Post by Lord Ba'al on Mar 10, 2014 13:47:47 GMT
Matthew Allen, the community rock star, has posted the following on the 22Cans forum.
Hello there 22cans community!
Some of you may remember me from posting on the forums here and there back in 2013 but I wanted to take this opportunity to reintroduce myself to everyone as well as to give a quick explanation as to what we've been up to and, more importantly, what you can expect from us going forward.
First, allow me to introduce myself! My name's Matthew and I'll be taking care of a good chunk of the 22cans community from now on. I've been with 22cans since back in August and while I dabbled in the forums and wider community here and there, I was primarily assisting with support and bug tracking behind the scenes alongside Sam, the Chief Discovery Officer (whom I also had the pleasure of working with back in the Lionhead Studios days since around 2005). However, as some of you may have seen, Sam will be departing 22cans. I wish him the best and am definitely gonna miss that crazy guy. So to help fill any gaps following his departure, I'll be stepping in to help out around the community. As it happens, I'd been wanting to get more involved on the community side of things for some time now and I'm looking forward to properly diving in.
THE COMMUNITY
I know that there has been a good deal of concern and frustration about the overall silence coming from 22cans over the past three or more months. Firstly, let me start by saying I completely agree with your sentiments. We could be, and need to be, doing a better job of keeping the community in the loop. That's one of the reasons why I'm here. More frequent community updates, interaction, and overall involvement is something that I'm really pushing for internally and I'm going to be doing everything I can to make sure that you all get the attention and communication that was, frankly, promised since the very beginning.
In short, I work for you, the community. I'll represent the community's voice to the development team and my job is to be an advocate for this community and their needs. I sincerely believe that fostering a community culture of transparency and honest communication is one of the best things a game developer can do and I want you all to know that I'll be pushing for this kind of culture as best I can within the company. It's something I feel is incredibly important.
As an example, I completely get that it's frustrating when the community finds out about key development updates from the press first rather than from 22cans. I can't promise that information won't be casually brought up in interviews and such, but when at all possible (and particularly for large updates), I'm going to try to make sure that you're not reading about these announcements from third parties before you hear it from us. I feel that you guys should be the first to know.
I'm also going to be adding another moderator or two to the forums just to help out and to answer questions as they arise. I believe that a moderator's primary job is to be helpful and to support the community, not just to discipline. I encourage and appreciate all feedback, the good with the bad. I'll also be working with the new and existing moderators to make sure that they're here to work for you, not against you. I'm also not a big fan of having anonymous moderators so, for the sake of transparency (which, as mentioned, I'm a big fan of in communities), I'm going to have the moderators use their original forum accounts. I'm also looking to update the forums here a bit and get it more organized and user friendly. So if you have some suggestions on this front be sure to let me know.
In addition, I'm going to see what we can do about releasing regular updates of some kind, either through the video updates we've done in the past or through some other way. Again, I've only just begun discussing these sorts of things with the team so nothing is concrete just yet. That said, if there's any specific ways would you all would prefer to get updates from 22cans then please let me know here in this thread as I'll be sorting through every comment that's left (and personally replying to many as well).
UPDATE 2.0
As you likely know, we've been hard at work over the past three or so months working on a rather gigantic update for GODUS. Despite being relatively silent, the team has still been reading through the forums and reviews and has been taking in all feedback, suggestions, complaints, and everything in between (including support emails and our analytics tracking as well). We have a few final bugs to squash with the latest update but, assuming all goes well, we're hoping to have the update released within the next week or so. Naturally, I don't want to get anyone's hopes up in case something last minute needs to get fixed, but I'll do my best to get a specific date to you guys by tomorrow.
There's far too many changes to list all in this one post, but a few of the bigger updates you can expect are as follows:
CLICKING
Everyone's wrist can rest easy now, as all the clicking that was previously present in GODUS has now been sorted. You'll likely see what a big difference there is all within the first few minutes of gameplay. Some changes include clicking and holding on a rock to remove it and then, while still holding the mouse button down, dragging and holding over other rocks to remove those as well. The same applies to trees. In my own personal playthrough, I've removed entire forests all from just one mouse click. Sculpting is much more powerful and easy to use as well. The first time you sculpt it'll feel like a breath of fresh air compared to where it was. Other little tweaks were made as well, such as clicking and dragging to collect belief all in one click, similar to how rocks and trees are now handled.
