Greetings, heroes of Songs of Silence! ⚔️
We continue with our Road to Launch series - giving you this week an insight on HOW exactly we listened to Community Feedback (you!) to build ✨ Songs of Silence. ✨
Yes, that's right! An DIRECT INSIGHT into Game Development. 🛠️
Full disclaimer - what we're about to show might seem "cryptic" at first 🤔 But it makes sense.
Also - This does NOT take into account bug reports. 🐛 We could (should?) make a dedicate news on that one.
🔁 Trust the Process 🔁
Before addressing anything, our team needed a CLEAR PROCESS.
This is taken from our internal Miro board. We used it before going into Early Access to define how we would channel Community Feedback.
To break it down ...
- Collection - Offer spaces where people can post and express their opinions 💭
- Consolidation - Once or twice a week, feedback is agregated into a single Excel Sheet 📝
- Decision - The sheet is reviewed by a leadership commitee, to align on priorities ⚖️
- Implementation - Tickets in JIRA (game dev tool) are created to track & address priorities 🎫
🔎 Collection 🔎
Players need a space to express themselves! Say what they like 🤗 or don't like. 😵💫
We chose to focus on 3 SPACES.
- Steam Forum
- Discord
- Our own Reddit-like website
Through these 3 spaces, we received close to 200 pieces of UNIQUE feedback. 😱 This doesn't take into account whether people agreed or not with what others were saying.
Long story short - We receive A LOT of highly pertinent feedback. Much food for thought! 😁
📝 Consolidation 📝
All this feedback needed to be ➡️aggregated in 1 place⬅️.
Time for things to become very corporate. 💼 We used a good ol' Excel sheet.
Note - the list goes on and on and on ...
⚖️ Decision ⚖️
Sadly I don't have any pictures to share with you here... 🙈
But in a nutshell, we gathered once a week (more in the first days of Early Access) to discuss what the 🔥 HOT 🔥 topics were in the different spaces.
We'd then decide on what to tackle first, based on the following questions - in that priority. 👇
- How bad is it impacting players?
- How often does it happen?
- How difficult is it to fix?
This then determines - in a very unemotional manner - what we tackle first.
🛠️ Implementation 🛠️
Alright, we all agree on what we must do! 🤝 Now comes the fun part.
We log the tasks into our tracking software as tickets 🎫 and off the Devs go!
A few weeks later, out come the fixes, content or features. Hot like a fresh load of bread. 🥖
And everybody is happy. 🥳 (at least in theory hehe)
And that's all for today folks! 🫡
We hope you're as excited as us for 1.0 Release on November 13!! 🤩
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKwhf7G7cpk
⚔️ See you on the battlefield! ⚔️
Cheers,
The Chimera Team