Development Roadmap or "What do I pay for?"

[VariousArtist]

Hello Gentlebeings!

New Indie projects are often very creative and ambitious. Also Indies today have much better chances to finance their projects via Kickstarts or Pre-purchase options and many customers are good with that.
However theres is a caveat with that and a lot of people just oversee it. What do you actually pay for?
No, I dont mean the statement that you buy a alpha/beta/WIP version of a game - thats usually very clear - I mean what do you invest your money in? You invest in the faith that you will have great game at an uncertain point in the future. And heres the common problem - No public development roadmaps!

A good example is the famous Dwarf Fortess, which developer is fully financed by the donations from the community. In return for their faith Tarn keeps his development roadmap as good as possible up to date so players can know what they invest their money in.
Yes, that might take time that a dev could use better by developing the game but the truth is that this does more for the development than merely coding more lines - it develops the whole foundation of the project, early shows gameplay issues that can arise and keeps the trust of the community for the project high. Invaluable, if you ask me.

Ive seen enough projects that are so unorganized, and cursed by "just-in-time"- or "on-the-fly"- feature implementations that the gameplay (the games core mechanisms) just wont work out.

So in short - an regulary updated development roadmap - so community members and newcommers can easily see where the train will ride to - is a valuable asset and I hope that this might be considered for this project. News and blog entries just cant come up with that - nobody can expect that a customer or newcommer can invest the time to dig through all that text just to get an overview.
Remember, the customers will stick here for a longer time while the development progresses!

thanks for your patience.
Enjoy

[SakeSage]

Pivotal Tracker is an AWESOME tool to relay what is happening in your game and it is free for individuals. And you can embed it on the website also for easy viewing.

https://www.pivotaltracker.com/

[1337]

Pivotal Tracker is an AWESOME tool to relay what is happening in your game and it is free for individuals. And you can embed it on the website also for easy viewing.

https://www.pivotaltracker.com/

seems like a great tool
are u a dev urself?