![]() ![]() Roughly 5% of our players use our unstable branch to play with brand new content early and give us feedback. We put out unstable updates of our game every two weeks and do a stable update every six weeks. If youʼre on Steam, make an opt-in unstable beta branch. We put out an update of TerraTech a minimum of every four weeks and we’ve maintained that cadence for roughly three of the five years that we’ve been making it, so far. Update your game as regularly as possible Put it out there as early as possible, gauge feedback and make your game better. Again, donʼt be precious about your game. We put a very early demo of TerraTech on IndieDB (we would now use itch.io as it’s more commonly used) as soon as we could, we took our demo to the Leftfield Collection at EGX, we put out a Steam demo as soon as possible and got the game into Early Access shortly after. Value your playerʼs opinions when informing design choices, feature prioritisation and the direction of the game. It’s essential that the community is listened to and that their input makes a difference. Donʼt hide behind a polished corporate-feeling front. Use Forums, Steam Reviews, Twitch, Discord, Reddit, whatever platform works for you, but be active on there and try to have real conversations. You have to give players something to play in order to get them involved. Maybe an exception is a new entry in a known franchise, but for this example, weʼll focus on the situation we started with, an unknown new game. This one seems obvious, but you canʼt build a community around your new game if people canʼt play it. How do you do it? Let people play your game It’s also a great way to avoid the risk of making something that players ultimately don’t like. Done well, it becomes a symbiotic relationship you use their feedback and suggestions to help steer and prioritise your work, and they get to see their input make the game better. In a nutshell, Community Driven Development is an on-going exercise in building strong relationships with genuine, dedicated players of your game, who become the driving force behind the development process. We’ve been making TerraTech with a process that we call ‘Community Driven Developmentʼ which has enabled us to grow our community around our game and we use what we learn from our community to inform our on-going development of it. Recently Kris, our Principal Designer here at Payload Studios, gave a talk on Community Driven Development at one of our events. ![]()
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