I think Kira wanted to get ahead of all of the comments about his washing machine playing a chime at 20:57. Did he check if that's copyrighted music tho...
@@LittleGrandpaSimpson ...after the video being up for three hours?... I thought he used a timed comment as an alarm to remind himself while reading the comment section...
i got lost in the supermarket yesterday, and i really needed to go to the toilet. thankfully, i ran into caspian, who i asked for directions. He told me that i would have to walk forwards by lifting up and moving each foot in a direction that matches the vector created by drawing a line between the point on his hand to the tip point at the tip of his index finger. Once i had reached the destination, in order to enter the bathroom i would have to evaluate the obstacles in my path. He suggested that i document and categorise my obstacles by creating a design document. After a thorough investigation and frequent feedback from the supermarket staff, i found that the door was going to be the biggest challenge moving forward. As it turns out, the door had a complex mechanism that allows the user to rotate the door along the axis of its hinge, allowing the user to pass through. To prevent the door from moving on its own however, there is a rotating extrusion that moves a bolt when grasped and twisted. The door would only open when pulled, not pushed. Once entering the bathroom, i realised I no longer needed to go to the toilet, as i had peed my pants half an hour ago.
After several years of development, I'm happy he got rid of his last remaining employee so that he could really kick it into gear and start writing the functional documentation for his imaginary game.
In the next episode of Devlogs: The coffee machine, how it is beeing implemented into the daily work, the effects on the workflow and the game, and all the different settings you can use to achieve different development goals. Comming soon: Bathroom break and the right toilet paper.
if bro was working on the game as hard as he works on his promos. that shit would be still not done. i was about to say done there but lets face it, this game aint never coming out
@@Jabarri74 I'm not so sure. Coffeezilla does very well with long videos, if you know it's quality... But this would be for us devoted Kira v. CoE fans
This dude is an excellent procrastinator. He does that thing where he'll pick some small thing that is less important and focusing on that instead of the main thing, cause then you feel less bad because you're still technically doing the thing you need to do. I do this too, but I didn't get hella money from crowdfunding
@@endless3cho I sometimes take writing work for video games and I will always put off the work until the day of the deadline, but I guess that kind of works for me because nobody has complained and I always finish on time.
That might work when you're a kid trying to postpone homework for another 15 minutes while derping around with pokemon, and mom asks if you have started yet. Doing that to dodge a million dollar lawsuit on the other hand...
As someone who's worked on game development for over a decade, and a professional using Unity for my career.. these design documents are great for larger companies but a downfall for smaller indie studios. It's better to create a series of small tasks (like kanban / sprint planning board) that outline individual features for your core concept, and AFTER each completion step add to your internal wiki. I've known dozens of "potential indie" game developers who spend years on a wiki, but never make anything substantial.
I feel like that at my job too. We are a small theatre acting like a big one. We spend all our time in meetings and planning and trying to be like the big ones with different processes, then we don't have time to do the work.
I agree. And I would like to add that the waterfall model seldom works on the detail level. It's a great way to outline the broad strokes of a software system but not to plan out the nitty-gritty. Any design document will need heavy revising anyway, when implementation problems surface and resources like time and money getting tight. So why waste time on planning everything beforehand? I'm a self-employed software developer and what I usually do is to first plan ahead the whole project on a very high abstraction layer, i.e. the features the software will have. Then I do more like sprints of tasks I plan there and then in order to keep things agile and changeable. There's no point in planning the animation of chicken egg hatching three years before it's time to implement that.
@@PointsofData I'm Swedish so I don't know exactly, we call it regional theatre, we're a regular theatre but we have an obligation to play for one region in Sweden (including touring). But we're the smallest of these theatres so we kinda follow a model for theatres bigger than us... I've had fun for four weeks working ten hour days painting a huge scenery and ignoring all the meetings because of that, but sadly I'm done now :/ it's a bit up and down. I'v had much better theatre jobs. The amount of meetings kinda kills me.
Not a professional, but I noticed something similar when I started modding games. It's far more productive to come up with an idea and go straight to the implementation, documenting it immediately afterwards. While I was writing roadmaps and tasks, I was doing nothing but falling behind on work I would have much rather have done.. The problem is that CoE is a concept on such a scale that it REQUIRES extensive design documents, but since the team is only Caspian, those design documents will never be realized in a reasonable timeframe. Probably shows how mismanaged the whole project is.
Imagine going to buy a car and a guy starts to explain to you how each part of the car work like engine, suspension or a gear box, what materials its built from, what factory it comes from, what processes are in a factory and technicalities they have to go through to produce the items needed. Then he moves on to explaining how he's company works and how many processes they have and starts showing you all the documentation with details of how they write, maintain and use those ... in the mean time there is no car to show/see.
lol Im picturing him sitting at a table talking to himself out loud about the lore, and even arguing with himself as if other people are really there lol
This reminds me of the Books for the series Red Dwarf, where Rimmer would spend weeks on his timetable setting out how much time he would spend studying for his exams, only to realise he had less time so he had to make a new timetable, each time having to redo it as he wasted time on planning out his studying and in the end never studied
Every month Caspian runs back to us like a kid with a bunch of drawings, rambling something like “did you guys know that foliage is actually very complicated?”. It’s like he’s discovering for the first time that design and development are a crap ton of work and requires being very precise and creating whole systems. Which would be very fun, if he wasn’t discovering that _for years_ on end, using other people’s money. Every time he explains a new feature to me, it just reeks of “I have no idea what I’m doing, so I’m going to explain every thought going through my head so it looks like I’m thinking very hard and getting somewhere”. Or he legitimately thinks it makes him a very good and smart boy to be doing this by himself, and he’s just so flabbergasted by how labor-intensive game development is that no one else must have realized it. He must explain to us poor dummies that you can’t just make a game happen with cool ideas (who would ever think that? definitely not Caspian!), you need properties and dependencies and and..
This guy should write speeches for politicians. It's just void after blank space after emptiness after meaninglessness. Edit: How could I forget about the false promises?
Yup, more generally it's a business/coding/data term for "When 2+ things are SUPPOSED to be the same, the 'Source of Truth' is the one that wins when they are NOT the same."
