Q&A Stream and Development Plans
Since we’ve launched the latest patch, many of you enjoyed the numerous additions and improvements that it brought to the game. From recruiting servants, and hiring builders to training soldiers and capturing criminals, our settlements got all the more lively.
Many of you have been sharing feedback, and reporting problems with the game and we’ve been listening and working hard to fix them. A patch is on the way delivering a large number of bug fixes, balancing updates, and quality of life improvements requested by our community. This patch is currently in closed beta and should be going live soon. Thank you to everyone for reporting problems, sharing your feedback, and remaining patient as we seek to address them!
[h2]Q&A Livestream[/h2]
To address any remaining questions you might have directly and interactively, we will be hosting Q&A livestream! Mark the date in your calendar, post your questions and get ready!
[h2]Addressing Early Access[/h2]
As we’ve been reading the feedback, we’ve noticed few comments that were somewhat critical and expressing disappointment that we are failing to deliver on the premise of Lords and Villeins. We take this criticism seriously and we were thinking what is the best way to address it. While actions speak more than a thousand words and we believe that ultimately to earn solid trust and goodwill with our players, first and foremost we need to deliver good content, these things take time and transparent communication of the development is just as important. So we decided to give you a look behind the curtain. An extra level of detail behind our decisions, what early access means to us and why we chose to make our game this way.
[h3]The Decision to Launch in Early Access[/h3]
It may seem obvious for a city builder genre, but deciding between the launch of the full version and early access was not an easy choice for us! The positives are clear - establishing a tight feedback loop with our community, giving our players a chance to shape the game early on and having a greater impact on what it ends up being while giving us a better insight into who our target audience is, so we can improve our chances to succeed within the limits of our creative vision.
What about some downsides? Building a procedurally generated simulation means that polishing this experience takes a long time. We knew that we will at the very least struggle to make the experience smooth during EA. While some level of roughness is generally accepted during EA, we remained conscious that this is not a free demo - we are charging our customers to access it, and with it comes a certain baseline of expectations and quality, that we will need to maintain throughout the majority of the development. With early access comes a lot of added pressure and extra time on top of an already complex and difficult game. A baseline that as a small team with our first game we may not be able to always meet.
Overall we felt that this is a tradeoff that is going to be a net positive for the game, so we went with it, and we’ve been very happy with our decision ever since the launch. The amount of feedback has been incredibly valuable and the game is simply a lot better for it. It brings the best out of us and makes us work harder and helps us to make a game that we are really proud of. However, the downsides do exist and it is a big challenge for us to manage well. One that we arguably have not always succeeded with and delivered versions of the game more rough than we would like to see.
[h3]Requests and Priorities[/h3]
Another challenge that comes with game development in general, but even more so during early access, is sorting the feedback, evaluating the impact of certain problems, and prioritizing them correctly. We receive many suggestions, feature requests, and feedback about the user experience on daily basis and it is our job to estimate how impactful they can be if they are a good fit for our vision, and what would be the best time to focus on them.
Here are some of the most significant things that we consider with each feedback:
Answers to these questions are often intuitive, based on feelings or subjective experiences, or driven by the personal motivations of our team. We listen to our players and reflect within the team on what we would like to see achieved with our game as well. While making these decisions, we also make a lot of assumptions about our future, what will happen next and how much of our time will be needed on everything else. All while doing our best to respect our limits, have a healthy working culture without excessive crunch, and take good care of our mental health.
We don’t always make the right call. Sometimes we hyper-focus on minor things, and we run out of time and start making undesirable shortcuts. And each time we do, we make sure to take a step back, improve our process and communication, find things to learn to do better and refocus for the next update. Admittedly problems with our planning led to certain parts of our game being under-prioritized longer than they should have, resulting in issues that were avoidable in hindsight. We are far from perfect, but we always try to learn.
