We did an update called “Agriculture & Sound Design”, where we revamped the whole sound design.Īnother good side effect is that players will understand what’s in this new update, why they need to get back into it.Arguably the strongest mechanic tied to the Silent is Poison, a debuff that causes enemies to take damage equal to their current Poison stacks.
Slay the spire seeds 2019 Patch#
You patch specific parts of the game, for instance you can make a “Good Tutorial Update”!. This way, all the team knows that what they’re updating are to improve the sensation of Seasons. For instance we had a “Ingame Seasons Update”.
If it’s a monthly update with a lot of stuff in it, find a theme!įinding a theme also empowers your creative decisions and processes. That look like a very basic advice, yet few people do it! You don’t have to give every patch a name. If you call your update Patch 0.17.0, players will think : “what the fuck is this shit?”. Just to be clear: we didn't work on Hades! They had a pretty cool update picture so I wanted to show it. Now we’ve seen the big lines, let’s move onto smaller tips!Įxample of Hades update, with courtesy of SuperGiantGames. On every update, if you can add content for those 3 kinds of players, your current players will be happy! It’s a good constraint as well for making creative decisions. That’s something you use in open development as well. Your game needs to be good for the beginners, the intermediate and the veterans. In game design, you have to make features for every path of the game : short term, medium term and long term. You can do both, but sometimes it’s interesting to do IMPROVEMENT, because players often complain about bugs! You may even be adding new languages to the localization! It’s also fine tuning the game even more. IMPROVEMENT - You’re improving what’s already there! You make a better UI / UX, kill the bugs or improve the framerate. INNOVATION - You add new stuff to the game, it can be content, gameplay features, a better core loop or whatever. They don’t need to lead the whole thing, just being there to support you with all the weight on your shoulders! Choose a focus : innovation or improvement If you do this, it means your players have 0 impact on your development, and loose the “open” tag. If you come to Open Development with a super fixed immovable schedule of what you wanted to do : YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. The most important thing with open development is “What are you actually putting into the game?”. You can use the beta branch on Steam one week before Buffer week.Ĭontent Strategy - Making ass-kickin updates! This testing week give your developers and community some time for playtesting and debugging! It’s also convenient for localization community players that want to help before the patch is released. Testing week : this was the trickiest to find. You have the peace of mind on focusing on the next update! Production week : aka leave me alone I want to work. Production is usually frozen during this week. We’ve found that the best update timing is MONTHLY.īuffer week: you push the update, gather community feedback and share things with people. Just remember to be cool with people, even if they’re “small players” and they’ll give it back to you. Same thing for discussing aggressively when you receive harsh feedback. If you’re secretive, your community won’t be comfortable sharing hard feedback with you.
I’ve worked on a dozen different game communities and I can say this is an important rule. There is a lot to say about Open Development, I will give simple tips & tricks that should empower you in this path. Some examples of Open Development are Dwarf Fortress, Endless Games (through Games2Gether), Neurovoider, Slay the Spire and Dead Cells. The studio is transparent about their processes Players have some kind of power on how the game is developed (low or high power) There are regular updates at frequent times (weekly, monthly, etc.) It’s hard to give a hard-written definition, but I would say it’s when: Kudos to them! Seeds of Resilience is out today! This article is based on our experience with Subtle Games (Antonin & Alexandre, developers of Seeds of Resilience) and what we’ve learned from the production of this game.
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