(German translation/deutsche Übersetzung)
One of the great parts about indie development is that there is a very accessible and close connection between developers and players, i.e. we don’t have to go through mounds of paperwork and oodles of meetings to get things done.
One of the great parts about launching on such a large gaming portal like Steam is that our game is fanned in front of thousands of eyes, and in turn we get some great feedback, all of which is great! If it is a heartfelt thanks, or a crushingly negative review, it is still feedback and it is still great for us to hear. We think the best way to make any game great is to have a two way street of communication with players and consider all feedback, even the negative.
In turn, when you combine the quick turnaround speed that indie development offers, along with all of the great new feedback, it means our game will begin to get buffed and shined, and we will end up with a gem in no time.
We have been on the forums, Steam chat, YouTube, hanging out in game, reading player reviews, and keeping our ears to the ground everywhere we can think of.
We know it’s only been one day, but here is what we have learned so far, and more importantly, here is what we are going to do about it.
- Attack While Moving We have heard several players ask to be able to move and attack at the same time. This requires a bit of tech and new animations to make happen, but we think this would be a move in a positive direction. We have IMMEDIATELY started our artists on this task.
- Controls: Several players have made note of both AD strafe (vs QE strafe) as well as the jerkiness of WASD. Again, we agree. We have already fixed for strafe, and will be looking at the WASD issues. These both should be live with our next build.
- Animations: We have received several suggestions that our character animations aren't expressive enough. Some of them feel clunky and out of date, particularly strafing. We agree. Our artists have started working on some new animations to really make our characters feel alive.
- Linearity of the starting zones: While the game does open up quite a bit after level 12-15, a lot of new players noted that the early zones felt very linear with little room for exploration. We agree. We are going to go through each of those zones and add a few secret and optional areas for players to discover.
- NPC Greetings: Our NPC’s greet players in several different languages. This was something that was intentionally done to add some variety to our game world. However many players have felt that this was some sort of localization bug, and others just plain don't like it. We are going to take steps to start cleaning these up to make them feel both more accurate to the server, as well as expressive of the NPC speaking.
- Launcher Stability: We have had a lot of players having issues with the launcher either crashing or not launching the game. This will be one of our main priorities to fix.
- Dancing: Several players have asked for dancing animations for their character. It may be a small thing, but we think that would be great, and we have started working on it.
Additionally, these are things that we have heard from the community, and have already fixed (these changes are live):
- The download was taking too long: We have fixed this. Our CDN was overloaded so we moved it to Amazon Cloudfront. Reports are that download speed has been increased.
- Tutorial zones were overwhelmed: We have opened up more channels and instances in the zones to allow for more new players at one time.
- Respawn rates were too low: We lowered respawn times from 1.5 minutes down to 12 seconds. We will continue to monitor the tutorial zones as well as other high level zones and make tweaks as we need.
- Quest tracker was broken: We fixed this.
- Some new players got a ‘zone full’ message: We made a way for more tutorial channels to open. No player should see this message again!
We hope you can come along with us on Villagers and Heroes journey. We love live development, and we love working with players of all types. Leave your suggestions on the forums, or send us a PM on Steam. We would love to hear from you.
-The Mad Otter Team