Hello incredible Voyagers! Michael / Spacenorth here with some community highlights, development insights, and upcoming events!
📸 Photo Contest Winners! 📸
First off, a huge thank you to everyone who participated in our in-game photo contest! The talent and creativity on display were absolutely amazing. After much deliberation, we're thrilled to announce our three winners:
🏆 Grace: “Never Succumb to The Deep”
🏆 Kanis - “Beauty and Denizens of Nera”
🏆 Violeta - “Waiting for the Sunrise With The Girls”
Congratulations to our winners! And to everyone who wants to see more amazing captures, check out the full gallery of entries – there were so many incredible submissions that choosing just three was nearly impossible!
Standing Out in the Survival Crafting Space
In our most recent dev stream, our cofounders Ryan and Michael dove into a topic that's central to our development philosophy: how we're creating something unique in the beloved survival crafting genre.
Embracing the Challenge
Let's face it – there are some incredible survival crafting games out there! As players ourselves, we love so many of them. The challenge for us has always been finding the right balance between familiar elements that honor the best parts of the genre and new ideas that make Voyagers stand on its own.
Early Bets on Uniqueness
Early in development, we had to place some big bets on what would make Voyagers special. These weren't just random guesses – they were deliberate choices that would shape everything from art direction to gameplay mechanics:
🌊 Seafaring
We wanted the ocean to be central to the feeling of exploration in our game! This bet shaped:
- Sailing mechanics that feel meaningful and fun
- Underwater exploration with unique resources and dangers
- Skimming across the waves with surfboards and spirit magic
✨ Spirits and Magic
The world is filled with spirits in need of help. In return, they will teach you new recipes and give you magical powers:
- Rescuing threatened spirits scattered throughout Nera
- Spirit companions that accompany you everywhere you go
- Elder spirits that bestow powerful magical abilities
- Fighting the corruption that threatens this magical world
🎨 Vibrant Art Style
This wasn't an initial bet, but emerged as a strong differentiator:
- The colorful, vibrant world of Nera stands in contrast to many darker survival games
- The beauty of the environment has become one of our most consistently praised elements
- A world that invites exploration through its visual wonder
Building a Feedback Loop
After placing these bets, the most crucial part of our process has been building a strong playtest process so that we can always hear from YOU, our fantastic community of REAL players. For over 12 months now, we’ve been playtesting with you regularly and you’ve been contributing invaluable feedback to help us make the game better and better.
We put a lot of work into collecting that feedback and turning them into themes and trends that we can act on. Then we organize our development objectives around improving the player experience in targeted areas before bringing it out to playtest. That creates fresh feedback and we start this development process all over again! Here’s what it looks like:
- Gather feedback from everywhere
- Regular playtests (every two weeks!)
- Surveys after each playtest
- Discord conversations
- FeatureUpvote board
- Responses to marketing like what gets players excited on social media?
- Find the patterns
- Categorize feedback into themes
- Identify both positive and negative trends
- Convert these into clear problem statements
- Turn feedback into action
- Connect feedback directly to new features or changes
- Create development milestones with specific player experience goals
- Iterate, test, and repeat!
Building and growing this feedback loop has been core of how we work. When you tell us something isn't quite right or that you love a particular feature, that directly shapes our priorities and development decisions.
We’re only a few months from launching into Early Access on Steam, and your feedback (plus excitement!) is the fuel for our development. Keep sharing your thoughts – they're invaluable to making Voyagers of Nera the magical experience we all want it to be!
Upcoming Events
Before we depart, we have a couple exciting events coming up very soon!
🎮 Next Playtest: This Wednesday!
Look out for patch notes dropping soon in our Discord server. We've got some exciting updates we can't wait for you to try and share your thoughts on!
🎨 MS Paint Fan Art Contest
Our deliberately low-tech art contest is in full swing! Show us your best (or worst) MS Paint creations inspired by Voyagers. Enter here on our Discord channel before next Monday!
Thanks everyone, and we’ll see you on the waves!
Michael and the Treehouse Team