@@PointsofData I mean he does call it a “dev log”. Anyone who knows software development would be familiar with the term. But in CoE’s case it’s likely just throwing in technical jargon to make it more “legit”
Jeromy is the master procrastinator. He does what I often do when I don't really want to do something: I start reconstructing my to-do list. I wonder why he didn't set out to design a table-top RPG. It would have been far easier to create with the complex systems he wants to have, and he'd be done by now. I would imagine that a Chronicles of Elyria table-top RPG would be quite good. I would actually love to play it. He clearly loves to write, to envision, to plan. Why develop a computer game?
Yes, yes! Please do a commentary on Jeremy's latest OCD meanderings that he sees as "game development." I trust you to edit when needed to preserve the sanity of viewers. If nothing else, his communications show why this game never had a chance; I'm guessing that we are seeing actual examples of his management style and his endless focus on reconceptualizing and reorganizing ideas and information on paper or in apps as a substitute for actual creation and iteration.
I genuinely would love nothing more in this world than listening to you rip into C/KOE. I’ve watched all your vids on it more times than I’d like to admit, I’m desperate for another hit of that good good Caspian
I bet Caspian could put together a fantastic resume for himself. He clearly keeps track of every little thing he does in a work setting and makes everything sound like a challenging time consuming task.
I'm pretty sure one of the big reasons the development of CoE went down the drain was Caspian doing exactly what he has done here. Writing some lists, doing some world building, chatting with people, etc. All of it unfocused and a low priority to begin with if you try to get things done. Sure, you need to have a GDD for your workers to get an idea on where to start, but that's done even before development begins. It's one of the first things in development. Otherwise it all becomes an unfocused mess. CoE is a perfect example. That Caspian is STILL at this stage tells it all.
TH-camr The Salt Factory described it as “one guy rendering water physics while the idea people go to lunch without him” and I think that’s so accurate.
I'd be surprised if there weren't several like "I am a ye Olde strip club owner. I need permissions available for people to enter and to engage in spending, but not to touch any of the workers"
This is how I imagine Caspian's day. First thing he does in the morning is, he pours a glass of water. Then he takes a knife and a foot long 2x4. Then he starts to carve two chopsticks out of that piece of wood. Around a noon, he starts to drink the water with the chopsticks very slowly. In the evening, when he is not thirsty anymore, he sits down in front of computer and writes a two sentences of the next month update. That's it. Rinse and repeat. No time to eat. Too much work 😂
I have been sending non stop questions about the agriculture and fog of war to Caspian. I'm so excited to play "Minimum deliverable product of Elyria."
Yeah "Golden Source" and "Source of Truth" are often used in IT departments to refer to "the most relevant/accurate" information - basically when trying to add order to absolute chaos. It's one of those phrases you'll have on your "Bullshit Bingo" cards 🤣
Yeah, it's a common term in software development too. "Single source of truth" is the authoritative data as it sits on a disk somewhere, not a copy of the data (which might be in memory, or on another system somewhere)
I wouldn't call it a bullshit term. It's a legitimate issue that in an organization, it's normal that stuff is recorded in many different places and then it's difficult to know what you can rely on. That's why having that single source of truth is absolutely crucial.
@@NMZS oh it definitely describes a legitimate issue and it’s also thrown around in meetings when people want to avoid dealing with the underlying issues surrounding it 🙂
Unironically this dude is probably pretty good at those reports where you need a certain number of words. He can stretch a few few sentences worth of explanation into an entire goddamn thesis.
Kira in case you didn’t see, Caspian recently did another fireside chat (and bizarre “competitive analysis” stream). As of April 2024 he apparently hasn’t made ANY progress as in response to a question he said (paraphrasing) “You guys will get to see some gameplay when there is gameplay to show.” A couple other bangers: - he was “surprised” that people responded to a recent survey by saying they weren’t interested in a single player KoE - he is now down to 1/3 of his work day working on KoE. The rest is working on his engine and teaching computer science at his local high school (may god have mercy on their souls) - he is even more audibly annoyed by people interjecting comments about his failures. He’ll say “okay.” And try to be flippant, but you can hear the seethe - the same goobers from his last discord call are still all in on the Chronicles of Caspian - he is rebuilding the website again - he blamed “influencers” as the reason he doesn’t update the website anymore I would LOVE to hear you react to it but I know you are probably burned out on it by now. Cheers!
Am I the only one who really appreciate how deep he goes with his cosplay as gamedev? He acts like he knows what's going on. It would be great if he would do a game with... I don't know ... fog of war or something.
Wow. “My website’s so old, I can’t integrate it with Discord”. That’s an excuse there, and he’s literally going through the first baby steps to understanding KPIs. This is why Project Managers exist, along with web devs, community management teams, etc. I wonder what happens when he beats the court.
there is a pm, the worst kind that doesn't ask the devs whats in the realm of possibilities. and there's nobody else. it's not really hard to come up with features and concepts the hard part is to limit the ideas into something that could be done(even in case of the fucking discord).
There's a term commonly used in software engineering (but applies to lots of disciplines) called "bikeshedding". It's used to describe the act of spending a ton of time on completely mundane and simple details, while not addressing complex and critical portions. This dude is the embodiment of "bikeshedding," I can only imagine what it was like working with him.
Someone must've pointed it out, but Caspian is like that friend a lot of us had who's like "I'm developing a video game" but they just spend all their time putting numbers into Excel sheets, collect links of programming tutorials and downloading software they never use.
2:19 Source of truth is usually used to point to the origin of data vs. a copy/manipulation of that data. In this case, it's referring to the intended design vs. its implementation. Usually liberties are taken when something is not well-defined, so the original intention may get warped.
yes. and he has still no f'cking clue that if the design bible doesn't match something that is as he says "actionable" or as I like to say "feasible" then it's totally fucking useless. anyone can make plans and make molyneux fantasies but they're kinda useless if there's no sort of plan or technical path to making them happen. if the design doc had some uml diagrams or something about some sort of data structures at least that would be something.
A little. I've made a few as student projects/game jams. But heeeell nah-uh, sounds like a bit of a deluded person, in many ways. I'd rather make my own projects than to work with somebody perpetually stuck in development hell.
@@roserevancroix2308 it's very unlikely they would be willing to take good advice to actually get a product out. like for starters just clone runescape or something before worrying about character aging. speccing that shit out before you have the systems(even on paper) in which it would need to work in is quite useless. it's just a bunch of "wouldn't it be something". they made such a bunch of conflicting promises that there's absolutely no point in continuing under the brand since it's financially and logically fucked.
