design, Github allows anyone to start their own sub project, and many do just to support their own personal belief or agenda. This can lead to an even bigger divide. It's basically, says " I don't like your idea so I'll just start my own" A better approach would be for people to discuss an existing or new idea before putting a bunch of time and effort into something that might not fit or work. PRs should be the last step not the first. It's only human nature for someone to defend something they just spent hours or even days on, and sometimes this defense turns hostile.

We all know there is a divide in the community. To close this gap will require people to change the way they act on Github. My recent outbursts where a direct result of people not taking time to consider the merits of an idea, but rather to just consider who was saying it and give it an immediate thumbs down. Believe me or not, but it is very transparent to those that can see the patterns. I would bet that there are certain people that just blindly follow others and support one side, just to protect their ability to be accepted or taken seriously, even if they don't agree. There are certain people that could post the best idea ever but it will just be ignored or immediately rejected by members of the community based on who and not what. Take the time to read and fully understand an idea, and have the courage to post a real reply as to why you support or don't support an idea or comment, even it if might go against those that you usually support. Courage to speak out and voice an opinion, even an unpopular one, will help make real change by starting a conversation. Endless Sky needs collaborators not sheep.

EDIT: I also wanted to mention that more frequent interaction from those on the development team would be a huge help. Too many times disagreements are allowed to go on for too long without any input from the powers that be.

[mOctave]

One possible solution involves people being willing to allow other newer faces to help finish up these existing unfinished areas.

The problem here is that generally people have a very narrow vision for areas already in progress. There's a lot we can all do, and it's great when someone does help finish one of them up. However, new contributors often don't know the vision behind it, and the person "in charge" of that area is also dealing with life, plus a desire to try new things. In order for this to work, we either all need to be willing to let go of our ideas (which would be great, but realistically isn't going to happen), give others a chance to work on our pet projects, and then be able to be an impartial judge at the end of the day. Alternatively, we can keep doing what we've been doing and provide new contributors with a way to get in touch with project leaders, which could serve to both provide fresh blood and remind the leaders that there is something they were working on.

but only if the original owner of said project is willing to be less possessive of their work

That's the hard part. We're all possessive of our work, and by definition our work here is Endless Sky. We all have areas we focus more or less on, but it's hard to not be possessive when many people here have been working on or with the game for five years or more.

A better approach would be for people to discuss an existing or new idea before putting a bunch of time and effort into something that might not fit or work

The only problem with this is, where do you discuss it? Discord is great, but not everyone has it. Starting a new issue is also great, but we have 800 of those, so your new issue will probably get a lot of activity in the first week and then be untouched for the next ten years. There's a good chance that one of the people with a vested interest in your work missed your issue in the week in which it was visible, and then you're back where you started.

Ideally, we'd cut out 750 of our issues, and then be able to have actual discussion. But, many of the issues are either unconfirmed bug reports or are feature requests that probably won't be acted upon ever but could be. In order to clean that mess up, you need someone (with authority, because people don't want their issues closed as not planned anymore than they want their PRs closed) who spends 30 minutes to an hour every day for couple of months going through the backlog.

Deny it not, there is a divide in the community

There are a couple. Usually they are caused by someone coming forward with work that doesn't match ES' vision, etc. and having it be shot down by someone powerful who's in a bad mood and is therefore somewhat tactless. The person who put in the effort to make it then feels personally insulted, and presumes that the person who shot down their project did so out of animus towards them.

I think there is an element of what you say. I think I can speak from experience when I say that there's a definite inertia that comes with joining the community and having limited information, then taking actions that are interpreted by those around you in a certain way because they've been around longer and have more information.

This is a hard problem to fix, though. We don't want to air all our dirty laundry in newcomers' faces, because that would only make the conflicts worse and potentially drive away possible contributors. On the other hand, the newcomers need information just as much as everyone else.

I think the changes of the past year or so have been quite helpful in this regard. Even if the average person doesn't have much more power, they still have the opportunity to gain information for themselves through the development manifesto, campfire chats, and so forth.

EDIT: I also wanted to mention that more frequent interaction from those on the development team would be a huge help. Too many times disagreements are allowed to go on for too long without any input from the powers that be.

