![]() He’s hopeful that Grounded has a long future ahead of it. “The yard’s fully finished, the story’s fully finished, but we still want to make Grounded the best game.” Brennecke says the team is looking forward to feedback about the story and ending before the team creates the next roadmap for the future. “Our launch is the game that we’re proud of,” Brennecke explains. The 1.0 launch is quickly approaching, and while there’s a certain sense of finality to it, Grounded is by no means finished. Let’s get the feedback on it before we do our final polish.” Spurlock adds, “I think a lot of our fans have been understanding about any weird stuff or bugs that show up because it’s not a full game yet.” “As a director I want to be like ‘I know you guys want to polish this, but it’s okay sometimes to ship something at alpha quality. “It’s tough as a developer sometimes,” Brennecke says. It takes a certain level of understanding and mutual respect between the developers and the community to be successful with an Early Access project. Even still, new features don’t always work as intended right away. ![]() The downside of the Early Access model is that iteration can actually take longer, since everything that gets added to the game needs a certain level of polish in order to be shipped to players in an update. The dev teams’ openness to collaborating with players seems to have had a knock-on effect, leading to a more positive and patient community. “Anyone can participate in that discussion and give cool ideas.” “The super powerful thing about Grounded is that everyone can be a designer,” he says. Often feedback leads to bug fixes and issues getting addressed, but it can also lead to new features and gameplay systems. “We pour through all that and see what’s bubbling to the top,” he says. Brennecke says he meets with community manager Aarik Dorobiala and head of QA Adam Taylor for an hour every week to go through all the feedback on social media. “That’s been really powerful and has shaped a lot of our decision making about how we approach different things.”Īnalyzing player feedback is what has allowed the team to shift focus when necessary and put their energy into building the things that players care about, like base building. Watching how the community has used the available tools in creative ways has been a huge inspiration “We just never even thought that stuff would be possible,” Brennecke says. Bounce pad elevators and stuff like that blew my mind, we started thinking we need to invest more in our base building.” Over time, that has evolved into high-rise mushroom bases, suspended walkways, and now, base defense activities. ![]() “Even in the first month, some of the players built these amazing looking, super fancy bases. “Before we released, all of our bases were fairly small,” Brennecke explains. Related: The 5 Best Games At PAX East 2022 Update 0.13 grew out of the community’s love for base building, which isn’t something the dev team had anticipated at first, according to Brennecke. After the panel, I sat down with game director Adam Brennecke and lead animator Zach Spurlock to talk about the update, what they’ve learned through the Early Access process, and the huge impact that the community has had on development.
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