Peffse@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Am I an unsolicited advice dude? I was at a convention playing an indie demo. The game had an island on a 2D field, with an invisible wall on the left, and a very clear cliffside and water on the right.
I spent a good 5 minutes looking like an idiot trying to figure out where to go, testing the borders, picking up the only item, putting down the only item, before giving up. The dev said to just go into the water. I asked “Why not make that cliff a gradual beach into the water to indicate it’s not a hazard?” and I got a brutal “the game already shipped and I’m not here for feedback” which immediately soured the whole experience. It’s like… why are you here then? Just set up the demo on steam and skip the fan interaction completely.
Day9 has nice talk about giving good feedback, and commands or commands hidden as rhetorical question are not one of them.
The right feedback would be something like: "Oh, this confused me. I did not expect the cliff edge to be the goal.
Not more, because you don’t know the intended. Maybe the dev wanted you to be confused or you were one of ten people to not go down the cliff.
Describe your experience and your expectations, not a solution to something that might not be a problem.
But see, that’s an almost naive take. A convention is not a professional environment. The social contract isn’t set, so it is two strangers meeting each other for the first time. The dev watched me flail about for five minutes before finally giving me the answer, so if I turn around and state the obvious “I was confused and didn’t realize the water wasn’t hazardous” it could easily be taken as a condescending statement. A belief that I think the dev is so stupid that he can’t figure out why I was having trouble.
So I had just a mere moment to figure out whether the dev understood where the problem was, and break it to him if he didn’t. Hence the question. Not a rhetorical question, mind you… a question hiding my information with a get out of jail free card. We were both there watching me humiliate myself, so how do I say most people are taught not to launch others into water without confirming they can swim, with this dev possibly being thin-skinned and unprofessional?
Ask a question. Why not make the cliff a gradual beach into the water to indicate it’s not a hazard?
The dev could have easily answered with:
I reused the cliff from elsewhere to save memory
or
I wanted to give people a chance to familiarize themselves with the controls before moving on
or even
I didn’t have enough colors
and that would have been the end of the exchange. The information was passed, we both knew I struggled, and now we both know why.
I mean by definition you are - so start in that situation by asking „are you looking for feedback?“
Devs are, by and large, computer people, and computer people are, by and large, not people people.
blackbelt352@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Nah you’re good, I have a feeling there is significant overlap between “unsolicited advice dudes” and chuds who screech about Sweet Baby.
nasi_goreng@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
What is Sweet Baby?
sukhmel@programming.dev 4 days ago
Sweet Baby Inc, the company that is usually accused of forcefully making games woke
blackbelt352@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Its a narrative consulting company based in Canada that right wing chuds think is ruining games by forcing wokeism into games because Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League was a bad game.