Here's the real issue, in a way. We've got what? Four and a half active devs? Five if you count Zitchas. That's with a community of probably tens of thousands of players, and dozens of active contributors. Each of those devs has a life to deal with, and since ES is free, they aren't making any money off of their work. Maybe enough donations for a cup of coffee once a month, although that's just speculation on my part. Definitely nothing substantial. Now, these devs have to deal with the Discord, Steam, and GitHub platforms. GitHub alone creates something like twenty notifications a day if you're watching the whole repo. Let's say the average person works 8 hours, and sleeps/rests 8. If you're trying to be an enlightened, fair, and reasonable dev who is connected to everything going on on GitHub, those twenty notifications might take 2 hours of your time every day. Your personal projects, Discord, and Steam might take another 2 or more. And then you're spending half of your free time every day working on ES.

I don't think we give the devs enough credit. They are chronically overworked as it is. So, why don't we give this huge burden to the community organizers instead? That's their job, after all. Oh, wait, there's only three of them, and they're chronically overworked and fairly strongly opinionated. They do a great job of what they do, and don't get enough credit for it either, but they aren't able to deal with this workload either.

That leaves the reviewers, for whom this does not fit their job description at all.

So, the big issue with this is the same big issue that the rest of ES has: we are a huge community with lots of ideas but so few people in control that they don't have the time and energy to deal with everything going on. These people are also liable to screw up every once in a while, which then makes dealing with any sort of issue harder. And, we can't just get new devs, because the devs we have have been working on the project for a bare minimum of two years and have each changes across thousands of lines of data or code. There are only two people I see being qualified to step into this position who are also currently active. There's a few people I can see being promoted to reviewer. But even making those promotions would only marginally increase the amount of devpower we would have to address these issues with.

Some potential suggestions:

1. Assign official leaders to each area of development. These could be devs, reviewers, or just people who have been putting a lot of work into that specific area for a long time. We already sort of have faction leads, but solidifying who's responsible for what new contact (code/content/balance/hotfix/art/project vision) leaders beyond just "Anarchist and Derpy sort of focus on content, warp and Quyykk sort of handle code, Saugia sort of deals with art" could help. That way, we would all have someone to ping when we come out with a major balance change, and that person would potentially have a team of one or two people to look over things with them, hopefullly including one dissenting voice who is still capable of reason and working as a beneficial team.
2. Give us a more diverse dev team. Right now, I might be wrong, but I think all the devs are white men in their twenties or thirties who live in first-world countries. Even if I am wrong, that's certainly the image they project. Considering that ES is played worldwide by all sorts of people, I don't think this is an accurate representation. Not only are we missing diversity of input, we're also stuck with a fairly homogeneous way of handling new issues that appear.
3. Make up a several-hundred-page package that contains all the things that new contributors are expected to know but don't. Include other documents (MZ's lore docs, the development manifesto, even maybe fringe lore docs written by splinter groups), a brief history of the project so far, and so on. Don't make it required reading for contributors, but make it an option for people who want to understand the project better. Update it as needed.
4. Assign a task force of three or four people to perform a cull of the issues. Close any feature request that doesn't align with the current vision and development goals that has been open without receiving comments for more than some specific amount of time (maybe two years), and hasn't provided a jumping-off point for anything. Close them graciously, and be sure to provide reasons for closure. Similarly, ask for reproduction for any bug older than that time frame, and close any reports that can't be reproduced.
5. Scrape together ten dollars for every player of the game per year so that we can pay the devs a living wage to work on ES. Unrealistic, but it would work if we could get the money.

[xX-Dillinger-Xx]

The only problem with this is, where do you discuss it?

I mentioned this before. If not somewhere new, the next best place is in a "discussion" As you noticed it is much easier to address comments on an individual basis. It is an easier place to keep thoughts organized.

...clean that mess up.

Yeah, as a newcomer it really is a mess.