[h3]The Compound Effect[/h3]
In the game development, there is a tendency for features to compound the complexity of everything that comes after them. Every feature, even the smallest one, has the potential to collide with something else, or at the very least increase the scope of the testing cycle we do before each update. This means that as we move throughout the development, it is increasingly more time-consuming to ensure the game is balanced, stable, and relatively bug-free.
The earlier a feature is done, the more time it will take overall during the full development process to be maintained. This is crucial for our planning, to prioritize certain features first. And it means that overly focusing on maintaining a perfectly polished experience during early access would be highly inefficient and if we would, the game would suffer from a lack of content. This is the main reason why balancing and AI optimization takes a long time to get right. Not only because there is a lot of iterations for us to learn and find a sweet spot with feedback, but even more so because they get impacted by nearly everything new added to the game and we have to exert significant efforts to iron out systems that have already been polished multiple times before, while also aiming to improve them every time.
[h3]What Is Next?[/h3]
So how do we plan to approach these issues moving forward? What are our plans for future content? After the minor update goes live, the next thing to look forward to is our last early access major update, what we internally call The Ruling Update. This update will be one that marks the end of the early access and it will focus on the ruling family and expand some of the fantasy and storytelling elements around being a ruler.
We will introduce a high council with important positions such as Master of Coin and Master of Law, but also already existing titles like bishop and minister. You will be able to select privileged villagers from the ranks of clergy, nobles, military, and your own ruling family to sit at the table with you. These positions give you access to new ruling actions, such as collecting intelligence about villagers, ordering propaganda to improve your reputation, or faking the tax reports to the royals so you can get away with paying less.
We will also introduce a town hall with hearings - a weekly event where selected villagers will approach you with problems in a more personal way. This update also focuses on community requests more than others, so you can expect some long-requested features to be added. We are not ready to confirm anything specific yet, so stay tuned for more details later.
Since the Ruling Update marks the end of early access, the amount of new content added in this patch will be smaller compared to the updates released previously, so that we can focus more of our time hunting down bugs, balancing the game, adding community requested features, and improving the AI and performance of the game. We will also take longer than usual to deliver this update, to give ourselves more time to improve the game, though we don't have any specific dates to anounce right now.
Hopefully, with this post, we’ve been able to give you an interesting insight into some of the challenges we face when developing this game. Our goal with this article is in no way to diminish the problems our game currently has and the criticism that our players share. They are important to us and we are doing what we can to address them as soon as possible. We also understand that the game industry is often not delivering on the promises that game developers make and players feel rightly skeptical. This article is not trying to change that.
Sometimes, in all of the excitement for video games, it is easy to forget that video games are made by people that have their limits. The game has been developed by four people, two of which have now moved to new projects as we reach the final stage of the development, and there are a lot of roles outside of making the game itself, that are part of our responsibilities. For many of us on the team, this is our first big game made so we are also making more mistakes and it has been a big opportunity to learn for us. Despite these issues, we are immensely proud of what we managed to make, and we simply hope that players will stick with us for the journey and that our work will sooner or later speak for itself. Many have already found great joy and satisfaction with what we do and we hope to grow our audience further and further for as long as we can!
Thank you for being with us on this wonderful journey! If you have some extra questions or comments, please leave them below or come join us on Saturday for the Q&A livestream!
To end with something more positive, we will leave you with screenshots from a community challenge that we’ve recently had on our discord. These settlements are nothing short of amazing so we hope you will love them as much as we do!
Made by Else:
Made by Calicoo:
Made by Raedzara:
Made by Tiaan:
Made by Liraine:
Made by Taggianto:
Made by Nowei:
Made by BambiAmby:
Many of you have been sharing feedback, and reporting problems with the game and we’ve been listening and working hard to fix them. A patch is on the way delivering a large number of bug fixes, balancing updates, and quality of life improvements requested by our community. This patch is currently in closed beta and should be going live soon. Thank you to everyone for reporting problems, sharing your feedback, and remaining patient as we seek to address them!