2:30 Source of Truth is a term I've heard in office work, it's basically a management term and he's using it correctly, he's basically saying that due to the way communication happened, there would be conflicting designs for particular parts of the game and it was unclear which one was the most up to date and accurate one.
I'm a games designer (not developer, games DESIGNER, as in engineer, as in I write games design docs as a matter of course) and IDK what the actual fuck that entire "Permissions" section is referring to... o.O
so essentially he says.. so we had the game design, but we made so many ad hoc changes that we were unwilling or unable to keep it up to date, hence we were doing whatever and claming it was up to date design because it was totally clear in my mind.
As a Developer, I find it extremely funny that he is currently working on the technical specifications in preparation for the upcoming Alpha Test... Sounds like a fun methodology... Develop everything first and when you approach an alpha release, go back and create the specifications for the Project. Imagine that, you're 1 week from an alpha release, and you start reviewing the technical specifications for the netcode and just realize a huge design flaw that will require the rewriting of the entire networking layer... Sounds pretty efficient
Forgetting everything from the last decade about this game, looking at just this update as written Jeremy seems like the kind of person who loves to plan a game but not the guy willing to actually make a game. Basically he is the "Idea Guy" on crack. Giving him the greatest benefit of the doubt, he comes across as a person who wants to have the entire game planned out 100% before he even touches a line of code or a game engine (I mean he has basically said that is what he is doing) which any game developer would know that it never goes the way you planned it. It really looks to me like a guy who has a ton of ideas for a game he would like to make, but when it comes time to actually start making it wouldn't know where to begin. ...then we bring back in all the info about it from the last decade and well, yeah, this game is never coming out. Maybe a different game will come out, with the chronicles name on it, but the game that he wants (and sold people on) isn't going to happen.
Without giving TMI, he reminds me of many people on a roleplay website I sometimes (try to) engage in. People love planning roleplays as a means of expressing their ideas, but when it comes time to start... Suddenly they're nowhere to be found.
Kira, "source of truth" is a term used in software development. When there are multiple people saying they want diferent things, and passing information in a casual conversation or via email, or via a random chat, it becomes dificult to extract the correct requirements for a software. The term "source of truth" aplies when the developers define that independently from every mean of communication, the management program X is "the source of truth" when people dont agree about the requirements. Example, if a person involved in the software says casually to a developer, a specific button should be green, but in the management program defined as "the source of truth" it says the same button is red, then the button should be red, if said person wants to change the button, they have to go to the appropriate channels to change "the source of truth" instead of simple asking randomly for the button to be green. Having a single "source of truth" basically hepls to organize the development process. I hope i explained it well enough, english is not my first language
I love this it's like watching people build a house but so far it's only a hole and there is one really excited dude in it who owns the company and he shows you the blueprints of the house he will build alone.
This "update" made it so clear as to why Caspian was unable to develop a minimum viable product after so much money and so many years: he's an obsessive guy who is able to deceive himself that making plans and diagrams and lists is a substitute for actually creating a game. He functions on the level of a 13-year-old who focuses on all the neat stuff that could be in a game If someone could or would actually do that, and is willing to spend time on discussing which obscure fine point of procedure would be better as if that actually carried one forward towards a better product. This is a grown man with the judgment and illusions of a young adolescent who has been using other people's time and money as his hobby.
No, he's just incompetent. He doesn't know how to code or do literally anything. The presentation they did was just a single day of placing Unity assets on a tiny area and calling it a game. The guy isn't obsessive or anything else besides scamming people. I'm just shocked people fall for it to be honest. It makes me want to become a "game" developer too. I can pretend to make a game like this or some other vaperware like Star Citizen with a bunch of lies, flip a unity asset job done in 2 hours as the game after 8 years, and no consequences will happen.
The way I see it, it's good you cover this topic. When attention to this fades out so does Jeremy. The attention makes him have to atleast makes him have to act like he is intrested in the project
Amazing how a one man gaming studio has time to make lists or wiki documents or code anything or eat or sleep. Game is going to be so awesome you guys it has trees, maybe probably.
He's talking about talking about the thought of thinking about talking about thinking about the talk he will be talking about the game. What palpable excitement!
He's probably an INTP. Massively intelligent , great vocabulary, super creative - but lacking the drive to get anything done. I have all kinds of worlds and projects I created in my youth that never saw the light of day. These dev logs and wikis are 'productice procrastination'. Getting nothing done while appearing to do something.
As an aside, "Source of Truth" is a concept in development when data is collated from multiple sources, SSOT (or Single Source of Truth) is a best practice where you peg one source as the "truth" when data collides so the system knows what does take precedence. Having multiple sources of truth is a bad thing, as you would imagine :) So yeah, the language is not unusual for dev jargon, but quite so for a public facing document, meaning that writing copy is indeed a job, and mostly why I do hardly partake in it, even for my own projects :D
The last update ("Q4 Update") was shared on kickstarter and received massively negative responses. Guess that explains why Caspian didn't repost this update there.
Also reading the flavour text for the seasons I'm increasingly convinced that what Jeremy really wants to do in life is write. He wants to write and create worlds, he should have just been an author. He could have spent all this time writing a series of fantasy books and he'd be vastly further along than he is with this game. But of course he probably wouldn't have eight million dollars then, would he.
"Source of truth" is a fairly common developer term. Normally, this refers to a location where information is considered of higher "priority" compared to other sources, when conflicts occur. For example your configuration can be stored in a .ini file or a database. The database is then considered the "source of truth" when the 2 contradict.
I figured it out. He's not a game developer at all, just posing as one. He is an English major postdoc who got stuck in his career at some point, went crazy and now does nothing but writing design documents which are documenting other design documents which ostensibly relate to a nebulous computer game. And while he is typing up this heap of nonsense, he makes the occasional weird noise which is not unlike that made by one of numerous animals at home in the rainforest.
@@roserevancroix2308 Did you not watch the same video? Read the same update? Nothing! It says nothing! He did nothing and somehow has all this to write about it. Even when he was full funded and had staff working for him, he still had nothing to show for it. The kingdom game isn’t even the game people wanted or was promised. Tell me something he actually accomplished towards the game people want since you want to defend him.