I don't think we give the devs enough credit.

contrary to what I appear to be saying I do agree that devs deserve a lot of credit and praise. I'm also a believer that everyone gets complacent over time and needs a little wake up call to bring them back to reality. I know many of my comments seem aggressive, and I get that, but it got people talking. I really don't like text conversations because all voice inflection and body language are lost, and that's what leads to people misinterpreting what I'm trying to say. Unfortunately, when one agrees to become a Dev their own desires, goals, and projects (as related to the project they are a Dev for) need to be moved to the the back burner. The good of the game and community needs to come first, but only after real life. So, yeah that's why I started "Devs need more help".

[MasterOfGrey]

EDIT: I also wanted to mention that more frequent interaction from those on the development team would be a huge help. Too many times disagreements are allowed to go on for too long without any input from the powers that be.

Here's the real issue, in a way. We've got what? Four and a half active devs? Five if you count Zitchas. That's with a community of probably tens of thousands of players, and dozens of active contributors. Each of those devs has a life to deal with, and since ES is free, they aren't making any money off of their work. Maybe enough donations for a cup of coffee once a month, although that's just speculation on my part. Definitely nothing substantial. Now, these devs have to deal with the Discord, Steam, and GitHub platforms. GitHub alone creates something like twenty notifications a day if you're watching the whole repo. Let's say the average person works 8 hours, and sleeps/rests 8. If you're trying to be an enlightened, fair, and reasonable dev who is connected to everything going on on GitHub, those twenty notifications might take 2 hours of your time every day. Your personal projects, Discord, and Steam might take another 2 or more. And then you're spending half of your free time every day working on ES.

I don't think we give the devs enough credit. They are chronically overworked as it is. So, why don't we give this huge burden to the community organizers instead? That's their job, after all. Oh, wait, there's only three of them, and they're chronically overworked and fairly strongly opinionated. They do a great job of what they do, and don't get enough credit for it either, but they aren't able to deal with this workload either.

Accurate

That leaves the reviewers, for whom this does not fit their job description at all.

This issue is sort of a product of their disempowerment though. The Reviewers were originally meant to be people who had demonstrated sufficient expertise in one area, that a dev who had a focus elsewhere could unequivocally trust that merging something based on their approval for a combination of focus areas fully covered by Reviewers and the merging Dev, would produce an output that, if not perfect, was sufficient to meet the bar for ES.
(Especially given we acknowledge that almost anything that gets merged, no matter by whom, ends up getting tweaked later by people regardless.)

To that extent, a Reviewer engaging on something inside their recognised field was meant to be equivalent to a dev doing so.

This degree of trust/respect was revoked after a just a few months though as the idea of devs having focus areas gave way to the devs having their weekly coordination meetings where they decide on things.

So, the big issue with this is the same big issue that the rest of ES has: we are a huge community with lots of ideas but so few people in control that they don't have the time and energy to deal with everything going on.

And this is the result, the idea of empowering people in specific areas was meant to make this load much more spreadable, and make it much easier for anyone in the dev team who had limited time to step in or out of things on a more flexible basis. The current more centralised control exacerbates this issue.

And so to that end:

1. Assign official leaders to each area of development. These could be devs, reviewers, or just people who have been putting a lot of work into that specific area for a long time. We already sort of have faction leads, but solidifying who's responsible for what new contact (code/content/balance/hotfix/art/project vision) leaders beyond just "Anarchist and Derpy sort of focus on content, warp and Quyykk sort of handle code, Saugia sort of deals with art" could help. That way, we would all have someone to ping when we come out with a major balance change, and that person would potentially have a team of one or two people to look over things with them, hopefully including one dissenting voice who is still capable of reason and working as a beneficial team.

This would actually be returning to the original intent - and so I wholeheartedly support this one.

The other suggestions aren't bad either. :)

PS:

There are only two people I see being qualified to step into this position who are also currently active. There's a few people I can see being promoted to reviewer. But even making those promotions would only marginally increase the amount of devpower we would have to address these issues with.

Colour me intrigued: but also, please do forward on Reviewer recommendations to community managers so we can consider them for promotion. As you well pointed out, we don't necessarily have bandwidth to keep up with everything, so receiving recommendations for Reviewers is greatly appreciated!

