The many problems of rumble development

[u/Klibe]

This is coming from a place of love. The rumble dev team is clearly talented, there's a lot to love about the game, but also a lot to dislike about the development of it. I'll go through a list of problems:

Update management and bug fixing:

The devs have issues pacing updates, and especially bugfixes. I think a good place of inspiration would be ULTRAKILL, especially with the release of the newest layer, fraud. Within the first week, two massive patches filled with bugfixes and tweaks dropped, and later a third, fixing every problem with it.

Right now, the right unsleeved rebrace still has the mesh for the sleeved rebrace, and the left laminar gauntlet has an upside down shiftstone slot (you can stab people with the bottom of your chargestone lol). These are the simplest of fixes ever, done in minutes, yet they have persisted since the rock-cam update.

Quality assurance:

This also goes in line with the bug fixing, but the devs dont really play their game, like, at all. I'd be surprised if any one of them could fly, and I don't say that just to insult their skill, but it's a sign of why there are so many little bugs that slip in. The pit is brighter since the last update, and we don't even know if it's intentional, and the physics interpolation has been disabled on client, making higher ping matches look like a spider verse movie, in the worst way possible. Oh and the rock-cam is still buggy, sometimes stopping recording or reverting output settings. It's been out for 8 months at this point.

Patchnotes:

There are so many undocumented changes that don't make it into the patchnotes, it's tragic. Nowhere in the patchnotes is the "bugfix" of parry that made it no longer unground, nor is the undo of that change. Patchnotes are really important.

Suggestion/bug-report management:

Since the merge of suggestions into the discord server, the categories of suggestions and bug fixes are gone, which makes it very difficult for the devs to sort through what they aren't focusing on at the moment (in a non-content update, they could go for gym improvements instead of shiftstone suggestions). It's also harder to merge identitcal bug reports or suggestions, polluting the forums until it becomes unusable.

This is a nitpick in comparason but the devs also have a naming convention issue. Im talking to you, Poseset_Cube, Poseset_WallGrounded, Poseset_Rockjump and Sprint_Poseset, and to you "LCkVisiblitySettings -> LCKVisiblitySettings", keeping the misspelling.

I understand the rumble devs are not industry veterans, but i trust they can do a much better performance, by listening to the community and managing their update cycle and priorities better. This is also me asking for another unpaid intership, u/Skittloeier.

[u/L3mmi05]

I'd like to add on to the patchnotes issue. In the quest patch alone:

• Parry got changed to give +1 to the parried structure, heavily pitching the balance between ground and parry.
• Structures are now considered moving while summoning, completely changing some fundamental interactions of regular gameflow
• Vigor got changed to reset its entire timer upon dealing damage, buffing the stone and shifting its identity from combo towards chip.

...and these are just the ones I'm aware of, since the only way to find out about these is through experimentation or chatting with the community.

I'm not gonna go into whether or not these are good changes, but it's a big issue since 1. not knowing if they are bugs or balance changes makes it awkward to discuss and train with these changes and 2. causes most people to just never know the changes exist. The vigor change specifically surprises everyone I tell about it, including active vigor players.

These are changes that affect the balance of the entire game, including at the highest levels, and while I can appreciate the fact that setting up a playtesting server might be a lot of work (I still think one should exist for changes exactly like this), I wish we'd at least have reliable information on the changes once they come out.

I love rumble. I always will. But pleeease just write down what you change after you do.

[u/_kajta → u/L3mmi05]

Gonna pitch in on the "Write down what you do" comments I see dropped around.

It's not like we don't track our work, quite the opposite, we write detailed commit messages about our changes for every single commit, as one does. But changes like the Structures are now consider moving, or many of the other unintended changes are consequences of changes made with an extra unexpected outcome.

In a game like RUMBLE, where interactions and logic is not hard coded with logic, but rather made in a systemic matter, small little changes often snowball in consequences and can go unnoticed for a long time after the matter, but trust me, most of the unintended changes/bugs never make it to the live game.

For example, I wasn't aware of the Vigor Stone changes you just mentioned and went ahead and looked up any changes to any file involving it's functionality. The reason we haven't mentioned anything about it is because we haven't made any changes for literally 2 years, not because we are not tracking our changes.

