Dear Community,
we are sorry that DIGIDICED took a painful long time to adjust the community communication to the growing interest and demand in the PC sector.
In 2021 we want to enhance this situation and flanking our current projects we want to establish a better information flow.
PC UI vs. Mobile Device UI
DIGIDICED originally started as a developer of “Mobile Device” games and since it was of interest for us to spread to all possible platforms we did not research thoroughly enough what the demands were for a PC games community. In our limited community research we initially assumed that mostly our mobile community would like to have their version of their already owned games on mobile devices as some kind of widget on PC. So, we thought that they would mostly play their games in a window next to their other leisure time activities on their computers. Hence, we did not plan to have a standalone PC interface, since we did not expect the people to allocate the whole screen or one of their monitors in a 2 monitor setup playing our games.
In the beginning we mostly got feedback that backed that assumption. This changed slowly initially and then faster and faster. We adapted our production line to offer a full screen mode that would make use of a full screen UI. Still we thought that this has to happen in our normal financial range. So we came up with an extended mode that would offer no interactive info panels. In our former opinion this was the best way to cover needs and to keep our normal workflow. Already back in 2018/19 we realized that this was not enough and that this approach actually lead to even more unease among the community. At that time we realized that the term “Mobile Port” was actually not a logical product of our origins but actually a negative stigmata that evolved to a toxic facet of DIGIDICED. In addition to this we also had faulty features and some persisting bugs that we failed to address.
We had plans in 2019 to alter this situation. Unfortunately these plans were interrupted due to a very difficult year 2019. Two thirds of the production muscle had to fill a new role as being parents and we made some strategical mistakes that limited our flexibility. As an indie company that can have severe consequences, but of course this is not the horse we want to ride in order to apologize. Even in such an situation a professional way would have been to face the community. Our players buy the game and the support and give their respect if this is done well and of course have a right to be angry if this is not done professionally.
This being said we again have to start with an information that will maybe upset some user... We know that especially games are subject of a hobby dearly held by everybody and we know that some experienced more frustration than others. Sadly we cannot recover our relation to all community members on an individual level. We can only try to enhance this situation on a general approach. But we hope that in the future we can win most of these users back as our next steps are based on those community members that decided to fight for their favourite games and who therefor also kept us working hard to find solutions. These people served the community and we hope we can achieve at least some of the demands in an acceptable portion of time.
This is what we plan to do in the future:
Community Communication
We will pull our focus off FB and will more evenly spread our channels for updates so that we will offer the news also on our homepage and also here in the community. We will make use of the beta feature on steam that allows us to have an own Dev page. In this way we can focus the communication and also use this as hub for mirroring our news/updates.
We will try to work out a model for bug report and verification that we can handle on our Indie level and probably we will therefor try to find people that are willing to enter the Beta Branches in our games, but also are willing to learn how to make it easy to pinpoint bugs so that those can be verified and located. ( 70% of bug reports are very inaccurate and if it is even a device related issue we are losing a huge amount of time that we cannot allocate as indies that easily)
Server Issues and Mainmenu Update
At the moment we are developing “Gaia Project” we decided to use this project to start to create a new server infrastructure. So Gaia is already using the new infrastructure and we hope that this update will cover certain aspects of some issues.
We adapted the size of the save games having to be transferred from and to the server. This will address issues that caused game errors during the loading of a game, confirming a move and entering a game that is opened by the “next game” button. At the moment these operations can cause a freeze that is mostly by passed by a restart but of course this is not a satisfying situation. The new server structure will also speed up/stabilize the display of profile, running games, messages and AI movement in online games.
We also are updating the mainmenu. The profile section will now hold more statistical information and it will be easier to browse and interact with friend/player accounts.
We will update the account merging process that got more important since we had problems with the weird issue that some platforms created new accounts while using the same device.
The Matchmaking will be easier and more clear. Also the display of the running games is being overhauled. We also have some new features that we will offer in beta mode with the upcoming Gaia implementation. (e.g. Tournaments).
More helpful documentation... in the new mainmenu we will implement more assistance to standard operations. So we will include more information to timer and time out actions. Also other formerly undocumented functions will be getting information.
We will step by step migrate the existing games to the new server after Project Gaia is finished. In a following step we also will step by step update the new mainmenu to the older games. But this will have a hierarchy and no fixed time table.
Achievements (maybe one of the most discussed features...)
We decided to put those to beta mode, too as we need to simplify the back end solution for that in order to use a more standardized method. Sadly we maneuvered us into a dead end situation that caused so many individual solutions that it is not rectifying to “improvise” solutions here. We know that this is not what most of you wanted to hear but we will find a solution that all achievements that are based on resources which can be extracted from the statistic will of course be granted. Special achievements that are triggered by information that is not saved in the stats will have to be reachieved after we fixed those. (this does not mean that we erase those cases where they have been achieved already...)
Implementing PC Version/ PC UI
as mentioned before we do not want to have Mobile Ports for PC anymore. This is a major redesign of our workflow, project structure as well as production costs. We already announced this in connection with our project updates of “Project Gaia”. So there will be a separate UI for mobile devices and PCs.
This touches another major debate here on Steam. This is a consequence of the wishes/feedback of the community and meanwhile also an existential requirement concerning the competition and standards that evolved in the last years for our niche.
As we are doing this the first time we are therefor also working on a streamlined process that allows us to standardize the workflow in order to make that a stable procedure in all future projects. Still we wish to also update existing games to have a PC UI as well. Of course this might not reach all of our games, since we have to be careful how to allocate our resources. But we do have a priorization which will include the games Viticulture/Burgundy and Terra Mystica.
For now this will be all for this announcement. We will provide a general road map soon in order to display more information and make our progress more transparent. We will also add individual Game info in the planned channels that we post here as well as soon as they get available
Cheers and a good start into 2021,
your DIGIDICED Team