"Look, everybody, Im busy! You cant sue me for doing nothing if Im busy!" This is me when I worked at McDonalds when we had no customers. Wipe down the same surface over and over again just to keep the manager from yelling at me for "standing around and doing nothing" when there is actually nothing to do.
"Source of truth" is actually a common term in software. Say you have a distributed database- all the databases hold the same information, but sometimes they're updated at different times. So maybe DB0 is updated first, and DB1-DB4 are updated as soon as possible after that. You call DB0 the Source of Truth, and there's no ambiguity about which one you should use- if two servers disagree, you just defer to DB0. It can also be used for design docs and things like that. For example, say you're writing the new Elder Scrolls game- the people who wrote the original Elder Scrolls left the company 15 years ago, and there's tons of conflicting information over various games, wikis, official books and so on- Bethesda might designate a "source of truth" that defines the basic, essential information for the lore, so that you know what to defer to in case you're not sure if Tiber Septim was born in Atmora or born on the island of Alcaire, whatever.
So, in just a few weeks of working on an game that's been in development fro years he managed to get as much done as a star craft 2 modder does on a weekend after school. Neat.
FYI, "Source of Truth" is something I ran into a lot in the Software Engineering world. It refers to data strategies that aim to reduce or eliminate the storage of the same piece of information in multiple places. Caspian is using it because it makes him sound important.
Source of truth is a pretty standard term, but not how Caspian used it, i think. Typically it's used in Data work. Basically what is the location of our best, most correct data. So what is the source of truth.
Probably already answered. But in software development “source of truth” or “single source of truth” is pretty commonly used to refer to consolidating your design and information into one location so that if questions come up during the process you can refer to one location and everyone is referring to the same information.
Kira, your laundry is done.
What?
I think Kira wanted to get ahead of all of the comments about his washing machine playing a chime at 20:57.
Did he check if that's copyrighted music tho...
@@LittleGrandpaSimpson ...after the video being up for three hours?... I thought he used a timed comment as an alarm to remind himself while reading the comment section...
Man that threw me off, didn't know the laundry was running here
I thought it was my washing machine.
i got lost in the supermarket yesterday, and i really needed to go to the toilet. thankfully, i ran into caspian, who i asked for directions. He told me that i would have to walk forwards by lifting up and moving each foot in a direction that matches the vector created by drawing a line between the point on his hand to the tip point at the tip of his index finger. Once i had reached the destination, in order to enter the bathroom i would have to evaluate the obstacles in my path. He suggested that i document and categorise my obstacles by creating a design document. After a thorough investigation and frequent feedback from the supermarket staff, i found that the door was going to be the biggest challenge moving forward. As it turns out, the door had a complex mechanism that allows the user to rotate the door along the axis of its hinge, allowing the user to pass through. To prevent the door from moving on its own however, there is a rotating extrusion that moves a bolt when grasped and twisted. The door would only open when pulled, not pushed. Once entering the bathroom, i realised I no longer needed to go to the toilet, as i had peed my pants half an hour ago.
Made my day 😂
Underrated comment
this comment is everything
I hope this comment stays at the top! 😂
New DLC quest unlocked: finding fresh pants.
This game is like a zombie phoenix, not alive, not dead, and always comes back.
And apparently constantly burning.
Like a good dumpster fire.
Also smells and looks like a dead bird on fire.
It's like Schrodinger's cat, but no one bothered to open the box
New D&D character idea, tyvm
It's nice that he can do multiple iterations of the game design document. I guess that makes up for not working on the actual game.
So basically the only progress that has been made was in making a list of how he will list things, Amazing!
My ADD ass doesn't need called out like that
Not true! He started making the website and discord nicer 😀
Well you know it may have something to do with the fact that making a game costs money.
@@roserevancroix2308 lmao
@@roserevancroix2308 You mean like the 8 million he already got?
After several years of development, I'm happy he got rid of his last remaining employee so that he could really kick it into gear and start writing the functional documentation for his imaginary game.
Yeah I think Caspian may have misunderstood the “too many cooks spoil the broth” analogy.
@@CoffeeForAll curiously, zero cooks and sitting in the oven for multiple years *also* spoils the broth
In the next episode of Devlogs: The coffee machine, how it is beeing implemented into the daily work, the effects on the workflow and the game, and all the different settings you can use to achieve different development goals.
Comming soon: Bathroom break and the right toilet paper.
The coffee machine: people have been asking if there will be espresso in the game. I will go through the finer points in the next update.
@@CainXVII 😂
Its crazy how Caspian manages to make so much content and write so much with so little, literally just air.
I agree, everything that he comes out with is just literally a load of wank, just empty words.
if bro was working on the game as hard as he works on his promos. that shit would be still not done. i was about to say done there but lets face it, this game aint never coming out
Watch previous State of Elyria videos. He managed to make 1 hour video from just grass assets and static world map.
Caspian should just become a ghost writer for books because writing heaps of bull seems to be the one thing he’s good at.
His one skill has just been made redundant by ChatGPT.
I would totally watch a full length featured film of you Kira watching Caspian make a list.
Me too but don't think the algorithm likes longer videos
Like he said, it's crack cocaine. I need another hit.
Absolutely
@@Jabarri74 I'm not so sure. Coffeezilla does very well with long videos, if you know it's quality... But this would be for us devoted Kira v. CoE fans
@@Jabarri74 This is the second channel so I do not think that algo matters as much.
This dude is an excellent procrastinator. He does that thing where he'll pick some small thing that is less important and focusing on that instead of the main thing, cause then you feel less bad because you're still technically doing the thing you need to do. I do this too, but I didn't get hella money from crowdfunding
Same. I am a procrastinator too. However, it has never produced anything truly beneficial in my life and I've never been paid to do it.
@@endless3cho getting money to procrastinate would be a fucking death knell for my life goddamn
@@endless3cho I sometimes take writing work for video games and I will always put off the work until the day of the deadline, but I guess that kind of works for me because nobody has complained and I always finish on time.
Came here to say this. This guy is the God-King of procrastination. He is "programming a game" by writing blog entries and wikis for years now.
That might work when you're a kid trying to postpone homework for another 15 minutes while derping around with pokemon, and mom asks if you have started yet.
