Hey Voyagers!
Stephiroth here with our regular development update. Today we want to share a little bit of insight into our Players' Most Wanted patch, both what's in the patch and how we decided on these features. This blog is more focused on some of our behind the scenes decision making than our previous blogs, so I hope you enjoy this peek behind the veil :)
✍️Behind the Scenes: Patch Planning
Typical Patch Planning
Typically patch planning begins the same way for us each time. We spend time upfront combing through all of our recent reviews, feedback surveys, Discord forums and FeatureUpvote board to gather feedback. We collect that feedback and make an analysis of what the top problems with the game are currently. Then with our team, we plan and brainstorm why we think these problems exist and ways, whether new features or updates to existing content, we can fix them.
However, for this patch we wanted to start a bit differently.
How This Patch Is Different
Picture this with me. You're hungry, it's lunchtime; you're on the hunt for what to eat and walk into a local sandwich shop. You're not sure what you want, but at the top of the menu you see "Angela's Special". Knowing an employee made this one, you were swayed and picked this sandwich.
This was the type of vibe we were initially aiming for when planning our current patch. There are a lot of features that get cut or bumped down in priority to focus on what the game needs most, but sometimes those are features that would help improve the game a lot. We wanted to create space to work on some of those smaller features in hopes they would improve the game and delight players with some features they didn't suspect were coming. Originally this patch was titled 'Dev Selects', but while trying to select what to work on we ran into some interesting surprises.
Developer 'Ikigai'
To help us pick features for this patch, we ran an adaptation of an 'Ikigai' exercise as a team. Ikigai is a Japanese concept that translates to "a reason for being" or "a reason to wake up in the morning". It describes the personal sense of meaning and joy that makes life worth living.
For our Ikigai, we had 4 categories in a Venn diagram:
What are we excited about?
What do players want?
What are known gaps in the game / improvement opportunities?
What can we make in our timeline for this patch?
Once we had our categories, we began to collect a list of old features, improvements or pain points that we had been eyeing for a long time, and new ideas that had never made it into a request or on our priority list.
Then when everything was sorted, we took votes on what to work on and it had some unexpected results.
The team had actually voted for only items that had come from direct player requests. It was funny in retrospect, knowing we were trying to pick things we were personally excited to work on, but the truth is we're excited to make players happy and want to improve the game as much as we can!
In the end, we took a mixed approach. We re-examined all of the items we had. We made sure to balance a mix of the most highly requested improvements from players, as well as features we felt passionately about that we felt struck a chord of what players love in Voyagers today.
And that is how we arrived at our new patch direction: Players' Most Wanted.
‼️What is in Players' Most Wanted?
We have several things coming for this patch that we're really excited about, as well as some work we were able to get ahead of for 1.0 that I'll share with you today!
This won't be the full patch notes, but a highlight of many of the items upcoming. Full patch notes will come closer to the patch :)
Inventory Size Buffs
This has been a sticky point of feedback, especially as we've added new things to find and new places to explore! So we are buffing this up so all of our loot goblins can fill up more before having to take the journey home.
Craft from Storage Available Earlier
We've been iterating on this over time, but players have still felt this comes in too late - so we are doing some work to move this up in progression while still maintaining a sense of progression.
Editable Signs
We have naming chests which fulfill some of the functional purpose of this feature, but signs have always been on our mind. One of our designers was particularly passionate about getting this into the game - and as soon as we playtested it memes ensued. We can't wait to see what people do with them :D
New Enemies
We have gotten a lot of feedback about low enemy variety, and we feel the same way! We've always wanted there to be more types of enemies in the environment and more fun ways to play around them. It's been tough as enemies are one of our most difficult things to develop since it requires design work, character art, tech art, animation, VFX, sound design and sometimes engineering too if we're trying to do something cool and new!
But we feel like we landed on a cool way to add more enemy variation and make them easier for us to make, and we're excited for you to see!
We will still work on brand new enemies as well, and there will be an enemy you've not seen before in this patch :)
Controller Improvements
We've been chipping away at this, but as we were playing there was one aspect that was so painful: scrollbars. We've made improvements so that joysticks can be used for these menus now, which we hope will make a big impact for controller players.
We still plan on making more improvements, particularly closing the gap on some keybinds that are still PC exclusive (like consume from inventory) as well as adding D-Pad navigation support. But I hope these changes will make controller feel better while we await those updates in 1.0.
Boat Improvements
We were noticing that players had a few particular pain points with the boat that made it confusing to use, or just unfun.
Namely:
The way sailing works between the small boats and big boats is confusing
Boat building can sometimes be finicky and buggy, whether the sails don't attach and you don't know why or too many things attach to the boat
It's hard to tell when the boat is actually stopped
Getting back to your boat while you're out adventuring can be a pain
We have a set of improvements coming for this and hope it'll make building and sailing the boat feel better and worth the time investment!
Building Quality of Life
Players love building and there's always more we can do - for this patch, we specifically wanted to focus on things that would make it easier to build and remove some need for glitch building that some of our power builders were doing.
Game Difficulty Presets
While we've always had ways to modify the difficulty, it was very confusing for players how to do it. Not only was the actual options menu hard to find, but it was hard to know exactly which options to change to make the experience smoother.
We'll now have a more streamlined way to set difficulty so everyone can tailor the game to their preferences :D
Spirit VO
Players love Spirits, and we wanted to lean into that and make them even more fun and delightful to have in your base. So now Spirits will have VO!
Arachnophobia Mode
This has been a long-standing request, and it always pains us when players can't play our game due to this. So we're excited to finally introduce an arachnophobia mode!
Knowledge Reset Potion
As we've updated content, we've had to re-arrange the Knowledge Tree a few times, sometimes leaving players feeling like they have misallocated their points or making it very difficult to access the new content for a patch. This was a huge pain point for players during the Explore the Deep patch. Even though we don't expect to be doing so many big changes in the future, we still wanted to introduce this so that no player ever feels locked out of the new content.
🔮Future Patch Improvements
While they aren't in the Players' Most Wanted patch, we also spent some time working on some exciting features and updates, including:
Updates to our Biome Progression to make it more clear what is happening in the story and what the player objectives are
The long-awaited Round Building Kit
Placeable doors and windows for buildings
These and much more are coming for our 1.0 launch :D
📣When do we hear more?
Make sure to stay tuned for our Dev Streams where we'll show some of this content as it's in development, and future blogs where we'll deep dive into the details of these features!