Space Game General All-Platform Thready Discussy Thing :)

Was it deleted? The link takes me only to the discussions page, not a specific thread.

Son of a gun, they did. Good thing i saved the html of the page. I’ll upload it soon.

Please. The deletion makes me only more curious.

Three cheers for integrity are clearly in order.

Here we go!

https://www.spacegamejunkie.com/files/Tutorial%20or%20Manual_%20__%20Final%20Theory%20General%20Discussions.html

Wow. I think the developer got the wrong end of the stick then proceeded to walk with said stick for miles.

It was apparent you were doing the guy a favour. Writing a short pdf manual is a trivial amount of work (as a minimum amount of instruction) and as you say, could help him with customer feedback.

You handled it well.

Thank you, I really tried to be civil and help them out.

You did great. One would also think pissing on a reviewer and curator during a company’s run-up to its inaugural offering is kind of … ill-advised, perhaps? Not that you’d be the kind of person to blast the game just for that, but yeesh.

I am going to mention this exchange when I review the game.

Yeah, I would too.

Is that what you were doing? :) By the second post you were implying they were lazy. Sorry, but if I didn’t know you from this forum, I’d probably think you were a bit of jerk.

How would you have reacted had they told you, “We’re not doing a manual or tutorial, we’ll let the community deal with that?”

I was flabbergasted. Stunned. I had hoped they, by being blunt and honest, maybe they’d get it. Clearly they didn’t.

I mean, was I wrong in my assessment of the situation?

As with beer, life’s too short for bad video games. If the dev won’t put in the minimal effort of explaining how to play the game, I’m sure not going to spend the effort to figure out how to do so.

Considering how the median game on Steam makes what, $1000?, I can’t imagine the devs are well-served by raising the barrier to entry to their game.

Quick 2 cents from a skim of the exchange:

It looks like they got stuck or focused on “tutorial” and possibly missed “nor any kind of manual either” at the end of your first post. Your first reply escalated quickly to suggesting laziness and then it just all got worse from there as they responded in the same sort of escalation.

It might have started from a miscommunication or misunderstanding on their part because they missed that reference. I don’t see them mention manual in any of their replies - just commentary about tutorials and strategy guides. It’s hard to know what they saw, thought, or missed. Either way, it’s unfortunate for them as they have a product to sell and need to read carefully before they reply or maybe they’re just clueless.

You could quite easily take from their initial reply they meant for the community to write tutorials and/or a manual. They later clarified they were referring to strategy guides. That is clearly a misunderstanding as Howler mentions. The developer is Danish, presumably English isn’t there first language. That might explain some of it.

I think having no manual/tutorial is probably a bad idea and its fair to mention that in a review. The conversation itself though, you threw the first stone. They could have equal complaint about the tone of your posts as well.

Brian, what’s your take on Galactic Dominion? I know you have a video up but I haven’t had a chance to watch it.

We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one.

I actually like it quite a bit. At first I was a bit confused as to what was going on, but the dev has been AMAZINGLY DILIGENT in responding to feedback, making the game easier to understand, adding quality of life improvements and so on. I returned to it the other night and was impressed by how much better it’s become.

Definitely worth a look if you want something a little different in your 4X.

Did you play in real time or turn-based?

Both, I prefer the real time, but both work fine.

Well, it’s out you guys.