Hi everyone!
We are overjoyed to see how many players enjoyed Worldwide Rush. It is fair to say that the demo is a big success. At least for us. Our goal was to start gathering feedback to improve what we have. We definitely got that. Allow me to share. I added some random game plane renders to keep the text less dry.
Feedback
We got so much feedback that the past week was mostly about drawing new plans and evaluating what everyone is saying through Discord, Reddit, YouTube, in game feedback and here on Steam. It is overwhelming and at the same time very exciting. Some of the feedback is about adding higher priority in our to-do list, but some are entirely new ideas that we either did not think about or just did not think it would fit and left it for maybe.
The top 10 of the most requested features in order:
- Line management. Makes sense and expected. Will add this with the next big update.
- Removing roads/rails. This was also a no-brainer. We wanted to add this with the AI update because removing roads that can be shared might be problematic.
- Easier view of full vehicle routes in more locations. Usually, the problem is UI and where to fit this route. But we will solve and add this.
- The game is too easy. Now this might be tricky, how hard do we push. Demo results proved that this is not a big issue, but an issue nonetheless. Especially for longer sessions. So the solution will probably be in more options when starting a new game to spice things up.
- Same route destination multiple times. Most of the issues were relating to routes that want to go back and forth. I am not sure if this is needed, but if we still keep getting this request, then of course we will add it.
- More tutorials, like tips and tricks about UI. For example, you can hold shift to avoid closing opened floating panels that are not pinned.
- Vehicles keep the same distance. This will come with line management.
- Upgrade all vehicles on the same route at once. This will come with line management as well.
- More zoom in. If we do that now, then it will be just blurry. It is something that we would like to do as well. We got all the data, all vehicle models and textures are already shipped with the game. If we convert our current 16 textures of 16x16k resolution to mesh vertices data then we could zoom in so much more. I fantasize about it, but it would not add much to the gameplay and is not that easy to do. Maybe.
- And like with every game - Multiplayer. After 1.0. The game is ready for it, but I am not ready with dealing out of sync bugs, which are known to be one of the hardest bugs to fix.
Stats
We got almost 9,000 demo players in a week, with a median play time of 45 minutes. At least 42% played for more than one hour and 24% played for at least 2 hours. Not to mention all of those who played for more than 20 hours. Difficulty is requested by many, but this relaxing experience is not so bad for others.
In this week, we got 10,812 wishlists. As expected for this genre, most of them came from Germany 17.7%, second place was much less expected - Japan with 14.1%. This just proves how important it is to localize. It is really a strange feeling creating a game with the whole world and people from the all around the world playing it.
Going Forward
The next step is to prepare for the Steam Next Fest with an updated Demo. AI and current feedback is the main focus for what to add. Next week I will start sharing our weekly progress. We want to deliver, especially with so many added expectations and honest interests in what this game can be. For that reason, we cannot promise a certain release date yet, but we will keep updating this demo and improving it as needed.