In case you missed it, we uploaded 2 new YouTube videos of our Dev Team reacting to mean feedback that we've seen across our X, Reddit posts, Discords and Steam Discussions about Voyagers of Nera after we first launched our demo in December!
Introduction to the Team:
Michael - Cofounder and CEO for Treehouse Games
Ryan - Game Director
Luke - Game Engineer
Stephanie - Producer
Tim - Game Designer
Ben - Audio and Game Designer
Brandon - Tech Designer
Christina - Game Design Director
Kyle - Senior Environment Artist
“Getting crevices sucks”
Kyle & Christina: We are working to fill in all of those spots as fast as possible. It is awful to get stuck when you have no way out except to unstuck yourself but we are working on it we look hard for every single crevice in the map. We want to fix them all, I promise. Hopefully we will try to find ways to detect them more easily hopefully so that one day you won't get stuck anymore. If you can submit a bug report whenever you find one that would be really helpful!
”Very stupid game the developers are so lazy.”
Michael: That’s just mean and hurtful! If you want to have a conversation, we are super happy to take feedback super happy to talk about what we're doing and make changes. But if you just think it's stupid then… we'll catch you on the next one.
“The day and night cycle is so fast.”
Ryan: Yes it is and this is super annoying. Recently we've done a big rebalance of day and night. Day is longer relative tonight uh you have more time to to do things during the day and we just introduced sleeping so if you want to skip the night and get on with your daytime activities. You can now sleep in the bed and time will pass by.
“I am not playing the game anymore. I cannot recommend it because it doesn't have thirst or starvation that makes you die. It's not a survival game, it's an exploring game.”
Brandon & Steph: Sorry you feel that way. A lot of the community has a lot of feelings about starving hunger and nutrition and thirst starvation is is a hot topic… a very divisive one we found out. A lot of new survival games are doing it quite differently too so there's a big spectrum of survival games all the way from like Seven Days To Die, and these like In The Forest and these really hyper realistic and gritty ones where you're decapitating an animal and grilling it to eat it. There’s also Enshrouded and Valheim where food is just kind of like additive and a little hand wave how you get it.
Ultimately, we've decided that we want to peel back on the difficulty of hunger specifically not making it kill you for a bunch of different reasons. One of them is that we have we we've added a lot of new frictions to our game in the form of combat, diving, and stamina management. We're trying to increase the general difficulty of our game, we actually had a system like this before. We actually needed to maintain thirst and addition to hunger, and we got a lot of negative feedback.
I think because our game is more stylistically like a Val and Ed who are typically more generous of dispersed that across multiple systems as opposed to just leaning directly on hunger as the only mechanism. We felt that hunger was was applying too much acute pressure and we wanted to try and spread that out which is why we made hunger a little bit less punishing. Hopefully if you do decide to come back you can see once we get our other systems online there's still a lot of challenge in the game, and you will still be challenged in many ways!
“The respawn is incredibly fast with no respect to player location so I have things just spawning constantly in my face it's not fun at all.”
Tim: You're right play our current demo. This won't happen to you anymore!
“The wood fuel burns too fast. I want to punch kittens. And before you say “but you can make coal later”, no - this doesn't excuse the idiocy of the burn timer."
Brandon: Please don't do that. we're definitely working on it. We have some pretty big changes coming to fuel down the pipeline so hopefully we can make things better, but yes - we all feel it too feel is a tricky thing to get get right. We're trying to hit a lot of different targets we're trying to have resource syncs in our economy so you have places to spend the resources we're trying to add engagement to the base management loop. There are things to do while you're at base, but I totally agree the current implementation of fuel is not not great. Don't punch kittens though. Don't do that.
“Moving items into the hot bar is counterintuitive. I prefer drag and drop method for the hot bar.”
Luke: The trouble with the drag and drop first this kind of, click to pick up - click to put down - approach is that when you drag and drop. First of all, it doesn't translate well if you ever want to add any kind of controller support because you can't you don't have the same kind of like cursor that you're moving around you kind of have to select things. For it then to do actions on those selections but also clicking and then clicking again gives you more interaction points because you can also use the right click. For example, you can pick up a stack, and then you can right click to drop like a single item from the stack or half the items from the stack.
