Dear Traveller,
I hope this little update finds you well on this fine Monday. Last week I sat down with one of our programmers, Arvid, to talk about the work the team is doing to make Book of Travels a little better every day, as well as how your valued feedback reaches them.
Now, for anyone who is wondering what Arvid does I’ll make a quick introduction. He is in charge of the user interface (UI) and player interactions. The UI is incredibly important since it’s pretty much the visual language through which you, the player, engage with the game. Just like I’m sure you’ve experienced yourselves, I have been turned off from otherwise interesting games because of their UI’s being too complex, too cluttered or even visually unpleasing – so it’s definitely one of those things that absolutely needs to be just right, and even though I personally think Arvid’s done an excellent job with Book of Travels’ UI so far it’s still an ongoing process.
And as previously stated he works a lot with making player interactions smoother and more efficient. An example of this was how he made lighting a fireplace better since its inception. Previously it worked like this: you clicked on the ground to spawn the fireplace, and your character had a little fireplace construction animation. However, the actual fireplace started to form after this animation during which your character would just be stuck in a standing position. When the fireplace was put where you wanted it, you had to click on it again to light it on fire, which had its own little animation. Arvid made it so that putting up the fireplace and lighting it was fused into one player command rather than two. So that is one example of the work he is focused on.
Screenshot captured by: Con
Sometimes you need to do some firefighting
Speaking of fireplaces, after launch we discovered that some players was using them to grief other players. Since we didn’t want Travellers to be able to stand in the fire, they were made into solid objects that you can’t walk over. This fact was abused to essentially trap others in corners and against walls. That is an example of how the community made us aware of a problem we didn’t foresee, and we made sure to fix that as soon as possible. Right now, you can walk right over it but Arvid told me that they plan on making it so that you take damage if you for some reason would willingly stand still in the fire.
And as we’re on the subject of player feedback making its way to our team, I thought I’d take the opportunity to clear up how that process works. I’ve had some of our more dedicated members of our community approach me with concerns about it. Doesn’t the more critical feedback get buried in less urgent issues? Is the latest piece of feedback the one to get looked at last in the pile?
The short answer is no. We’re always primarily looking for “good” feedback, so if someone reports an issue that is completely detrimental to the experience, whatever that may look like, and provides us with lots of useful information on how this issue occurs – we will look at that before smaller problems. Our QA department is in charge of going through all feedback we receive. They look at an issue, try to replicate that issue with the information they get in the bug report, and then they pass it on to our programmers, who in turn start working on fixing that problem.
One might also ask questions like “I’ve reported bugs X and Y weeks ago, why aren’t they fixed by now” and the answer is that not all of our programmers are specialised in every field. Arvid, for instance, would be the one to look at bugs related to the UI, whereas a combat bug would go to someone else. In other words, we don’t often have large groups of programmers working on the same thing. Furthermore, some problems take longer to solve for various reasons. So don’t worry, we are hearing you and we’re working tirelessly to optimise, bug fix and otherwise make Book of Travels better and better. It just takes time.
If you’ve managed to get to the end of this post, I thank you for your attention and I hope I could provide some clarity to what our work flow looks like in regards to your feedback. Until next time!
Best wishes,
Oliver & the team at Might and Delight
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1152340/Book_of_Travels/
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