It's been almost 2 weeks since I've had a larger sale where you were able to set your own price and buy Dungeon Colony for as little as $0.01, yes one cent. The reason for the sale was the completion of version 0.2.1.x - Game Audio. I love these kinds of sales as they give everyone a chance to get the game and play it during alpha development. This can be a really good thing if you need to get a bit more feedback from actual players. And so it did: The response was great and the demand crippled my server. Moreover, I received an influx of emails which took an eternity to respond to. To overcome all of these issues I created a new way for players to communicate with me which I'm releasing today in version 0.2.2.14 (Try it now here free).
The In-Game Feedback System with Votes:
In order to organize all the bugs, comments, questions and feature requests in one place, I've long been wanting to use a forum of some sort where players can post such things. One solution had been to use an existing forum that's on some website, but there are forums just about everywhere: There is a forum on steam, indiedb, tigsource etc. And players have submitted bugs on all those platforms before, which leaves me with the problem that bugs are scattered around the web making it difficult for me to track them.
As a result I'm releasing a new experimental system where players can send me feedback from within the game.This system can be accessed from the Main Menu (see 'Feedback' button), but you have to be a registered user in order to send me something. Demo users do not have access to this.
The following screenshot is the Feedback List page. It shows all of the currently open bugs, suggestions, questions and feedback:
Any feedback that is submitted will not be shown immediately on the list page. I will first review it to make sure it is relevant and not spammy.
Vote Count, Up-votes, and Yes/No Votes:
Every player who as purchased an account gains access to the voting system. There are 4 categories of requests:
- Bugs
- Suggestions
- Questions
- Feedback
Users can vote on each of these categories, however, for bugs and suggestions each player gets only a total of 2 votes to distribute. For example, if a player likes a particular feature request she can vote for it. That leaves her with another vote to be used on another feature request or another bug. Votes cannot be undone. So be careful what you vote on. However, once a bug or suggestion has been completed, the vote is recycled back to the player, which she can use again on another item.
On the other hand, votes for Questions and Feedback are unlimited and help reveal the more interesting questions or feedback submissions.
Bugs, questions and feedback can only be up-voted, which causes the most voted item to appear at the top of the list. Suggestions on the other-hand have a YES or NO vote. This should help me determine the sentiment of the community over each feature request and whether I will end up creating it or not. Suggestions are merely for smaller feature requests and I will generally not take any larger game design requests.
The above screenshot shows how a request is submitted.
More games should have this.Excelent idea^^.