This kind of inventory management ends up being super complicated because it's so common that it needs to be intuitive, but it also has there are a lot of different things you want to do because you want to have a lot of precision over how you move stuff around between inventories. If we get a lot of negative feedback, we might change it - but I think for now we're sticking with the click to move we have made some other improvements though so it should feel a lot more fluid. I think some of the feedback here is actually not so much maybe always around drag and drop, but that it just felt really bad to do because there was a delay when you picked something up. That part should be fixed so we'll see what you all think with the latest iteration of this.
“Please change the steering. It’s a mess to run from the stern and the acceleration point on the back on the boat.”
Meg:I almost wish it was more complicated! Lucky for you it's not fully up to me so we'll see how this develops in the future.
Ben: I think this is a fair critique I kind of like that that there's two different mechanisms to steer the boat. I agree with you partially I don't think it feels as good as it could I do like having multiple stations there's something about it that feels active. I hearken back to Sea of Thieves that first small boat kind of I think that's what we're trying to get after, but I agree it's not as as seamless as we want it to be so we will be working on that.
“I was excited about sailing until there was no sailing. Your boat just moves forwards and backwards… more like slides forwards and backwards. There is no bobbing in the water, the water is super flat. There are no waves. Your boat has a sail but there's no wind! Not even wind effects. You just lower your sail and it starts sliding forward."
Ben: This is harsh but this is true. Currently we have really simple boat traversal mechanics and so it does lose that feel of sailing. I love when games have really strong like experiential and movement things. This is a tricky problem because you have to sink boats across all players and then if you have waves on the ocean then you have to sink the ocean… and so there are technical things that are difficult to do with this it's not impossible! Lots of games have done it but something we're looking into something we want to make better we will will not feel like it slides forwards and backwards. I promise that we've gathered that kind of feedback from you guys we have more justification to try to add these things in the future.
Meg: You're not wrong. All the those things mentioned like the water being flat, no waves, no wind effects, I think those are things we want to address. If we wanted to get our sailing mechanics in a functional state first before adding those kind of bells and whistles especially for multiplayer games.
“There is no take all button when looting a chest.”
Luke: This is what happens when you open the chest 90% of the time. What you want to do is just get everything out of the chest especially if it's something you found while you're out adventuring. This is on our backlog! We've actually done some of the work needed in order to get this working. There are a few things here and there that the “take all” button but people might also want to like sort or another common thing in similar games is like a take all of kind. If you have an existing stack of an item you might want to like take all the items in the chest that match to an existing stack. The set of existing stacks that are in your inventory or vice versa um so there may be like three or four total sort of quality of life inventory management solution that we want to have. The “take all” button something we are definitely adding.
The thing with Game Dev is you always have a 100 things you want to do right… so it's not so much a question of like what is a good idea it's more of a question of what is the most important thing to do next in the game. At this point we haven't gotten to the take all button, but I'm pretty sure we're going to get to it shortly so keep your eyes out!
“Someone watched the dopest Disney movie music sequence and got inspired.”
Steph: This one's not mean… this one's really fun! We do hear a lot of that Voyagers of Nera feels like Valheim meets Moana. Our main focus was trying to make sure that the game is really broadly appealing and gets away from some of this traditional survival crafting experience where you're trapped on like a desolate dark scary Island fighting zombies. We were trying to be like, hey what's it like actually to adventure and survive in a magical world and fight back enemies and bring back life to the world. That's kind of where our inspiration really truly comes from. I do really love Moana and I do know the whole soundtrack so…
“Endless potential but the game is terrible.”
Steph: That is kind of sad. I like to reframe this because I think if they're thinking there's endless potential but the game is terrible that means we have something that they're really excited about, or at least they like the concept. The direction or some of the promise that we're wanting to give and maybe we're just not delivering it right now but that's the whole reason why we ship the game early and often and try to get feedback is because we really want to deliver on the experience that people are hoping to get when they play the game. We'll do our best to make that true.
“I crafted a torch before a quest and it told me I had to craft a second one. Same for the other quests like cooking meals on the campfire.”
