It's always struck me that GG doesn't have a proper Project Manager running tings behind the scenes. The whole community-led voting board initiative was supposed to give power to users to steer the direction of development, but ultimately a lot of what resulted was buggy and half-implemented features.
I recently attended a two day training course for work which had a number of optional seminars. I opted to take one on agile development, despite not being a developer myself (well, not outside of GG). I'm sure many here will know what I mean but basically agile development is a project management philosophy that relies on regularly-released 'sprints' with frequent testing and feedback, and iterative development. You build your product gradually, refining month-on-month, sometimes even week-on-week. The direction of the project can change based on the changing needs of clientbase, it's not set in stone and then developed in isolation for months at a time. Not really applicable to my job, but all I kept thinking was , "this is what Game Guru needs" (and also, "I should do this for my next game project").
Let's imagine how this could work for GG. Lee announces he's going to make a concerted effort to open up third person functionality. Historically, this would mean he would go away and develop largely in isolation for a few months, then come back and debut his work, at which point we all find 50 bugs that get added to the issue tracker, and Lee moves on to another feature. With agile development, Lee would commit upfront to releasing a new sprint of Game Guru every 2 weeks. In the first sprint, all that would be implemented would be a simply camera control. Drop a character on the start marker, it can hover around the map but you can free move the camera by holding mouse 1. Release, we test, we feedback. Sprint 2: bugs from the camera system are ironed out, and Lee adds collision detection to the camera so it doesn't clip through entities. Release, test, feedback. Sprint 3: Bugs from the camera system are fixed, and Lee embarks on making animations call depending on what key is pressed. Release, test, feedback. Sprint 4: Characters can now be moved about, now it's time for hitbox detection so enemies can shoot the player. This goes on and on until, eventually, the feature is finished. It's been built up gradually, with constant feedback, so it is less likely to have bugs and is more likely to satisfy the needs of users.
Maybe all that is wishful thinking, but it's clear from this thread that something has to change with the way Game Guru is developed. Getting in a proper Project Manager, or at least adopting a new style of development, might help.
AE