Transparency, Developers and Story Boards?

[Butleruri]

I am fairly new to the industry and realized that I have yet to find developers that publicly post their storyboards and mechanical development guides. I mostly only see road-maps and update info, but they're very vague. Why is that?

I write everything down and structure all the events and information on many platforms before I even begin adding it into my mediums. I felt like I should open at least the story outline google docs to the public so they can see how my ideas develop and how they web in the game's structure. Is this a good idea? Why do others not do this? Wouldn't this create more transparency and better communication between developers and their players?

Should I simply stick to a road map and periodically update it's development process?

 

[kytee]

Yeah it would. However, if you create a compelling story, (haven't checked out your stuff, sorry) those outlines become massive spoilers. There's also something about how creating a story is a lot like being a magician; You don't want to reveal how you did the trick because it ruins the experience for the audience. Some people do appreciate seeing how it's done. For others, it might ruin their future experiences because what you show them can't be unseen.

 

[Marzepain]

I think it comes down to being a consumer or a developer of games.
For those who simply want to experience the game it's a turn off, however there are many game developers in this forum who may want to learn from your process.
They way you describe your process, mentioning storyboards etc. seems already way more professional than what is average in this forum, so I would be quite interested. Although with all "open" development, most prominently open source, you have to expect critique as people will have an opinion about what you are doing. The critique is actually what makes things better and makes you grow, but it can be painful. This crowd is improving but it may improve a little faster from enlighten examples.

It question borders on the things discussed in
Examples of Renpy games that that made good use of the NVL-Mode
as the NVL-mode can be used to create text descriptions for missing image assets so you can play through the game while it not being finished. That's great for testing, but the audience experiences the game in a unfished state and can't help but have a bad experience.
One could use that trick to guard off scenes by adding a check for a "released" or "testing mode" flag to all of the scenes and redirecting when a player is not a tester or enters a unreleased scene.