The Road to Launch 4: A Time to Choose
Greetings Dungeon Fighters!
Imagine a horde of goblins in one of Dungeon Fighter Online's many dungeons. They're all dangerous and they're all throwing different attacks at you. You need to make moment-to-moment evaluations about which creature is the most dangerous at any given moment and which you'll need to coordinate your attacks and combos to break your way through to the eventual treasure at the end of the adventure. It's exciting and its fun and it's at the heart of what makes Dungeon Fighter Online such a great game.
It also describes the job of the development team, except that instead of goblins we're fighting a laundry list of bugs, suggestions, requests, changes and the issues that come with potential new features that we want to implement in Dungeon Fighter Online. The end result is update day, when a whole passel of features, fixes and stuff is placed in the game. Getting to that moment is never pretty, and deciding what goes in those updates is a large part of what we spend every day doing.
Signal to Noise
How would you improve Dungeon Fighter Online? Wait, don't tell me here. There's a rich tradition on our official forums of offering up community suggestions. We pore over these frequently looking for ways to improve the game. The problem is that we can't just listen to the forums exclusively because only a small, vocal percentage of DFO players ever post on the forums. That's why we constantly go over data about how people are actually playing the game. We use this data to tell us on average how long it takes to clear a dungeon, what items people are buying in the shops and where people might be using cheat programs and hacks. All of this data is filtered into reports that we then compare to an enormous list of potential bugs and implementable features that act as our general roadmap to launch.
Then there are other considerations that will impact the eventual shape of a game update. Sometimes there are larger features on the drawing board that can't be put in until a lot of low-level work on other systems is completed.
Choosing Your Battles
Then how do we choose how to create a DFO game update? That's where good project management and choosing priorities becomes so important. Obviously, our first priority needs to be keeping the game up and running. Hardware issues or any kind of technical malfunction that might bring the servers down immediately pushes everything else to the back burner. After that, we look at critical bugs or major gameplay imbalances that need to be addressed. Then we need to choose what we're going to work on in any particular update - and that's where the concept of the "theme" comes in.
You may have noticed that every update we release is usually built around a particular theme. For example, "Warriors Unite," the April 28th update is all about guilds. We've learned from hard experience that it's better in an update to work on a particular feature and get it and all of its supporting systems in place than to try to launch a whole bunch of stuff in a scattershot fashion. Guilds are one of the key social features an MMO relies on to establish a stable player base - people are more likely to stick with a game once their friends are involved, so we felt it was important to get this functionality in before launch. It also allows us to concentrate our energies on what works better from a business perspective. It's much easier to get press coverage and fan chatter when an update has an easily understood "narrative" rather than just a laundry list of unrelated features.
The truth is, we don't always get it right. The DFO development team is just as human and fallible as anyone else and sometimes we make mistakes. We often have differing opinions internally about what's the best way to proceed on the game and what we should be working on. Rather than allow that to pull us apart though, we take everyone's suggestions into account and come to a decision on what any particular update's theme should be. This allows us all to pull together and work toward the same end -a better.
Dungeon Fighter Online for everyone.
The good news is that it seems to be working. We've been hearing really positive feedback on our recent content updates. We're working on every part of the DFO experience, and we want you to get a better feel for how the DFO magic happens. As always, stay tuned to our website for more Beta Journal updates, and join the DFO Facebook for regular updates and events!