The Fanbase as a Development Committee

With the recent release of planet-colonization sim Planetbase, combined with four swift patches to it, we've seen another example of the fine line between a bug and a feature. After its release on October 15th, it quickly climbed to become a best seller on Steam with SteamSpy reporting 80,419 owners at the time of writing.  Social media, Kickstarter, and the their ilk has made it easier than ever for fans to voice their ire and pleasure directly to publishers. For some games, like Planetbase, patches are rolled out to change how the AI of the game sets up priorities, but other companies have stuck with their original vision, refusing to respond to customer demands.

This reflects one of the ongoing challenges with modern game development – the audience is essentially part of the process now. In an interview with Martiño Figueroa, responsible for the design and programing of the game, from Madruga Works, the team behind Planetbase, said that the Reddit community that grew up around their company was without any particular planning on their part – “It just happened.”

With the recent release of planet-colonization sim Planetbase, combined with four swift patches to it, we've seen another example of the fine line between a bug and a feature. After its release on October 15th, it quickly climbed to become a best seller on Steam with SteamSpy reporting 80,419 owners at the time of writing.  Social media, Kickstarter, and the their ilk has made it easier than ever for fans to voice their ire and pleasure directly to publishers. For some games, like Planetbase, patches are rolled out to change how the AI of the game sets up priorities, but other companies have stuck with their original vision, refusing to respond to customer demands.

This reflects one of the ongoing challenges with modern game development – the audience is essentially part of the process now. In an interview with Martiño Figueroa, responsible for the design and programing of the game, from Madruga Works, the team behind Planetbase, said that the Reddit community that grew up around their company was without any particular planning on their part – “It just happened.”

The audience behind many games, and Planetbase is no exception, provides constant feedback as to how they think the game could be better, more interesting, or even just things they would like to see. The difficulty for a game designer is trying to walk the line between responding to audience complaints and losing sight of the creative direction.

Speaking about the AI -- one of the biggest sources of complaints -- Figueroa said, “We are going to be improving the AI (we've already done this significantly), and also we are going to put some effort in explaining the AI behavior to the player a bit more. We listen to the audience of course, but we always have to factor in the side effects of changing the game mechanics significantly as we don't want to lose the tension in the game.” Through sticking with their focus, they’re certainly turning away players who want more control over their base.

The subreddit for Planetbase, meanwhile, has plenty of complaints about idling colonists, the game being too easy, the game being too hard, and so on. It is from this group of fans that they may hope to sell DLC to one day, a prospect that may be difficult if too many of them lose interest due to the game not being what they expect.

The plan for Planetbase is to rely upon this DLC to continue to bring in money for MadrugaWorks. “Hopefully after that we will be able to decrease the frequency of these updates and start focusing on designing more content maybe for some kind of DLC, but we are here for the long run and we will provide support for a long time.“

When there are hundreds or even thousands of customers making demands on the creative team, it is impossible to make them all happy while sticking to any sort of creative vision. Many of these games have extensive plans for development, but departing from their plans and instead rewarding an involved fan base can reap dividends.

Audience participation has also become a part of development for many games. In everything from Kerbal Space Program to Cities: Skylines, developers have taken ideas developed by the community and integrated them into the game. For the Planetbase team, “people had [sic] some interesting ideas, one of them was the "Medical Cabinet," a place to store Medical Supplies in the Sick Bay which we will probably implement soon.” Not all of these ideas are necessarily going to bear fruit, however, and the audience is going to inevitably demand things that are outside of the scope or plan for the project.

The team behind Planetbase is committed to working with the audience to try to make the game as good as possible within their vision. This seems to be the best way to accomplish this balancing act, and a number of other publishers have found success using this model. Through this model the views of the audience can inform, but not determine, the end product.

It looks like this back and forth is a regular aspect of modern game development, especially if the game is a relatively smaller affair that will be relying upon updates for the game to finish. Learning to partner with the audience will ensure that not only are they going to buy your game, but also they will become those that are helping new people learn about it.