CARDS
The card system has also been entirely reworked. We've introduced a new timeline feature which will replace the card book. Contained within chests are various stickers (elements/resources) that you can accrue and assign to various cards in any order or way that you like. This ends up giving more control to how you unlock your cards. For example, I'll sometimes skip over unlocking a card I don't particularly need in favor of saving up my stickers to unlock a more powerful card later on in the timeline. Many of the bugs associated with chests and cards have also been thoroughly squashed. All in all, it's much easier to use, more stable, and gives you more control over your cards.
MORE VARIETY
There's tons of little details as well that have been added in. Followers have a bit more personality now, ranging from a group of followers getting together and hanging out around a campfire to a follower going for a stroll and dangling their feet off a ledge into the water. We've also added something called Voyages which you'll get to see more of when we release the update. Not to mention tons of other small details we'll be talking more about soon.
Naturally, we'll be posting some official patch notes once the update gets released, but the above notes will give you a small taste of what to expect. Do know that we're also hard at work on eventually introducing the fully connected world of GODUS in a future update.
As game development continues, we've also found that GODUS is definitely a unique kind of experience compared to many other games out right now and the term "Zen-like" has been tossed around the office more than once. Perhaps some of you have already picked up on a similar vibe from the game. That said, I'm confident that once you all start diving into this update you'll immediately see that a number of the most common feedback points about the game have been sorted. Which isn't to say we don't have more work to do (last I checked we're still at 49% completion), but I feel that we've made a huge step in what we feel is the right direction for the game. I hope you all agree.
IN CLOSING
Thank you all for taking the time to read this thread and, more importantly, thank you for your patience with us as we polish up the final bits of this substantial update. Remember, I'm here to work for you guys so feel free to reach out to me if you ever need anything. I'll be working on your behalf behind the scenes doing what I can to make sure that we're more communicative in the future and that we support this community the way it deserves to be supported. Please don't hesitate to get in touch any time either on my Steam profile or in a private message. Also feel free to follow me on Twitter or even on Facebook. Likewise, I'll also read every reply in this thread and do my best to answer any questions that arise.
I look forward to getting to know you all more closely. See you around the community!
Some of you may remember me from posting on the forums here and there back in 2013 but I wanted to take this opportunity to reintroduce myself to everyone as well as to give a quick explanation as to what we've been up to and, more importantly, what you can expect from us going forward.
First, allow me to introduce myself! My name's Matthew and I'll be taking care of a good chunk of the 22cans community from now on. I've been with 22cans since back in August and while I dabbled in the forums and wider community here and there, I was primarily assisting with support and bug tracking behind the scenes alongside Sam, the Chief Discovery Officer (whom I also had the pleasure of working with back in the Lionhead Studios days since around 2005). However, as some of you may have seen, Sam will be departing 22cans. I wish him the best and am definitely gonna miss that crazy guy. So to help fill any gaps following his departure, I'll be stepping in to help out around the community. As it happens, I'd been wanting to get more involved on the community side of things for some time now and I'm looking forward to properly diving in.
THE COMMUNITY
I know that there has been a good deal of concern and frustration about the overall silence coming from 22cans over the past three or more months. Firstly, let me start by saying I completely agree with your sentiments. We could be, and need to be, doing a better job of keeping the community in the loop. That's one of the reasons why I'm here. More frequent community updates, interaction, and overall involvement is something that I'm really pushing for internally and I'm going to be doing everything I can to make sure that you all get the attention and communication that was, frankly, promised since the very beginning.
In short, I work for you, the community. I'll represent the community's voice to the development team and my job is to be an advocate for this community and their needs. I sincerely believe that fostering a community culture of transparency and honest communication is one of the best things a game developer can do and I want you all to know that I'll be pushing for this kind of culture as best I can within the company. It's something I feel is incredibly important.
As an example, I completely get that it's frustrating when the community finds out about key development updates from the press first rather than from 22cans. I can't promise that information won't be casually brought up in interviews and such, but when at all possible (and particularly for large updates), I'm going to try to make sure that you're not reading about these announcements from third parties before you hear it from us. I feel that you guys should be the first to know.
