Greetings, collectors, and welcome to The Midnight Chronicle #7.
Streaming the soundtrack
You can still get the complete official soundtrack!
Buy the Early Access and the complete soundtrack together to get 10% off the total price.
Prefer streaming?
Volume 1 is now available on your favorite streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and more.
This volume includes 20 tracks featured in Early Access.
BEHIND THE SHADOWS
Every menu, HUD, and map you touch in 1666: Amsterdam passes through the UI/UX team. Since Early Access launched, they've been reading every review, every Discord thread, and every suggestion. This month, I sat down with Étienne Beaulieu, Director of User Experience, to talk about how his small team shapes the way you move through the shadows.
Who is on the UI team, and what does a typical week look like since Early Access launched?
Hello, I’m Etienne Beaulieu, @Bouldepwel. I’m the User Experience Director at Panache. I’ve been at Panache for 11 years now. I was the lone user interface person for Ancestors so when we started 1666, we grew the team to 3. We have a programmer and a senior designer, Anthony and Christine.
My role is to oversee the User interface development, but also to bring the user experience mindset to the whole team. I have been supervising various playtests over the past few years, bringing back feedback for the project.
For Early Access, we wanted to have most of the menus available to put them in people’s hands and grab good feedback. This lets us put extra effort on areas that people use the most or have the most input on. We still obviously have a few more features to add. But for the short term our main focus is adding customisation to the various gameplay features. We have a long list of quality of life features to add, so right now, we are focusing on that and debugging.
How does the team sort through feedback from Steam, Discord, and Reddit, and how do you all decide what to fix first?
We read through a lot of comments and try to aggregate the more common and the loudest complaints. Watching VODs also helps figure out decision patterns. We are also gamers ourselves, so just by playing the game there’s easy improvements to find. We try to rank every feedback with each other to then plan them through time. Some very needed and important features will take a bit of time to make so we need to start them now because they won’t be in the game for a bit. There’s also a lot of quick fixes that can greatly improve the quality of the game so we get plan to get some of those done as quickly as possible. Check out our socials to keep up with the updates.
Players told us that navigation, signposting, and the HUD can feel confusing. Were you surprised to see this, and what did the team learn from it?
Not at all surprised, we knew from the beginning we wanted to keep some of the ideas from Ancestors, as well as making an investigation game. But also creating a new world and IP, discovering what the rules of this new game is. We always kept a tightrope of not handholding too much and getting you to figure it out and laying out enough clues to help you find the way.
The general navigation was a real interesting development because we actually went to Amsterdam and walked its streets. It’s so incredibly easy to get lost that you discover ways of orienting yourself based on landmarks for example. That church spire in the distance is a beacon of orientation. We wanted to keep some of that experience for the player, so even though you have access to a bird’s eye view there’s no minimap or waypoint markers. We wanted you to discover the streets and take your time. Use your observations and reading skills to figure out what to do and where do go.
So there’s still improvement to come on this side, but we do have a slower pace game where taking your time, exploring, reading will be rewarding. We are working with various mission teams to improve the hints or other adding other player tools to help you figure out the investigation.
How do you work with the other teams (gameplay, design, art, programming, etc.) when a player feedback touches several areas at once?
Like mentioned before, I’ve been doing feedback work with the whole team for a while now. So the team is used to me talking to the different departments. My role is to try to bring an outside view to feature development. “But how will the player understand this?” I think I have the skill to detach myself from the development side and align myself with the player to bring that voice inside the team. I don’t always have the solutions though; it must come from the various team members that know their toolkit well because fixing a wide problem comes from small fixes and big features. So, I try to personify the players to expose problems, then sit down with different teams and bring the player voice to the conversation. I bring ideas that players have brought up or screenshots of areas where it’s problematic to see what kind of fix we can do.
Was there a UI suggestion from player feedback that surprised you, something the team hadn't thought of but loved so much that it's going into the game now or later? Can you tell us what players will see next?
Let me first shoutout the decryption fans that cracked the Zaindaris writing I developed. I wasn’t quite sure how long it would take, but it wasn’t long at all. I didn’t set out to make a super dense hard to decrypt alphabet, I wanted it to feel achievable for everyone. I was still impressed, congrats!
Having been with all the playtests thus far, I wasn’t surprised by the player feedback. The game has big ambitions, and releasing early access meant not everything was going to be there and polished at first. So it gives us a chance to add all that polish in the direction of what players want from the game. Seeing the feedback made us go back to some systems that still needed more love, like the cat navigation.
Beneath the gabble stone
We'd like to officially welcome the latest members of our coven.
What lies ahead
Between the community feedback, production, and a mountain of Jira tickets, we've also kicked off something new behind the scenes: a documentary about what it's actually like shipping a game in Early Access. We've decided to put the community at the heart of our production, so sharing this part of the project with you matters to us.
First time we've tried anything like this, and we're learning as we go, same as you. Can't wait to share it with you all.
As you saw in our first Coven touch point, the 0.2.2 patch notes are already taking shape. Read the last update here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/3949550
See you on the next full moon.