Doing that to dodge a million dollar lawsuit on the other hand...
Kira, please, there is nothing more I need in this world than to watch you watch that 47 minute video.
Agreed. I *need* to see it.
I need to see it
Every blog post is a bit of the gameplay. Literally the chronicles of Elyria. Chronicled by the man, the legend.
You mean Caspian masterminded Kira into being part of the plot?...
Nono, I mean Caspian is chronicling Elyria in blogposts and thats the real gameplay. The literal Chronicles.
@@TheZealo So meta
You are absolutely right. Nobody sees it. We are witnesses of the Chronicles Of Elyria
As someone who's worked on game development for over a decade, and a professional using Unity for my career.. these design documents are great for larger companies but a downfall for smaller indie studios. It's better to create a series of small tasks (like kanban / sprint planning board) that outline individual features for your core concept, and AFTER each completion step add to your internal wiki. I've known dozens of "potential indie" game developers who spend years on a wiki, but never make anything substantial.
I feel like that at my job too. We are a small theatre acting like a big one. We spend all our time in meetings and planning and trying to be like the big ones with different processes, then we don't have time to do the work.
@@CainXVII community theatre? Oof. I hope you're having fun despite that.
I agree. And I would like to add that the waterfall model seldom works on the detail level. It's a great way to outline the broad strokes of a software system but not to plan out the nitty-gritty. Any design document will need heavy revising anyway, when implementation problems surface and resources like time and money getting tight. So why waste time on planning everything beforehand?
I'm a self-employed software developer and what I usually do is to first plan ahead the whole project on a very high abstraction layer, i.e. the features the software will have. Then I do more like sprints of tasks I plan there and then in order to keep things agile and changeable. There's no point in planning the animation of chicken egg hatching three years before it's time to implement that.
@@PointsofData I'm Swedish so I don't know exactly, we call it regional theatre, we're a regular theatre but we have an obligation to play for one region in Sweden (including touring). But we're the smallest of these theatres so we kinda follow a model for theatres bigger than us...
I've had fun for four weeks working ten hour days painting a huge scenery and ignoring all the meetings because of that, but sadly I'm done now :/ it's a bit up and down. I'v had much better theatre jobs. The amount of meetings kinda kills me.
Not a professional, but I noticed something similar when I started modding games. It's far more productive to come up with an idea and go straight to the implementation, documenting it immediately afterwards. While I was writing roadmaps and tasks, I was doing nothing but falling behind on work I would have much rather have done..
The problem is that CoE is a concept on such a scale that it REQUIRES extensive design documents, but since the team is only Caspian, those design documents will never be realized in a reasonable timeframe. Probably shows how mismanaged the whole project is.
Imagine going to buy a car and a guy starts to explain to you how each part of the car work like engine, suspension or a gear box, what materials its built from, what factory it comes from, what processes are in a factory and technicalities they have to go through to produce the items needed. Then he moves on to explaining how he's company works and how many processes they have and starts showing you all the documentation with details of how they write, maintain and use those ... in the mean time there is no car to show/see.
"Take a look at this flowchart buddy..."
*slaps roof of design document*
@@ian_bi literally shed a tear laughing at this😂
😀@@samgyeopsal569
This game will basically be a text-based "choose your own adventure" in confluence
Honestly, I would love to have a text-based multiplayer game again. Give me a great MUD/MUSH again!!
choose your own lie haha
@@endymallorn pretty sure there's lots of muds still running.
Don't give Caspian even more ideas.
This one was good man hahahahaha
I've been waiting for another episode of Keeping Up with The Caspians so long.. thank you Kira for bringing us proper entertainment
When an only developer of a game is obsessed about 'finalizing specifications' of the lore of a game...
lol Im picturing him sitting at a table talking to himself out loud about the lore, and even arguing with himself as if other people are really there lol
This reminds me of the Books for the series Red Dwarf, where Rimmer would spend weeks on his timetable setting out how much time he would spend studying for his exams, only to realise he had less time so he had to make a new timetable, each time having to redo it as he wasted time on planning out his studying and in the end never studied
Every month Caspian runs back to us like a kid with a bunch of drawings, rambling something like “did you guys know that foliage is actually very complicated?”. It’s like he’s discovering for the first time that design and development are a crap ton of work and requires being very precise and creating whole systems. Which would be very fun, if he wasn’t discovering that _for years_ on end, using other people’s money. Every time he explains a new feature to me, it just reeks of “I have no idea what I’m doing, so I’m going to explain every thought going through my head so it looks like I’m thinking very hard and getting somewhere”.
Or he legitimately thinks it makes him a very good and smart boy to be doing this by himself, and he’s just so flabbergasted by how labor-intensive game development is that no one else must have realized it. He must explain to us poor dummies that you can’t just make a game happen with cool ideas (who would ever think that? definitely not Caspian!), you need properties and dependencies and and..
This guy should write speeches for politicians. It's just void after blank space after emptiness after meaninglessness.
Edit: How could I forget about the false promises?
😀
He has all the word salads ever made in the world inside his head, it's amazing!
"Source of truth" is a business change term when using bringing 2 sets of code into 1. I use it alot in data but it works in code too.
Yup, more generally it's a business/coding/data term for "When 2+ things are SUPPOSED to be the same, the 'Source of Truth' is the one that wins when they are NOT the same."
Why is he using programming terms in an update to backers who are probably largely not programmers?
@@PointsofData try to sound clever. Using business coding jingo
@@PointsofData I mean he does call it a “dev log”. Anyone who knows software development would be familiar with the term. But in CoE’s case it’s likely just throwing in technical jargon to make it more “legit”
Working on everything game-adjacent and describing it instead of just working on the game. Procrastinating genius right there
Strongly agree.
I think you misspelled 'procrastinating incompetent'.
Jeromy is the master procrastinator. He does what I often do when I don't really want to do something: I start reconstructing my to-do list.
I wonder why he didn't set out to design a table-top RPG. It would have been far easier to create with the complex systems he wants to have, and he'd be done by now. I would imagine that a Chronicles of Elyria table-top RPG would be quite good. I would actually love to play it. He clearly loves to write, to envision, to plan. Why develop a computer game?
b mm vj
Yes, Mr. Kira. Say the line, Mr. Kira. Watch the video. Listen to Caspian speak words. Just do it.
