TL;DR: you're mostly right, but I don't concur entirely.
Zanteogo wrote: ↑Mon Dec 24, 2018 10:12 am
Sorry, Grumblesaur, I could honestly care less now.
It's a wonder you're still here then.
Zanteogo wrote: ↑Mon Dec 24, 2018 10:12 am
People like myself were told to shut up by people like yourself when this project still had a chance to turn around. We were told that everything was fine (by people who couldn't possibly know this), when everything we saw showed that this project needed to be handed differently.
What were any of us to do, really? Reach into Josh's office and rearrange his kanban board?
I realize I was one of many telling you to shut up (in perhaps different words), but seeing as Josh's workload and mental health eclipsed his ability to stay in contact on the forums (you might argue he was still viewing them in the interim, but you might also argue that he'd've posted a heads-up in the same case), I doubt a whole chorus of forum members screeching management advice toward his IP address would scarcely have been more productive than the shitstorm come-and-gone that is so distantly a memory now. Maybe I was wrong to try to quell the unrest that arose, and if my distaste for dissent was the final nail in Limit Theory's coffin then you have my sincerest apologies. We're all a little older and a little more disenchanted now, and I freely admit I've been a hothead here in years past.
But to say that we here on this forum, perhaps only a fraction of the Kickstarter backers, should have the requisite gravitas given to our suggestions to swing the pendulum of the whole project presents us with a trouble spot. We did fund the thing, yeah, but that doesn't make us the board of directors. To this I imagine you'd respond that Josh isn't freed from criticism just for having the dream in the first place, and you'd be right. But it's an unanswerable question, whether we had the authority to demand, to advise, or something else. Perhaps at the time, because I did not see myself as having the expertise or authority to advise Josh, I discouraged others from doing so, even if they knew better than I did.
Still, I feel to pin the blame on the community for letting LT fall through the cracks bears some acknowledgement to how unusually close we were with our developer to begin with. We used to get daily updates. Josh had some drive to show off. We got a performance, and people began to realize that they wanted substance instead. Maybe it would've been different if I (and others like me) had encouraged more criticism, but perhaps it would've been different if our magician had not felt some (self-imposed) pressure to showcase his tricks.
Zanteogo wrote: ↑Mon Dec 24, 2018 10:12 am
Perhaps if enough people would have said;
"You know Josh, things don't seem to be going so well, maybe it's time to do some feature cuts? They can always be added down the road."
"With all due respect Josh, programming off your lucid dreams, though interesting, doesn't seem like a good way to actually make a project like this come to completion."
"Hey Josh, just a suggestion, maybe instead of playing with the same menu and shader, for the hundredth time, maybe that time could be used to make the base game actually work to a degree? Thanks!"
And doesn't that depend on whether Josh was really listening to us? For all the times that so many of us here said we wanted to see snippets of code, that we wanted to see fighters dueling, miners extracting, freighters docking, stations launching ships? For all the times that so many of the career programmers here
did say that Josh wasn't really making progress? We got graphics. We got C++. We got C. We got LTSL, then Python, then Lua, then Lua with a JIT compiler. We got engine after engine. Maybe he thought it was all doom and gloom and drama up until it was too late, or maybe he knew all along that his programming prowess couldn't cash the checks his devlogs and video updates were writing, and was just biding his time, hoping that he could bridge the canyon between what he had and what we were promised with just a little more experience or a little more time.
Even as the old General Unhappiness Thread had been, in my mind, a toxic waste containment zone, it's not like we ever prevented Josh from looking at it, or any of the responses to devlogs or other development updates. Unless Josh was totally deluded, he knew he had his critics as well as his devotees. Even supposing that the extent we influenced Josh (irrespective of our views) was nonzero, Josh still had final responsibility for the implementation of not just the game itself but the process to create the game.
Maybe if we had said more of those things it would've happened, I'll agree with you there. But was it our responsibility? No, I feel that we gave Josh the responsibility when we gave him our money. Josh made the call to do it all himself up until we saw those brief starbursts of Adam, Lin, and Sean, and it seems that it was too-little-too-late by the time the first of them was given tasking.
Zanteogo wrote: ↑Mon Dec 24, 2018 10:12 am
If more people treated Josh like someone who took several thousand dollars to make a game, and not like their old collage room mate, things would have been different, maybe, I guess we will never know.
I suppose that would depend on whether Josh was as capable as any of us believed in the first place. Brilliant as he is, he did leave school to do this. Even the best computer science education is lacking if only half-complete, and drowning during your first few years in any field isn't a great way to build good work habits.
Maybe someday Josh will poke his head back in and do his own postmortem, but I'll call this mine for now, and say that I'm sorry for quieting your opinions, and that to some extent I agree with you here. Despite not being a developer, I have learned much from the defeat of LT.