Hello!
It is Oleksandr from Starni Games with the new Dev log entry. One month has passed since the Headquarters: World War II release, and I would like to tell you more about how it went, what feedback we got, and what our team has been focusing on since the release. Additionally, I will touch on how we plan to move forward with the project.
One month has passed since the release of Headquarters: World War II and we can finally draw our first conclusions.
First of all, most players enjoy the game overall and would like to play it more - which is very important for us as developers to understand. We would not want to develop a game that nobody likes and nobody wants. So, that is a big relief to our team that the overall reception of the game is positive and we can keep working on the project.
Secondly, we acknowledge there were numerous issues in the release version of the game that were detrimental to the players’ experience and enjoyment. We already fixed some of those issues, and we are trying our best to address the remaining problems as soon as possible. This is our top priority at the moment - to make sure the game runs as smoothly as possible.
Thirdly, we received lots of feedback and suggestions from the players on Discord, the Steam community hub, and Slitherine forums. We are looking through all the feedback very carefully, and categorizing all the issues and suggested improvements to prioritize them correctly. So, do not worry if you suggest some new feature and do not see it in the next update - chances are high it is stored for later updates.
Interesting fact: so far we get more improvement suggestions than the actual crashes and bug reports. So, there are lots of things you guys want to add, change, or improve. And it may take us some time, but we keep track of every suggestion.
Lastly, we see a lot of interest among the players towards the potential new content for the game and get a lot of questions about that. We are happy to hear that you want more content and we listen to your ideas and suggestions for it.
What is our plan?
Step 1:
For now, our top priority is fixing all the most annoying issues and gradually adding some of the most-wanted quality-of-life improvements. We keep a good pace of 1 update per week and we want to maintain it until all most pressing problems are resolved. Then we will switch to less frequent but larger updates.
AI - We have made some improvements to the AI system since the release, but we are still getting reports of AI behaving passively in some games. We further investigate this issue and will do our best to address it as soon as we can.
Multiplayer crashes - we are gradually moving towards a crash-free multiplayer experience. So far, we are not satisfied with our results, but we are looking to improve the situation very soon.
File system issues - we had some issues if the path to the system folder with save files was in non-Latin symbols, or the game was run by a Windows user who is not an Administrator, and so on. We fixed the folder names issue in the 1.00.04 Update, and a couple more fixes are coming up in the next updates.
There are many other things, of course, but I highlighted the most problematic ones.
Step 2:
Since some updates may affect the ongoing multiplayer games, if the players have different versions of the game (all updates we released so far should be compatible, so I am talking about some future updates) - we want to implement a system that would check the game version and warn the players about the need to update their game to continue playing in multiplayer. That is when we will release a bigger update that would also include some stats rebalancing and so on. At the moment we are gathering the data and feedback, but not changing unit parameters for now.
Step 3:
Introduce the roadmap for the project to communicate to you our plans for its further development and expansion. We want to be very transparent about our future plans, and we will share our plans as soon as we finish gathering and analyzing all of your feedback and adjust our plans accordingly. Your input is most critical for our decision-making following the release.
Step 4:
Start running the multiplayer tournaments. As soon as we ensure that multiplayer is stable and solid, we will start running various tournament events and we hope that you will enjoy playing in them. For now, you have the time to get a better understanding of the game and train against other players on Discord to make sure you can show your best in the competition when the time comes.
Step 5:
Work on some additional content for the game. This could be in two forms - free extra content that comes to all players who purchased the full game at no additional cost; or a paid DLC that offers even more content and helps the team to keep working on the project in the long run - as we are speaking of years of additional development here, potentially.
I know many are skeptical of paid DLCs, but I think it greatly depends on how the developers approach them. From our perspective, it helps to produce more content and features for the game in the long run, part of which will become available for everyone to enjoy completely free.
We already got a bunch of questions as to what the next DLC would be. We have some ideas, but we also want to make something that you - the player’s community - want. So, please let us know in the comments or on Steam/Slitherine forums - what future DLC of your dreams do you anticipate the most?
Ah, and one last thing - we are now looking into the possibility of adding the Steam Workshop support, so we will keep you updated on that!
Stay tuned, and see you next time!