Tale Tuesday #30 – Common Questions About Game Dev #4

Hey everyone!

It’s time to finally update everyone on the development and announce, that the ‘Cosmos Conquer’ is coming soon. Beforehand however, let’s continue our ‘Tale Tuesday’ mini-series where we respond to your questions about game dev!

Are players suggestions listened to?
When it comes to Iguana Mercenary – yes! Very often we’ll go through Steam Posts and Discord to get feedback from the players and apply it, adding it to the game in the future updates. Sometimes the feedback is so crucial that we decide to add it right away in the next update. That was the case in the recent ‘Cosmos Conquer’ update, where I’ve added option to change how fast the tutorial text disappears, allowing for additional accessibility. Some changes are more important then others. Not all of the feedback will end up in the game though. Sometimes the changes just don’t seem good for the game.
In general, however? It really depends. In case of bigger studios and games, more people would have to deliver the same feedback or suggestion for it to be noticed. The more people share the same opinion about the game, the more likely it is to have it listened to. In general, a lot of feedback doesn’t go through at all.

Why the final product varies so much from what was shown before?
You may recall that from many video games conventions – big studios show us an awesome game with breathtaking cinematics and incredible features. When it comes to the release some time later, we.. don’t really get what we saw. Why is that?
Obviously, marketing is a big part of the video game ‘campaigns’ nowadays. Taking part in huge event and promoting your game is an incredibly large marketing campaign. If you got a chance to present your game on the stage, would you try to do your best? Obviously! That’s why marketing often takes extra steps and gives us a nice, cinematic presentation just to make the game look more appealing. It doesn’t mean the game is bad – it’s just to make us more interested.
Another, probably less common reason is also cutting spendings. Development teams may get their production time reduced for a number of reasons and they simply don’t have time to include everything they’ve wanted. Either way, the developers attempt to make the most of it either way.

And that would be it for today’s ‘Tale Tuesday’! In the next episode we’ll look into the last set of questions to answer. Stay tuned!