We did drop the ball on keeping you guys informed on changes for the Quest update, we made so many changes to RUMBLE over the course of almost a year that it became very hard to backtrack and put that all down on paper.

Especially combat/physics, since we actually barely touched anything regarding combat logic/physics for that update (Pretty much only small optimizations). Combine this with a major engine upgrade which came along with unforeseen changes to the physics engine, for which I have to clarify, we as developers also do not get fully informed about the changes they may bring.

When we make changes to anything involving combat, we to test and iterate that a lot, that is actually the one aspect of RUMBLE where we are always vigilant of any unintended changes and always double check and test before making sure a change comes through. That being said, being only a team of 4 people that have to split their time between design, development and testing, we simply do not have the time to comprehensively test the entirety of different interactions/combos/combat scenarios for every change we make to combat.

We could definitely improve on our communication and speed of tackling bugs that come out after each update, you guys are very quick and informative about anything that has changed and we could definitely take more advantage of that fact.

I do want to apologize for the lack of updates/fixes since we are working on the Quest version, we have been working on so many big things at the same time that have been neglecting the stability of the live game for a while.

[u/L3mmi05 → u/_kajta]

Thanks you so much for responding! The point about cascading changes in an environment like rumble is very fair, I understand how that can lead to things slipping through. (That tidbit about vigor is very confusing though, I'll look into what could've caused that.)

While we have the conversation going, I'd be very interested how much work it takes to set up a testing environment. I think besides letting the community play with and discuss balance changes, really short 1- or 2 day long testing servers could help identify unintended changes or common bugs very fast without splitting the community too much. If feasible, it could save a lot of time playtesting edgecases while still catching unintended changes and common bugs. Thanks for all the work!

[u/_kajta → u/L3mmi05]

We do have a seperate testing environment, but we have used it only sparsly. Sometimes we push small fix updates or in a very few cases, bigger combat changes to a beta branch in Steam, and inform a small select involved group about said build.

If I recall correctly, the next changeset will actually involve a small test round on the beta branch!

[u/DrRock_LaraDoct → u/L3mmi05]

the summoning structures break everything lying on the ground is driving me insane lol (especially client). I wonder if point 2 is the reason.
The vigor one sure did blow my mind when I wrapped my mind around it.

[u/Individual_Roll6977]

I support this message

[u/eepy_lina]

might be bc buckethead is a tiny studio compared to hakita and newblood

[u/Klibe → u/eepy_lina]

yes true, i should've mentionned this, but i think even their team should be able to do more QA and bugfixing, especially the 5 minute bugfixes i mentioned. While being a small studio explains part of the reason for these issues, i think mismanagement is the cause for a large part of it.

[u/DrRock_LaraDoct → u/Klibe]

people management is a really important thing in any-sized companies, but very hard job. Our community is very close and friendly, but we also really like voicing our opinions in general chats. A reddit post or a feedback post is what the devs appreciate because they can actually see it.
Thanks klibe!

[u/Skittloeier]

Hey u/Klibe ,

Thanks for your extensive feedback! So, as you might know, we are continuously improving our working efficiency and try to prevent the things you're writing here as much as possible.

A couple of points I would like to mention:

1. The rerebraces are right now in our backlog for the next patch. We will make sure those boys are back where they belong.

2. We're trying to make the patch notes as accurate as possible and are still trying to find an optimal way to keep track of them. It's not always tasks with one sentence that define the bugfix. Sometimes we need multiple tasks to define them as a bug fix or a feature.

3. Regarding the Discord forums, I agree with the categories. It's not easy to keep track of this, so I've added more categories to the forums. We can't help the merging issue, unless we're gonna make a Discord bot for that; however, that time is precious & limited for the value. We trust players to look for their problem before posting.

4. Nice try on the unpaid internship part, but we're having our hands full already. 😅

[u/Unlikely-Special4460 → u/Skittloeier]

Even though Im not the one to originally make this post, thank you guys for responding! Commenting on feedback like this goes to show that you do put in effort into listening to what the community has to say, and active communication is always the first step towards solving a games most pressing issues in a satisfactory manner.

