One things that makes WolfQuest such a great thing for us is the player community. From the beginning, the mission of this project was to get people engaged and really thinking about wolves and ecology. It’s amazing how players’ enthusiasm has sustained WolfQuest through the years. Not a day goes by that we don’t hear from players about new ideas and improvements you would like to see in the game.
And we pay close attention to those ideas! One of my tasks has been to go through all the posts on the forum Ideas for New Episodes V2 and the discussion on Steam: Ideas for Future Updates as well as the other ways players share. To help us think about them, I have built a massive spreadsheet tracking and tallying player ideas for the WolfQuest team to reference. We note each idea, sort them into categories, and tally how many players suggest each idea. This gives us a good overview of player priorities and wishes.
As we add things to the game, we get to mark them as DONE on this spreadsheet (and this makes us happy). We note the ones that are possibilities for the next episode or save them for future episodes. We sort them according to popularity and feasibility (always thinking about wolf ecology as well as the gameplay). We discuss endlessly which ideas we can include and how they might play out!
If you read all the player posts, you can see the patterns of player requests. Good news! Most people agree.
We have sorted player ideas into theses categories:
* Gameplay
* Wolf behaviors
* Hunting
* Pack/stranger/dispersal wolves interactions
* Wolf customizations (pelts, scars, aging etc.)
* Ambient nature (things that bring the landscape to life like sounds, terrain and flora variety, weather, and animals that wolves wouldn’t interact with but would be cool to see)
* Interactive nature (like elk, moose, or even ravens)
* Human ambience (human detritus, e.g Lost River, old boots in the woods….)
*Other (nuts and bolts game options like chat, camera controls, etc.)
Every new idea is considered and weighed. The biggest factors that determine what we add:
* Is this accurate, real-life wolf behavior and/or ecology?
* How will it improve gameplay? Will it be interesting and fun? Is it worth the effort to implement?
* How will it affect the how the game runs? We are bound by ever-evolving technical limitations. Our players use many, many, different devices…
* The budget. Always.
* Time. We want to get the new episode out sooner than later.
Some highly-requested player ideas that you will see in the next episode:
* Continue raising those pups — but will they survive long enough to learn how to hunt?
* Baby prey (snack to banquet-sized). So cute and tasty!
* Mule deer: bucks, does, and fawns. Watch out, those hooves pack a punch
Many more to come! Stay tuned to hear more about how Tower Fall is developing. And keep those ideas coming.
Read and share player ideas at:
- Ideas for New Episodes V2 (this forum)
Steam: Ideas for Future Updates