You didn't say the magical word.🤨
@@roserevancroix2308 superqualifragilisticexpialidocious
Yes, yes! Please do a commentary on Jeremy's latest OCD meanderings that he sees as "game development." I trust you to edit when needed to preserve the sanity of viewers.
If nothing else, his communications show why this game never had a chance; I'm guessing that we are seeing actual examples of his management style and his endless focus on reconceptualizing and reorganizing ideas and information on paper or in apps as a substitute for actual creation and iteration.
I want to see you cover his 47 minute video. I'm sure it will still be entertaining and hilarious.
Ditto!
Maybe a livestream to make it more survivable for kira
Yes please! I enjoy your opinions bout this stuff.
I genuinely would love nothing more in this world than listening to you rip into C/KOE. I’ve watched all your vids on it more times than I’d like to admit, I’m desperate for another hit of that good good Caspian
I bet Caspian could put together a fantastic resume for himself. He clearly keeps track of every little thing he does in a work setting and makes everything sound like a challenging time consuming task.
Every time I see a CoE update by Kira I rub my hands like a fly.
I'm pretty sure one of the big reasons the development of CoE went down the drain was Caspian doing exactly what he has done here.
Writing some lists, doing some world building, chatting with people, etc.
All of it unfocused and a low priority to begin with if you try to get things done. Sure, you need to have a GDD for your workers to get an idea on where to start, but that's done even before development begins. It's one of the first things in development.
Otherwise it all becomes an unfocused mess. CoE is a perfect example.
That Caspian is STILL at this stage tells it all.
TH-camr The Salt Factory described it as “one guy rendering water physics while the idea people go to lunch without him” and I think that’s so accurate.
Without a doubt people were trolling the hell out of those 'permissions submissions'.
I'd be surprised if there weren't several like "I am a ye Olde strip club owner. I need permissions available for people to enter and to engage in spending, but not to touch any of the workers"
Isn't that what dumb people always do with things they don't know shit about just to get attention?
YES! I want to see you slowly break down while listening to Jeremy speaking
you have to watch caspian make a list for 47 minutes,so that i can watch you watch caspian make a list for over an hour
And we need to know what 90% done means. This is important.
Chronicles of Elyria videos always make my day brighter.
This is how I imagine Caspian's day. First thing he does in the morning is, he pours a glass of water. Then he takes a knife and a foot long 2x4. Then he starts to carve two chopsticks out of that piece of wood. Around a noon, he starts to drink the water with the chopsticks very slowly. In the evening, when he is not thirsty anymore, he sits down in front of computer and writes a two sentences of the next month update. That's it. Rinse and repeat. No time to eat. Too much work 😂
A Kira VOD just looking incredibly bored at Caspian's listmaking skills would make my day, I got a lot of long commutes this february.
I have been sending non stop questions about the agriculture and fog of war to Caspian. I'm so excited to play "Minimum deliverable product of Elyria."
Caspian is basically DM'ing a multi-million dollar tabletop game, where the setting is a game development studio.
Yeah "Golden Source" and "Source of Truth" are often used in IT departments to refer to "the most relevant/accurate" information - basically when trying to add order to absolute chaos. It's one of those phrases you'll have on your "Bullshit Bingo" cards 🤣
Yeah, it's a common term in software development too. "Single source of truth" is the authoritative data as it sits on a disk somewhere, not a copy of the data (which might be in memory, or on another system somewhere)
I wouldn't call it a bullshit term. It's a legitimate issue that in an organization, it's normal that stuff is recorded in many different places and then it's difficult to know what you can rely on. That's why having that single source of truth is absolutely crucial.
@@NMZS oh it definitely describes a legitimate issue and it’s also thrown around in meetings when people want to avoid dealing with the underlying issues surrounding it 🙂
Unironically this dude is probably pretty good at those reports where you need a certain number of words. He can stretch a few few sentences worth of explanation into an entire goddamn thesis.
I'm so excited for this game to come out in 31 years! It definitely is! For sure!
Kira in case you didn’t see, Caspian recently did another fireside chat (and bizarre “competitive analysis” stream). As of April 2024 he apparently hasn’t made ANY progress as in response to a question he said (paraphrasing) “You guys will get to see some gameplay when there is gameplay to show.”
A couple other bangers:
- he was “surprised” that people responded to a recent survey by saying they weren’t interested in a single player KoE
- he is now down to 1/3 of his work day working on KoE. The rest is working on his engine and teaching computer science at his local high school (may god have mercy on their souls)
- he is even more audibly annoyed by people interjecting comments about his failures. He’ll say “okay.” And try to be flippant, but you can hear the seethe
- the same goobers from his last discord call are still all in on the Chronicles of Caspian
- he is rebuilding the website again
- he blamed “influencers” as the reason he doesn’t update the website anymore
I would LOVE to hear you react to it but I know you are probably burned out on it by now.
Cheers!
Am I the only one who really appreciate how deep he goes with his cosplay as gamedev?
He acts like he knows what's going on.
It would be great if he would do a game with... I don't know ... fog of war or something.
Wow. “My website’s so old, I can’t integrate it with Discord”. That’s an excuse there, and he’s literally going through the first baby steps to understanding KPIs. This is why Project Managers exist, along with web devs, community management teams, etc.
I wonder what happens when he beats the court.
there is a pm, the worst kind that doesn't ask the devs whats in the realm of possibilities.
and there's nobody else.
it's not really hard to come up with features and concepts the hard part is to limit the ideas into something that could be done(even in case of the fucking discord).
There's a term commonly used in software engineering (but applies to lots of disciplines) called "bikeshedding". It's used to describe the act of spending a ton of time on completely mundane and simple details, while not addressing complex and critical portions. This dude is the embodiment of "bikeshedding," I can only imagine what it was like working with him.
Someone must've pointed it out, but Caspian is like that friend a lot of us had who's like "I'm developing a video game" but they just spend all their time putting numbers into Excel sheets, collect links of programming tutorials and downloading software they never use.
My condolences to those hardcore roleplayers, RP'ing their heart out about a game they will never be able to play. CAN WE GET AN F FOR THEM
More like an L
2:19 Source of truth is usually used to point to the origin of data vs. a copy/manipulation of that data. In this case, it's referring to the intended design vs. its implementation. Usually liberties are taken when something is not well-defined, so the original intention may get warped.
