Hello to those whom follow Project Wayvern. I’m Faith, my user being better known as Mara.
Here in this announcement we will look over the general state of our administration, staff, and development team, its structure and incapability, and a general synopsis of PWs direction and better understanding how we entered a sudden state of inactivity, after what felt like a booming beginning. I will leave my thoughts in pretext, to best understand from a mental-standpoint what made PW slow down so quickly, and why as a team many are demotivated to continue from here.
Current feelings towards PW
Now, this might sound repetitive and overanalyzing, but for the latter part of the past two years I have been expanding my reach in development, and professionally training myself in multiple fields, in an attempt to avoid drama and heresy, and build on the failures of past promised projects I have felt guilt-ridden on for years. This might sound shocking and overly dramatic, but I think that (almost) every second of work I now put into PW, over the past couple months became a source of misery and agony, at the fear of my character and my peers being attacked or unfairly treated. As a developer, I’ve been in the roblox ecosystem to a professional level since 2017. Now, knowing how Roblox works, especially as a game engine, to put it in very simple terms, Roblox is a black box with which you have to constantly fight in order to get anything done and published to a community. As soon as your game introduces a minimum amount of complexity however, your productivity curve takes a huge hit, and you end up struggling to release even small additions and bug-fixes, all in while being ridiculed by the community you’re trying hard to build for. Take a deepened lack of control over back-end infrastructures, obligation to adopt cheap first-party storage solutions, and the lack of monetary gain dumped ontop (I have made pretty much no money during the development, taking this all as a passion project pretty much), the absolutely dreadful development experience with Roblox Studio, the client-server model (most importantly character replication being difficult with customisation) that quickly become an almost unfixable technical debt.
Quarrels definitely heightened the lack of ability to want to continue the game, making for an added feat to deal with. If I could place it in light words, I would. But thats the general consensus of it all.
The state of Administration, Development and their effect on the game
Due to the sheer stress the community has had on me, there were periods of time I tried to take LOAs (go on-leave, like a holiday) to try recuperate and mentally recover from the anguish this project has put me through once again. The ATF scene is beyond normal fitting norms of toxicity and ill-fed behavior, that no user can do through prolonged exposure to such coarse interactions. I typically tried to rely on my administration team for these things during breaks, but I often found myself working through periods of inactivity to stop the community from folding in on itself and outright dying. There was a point in time that, even in spite of such a heartful and supporting team, I was a lone sailor in a sea of sharks. The Administration team quickly became evident as an unreliable source to run the project, let alone make properly administrative decisions, especially with poor picks way back in the past. Removing individuals from upper management also became complex, as you had to juggle their current position and contribution with the reality of how insufficient it became keeping them on the team.
Onward with the above, there also became a lack of transparency to the community. We worked and outreached goals to try to deliver, and at a point it was increasingly looking great. This didn’t last long, as the exposure of PW left alot of the team demoralized and unwilling to participate. From a development sectre, crucial additions from animations, to products to befill the game became very limited. One huge part was especially expertise. On the team, over the course of almost a year and a half there would have only been two professionally trained developers who actually were with us, and even then contribution was alass, at a stagnant low point. I would like to imagine that I could ask people to come on to help, and maybe hope for a stronger production, but given the reputation of myself and the group after relentlessly hard-fought raids, I only see reaching out to old friends, and assistance being overlooked with our reputation.
The state of our staff team
This is a whole can of worms to pry through, but our staff was quickly broken into sectres of inactive foe, and plagued individuals who caused absolute riot for the teams general image. Call it one users exposure being toppled with a power-trip, or another bewittling other communities under representation of PW, the staff team is something to reform and think about; but that thought must come another time, I believe.
The effect the community has given
I think it’s important to mention what kind of impact the community has on me. I am thankful for the support our most loyal players have shown us, and I’m still baffled that we’ve managed to release, for what its worth? A absolutely astronomically detailed, vast and mind-boggling passion project. I never had believed that I could produce a game with such abstract vastness and quality again, especially after the botched release and shutdown of my prior. I am proud of these works, and I’m unsure if many of you share similar mindsets, but if you want me to be honest, I feel like this has become a curse. This level of responsibility in such an environment is extremely stressful to me. Releasing something novel to the community is supposed to be fun, but most of the time it ends up being somewhat unrewarding and painful. I understand that working on a game like this brings high player expectations, but I’m afraid I’m not always able to live up to those expectations. The hard truth is, I would rather completely scrap something that sounds cool, than being met with the aftermath of the community being displeased that I could not deliver something that I had been working on. I think it’s also important to mention that toxicity is extremely prevalent around here, with numerous raids and attacks not on myself, which I can deal with; but my peers being banished for even affiliating with me, even if certain accusations get proven false. I like to think I’m above this kind of stuff and that I can avoid it, but it seems like it’s an integral part of the “game”, though I I’m just not built like that.
The state of the game
Second to lastly, I think it’s worth mentioning that I’m aware of the state of the game. To this day, this game feels to me like a collation of all my attempts to turn this game into something that it isn’t. Call that a lack of vision or being dreamy and overly courageous, but it’s clear we’ve managed to attract differing playerbases without fully satisfying the expectations and needs of one or another. Anyways, this has an impact on my motivation to work on something new - what’s the point of doing that if the other half isn’t going to enjoy or even care about it? While we have some concrete ideas to make the game more fun, playerbase prioritization is definitely a conversation to be had, especially regarding factions, story and game structure.
Lastly, lets throw in a bit of extra game direction into the mix. Now, we’ve spent alot of time delivering a project, professionally producing assets and models, and obtaining a proper direction to make the most fun experience possible. Now, issues would come to arise when you look at the games current point, where large open-world roleplay games generally find their grounds on active communities best tailored for being fun. PW definitely had this opportunity during its boom-wave period, but given its drama-induced coma that became a side-effect of this, PW as a project sits dormant way before its best days. Taking a deepened thought about playerbase retention, its definitely evident alot needs to be done in game features, which on the unfortunate levels of what was explained in previous paragraphs, is why alot of us sit demotivated to contribute further, keeping what some would call “needed” elements to the game taking longer to implement. I should state again, developing a game, especially one that for its entire development cycle took no payments, and infact spent more into it than what would likely ever come out of it, should be fun. Taking time to find what made making this game in the first place so fun will take time, and amassing another boom-wave will as well. Starting with working on a better internal team, and feeling happy with progress would be a start, but until we can find someone who actually cares for this game as much as we did near the start of the year, may take time. For where we sit on the future, I won’t leave any more timestamps due to what effect that gave us, but I think I’ll just leave you to this inconclusive thought.
Be the architect of your own mind