Cinco de Mayo Update + Some Discussion About Scope Creep

Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone! This is one of my favorite times of the year because it's a great excuse to eat Tex-Mex food and my family can't say no because it also happens to be my birthday. Win / Win!

Fun Stuff To Add

It's funny how that can lead you into some serious temptation though. Yesterday (May the Fourth Be With You btw) I had the "brilliant" idea to add some Cinco de Mayo themed items to Delvers Inc. The thought being, hey let's add some tacos, some enchiladas, maybe a margarita, that sort of thing to the game as a fun little side item. Adding items and giving them effects is pretty easy now, I would just need some icon art which I probably had in one of the many collections I draw from.

This morning I started to really think about it and plan out what needed to happen. For a start...what effects would they supply? After all, just having some food items that don't do anything would be kinda pointless. It didn't take long to hit on taco = +1 heal, enchilada = +2 heal, and margarita = +1 attack but also -1 defense. So that wasn't too bad but...it felt kinda silly to put them in chest drops. I would need to sell them somewhere. Selling them at the merchant seemed equally silly, but we have an Innkeeper, unfortunately the Innkeeper was currently only set up to have a dialogue with the player about getting the location of a new dungeon map.

We could make modifications to the Innkeeper dialogue scripts to have an option to buy each of the items but that isn't very scalable if we add more food-like items. We could add the ability to open a shop like experience but right now the Merchant is an entirely different UI panel and we don't have a separate shop UI, so then we would have to create a new UI for a pop-up shop. Suddenly this is looking like a lot of work for something that was supposed to be just a fun little bit of 'frippery' (that's your 0.25 cent word for the day).

That's Scope Creep

I ended up dropping it for now, what started like a fun little sounding thing ended up being actual work. Which really got me thinking about how easy it is to scope creep yourself. Back in the day when I was working for game studios, it was not uncommon for a designer or product manager to come up with a little idea that sounded great on paper. That's when one of two things would happen. Either a) they would ask for an estimate and get dissapointed when it turns out that the simple little thing had actual work attached to it that couldn't be justified, or b) it would get pushed forward anyway as a pet project of someone and suddenly timelines are getting blown and other bigger and more important features are getting delayed. Invariably engineering would get blamed for it no matter what. "Engineering is always over-estimating timelines to avoid adding new things, they must hate fun!" or "Why is engineering always slipping and missing their deadlines? Lazy slackers need to crunch to make up the time!"

Scope creep being recognized AS scope creep and shelved without acrimony was an incredibly uncommon occurance. There are, of course, places that are better at it, but for the vast majority scope creep is rampant and the blame game lands squarely on engineering when it happens. We should be better at communicating about it but for whatever reason, we aren't. Is it ego? Is it a facet of everyone having too much to do already that having a discussion about it falls to the wayside? Is it, in fact, on engineering's inability to properly articulate the technical aspects and costs of a request so that non-technical people can understand the impact? Probably it's a little of all of those things. I can't blame a lack of good communication and ego on Delvers Inc's lack of tacos and enchiladas though. I am a one man shop so I am only having to communicate with myself. Kinda like my wife having a parent-teacher conference when she was home schooling our kids.

Delvers Inc. Updates

What's up with Delvers Inc though? Well since we last spoke Delvers have gained classes. In the end, I felt that classes just added clarity to what a delver does in ways that a classless system just doesn't. I love classless systems, One of my favorite old-school MMOs was Asherons Call which was famously classless. Special Actions have finally gotten implemented, they are still just called Special Actions for now, but they work! Delvers can also be upgraded outside of their level. You can "consume" three other delvers of the same type and rarity level to upgrade another one to the next rarity tier.

This also means that our leveling data now has different values for each level AND rarity tier so that having an Epic Varro Duskrun hits harder than a Common Varro Duskrun. I have been working on some eye candy for the UI to give it a little bit more pop and less of an Excel spreadsheet feel to it, courtesy of the DoTween Pro asset. Finally I cleaned up a few bugs that had been hanging around for awhile which is always a feel good moment.

The Plan For Next Week

This week I will be focused on getting more of the flash into the UI and into combat (floaty damage numbers anyone), as well as a foray into some sound effects and background music.

Thanks for reading and keeping up with Delvers Inc! We'll talk again next week and in the meantime, follow us on X and Facebook for updates or sign up for our newsletter so that you don't miss a post!

-Arakiel