Ryan: You're absolutely right this is super annoying. Currently for the demo we focused on getting a pretty basic quest setup just to provide some guidance to new players but we plan to streamline this further we're working on making quests more intelligent. We'll recognize what you've already done and what you've already crafted you won't have to just craft something again just to check that quest box.
“Beautiful looking game, but while I get the calm water in the starting area it's pretty empty of lif while swimming. Where are all the fish we catch coming from with the pole?
Ryan: In our next milestone we're focusing on breathing a lot more life into the underwater areas what we have in the demo is really basic. We are actually introducing spear fishing, along with that we're adding a ton of new enemies and critters and resources to the underwater areas. We're adding colorful coral and some scary enemies that you'll encounter down there. We're giving you a lot more reasons to go down and catch all of the different varieties of fish that you'll find first.
“The food drain is abhorent and makes the game a chore to play.”
Brandon: Yes totally. This is something we're working on actively trying to find the balance between something that is engaging and fun and and challenges. You as a player to to survive but also isn't super easy so we're still trying to find the balance there. We totally hear you and don't want it to be a chore but hopefully we can make it feel like a interesting challenge moving forward.
“One time I ate like 10 coconuts and 18 mushrooms and it went up maybe 25%. The year is 2025 no one wants to waste time with a constant hunger BS! I would probably buy it if not for the BS.”
Brandon: That's true… I mean have you ever eaten 18 mushrooms though? You know, throw 18 mushrooms on a pan and it turns into like like a single bite…. so you know it's we're going for that ultimate realism angle.
No, I'm just kidding! There is a lot of tweaking and tuning that we are actively working on. Like I said in the last comment, it’s definitely a challenging thing to find the balance especially because a lot of our systems are work in progress. Our economy is work in progress so we're always trying to find the balance and we will definitely keep making changes to make food less annoying.
“Oh boy, a multiplayer survival crafting game no one's ever thought to make that before!”
Michael: This was way more original when we were starting to talk about this in 2020 obviously making the game has taken longer than we thought. We still think there's a lot of room for this to be dope. A lot of our best times playing games over the last few years has been in survival crafting games. We hope to still offer something very fresh and new.
“Is this just another survival game that's going to be in “alpha forever” until the devs take whatever money they can they can and run?
Steph: I hope not but there's this harsh reality honestly that even if a small group of people really love the thing that you're making it's not always enough even though I would love for that to be true because we're people with jobs and we need to make money, just so like we can keep working on the game! I think a lot of the stories when you see these people like that are in Alpha forever and never make updates probably it's actually they ran out of money. They probably didn't make enough money to keep making the game. It’s sad because some of those teams don't exist anymore so it's really hard I think to understand what each of these games are going through individually. We don’t know what's happening behind the scenes but our goal is not just to steal your money.
I think we're we try to be really transparent about what our goal is which our goal is to make a game that's like the best way for friends to spend time together. I hope that that game will launch and be successful and people will be able to play it for a really long time and we'll ship lots of updates!
“Jumping feels extremely heavy and no climbing mechanic makes getting to places not very enjoyable.”
Tim: This is one of those things that's funny about working in video games. I was looking into this and our jump height is a meter and a half which is higher than Michael Jordan's legendary probably apocryphal 40 8 inch vertical leap! (But we’re working on it.)
“Running out of stamina out of combat makes the game play tedious.”
Tim: I'm sorry it's tedious though I think the fun part is running out of stamina when an enemy comes up behind you so we want to make it we want to make it hit hard for you if you're gathering and then get attacked.
"Attacking has no forward momentum and stops you where you stand so if the enemy is backing up you can't ever hit them.”
Tim: Yes this is true also once again play the current demo and I think you will feel much better about this!
Thanks for playing our game love getting this feedback even when it's mean. It’s very constructive and helps us recognize what priorities we should focus on when our players are playing the game. If you are interested in providing feedback, our team regularly checks our FeatureUp Vote Board: https://voyagersofnera.featureupvote.com/ where we look for feedback for the game and prioritize it based on how many people vote. It’s really important for us since we are in our demo state right now, to create the best game we can for our Early Access. We can’t wait to show you!
- Treehouse Team