Originally Posted by
RevdKathy
I suspect the S8 coders must loathe Castle Story. It must be a nightmare to work on. It's old code, so will have been security patched umpteen times. It was never written to last this long, it was designed to be a story with an end. Then someone invented the short term goal, so now it goes on an on forever. If they run the same timed goal code, the players complain it's the same as X goal. But if they write and add new code, it's so complex and fiddly now they're almost guaranteed to break something either in that code or some other part of the game.
Add to that the artists must love it because it gives them a chance to be completely free in their creativity ( mushroom people? Weird fantasy animals? Any culture you care to appropriate...) and the shareholders must love it because it's one of their biggest earners, and the poor coders are stuck trying to squish the bugs while always being expected to produce something new. And the players love it and grumble at every new bug, but the coders have to keep churning out new timed goals without getting any time to fix old ones. Maybe we should cut them a bit of slack over this latest fiasco.
I really feel for them. Maybe it's time to retire CS, finish the story and send our team on a new quest in a new game (with new, clean code). CS could be left as a legacy game for people to play through to complete the story, build a departure point and gather resources for the quest. You could even make it so the kingdom could send resources to the new quest, so all those hours and dollars spent would still give an advantage to long time players, who could continue to use CS for that, and maybe 4 seasonal goals a year, just for those still playing. Lots of opportunity, and new, fresh, written from scratch code.
I open CS and I think of the coders version of 99 bottles.... 99 little bugs in the code, 99 little bugs in the codd, take one down, fix it around, 106 little bugs in the code!