Extended Survey Insights (Patreon)

Today we’ll be going over some more details and giving you an in-depth overview of our recent survey, which had 197 responses in just under a week. We are going to go over our rationale when interpreting this survey, and see what you think. This is not the only survey we are going to do, but we definitely intend to create better data as we do more of them.  If you haven’t already read the new survey dev log, it will be a good primer to the topics covered here. You can do so by following this link:

https://www.sanctuary-rts.com/post/what-our-players-want



We covered in the developer log what these general trends were, but as you may notice, there was a large disparity of what was and wasn’t wanted. One thing we learned from this survey is exactly how important survey validation is for questions like these. Many players just put the top options but left both “singleplayer” and “multiplayer” blank. Psychologically, some players may have felt that they wanted too many of these features and wanted to leave some ticks blank. We were trying to reduce the number of questions in the survey to not make it as daunting, and easier to fill out, but this is a case where this could have been broken further into multiple questions.

We know from experience that just because certain features aren’t necessarily requested, it doesn’t mean their existence should be deprioritised. Competitive play is often a hook into a game for both the purposes of showing off the game, as well as a casual activity for the observer. It is very important for us to be mindful that we may need to do things the survey doesn’t generally point to initially. However, it is always important to keep focus on how our audience feels and perceives our product. It is clear there is a huge hook in the simulated projectile RTS genre to just enjoy the experience.


The “other” responses descend down the bottom there, but this taught me that I need to be careful with using words like “adjacent” when making these. A lot of people did not interpret other RTS discords as fitting into that option, so it might be better to try using simpler English in the future. With that being said, the numbers really came down to something like:

> 60% - Gyle + Other Influencers

~20% - Adjacent Communities
~10% - Word Of Mouth
<10% - Other

This has made a need for marketing clear, as the majority of our traffic coming from one source means we’re not casting the widest net to find our audience. Part of this is why you may have noticed an increased push for content generation so that we can have a steady stream of interaction across all our social media. We are also currently looking for somebody to fill a paid position as a crowdfunding expert with a background in marketing to try to make up this deficit. If you know somebody that could help, there is a listing here that you can send to them:

https://remotegamejobs.com/jobs/enhearten-media-crowdfunding-expert-remote-job

Sometimes you try to push your community to try to get some better data. This was the question that received the most complaints, yet gave us some of the most useful information.

One thing that concerned a lot of individuals was the push that seemed to exist in our community to “join a faction”. In the Discord, you get additional channels based on a faction selection, and in this question, you were not given a choice to sit it out, you were being asked to pick one! Many interpreted this as potentially having us force players to pick one faction in the game too.

Rest assured, it makes no sense to force players to commit to only experiencing a third of our game. All factions will be playable at launch, and you will be able to switch between them. Our real focus was to see if we could create a rough faction balance; we don’t want any individual faction to be unliked and thus have a huge disparity in faction choices.

Discounting the responses where people had said in their next answer “they had picked one at random”, the actual player population is roughly:

36.5 % - Guard
33 % - EDA
30.5% - Chosen

This was originally a little more lopsided when the survey was first released. We noticed that the Chosen was actually hovering near the 28% mark. It recovered later, and we believed our videos and community conversations addressing our desire to fix their lore and make them less evil contributed to improving their perception in the future responses, but not enough to restore the deficit from the earlier responses. We don’t think the numbers thus far are too concerning, but we will be monitoring them and would love feedback on how our community perceives these factions in greater detail.


This question was in short answer form, so I broke the answers down into categories and counted their responses.

We were surprised how much content in our game actually came preloaded for us with community imagination. We were able to discover connected themes that allowed us to improve our decision making going forward.

An example is the association of the Chosen with “Lasers”. There was actually a debate internally whether the Chosen should use lasers or plasma-based weaponry as they would have varying impacts on the aesthetics and gameplay. This gave us a great way to resolve that debate as it seemed our community heavily leaned into lasers. We imagine the pure light of the lasers matched the aesthetics people were envisioning for the faction.

Other associations were very unexpected. We have been relatively silent on assigning gameplay identities to factions, yet they seemingly formed from similar games. We weren’t surprised by the defensive aspect being ascribed for the EDA as their models were already chunky. However, the Chosen being “micro-intensive” was a very recurring sentiment. We’d love to hear from anybody here if you can tell us why.


Won’t dwell too far into this one, but here is the raw data so you can judge for yourself. You can see why naval gameplay is one of our kickstarter goals!



A loaded question, since we only announced this on the Discord. When this question was made, we had hoped to put out the survey on more platforms but unfortunately I had still not gotten fully setup and some social media proved to be a hassle.

However, we can announce that we are working on a forum using the Discourse framework. We know that forums can be a good way of discussing in a more structured style, and therefore we will be activating it once the community is more established.


Our community are definitely gamers. This proves it.



We cover this mostly in the dev log, but just to reiterate;

We are committed to providing a great experience out-of-the-box. If the game really succeeds, we will provide free content in the form of additional patches, and possibly large expansions to buy. Otherwise, the only monetisation will be buying the game initially.


Since this was a long answer question, here is some categorization based on our results for which suggestions were in the top ten:

We have a lot of features here, and therefore a lot of pressure. Although we’d love to do every single one of things, part of the difficulty of building a game at this complexity is the sheer amount of work that needs to be done for any given feature. We already have a team of more than twenty people, and are still growing. The success of the kickstarter will determine exactly what features we can and cannot include on our budget.

On a side note, we have managed to acquire 4 spare alpha keys to distribute to our dedicated players for the game https://gatesofpyre.com/

If you’re interested, come chat to us in #patreons-corner and I’ll consider you. Ideally this will go to people who do play games regularly as we’ll need players to represent our community in active competition. Decisions won’t be made quickly, it’s not first-come-first-served.

As usual, please give us some feedback in the comments. This is a meaty, in-depth post and is chunky in information. I’d love to know what insights you may have gleaned from our data.

Timevir