[h2]Q&A Livestream[/h2]
To address any remaining questions you might have directly and interactively, we will be hosting Q&A livestream! Mark the date in your calendar, post your questions and get ready!
- When: Saturday, July 16th, 8PM CEST / 2PM EDT / 11AM PDT
- Where: Twitch
- If you miss the stream, the VOD will be hosted on our Youtube channel
- Live in the chat on Twitch
- Using the !question-lav command on our Discord
- In the comment of a thread on Reddit
- In the comments below this article
[h2]Addressing Early Access[/h2]
As we’ve been reading the feedback, we’ve noticed few comments that were somewhat critical and expressing disappointment that we are failing to deliver on the premise of Lords and Villeins. We take this criticism seriously and we were thinking what is the best way to address it. While actions speak more than a thousand words and we believe that ultimately to earn solid trust and goodwill with our players, first and foremost we need to deliver good content, these things take time and transparent communication of the development is just as important. So we decided to give you a look behind the curtain. An extra level of detail behind our decisions, what early access means to us and why we chose to make our game this way.
[h3]The Decision to Launch in Early Access[/h3]
It may seem obvious for a city builder genre, but deciding between the launch of the full version and early access was not an easy choice for us! The positives are clear - establishing a tight feedback loop with our community, giving our players a chance to shape the game early on and having a greater impact on what it ends up being while giving us a better insight into who our target audience is, so we can improve our chances to succeed within the limits of our creative vision.
What about some downsides? Building a procedurally generated simulation means that polishing this experience takes a long time. We knew that we will at the very least struggle to make the experience smooth during EA. While some level of roughness is generally accepted during EA, we remained conscious that this is not a free demo - we are charging our customers to access it, and with it comes a certain baseline of expectations and quality, that we will need to maintain throughout the majority of the development. With early access comes a lot of added pressure and extra time on top of an already complex and difficult game. A baseline that as a small team with our first game we may not be able to always meet.
Overall we felt that this is a tradeoff that is going to be a net positive for the game, so we went with it, and we’ve been very happy with our decision ever since the launch. The amount of feedback has been incredibly valuable and the game is simply a lot better for it. It brings the best out of us and makes us work harder and helps us to make a game that we are really proud of. However, the downsides do exist and it is a big challenge for us to manage well. One that we arguably have not always succeeded with and delivered versions of the game more rough than we would like to see.
[h3]Requests and Priorities[/h3]
Another challenge that comes with game development in general, but even more so during early access, is sorting the feedback, evaluating the impact of certain problems, and prioritizing them correctly. We receive many suggestions, feature requests, and feedback about the user experience on daily basis and it is our job to estimate how impactful they can be if they are a good fit for our vision, and what would be the best time to focus on them.
Here are some of the most significant things that we consider with each feedback:
- What are the possible solutions and do they overlap with something we are already planning to do?
- What part of our player base is impacted by it and how often do they encounter the problem?
- Does the team agree with the perception of the problem?
- Does it align with our vision or is this a case of a misplaced expectation?
- What is the scope of the intended solution?
- When can we implement the solution in a way that does not impact the timeline of delivering new content?
- Is it worth delaying the new content if there is no such possibility?
- When is it the most effective to act? Is it more efficient to solve the problem now or later?
- Will the problem last when we implement some of the features planned in later updates?
- Are there any simple and creative solutions that are worth doing in the meantime to reduce the impact of the problem?
Answers to these questions are often intuitive, based on feelings or subjective experiences, or driven by the personal motivations of our team. We listen to our players and reflect within the team on what we would like to see achieved with our game as well. While making these decisions, we also make a lot of assumptions about our future, what will happen next and how much of our time will be needed on everything else. All while doing our best to respect our limits, have a healthy working culture without excessive crunch, and take good care of our mental health.
