When ShiningRadiance first mentioned her intention to run a poll on the sandbox issue, I toild her that the game development process was not a democracy. And it's not. If you look around you'll find software development projects fall roughly into three categories:
- those with paid developers;
- those where the developers make the final decisions; and
- those with no developers at all
At the moment, this is a type 2 project.
That said, I've no wish to inflict my vision on people if the majority are dead set against it. So maybe we need another poll, this time on the "personality" controversy.
As most of you will know, I'm in favour of the first option. If it turns out that that's not what everybody wants, I'll probably stand down as a WM dev, pretty much immediately. I know that sounds a bit like "
either I get my own way or I'm not playing any more". Probably it would seem better if I just allowed myself to quietly lose interest afterwards. But I want people to know where I stand, and why.
As regards why, there are a two main factors. One is that a big part of my motivation has been looking forward to all the cool events I'll write once it's all done. If I can't write those events, it gets damn hard to motivate myself. All the more so since everyone who
isn't a dev will be able to write whatever mods they damn well please; I end up being only one who can't play with the shiny new toys I helped create. That's ... just depressing, really.
The second reason is that even if I wanted to, I find it very hard to write in that style, at least where Crossgate is concerned. Everyone's creative process works differently and I find my inspiration here starts by constructing the dialogue in my head. If I can't do that, the ideas just dry up.
And thirdly I'm fed up to the back teeth of having to endlessly justify every comma and semi-colon that I write. This blasted debate doesn't seem to want to go away, and if it's going to come to this, then I'd sooner it happened now rather than in six months time after I've done a shitload more work.
So let's see what people really want here. And then, I can either carry on where I left off. or else I'll leave you in the more than capable hands of my fellow devs, and see you all when Clonemaster is ready for an alpha release.
Either way, I'm looking forward to spending my time coding rather than playing at politics.