Yep. Normal dev terminology
”What’s the source of truth here? The jira ticket, the codebase, the design file or the readme?”
I saw "Kira" and "Elyra" and nearly shat myself 👀👀👀
I feel like caspian's life would be so much easier if he spent all the time hes used to pretend to make a game actually making a game
Probably not, now with chat gpt able to write more bullshit at the click of a finger
So he's basically saying, in so many words, that it's all still or back at the design phase?
yes.
and he has still no f'cking clue that if the design bible doesn't match something that is as he says "actionable" or as I like to say "feasible" then it's totally fucking useless.
anyone can make plans and make molyneux fantasies but they're kinda useless if there's no sort of plan or technical path to making them happen. if the design doc had some uml diagrams or something about some sort of data structures at least that would be something.
Yes maybe you can go and help him?
Do you know anything at all about making games?
A little. I've made a few as student projects/game jams. But heeeell nah-uh, sounds like a bit of a deluded person, in many ways. I'd rather make my own projects than to work with somebody perpetually stuck in development hell.
@@roserevancroix2308 it's very unlikely they would be willing to take good advice to actually get a product out.
like for starters just clone runescape or something before worrying about character aging. speccing that shit out before you have the systems(even on paper) in which it would need to work in is quite useless. it's just a bunch of "wouldn't it be something".
they made such a bunch of conflicting promises that there's absolutely no point in continuing under the brand since it's financially and logically fucked.
@@roserevancroix2308 If I had $8m I could make a game. It wouldn't be the last game you'll ever play because that wouldn't be feasible lol.
2:30 Source of Truth is a term I've heard in office work, it's basically a management term and he's using it correctly, he's basically saying that due to the way communication happened, there would be conflicting designs for particular parts of the game and it was unclear which one was the most up to date and accurate one.
Yes. We want to see you watch his video and react to all the Visio charts, excel sheets etc etc
I'm a games designer (not developer, games DESIGNER, as in engineer, as in I write games design docs as a matter of course) and IDK what the actual fuck that entire "Permissions" section is referring to... o.O
The crazy thing is, the second the last lawsuit against him gets dismissed he is going to disapear forever (or start a nft metaverse game)
I thought it already was dismissed? Caspian talked about that in the last quarterly update
@@byst33in appeals. The people behind the lawsuit are morons though
@@byst33 You watch Caspian's Q updates!??
@@LautaroQ2812 on Kira's channel, which you're currently commenting on...yeah...
@@byst33 I thought Kira mentioned that they were still some active lawsuits left.
I’m super excited for the 43 minute video! I can’t wait to watch it while plug my toaster into the bathtub.
so essentially he says.. so we had the game design, but we made so many ad hoc changes that we were unwilling or unable to keep it up to date, hence we were doing whatever and claming it was up to date design because it was totally clear in my mind.
7:59 omg…you could hear the frustration with that F off lmao
I bet he considers the developer blogs as working on the game and when he's finished writing he says "That was rough and time for a nap".
As a Developer, I find it extremely funny that he is currently working on the technical specifications in preparation for the upcoming Alpha Test...
Sounds like a fun methodology... Develop everything first and when you approach an alpha release, go back and create the specifications for the Project.
Imagine that, you're 1 week from an alpha release, and you start reviewing the technical specifications for the netcode and just realize a huge design flaw that will require the rewriting of the entire networking layer...
Sounds pretty efficient
Forgetting everything from the last decade about this game, looking at just this update as written Jeremy seems like the kind of person who loves to plan a game but not the guy willing to actually make a game. Basically he is the "Idea Guy" on crack. Giving him the greatest benefit of the doubt, he comes across as a person who wants to have the entire game planned out 100% before he even touches a line of code or a game engine (I mean he has basically said that is what he is doing) which any game developer would know that it never goes the way you planned it. It really looks to me like a guy who has a ton of ideas for a game he would like to make, but when it comes time to actually start making it wouldn't know where to begin.
...then we bring back in all the info about it from the last decade and well, yeah, this game is never coming out. Maybe a different game will come out, with the chronicles name on it, but the game that he wants (and sold people on) isn't going to happen.
Without giving TMI, he reminds me of many people on a roleplay website I sometimes (try to) engage in. People love planning roleplays as a means of expressing their ideas, but when it comes time to start... Suddenly they're nowhere to be found.
Kira, "source of truth" is a term used in software development. When there are multiple people saying they want diferent things, and passing information in a casual conversation or via email, or via a random chat, it becomes dificult to extract the correct requirements for a software. The term "source of truth" aplies when the developers define that independently from every mean of communication, the management program X is "the source of truth" when people dont agree about the requirements. Example, if a person involved in the software says casually to a developer, a specific button should be green, but in the management program defined as "the source of truth" it says the same button is red, then the button should be red, if said person wants to change the button, they have to go to the appropriate channels to change "the source of truth" instead of simple asking randomly for the button to be green. Having a single "source of truth" basically hepls to organize the development process. I hope i explained it well enough, english is not my first language
I love this it's like watching people build a house but so far it's only a hole and there is one really excited dude in it who owns the company and he shows you the blueprints of the house he will build alone.
This "update" made it so clear as to why Caspian was unable to develop a minimum viable product after so much money and so many years: he's an obsessive guy who is able to deceive himself that making plans and diagrams and lists is a substitute for actually creating a game. He functions on the level of a 13-year-old who focuses on all the neat stuff that could be in a game If someone could or would actually do that, and is willing to spend time on discussing which obscure fine point of procedure would be better as if that actually carried one forward towards a better product.
This is a grown man with the judgment and illusions of a young adolescent who has been using other people's time and money as his hobby.
No, he's just incompetent. He doesn't know how to code or do literally anything. The presentation they did was just a single day of placing Unity assets on a tiny area and calling it a game. The guy isn't obsessive or anything else besides scamming people. I'm just shocked people fall for it to be honest. It makes me want to become a "game" developer too. I can pretend to make a game like this or some other vaperware like Star Citizen with a bunch of lies, flip a unity asset job done in 2 hours as the game after 8 years, and no consequences will happen.
I'm here for the 2 hour video of you ripping apart his 47 minute video. This shit makes my day.
