Welcome to the Thrive team! I am the Design Lead for the Microbe Stage and this is a post about how to join in with discussions.
All team members are considered to be part of the game design team and it is really important to me that each team member feels respected and heard, so feel free to post in any game design discussion.
The design process is discuss -> decide -> implement -> discuss.
So first there’ll be a discussion, preferably on the dev forum. The best way to share your opinion is in a small number of thoughtful posts. Read what others have written, contemplate the issue and then say what you think and it will be taken into account.
Once a discussion has matured if there is a consensus in the team about what to do then we will do that. If there is no consensus and multiple options are preferred by different people I will choose what we are going to do next. Remember that frequently there can be several good ideas out of which we can only pick one. So even if you’ve got a good idea and made a good case for it still it may not be implemented, this is the nature of teamwork, none of us will get 100% of what we want.
Then we will implement this decision. In general I will try to make sure the implemented steps are small, I think rapid iteration is the key to good progress.
After you have played the release which has this feature in then it’s fine to reopen the discussion in any way you choose. So if you think things should be changed or added to or even removed feel free to say that in light of your new experience.
Features will be preferred if they have a high (awesomeness / effort) ratio, we only have limited resources to build the game and we want to get most bang for our buck. Moreover if you are keen to implement something yourself that will be a strong point in its favour.
I hope you enjoy your time on the team and get a lot out of it. Please respect the other team members as much as you can, a good way to do that is to read what they write and try to understand their point of view. Thank you for joining us.