Hello everyone, and welcome to the first developer log for our upcoming game Sanctuary! The team has been eagerly waiting to show you what we’ve been working on, and soon we will be giving you all regular updates on progress from our developers and artists.
We will give you an inside look into our processes twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays. You will be able to discuss these logs with us on the Sanctuary Discord. If you haven’t already found the link, you can click the discord icon in the top bar or at the bottom of this website.
Today, I will be going over the results of our recent community survey, giving you some insight into what you thought about our project so far, as well as responding to some common queries we received. If you are a patreon supporter, we will be giving extended insights to the raw data over there, as well as early access to future development logs. If you aren’t subscribed, it’s a good way to get a deeper inside look at our development on a more trusted level, but don’t feel obligated to! You can find our patreon also in the top bar and at the bottom of this website.
Now let’s see some of the key survey questions:
Which of these interest you with regards to Sanctuary?
The survey overwhelmingly showed our playerbase was interested in both multiplayer and singleplayer, with an emphasis on multiplayer, which is obvious given the initial public we built our discord from. Our players were more interested in casual and cooperative content with massive battles, but a substantial amount of players also seemed interested in competitive content, even just as spectators to seeing the best players play. This doubly means that we need our game to work on all the core levels, and therefore we believe the key approach is to make solid RTS fundamentals that will allow the game to be enjoyed by everybody. Some interesting answers included zero-player content. Some of you want to see artificial intelligence battling itself with various settings and watch a battle unfold while you spectate around. Artificial Intelligence is technically expensive to produce and will be one of the stretch goals of our kickstarter in August of 2022, so make sure you let your friends know about Sanctuary so we have the best chance of getting that in there.
How did you initially find out about Sanctuary?
We have found that our current marketing needs more effort for our project to really succeed. This is one of the primary reasons we have started this developer log, so that we can get our content out there and give people reasons to engage with us more than just having pre-alpha content on the Discord.
Thank you to everybody who has shared the progress of our game so far with their friends. We are committed to improving in this regard in the future.
We have been really interested in what drew people to our game’s different factions. Despite only surfacing some models and cursory descriptions, a surprising number of you were agreeing on very defined traits about the factions, even on things we hadn’t outright commented on. The EDA players love representing humans and the rugged, tough look we gave them. The Chosen enjoyed the aesthetics of their faction and their sleek yet powerful look. The Guard loved machines and ethics, two words we were glad to see could be related together in our universe. One thing we had not shown is gameplay, yet it seemed a lot of players had preloaded notions of what styles of gameplay the different factions should be! This was highly interesting to us, and shows how much impact our art has had on you. We will be giving you more gameplay related details as we build up those parts of the game.
How often do you play video games?
More than half of our respondents play every single day! Not surprising for a gaming community. It wasn’t surprising to us that we'd have so many dedicated gamers, given that our team is composed of them, but it seems we have the same situation within our community. We feel this is a great indicator that we’re making a game that appeals to those who will be able to play continuously when it is finally released. Sanctuary is a game we intend to provide hundreds if not thousands of hours of enjoyment. I know I’ve logged 17,864 hours on Steam alone to date over the last decade. Feel free to post your amount in the comments!
Which of these DLC models would you be willing to accept?
There was a huge fear that this question was asked to figure out how to best monetise you. This was actually a reality check for our team, to see if our team’s intention to avoid microtransactions was the general community sentiment. The community overwhelmingly wanted larger expansions more than any other kind of post-launch content. 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.
What is your most wanted feature to add to Sanctuary RTS?
We got a huge variety of responses here, but the clear winners were in the following categories:
Quality of Life. Micro + Macro RTS features
Performance
Large Battles
The bulk of our team are developers for precisely these reasons. Performance for something at the scale we are building is the key challenge. Challenges in allowing 1000s of units to operate in the game involve balancing the load on the cores in your processors, allowing each operation to run efficiently on them, and also creating a method of simulation despite commands being sent over higher latency networks.
In our next developer log, we will talk about these challenges with a nice piece by our performance developer BADUMP. It will involve you in the technicals at a level of transparency rarely shown by developers and we hope it’ll impress you.
Until the next developer log, I hope you have a great time engaging with our community. Feel free to talk to me on the community Discord, or alternatively you can message us on our other socials like Reddit. See you all next time! Timevir