Matchmaker, and a Survey!

First of all, if you haven’t had the chance to play Project Matchmaker v0.02 yet, it is now available to the public! You can grab it from the menu on the left (or maybe above on mobile?) and you can get all the info on what’s going on with this update over here.

Once you’ve played the new update, and hopefully have played Project Wild One as well, I’d like to get your opinion! I’ve made a short survey you can fill out through the link below. Now, I’m going to give some context, but the important thing to me is to know how you personally feel about these projects, so you’re welcome, maybe even encouraged, to fill it out before reading on.

Click HERE to fill out the survey!

All done? Alright. So, I’ve been anticipating this question for a while. Let me give a little background.

When I started rolling out prototypes, I knew a lot of people would be uncertain, even uncomfortable, about me working on a game besides MVOL, and rightly so. I’ve shown I can do a decent job at a specific kind of game, but it had a lot of flaws, and I’m unproven in a lot of areas as a designer. So I wanted to start with a project that should at least feel… comfortably familiar? Something new and fresh, but similar enough to MVOL that people would be comfortable. Including, well… the people that pay my bills.

To be honest, that was one of the biggest scary moments going into this prototyping phase. Would the people that have been supporting me decide to move on if I moved to a project that was overly different? So to some extent, this was what I felt was the “safe” move to make sure I didn’t up and lose my livelihood in this transition, by offering something that hopefully appeals to the same demographics and the same sweet spots. It wasn’t the most exciting of the ideas I had lined up, but it was still interesting, and I felt I was ready to go the distance on it.

So, what happened? Well, a few things. First of all, I rolled out another big prototype with Project Wild One. I knew going in that at some point I might shift priorities and make another project my new Main Project, the one I focus on most while developing other ideas on the side. So from the start I expected I’d hold a survey like this at some point.

And to be honest, while Project Matchmaker has had a lot of interesting ideas to work with, I think I was much more audibly excited working on Project Wild One, even if it was a much larger challenge as a whole. And, for that matter, I feel like I’m getting a lot more feedback and hearing a lot more excitement around PWO than PMM. But PWO is more the type of game to invite that sort of stuff, while PMM is closer to a book you just read and enjoy without as much need for commenting, like MVOL was. That doesn’t necessarily mean it was more popular with people overall.

Meanwhile, despite Matchmaker being a much less technically ambitious project overall, more focused on prose content, it has turned into a grueling coding challenge for its own reasons I’ve talked a fair bit about in the past. At this point I’ve got a lot of frustrations with the project, but I still think I can make something good out of it. It’s just that at this point… I think that would basically require rebuilding the game’s code from the ground up, as I did with Wild One.

So! That makes for a lot of different reasons for this to become a very pressing question: how excited are people about each of these projects? How excited are people for more new prototypes after this? Will it be worth it to rebuild PMM from the ground up so I can keep expanding it, or is the “safe” option not really inspiring much interest from folks after all? Are my supporters still wanting something more similar to MVOL, or something even more different? Is the excitement I’m hearing around PWO just a vocal minority, or did I hit a sweet spot with that project?

As always, I won’t let the survey make my decisions for me, the final decision is mine, but it’s important to me that I have a clear idea of how my audience is feeling– and if I want to keep a roof over my head, I especially need to take the opinions of my supporters into account. So there’s a lot complicating this question, but I’m hoping to get feedback from everyone purely on the matter of the projects themselves: what’s worked? What hasn’t? What does everyone want and hope for from here? I know that to some extent if I come in here saying “I like this project better and this one is too much extra work” it can skew the results, especially since my audience tends to be so kind and supportive it can be a little embarrassing. I’m deeply grateful for how much you guys have encouraged me to forge my own path, but it’s important for me to get the raw truth about things like this, free of any such… leanings.

So that’s why I’m hoping folks will take the survey before reading all this, or at least do their best to answer purely with how they feel about their own interests. I’m overdue for a new Dev Journal actually, so in a few days I’ll probably put one out there folding together the results from the survey with a report on how development is going so far on the upcoming Project Voice.

So keep an eye out for that! Thanks for reading, thanks for playing my games, and thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts on my work!