We don’t always make the right call. Sometimes we hyper-focus on minor things, and we run out of time and start making undesirable shortcuts. And each time we do, we make sure to take a step back, improve our process and communication, find things to learn to do better and refocus for the next update. Admittedly problems with our planning led to certain parts of our game being under-prioritized longer than they should have, resulting in issues that were avoidable in hindsight. We are far from perfect, but we always try to learn.
[h3]The Compound Effect[/h3]
In the game development, there is a tendency for features to compound the complexity of everything that comes after them. Every feature, even the smallest one, has the potential to collide with something else, or at the very least increase the scope of the testing cycle we do before each update. This means that as we move throughout the development, it is increasingly more time-consuming to ensure the game is balanced, stable, and relatively bug-free.
The earlier a feature is done, the more time it will take overall during the full development process to be maintained. This is crucial for our planning, to prioritize certain features first. And it means that overly focusing on maintaining a perfectly polished experience during early access would be highly inefficient and if we would, the game would suffer from a lack of content. This is the main reason why balancing and AI optimization takes a long time to get right. Not only because there is a lot of iterations for us to learn and find a sweet spot with feedback, but even more so because they get impacted by nearly everything new added to the game and we have to exert significant efforts to iron out systems that have already been polished multiple times before, while also aiming to improve them every time.
[h3]What Is Next?[/h3]
So how do we plan to approach these issues moving forward? What are our plans for future content? After the minor update goes live, the next thing to look forward to is our last early access major update, what we internally call The Ruling Update. This update will be one that marks the end of the early access and it will focus on the ruling family and expand some of the fantasy and storytelling elements around being a ruler.
We will introduce a high council with important positions such as Master of Coin and Master of Law, but also already existing titles like bishop and minister. You will be able to select privileged villagers from the ranks of clergy, nobles, military, and your own ruling family to sit at the table with you. These positions give you access to new ruling actions, such as collecting intelligence about villagers, ordering propaganda to improve your reputation, or faking the tax reports to the royals so you can get away with paying less.
We will also introduce a town hall with hearings - a weekly event where selected villagers will approach you with problems in a more personal way. This update also focuses on community requests more than others, so you can expect some long-requested features to be added. We are not ready to confirm anything specific yet, so stay tuned for more details later.
Since the Ruling Update marks the end of early access, the amount of new content added in this patch will be smaller compared to the updates released previously, so that we can focus more of our time hunting down bugs, balancing the game, adding community requested features, and improving the AI and performance of the game. We will also take longer than usual to deliver this update, to give ourselves more time to improve the game, though we don't have any specific dates to anounce right now.
Hopefully, with this post, we’ve been able to give you an interesting insight into some of the challenges we face when developing this game. Our goal with this article is in no way to diminish the problems our game currently has and the criticism that our players share. They are important to us and we are doing what we can to address them as soon as possible. We also understand that the game industry is often not delivering on the promises that game developers make and players feel rightly skeptical. This article is not trying to change that.
Sometimes, in all of the excitement for video games, it is easy to forget that video games are made by people that have their limits. The game has been developed by four people, two of which have now moved to new projects as we reach the final stage of the development, and there are a lot of roles outside of making the game itself, that are part of our responsibilities. For many of us on the team, this is our first big game made so we are also making more mistakes and it has been a big opportunity to learn for us. Despite these issues, we are immensely proud of what we managed to make, and we simply hope that players will stick with us for the journey and that our work will sooner or later speak for itself. Many have already found great joy and satisfaction with what we do and we hope to grow our audience further and further for as long as we can!
Thank you for being with us on this wonderful journey! If you have some extra questions or comments, please leave them below or come join us on Saturday for the Q&A livestream!
To end with something more positive, we will leave you with screenshots from a community challenge that we’ve recently had on our discord. These settlements are nothing short of amazing so we hope you will love them as much as we do!
Made by Else:
Made by Calicoo:
Made by Raedzara:
Made by Tiaan:
Made by Liraine:
Made by Taggianto:
Made by Nowei:
Made by BambiAmby: