We recently had our first public playtest for Gateworlds - the fantasy colony sim about exploring floating worlds and appeasing fickle gods. We gained a lot of helpful feedback and thought we'd share some of the interesting insights!
Here are some of the notable facts that stood out over the two weeks that the public playtest ran:
Of the 1,473 people that signed up for the test, 67 "beat" the demo (received the final notification). This makes sense. Our game is largely an open-ended sandbox. There are a ton of different ways to play, and most people set their own goals. We were expecting very few people to actually play all the way through.
Our median playtime was 25 minutes, which was exactly what we were hoping to find. The playtest version of the game had very limited content and we were mostly testing our tutorial experience. That said, one person played a total of 15 hours over 20 sessions. Our data is anonymised, but a shout out to whoever played it that much!
20 characters lost their lives: either everyone is really good at taking care of their village, or our characters are very strong.
23,882 trees were chopped down and a total of 15,425 wooden walls were built. As is tradition with colony sims, everyone starts with the wooden shack in the woods.
The most hunted entity was the jackalope with 2,351 killed, followed closely by the even more threatening spinach, with 2,034 "killed". Good to know players were keeping their characters well fed.
74 players went to a new world, but only 6 moved their base to a new world. This is not unexpected, as we are still working on the full travel and progression systems. However, what was surprising was that one person somehow managed to find their way back to the shattered world you start on - not sure how they did it but it was a good challenge for us to look into.
There are a lot of other data points that we've been analysing and we're very excited to make some pretty big changes.
We are currently working hard towards our next major playtest - we'll be making an announcement about that soon.
One of the biggest points of feedback we're addressing is the worlds travel. We're working hard on a revamped system for travelling between worlds. This system will include persistent worlds so that players can jump between multiple worlds and really get stuck into the exploration.
We'll also be revamping a few of the world types so that there is more stuff to find and more of a challenge presented.
A huge thank you to everyone who tested the game previously and if anyone wants to join a future test then you can sign up to it on our Steam page. Or join the Discord if you want to try it sooner!