Community Update 2 - Dev Q & A

Hello, Specialists!

This week we’ll be hitting our first month of launch on From Space! Time flies! During this time, your feedback and support have been instrumental in helping us shape the future of From Space.

To date, we’ve released 3 Patches (one each week!) dedicated to improvements, implementing player feedback, and additional features. Some of the feedback points raised in our first Community Update involved Matchmaking, and Save Games from a multiplayer session. At that time we announced that we’re investigating solutions to solve these points, and today we want to share a little more on where we’re at!

• Luke (Community Manager):
  Hello Remco! Great to have you here. We’re back with another Community Update, I know the team is excited to get to talk to the community and provide some updates. So let’s dive right in shall we? Remco (CEO - Triangle Studios):
  
• Luke (Q):
  So one of the questions we see from the community regarding matchmaking is “Why wasn’t this in-game already?” Can you provide a little insight into the decision on this during development?
  
  Remco (A):
  When we set out to create From Space, we chose a scope that fitted well with the capabilities of our team. We always wanted it to be a multiplayer experience, but we knew it would be difficult to sustain an online audience as an indie-title. So we chose to focus around playing with friends online.With a strong focus on what you want to build, you also have to make sacrifices for things that would be nice to have, but are simply too big for your team, planning or scope. In our case, this meant that we were not able to offer features like lobbies or matchmaking at launch. Something that we have learned many players expect as a basic functionality.
• Luke (Q):
  With being a smaller development team, you mention that prioritizing during development is a must. What are some of the challenges of implementing a matchmaking function into From Space?Remco (A):
  In order to answer this, I need to explain that In From Space, players are connected directly to each other. This means that one of the players is the host (or server) and the players who join the session are connected to this host. This is good because you don’t require a central server to keep track of all of the active players around the world. It is both cost-effective, as well as future proof.Now that we are looking into matchmaking and lobbies, we will need a way for players to play together, other than the friend invites that we currently support. Finding the right solution among dozens of options takes time, and we want to be careful with the choice we make.We also need to think about how matchmaking changes the experience of the player. Is the campaign still fun if you play with a random person? Do we need more features to help improve that experience? These are all questions that need answering, in addition to the new technical challenge of building such a feature.
• Luke (Q):
  So now we have more of an understanding of the challenges involved in implementing matchmaking, can you share some details on what the team is currently doing, or what areas they are looking at to bring this function to From Space?Remco (A):
  Our first step is upgrading our networking architecture. The one we’re using was a good choice at the start of the project, but it limits us too much now that our ambitions are growing.Once that upgrade is complete, we’ll have to do a lot of testing, or “quality assurance” work to make sure the game still works exactly like we intended. Once that all is done, we can start designing and building new features. Our challenge will be in finding the sweet spot where random players can have the same great experience as friends when they play together.This may come across as vague, but as is often the case in gamedev, there are a lot of uncertainties, and we don’t want to make any promises we can’t keep.
• Luke (Q)
  That’s great to hear, and we’ll continue to share updates and our open communications with the community as we edge closer to getting this in-game. Now let’s talk about another function players have been asking for, and that’s being able to bring their Save Game from a co-op session with them in their solo experience. Remco (A):
  This is an interesting one. We were surprised by the large number of people asking for this feature. We assumed that players would either play the game alone (and thus have a local save) or play it with friends (and thus re-join their friend if they wanted to play the game over multiple sessions). It’s become clear to us that players want more flexibility.We’ve also seen messages from players who are frustrated with being forced to play as a low-level character while their friend might already be at a higher level. To help these players, we’ve built a Catch Up feature that accelerates the XP you gain while playing if you’re at a lower level compared to the host in a session. This will make the process of catching up more fun and more importantly, a lot faster.
  
• Luke (Q):
  So now that we’ve implemented a solution for balancing that experience for players joining a session, what are the next steps to allow players to bring their co-op Save Game to their Solo experience? Remco (A):
  So this is what we’re working on right now. Players will have the option to continue any session, even if it’s one where they joined a friend. And as with the multiplayer feature, changing the way the game saves progress is something that we need to be really careful with. I think a lot of players will be very happy with this feature, as it gives you all the flexibility you want whether that is to continue locally, or re-joining your friend at a later time.
• Luke (Q):
  Our From Space fans in China are an important part of our global community, we’ve received a lot of valuable feedback from them, we couldn’t be more grateful for their support! One of the key feedback points we’ve seen here is regarding connectivity performance.
  
  Can the team provide any information on what we’re doing in this area to improve connection performance for our Chinese community?  Remco (A):
  To be honest, when developing From Space, we weren’t aware that it would be difficult for our Chinese players to connect to each-other, it came as a total shock! We understand the player's frustration, as you expect a game to work, so we immediately started working on possible solutions. We’ve started asking for help and are getting support from our partners to try and resolve the issue. We have discovered that the problem is with the way Internet Service Providers (ISPs) don’t always allow for “peering” between two players, which is exactly what the network architecture in From Space requires to work properly. This is why some players experience these problems, while others are able to play just fine. We have several possible solutions that we’re looking into, but all of them require us to upgrade our network architecture. This is the equivalent of changing an engine in a vehicle when it’s already driving on the road, so I hope players will understand that we work quickly but diligently on resolving this problem.
• Luke (Q): Alright, thanks for taking the time to sit down and provide the community with an update today! I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t press you on one more question we see a lot in the community! We’ve mentioned we’ll be sharing a Roadmap in future to showcase what content players can expect. At the moment our primary focus is on addressing player feedback, but can you share or even provide a little tease on what players might expect?Remco (A):
  Ooh, yes! Well, let me say that we have a *lot* of new ideas for From Space, and we’re hearing calls from our players who are asking for more content, or for ways to continue playing after they’ve finished the campaign.I can’t reveal too much of what we’re working on right now, but maybe I can just tease that there is something *SPECIAL* coming up soon. Too vague? Maybe!

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And that’s it for today! Thank you to our incredible community who continue to support us and share your ideas with us! Please continue to send us your feedback and suggestions!

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