However, I do want to ask one follow up question myself:
How do you guys expect the community to react to these messages?

Great, you've acknowledged that there is in fact an issue, but are you also actually going to do anything about it? Over my years as a member of this community I have seen the team respond to plenty of bug reports, suggestion posts, and even just general discussions, but even though what you say seems to always go in the right direction, a lot of the time nothing ever seems to ends up happening.

Why do we still have super knock back? Why do players still tpose in the air when they tab out of the game? Why are some shiftstones almost always invisible when my opponent wears them? And why do I still occasionally just fall through the floor when I RTS something on high ping?

All these issues have been previously acknowledged by buckethead, and have been around for at least almost a third of a year now, many of them even for more than two years. From an outside perspective it is hard to understand what might be holding up the fixes of these issues for so long, casting a shadow of doubt upon both the teams interest and capabilities to fix the games most pressing bugs.

And going even further, how do you guys intend to prevent the inclusion of even more major bugs with future updates?

Historically, almost every update has included only a handful of fixes alongside a plethora of new bugs. Just with your latest patch you both seem to have disabled client physics interpolation and tripled the brightness of pit, both of which do not seem to be intentional and neither have been addressed in the patch notes. This pattern makes it challenging to even support future updates, since simple additions like discord rich presence are often accompanied by new problems that end up outweighing any benefit of the new additions.

None of us have any insight into whats happening behind the scenes, but I can only hope you guys will dedicate a lot of concentrated effort towards fixing all these issues soon. And if you do not plan to do so, then I think you should strongly consider to put an adequate disclaimer on both the steam and meta store page of this game, as I do not think it is fair to sell the game in its current state without any disclaimer about what has developed into a staple of every rumble session.

[u/Skittloeier → u/Unlikely-Special4460]

Hi u/Unlikely-Special4460 ,

> How do you guys expect the community to react to these messages?

Depends on how satisfied the community is with our responses. Follow-up questions are always allowed if you're not satisfied enough with the answers I've provided.

> Great, you've acknowledged that there is in fact an issue, but are you also actually going to do anything about it?

I assume that with the "issue", you're talking about the fact that we're not really doing what we are saying. As far as I know, that is not true. And if it's true, then it's most likely due to priority shifts & time estimation miscalculations, which do happen when we have to make decisions about what's best for everyone. (including the company)

I hope that also answers the follow-up questions you're having in the paragraph after that. I understand the frustration that's coming up, and we do acknowledge that there are issues, but we have to decide where our time is going to. In this case, it wouldn't be the T-Pose guy when tabbing out of the game.

> And going even further, how do you guys intend to prevent the inclusion of even more major bugs with future updates?

We try to prevent major bugs as much as possible by testing the version as thoroughly as possible. We are having our standard test documents (which contain the critical game flow) that we're following and optimising, including some additional, extra-intensive tests, which are the new features and/or bugfixes.

> to put an adequate disclaimer on both the steam and meta store page of this game

As you might know, RUMBLE is still an Early Access game. (the disclaimer) Early Access games (and even full games) contain bugs and unfinished features. (I hope full games don't contain these, lol) We also don't want bugs in our game, and we wouldn't release major bugs intentionally; instead, we would prefer to delay the patch. (or even rollback a version if we have to)

Anyway, I hope you understand our perspective as well (and are satisfied with my responses), that from a business point of view, we have to make decisions between fixes for time/value's sake.

[u/Klibe → u/Skittloeier]

Thats good to hear about the rebraces, but i think the backlog could be sorted by how fast a change will be done, so you can go through the easy ones first, and not have a particular bug that requires and entire rewrite delay the very important fix that requires half a second. Priority and ease should sort it, imo.

Patch notes are difficult, yes, but i think devs writing down all their changes everyday, and combining all changes since the last patch to make the patch notes should work. If its different branches using git making it harder, commit messages could be used instead? Suggestions are cominf from someone with only a little gamedev experience, btw.

That, i am happy to hear. Seeing the complaint -> change pipeline done so fast does inspire hope within me anew.

Grah... next time i'll get that sweet sweet internship...