Design Diary #020 - The Feedback Loop

Hello everyone

A meta post open to the public. I have been talking about the game and am in the middle of working to finish Haven and continuing design on Horizon, but with the different platforms of player engagement across forums, Patreon and Discord I wanted to talk about feedback and how it is affecting me and development overall.

When I started development I was hanging out at the Lagoon and there was a lot of feedback from day one. Everything was new and exciting, people talked about the characters and had ideas, theories and suggestions. It was the wild west for me. There were bugs everywhere and I hammered out events fast. (In hindsight, I should have focused slightly more on making the systems less buggy first, so many beginner mistakes.)

As we moved along and I became more familiar with Adrift the feedback started slowing down as people just started waiting for the next release and just had the occasional comment. This was when it first hit me. The long silence. Being a solo developer, I don't have anyone to discuss any of this with. I would spend all my free time for a month to work on this without any feedback and then release an update and not get any feedback. I could feel it start to slowly erode at my optimism.

Over time this erosion started to show as the releases got slightly smaller and then towards the end of Hotel I got hit by the arm infection that paused development.  The break did refuel me slightly and getting to the finish Hotel and start Haven gave me another boost along with the pretty positive response from the people that had waited for the complete game.

Haven had it's ups and downs as well. There was a real life issue, but then a upswing after I joined another forum with another bunch of great feedback that lead to 2 updates released in 20 days. What all of the above shows is that I very much run on feedback. That is one of the reasons why I wanted to test out Discord, because it could be a good tool for that and in a twist of Irony, Patreon posts might not be. Most of the Design Diary posts have less then 5 readers and some have only 1. So if you are still here. Thank you.  I am just trying to find a way to spend my time better and maybe clear my mind between looking at all that crunchy code.

Have a lovely day

Seztworks