Wolfire Games Forums

Hello,

I talked about open development marketing at a school in Berlin, Germany today and mentioned Overgrowth and Wolfire.

The slides (web site form, no stupid presentation file download)

The listeners had some interesting question and I thought I should pass them to the community here, perhaps some of you can contribute some answers?:

1. In what ways does the pre-order-community of Overgrowth influence the development of the game? Are there polls or feature request trackers? Does Wolfire look at high-activity threads' suggestions and incorporate them?
2. Were there suggestions coming from the community, which have been implemented into Overgrowth?

There were some questions about how the company deals with the community commenting on the game as well:

3. How does Wolfire keep up with forum/blog/facebook/chat comments/suggestions? Is there anything written by fans/haters you don't read due to time pressure?

4. When a community suggestion is supposed to be considered for implementation, do the programmers/artists deal with the suggestion thread or does somebody present the suggestions in summaries to them?

I'm not even sure interactions happen on the levels I assume existing for these questions.

Thanks!

Sounds like a pretty cool thing you did, I'll give you some answers.

1. They have said that when they are going to implement a new feature, they look at the forums to see if there are any threads on the forum with ideas and such. This stuff is almost only found in the SPF (sercret perorder forums) since there are the people who can actually play the game and give feedback.

2. I think David made it so that you could activate collisions with models using the plant shader based on that a community member wanted this feature.

Also, it has been requested that the specular for a texture should be taken from a separate picture file instead of from the alpha channel of the normal texture file if one wishes to do so, David has said that he's probably going to make it so.

3. They write some posts on the forums from time to time and sometimes answer to comments, they are constantly in the IRC chat so if you want to talk about anything they are always there to answer. I don't think they bother with haters at all, really no reason to.

Most often they won't write anything on forums or blog comments if they don't have anything to say about it.

4. All the developers check the forums from time to time, but if someone sends a summary of a really good thread to the devs that they think the devs should take into consideration, I'm sure they will as well.

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There you go! Hope that answers your questions.