The way I see it, it's good you cover this topic. When attention to this fades out so does Jeremy. The attention makes him have to atleast makes him have to act like he is intrested in the project
Amazing how a one man gaming studio has time to make lists or wiki documents or code anything or eat or sleep. Game is going to be so awesome you guys it has trees, maybe probably.
Well, it apparently has mushrooms. I was very interested to hear about that...
He's talking about talking about the thought of thinking about talking about thinking about the talk he will be talking about the game. What palpable excitement!
It's like watching Rimmer plan his exam revision.
Man, Caspian must have got a thesaurus for Christmas! He's using all the words!
He's probably an INTP. Massively intelligent , great vocabulary, super creative - but lacking the drive to get anything done.
I have all kinds of worlds and projects I created in my youth that never saw the light of day.
These dev logs and wikis are 'productice procrastination'. Getting nothing done while appearing to do something.
As an aside, "Source of Truth" is a concept in development when data is collated from multiple sources, SSOT (or Single Source of Truth) is a best practice where you peg one source as the "truth" when data collides so the system knows what does take precedence.
Having multiple sources of truth is a bad thing, as you would imagine :)
So yeah, the language is not unusual for dev jargon, but quite so for a public facing document, meaning that writing copy is indeed a job, and mostly why I do hardly partake in it, even for my own projects :D
The last update ("Q4 Update") was shared on kickstarter and received massively negative responses. Guess that explains why Caspian didn't repost this update there.
“Did you know you can rearrange the deck chairs on the titanic!?”
Also reading the flavour text for the seasons I'm increasingly convinced that what Jeremy really wants to do in life is write. He wants to write and create worlds, he should have just been an author. He could have spent all this time writing a series of fantasy books and he'd be vastly further along than he is with this game. But of course he probably wouldn't have eight million dollars then, would he.
I miss having updates to this trainwreck so much I'm watching older videos of it. Can't wait for the next video.
OF COURSE we want to see 47 minutes of Kira reading a spreadsheet!! It's about CoE ffs!
20:57 - Upvoting for the LG washing machine song!
"Source of truth" is a fairly common developer term. Normally, this refers to a location where information is considered of higher "priority" compared to other sources, when conflicts occur. For example your configuration can be stored in a .ini file or a database. The database is then considered the "source of truth" when the 2 contradict.
I think your laundry finished in the time you did this video lmao I swear I heard a washing machine chime in the background. Great video as always :)
Please do the review video of his 47 minutes ramble, Kira ! We love your CoE analysis/ saga ! ☺️
14:29 Essentially, you did 😁
Those who didn't "ask for this" would recognize that it is part of the implementation of FOIP......
Hell yeah! What a way to start my day. Btw, the designs in your shop are frickin sweet, especially Earth Control.
Caspian has this amazing ability to expand and detail on doing absolutely nothing. He accomplished nothing and somehow has so much to say about it 😂.
I figured it out. He's not a game developer at all, just posing as one. He is an English major postdoc who got stuck in his career at some point, went crazy and now does nothing but writing design documents which are documenting other design documents which ostensibly relate to a nebulous computer game. And while he is typing up this heap of nonsense, he makes the occasional weird noise which is not unlike that made by one of numerous animals at home in the rainforest.
How do you know he accomplished nothing, are you a personal friend of his?
It's pretty Zen.
That's how I passed a few presentations from uni
@@roserevancroix2308 Did you not watch the same video? Read the same update? Nothing! It says nothing! He did nothing and somehow has all this to write about it. Even when he was full funded and had staff working for him, he still had nothing to show for it. The kingdom game isn’t even the game people wanted or was promised. Tell me something he actually accomplished towards the game people want since you want to defend him.
The best thing about this game is that when you search it on youtube, Kiras videos come up at the top.
"Look, everybody, Im busy! You cant sue me for doing nothing if Im busy!"
This is me when I worked at McDonalds when we had no customers. Wipe down the same surface over and over again just to keep the manager from yelling at me for "standing around and doing nothing" when there is actually nothing to do.
"Source of truth" is actually a common term in software. Say you have a distributed database- all the databases hold the same information, but sometimes they're updated at different times. So maybe DB0 is updated first, and DB1-DB4 are updated as soon as possible after that. You call DB0 the Source of Truth, and there's no ambiguity about which one you should use- if two servers disagree, you just defer to DB0.
It can also be used for design docs and things like that. For example, say you're writing the new Elder Scrolls game- the people who wrote the original Elder Scrolls left the company 15 years ago, and there's tons of conflicting information over various games, wikis, official books and so on- Bethesda might designate a "source of truth" that defines the basic, essential information for the lore, so that you know what to defer to in case you're not sure if Tiber Septim was born in Atmora or born on the island of Alcaire, whatever.
I’ll 1000% watch you react to that 45 minute video, and I’ll give it a like.
I will promise Kira a like too
So, in just a few weeks of working on an game that's been in development fro years he managed to get as much done as a star craft 2 modder does on a weekend after school.
Neat.
I want to see you watch Jeremy write things on a "dynamic list" for 47 minutes!
19:15
"And of course, our most popular package 'Jester'."
I want to see a 47 minute long video of you listening to jeremy talk about what he's done.
FYI, "Source of Truth" is something I ran into a lot in the Software Engineering world. It refers to data strategies that aim to reduce or eliminate the storage of the same piece of information in multiple places. Caspian is using it because it makes him sound important.
This guy is now explaining how the "dog" ate his homework. No tech demo of all the things he is talking about.
Please Kira, read everything and watch everything that Daddy Kaspian wrote and uploaded. You don't know how much i need this in my life right now
Yes do it!
I'm really missing the Dreamworld CoE times
Source of truth is a pretty standard term, but not how Caspian used it, i think.
Typically it's used in Data work. Basically what is the location of our best, most correct data. So what is the source of truth.
Probably already answered. But in software development “source of truth” or “single source of truth” is pretty commonly used to refer to consolidating your design and information into one location so that if questions come up during the process you can refer to one location and everyone is referring to the same information.
At this point he must be trolling, how long can keep the masquerade going. 🤯
This is the content we be here for.
I'm already itching for you to react to that 47 minute document!
What a treat this was! I just got finished binging Kira’s playlist on this only to find a new upload!!!