[mOctave]

I agree with pretty much everything here, except that I think ES is definitely in beta rather than alpha. Alpha implies an unfinished product that is in closed testing and is yet to be released to the public. Not only has ES been released semi-regularly for the past eight years, it is a very popular game and rated quite highly online despite its faults. If we were forced at gunpoint to make a 1.0 release within the next month, I think we could. It would be missing a fair amount of what MZ wanted in such a release, but it would still be a fully-functional, relatively complete, and thoroughly enjoyable game.

[xX-Dillinger-Xx]

missing a fair amount of what MZ wanted

It's nice to want to honor his vision. The game has grown a lot since then and I'm sure he is proud of what has been added to his creation, but he left and to my knowledge is not planning on returning. I would argue that it is not MZ's anymore.

[xX-Dillinger-Xx]

I wanted add another comment for people to ponder.
The power of a 👍 is a lot less then that of a 👎. These are my interpretations of each, I would assume many people read them the same way.
👍 without a comment.

• means I read your idea and like it, but don't have anything significant to add at this point.

👎 without a comment.

• I read your idea and don't like it but I can't even be bothered to explain why
• I read your idea and don't like it and don't want to discuss it any further, period.
• I gave you a thumbs down because my friend did so I did too
• even worse I don't like you.

When you agree, the content and context of what you agree with is already there, and an accompanying comment would only be a repeat.
If you disagree you have an alternative view with content and context, but without an accompanying comment we don't know what this alternative view is.
Getting a 👎 with a good explanation can actually be a positive experience if the receiving person is able to expand on the idea or learn where they made a mistake.
I strongly believe that no one should give a Thumbs Down without an explanation.

[ziproot]

I was asked to give my opinions to the vision in a private channel, and I thought I would make them public

The development process needs to be permissive, rather than restrictive

Agree

Development priorities

I have a slightly different idea in mind, but I mostly agree:

• Maintenance is priority number one
• All improvements (including balance improvements, typo fixes, code style improvements, along with improvements to gameplay and story) are priority number two

In my opinion, balance improvements improve replayability by letting you choose different ships or loadouts each time, typos break immersion and make the game less fun, and better code style means an easier time maintaining the code, improving it further, and adding new features.

• All new features are last priority and should mostly be done to enable improvements (e.g. the ability to have indicators that you do not have to visit so that pact recon, scar’s legion, anglerfish, scientist rescue, etc. can be improved) due to increasing the maintenance burden

Endless Sky is a game in Alpha, not beta, and priorities need to match.

I disagree. I think that the game can be released as 1.0 right now, and from what I can tell most steam reviewers either don’t know the game is considered “alpha” or are surprised that it is. Even the navy and syndicate campaigns would just be improvements to the main plot by allowing you to play more than one side, whereas yet another alien™ would be a new feature. There are already many different ways to play the game, and I think just improving those would still make a decent game.

Telling diverse stories requires diverse styles.

I mostly agree. I think the game does a good job of looking like one game and not a patchwork of different games each being developed by a different person. I don’t want Endless Sky to become the snarl from the Order of the Stick (a tangled mess of different visions of the game that ends up killing development because people couldn’t work together or compromise and all wanted to do things their way). I already see potential for the game heading down this path, and I think we need to keep in this in mind. I do think there should be different perspectives, but they should be additive, not reductive.

[ziproot]

On the Methodology:

The methodology has the same problem as the dev vision document, in that it doesn’t actually draw the line.

For instance

The flip side of this, however, is that campaign writers should be careful in how they reference things in other campaigns. Some interconnection is good, but it should be optional or alternative content, not required for the main story. Mutually exclusive campaigns can definitely be a thing

This doesn’t actually give any limits or requirements.

Developers have the responsibility to ensure that it is merged cleanly and that the appropriate reviewers have checked the work

What does this mean?

If a change cannot be directly and clearly seen to be improving immediate gameplay and story as seen by a casual player, then it should be left for the Beta stage

Who would be considered a casual player?

EDIT: It looks like a better wording might be:

Balance changes should only be made if at least one developer thinks the change will be noticeable by what they consider casual players until the game reaches the Beta stage.

That looks like a good start. It still depends on subjectivity, meaning it won’t help with telling whether or not a PR will be merged, but it is a step in the right direction.