I'm also going to be adding another moderator or two to the forums just to help out and to answer questions as they arise. I believe that a moderator's primary job is to be helpful and to support the community, not just to discipline. I encourage and appreciate all feedback, the good with the bad. I'll also be working with the new and existing moderators to make sure that they're here to work for you, not against you. I'm also not a big fan of having anonymous moderators so, for the sake of transparency (which, as mentioned, I'm a big fan of in communities), I'm going to have the moderators use their original forum accounts. I'm also looking to update the forums here a bit and get it more organized and user friendly. So if you have some suggestions on this front be sure to let me know.
In addition, I'm going to see what we can do about releasing regular updates of some kind, either through the video updates we've done in the past or through some other way. Again, I've only just begun discussing these sorts of things with the team so nothing is concrete just yet. That said, if there's any specific ways would you all would prefer to get updates from 22cans then please let me know here in this thread as I'll be sorting through every comment that's left (and personally replying to many as well).
UPDATE 2.0
As you likely know, we've been hard at work over the past three or so months working on a rather gigantic update for GODUS. Despite being relatively silent, the team has still been reading through the forums and reviews and has been taking in all feedback, suggestions, complaints, and everything in between (including support emails and our analytics tracking as well). We have a few final bugs to squash with the latest update but, assuming all goes well, we're hoping to have the update released within the next week or so. Naturally, I don't want to get anyone's hopes up in case something last minute needs to get fixed, but I'll do my best to get a specific date to you guys by tomorrow.
There's far too many changes to list all in this one post, but a few of the bigger updates you can expect are as follows:
CLICKING
Everyone's wrist can rest easy now, as all the clicking that was previously present in GODUS has now been sorted. You'll likely see what a big difference there is all within the first few minutes of gameplay. Some changes include clicking and holding on a rock to remove it and then, while still holding the mouse button down, dragging and holding over other rocks to remove those as well. The same applies to trees. In my own personal playthrough, I've removed entire forests all from just one mouse click. Sculpting is much more powerful and easy to use as well. The first time you sculpt it'll feel like a breath of fresh air compared to where it was. Other little tweaks were made as well, such as clicking and dragging to collect belief all in one click, similar to how rocks and trees are now handled.
CARDS
The card system has also been entirely reworked. We've introduced a new timeline feature which will replace the card book. Contained within chests are various stickers (elements/resources) that you can accrue and assign to various cards in any order or way that you like. This ends up giving more control to how you unlock your cards. For example, I'll sometimes skip over unlocking a card I don't particularly need in favor of saving up my stickers to unlock a more powerful card later on in the timeline. Many of the bugs associated with chests and cards have also been thoroughly squashed. All in all, it's much easier to use, more stable, and gives you more control over your cards.
MORE VARIETY
There's tons of little details as well that have been added in. Followers have a bit more personality now, ranging from a group of followers getting together and hanging out around a campfire to a follower going for a stroll and dangling their feet off a ledge into the water. We've also added something called Voyages which you'll get to see more of when we release the update. Not to mention tons of other small details we'll be talking more about soon.
Naturally, we'll be posting some official patch notes once the update gets released, but the above notes will give you a small taste of what to expect. Do know that we're also hard at work on eventually introducing the fully connected world of GODUS in a future update.
As game development continues, we've also found that GODUS is definitely a unique kind of experience compared to many other games out right now and the term "Zen-like" has been tossed around the office more than once. Perhaps some of you have already picked up on a similar vibe from the game. That said, I'm confident that once you all start diving into this update you'll immediately see that a number of the most common feedback points about the game have been sorted. Which isn't to say we don't have more work to do (last I checked we're still at 49% completion), but I feel that we've made a huge step in what we feel is the right direction for the game. I hope you all agree.
IN CLOSING
Thank you all for taking the time to read this thread and, more importantly, thank you for your patience with us as we polish up the final bits of this substantial update. Remember, I'm here to work for you guys so feel free to reach out to me if you ever need anything. I'll be working on your behalf behind the scenes doing what I can to make sure that we're more communicative in the future and that we support this community the way it deserves to be supported. Please don't hesitate to get in touch any time either on my Steam profile or in a private message. Also feel free to follow me on Twitter or even on Facebook. Likewise, I'll also read every reply in this thread and do my best to answer any questions that arise.
I look forward to getting to know you all more closely. See you around the community!
