Greetings travellers,

the new year is here, we’ve evaluated the first Fireside semi-public playtest since Gamescom and would like to share the results! Generally, we’re very happy with how the playtest went. 458 of you played Fireside between December 27^th and January 19^th! In total, you played for 352 hours. That’s about 45 minutes of play time per player and way more than we would have expected before the playtest. Afterall as Jesse Schell said, the 21^st century is a war for attention and getting 45 minutes of people’s valuable time is a great sign that you all enjoyed Fireside!

This is further supported by the positive qualitative feedback you sent us via the in game feedback feature! Most commonly, you complimented us on the game’s sound, narration, art style and relaxing atmosphere. Since these are the focus-points of fireside we’re very happy that you enjoyed this! Also, the average rating you gave our game increased by a mind-blowing 10 points from 75,22 at Gamescom to 85,58 at the playtest. If this was our meta-score we’d be very happy (although you all were more lenient most likely since this version was communicated as a prototype!). All of this makes us confident that we’re heading in the right direction while developing Fireside.

So while all the positive feedback you sent makes us happy and motivated to continue developing Fireside, you also provided some great constructive feedback and found bugs we can work to fix! You found 55 unique bugs and issues some of which (such as the missing portraits for procedurally generated NPCs or items mysteriously vanishing in the game over screen) were more common than others (soul energy tokens not always being saved correctly or the game freezing when travelling to the island). We’re in the progress of fixing these bugs and will deploy a patch asap!

Additionally, you provided 102 unique points of feedback. Here – it needs to be said – we won’t be able to realize everything you wished for (e.g. subtitles for the developer commentary) but will do our best to consider your feedback in further development. Some points such as your request to add keyboard / controller support are straight forward to implement (although they still quite some effort) others such as improving the overall balancing of the trading system are on our agenda too.

With all that said: We’re still looking for a publisher willing to fund the further development of Fireside. Thanks to the gracious support of FFF Bayern, we’ve been able to develop the prototype you were able to playtest. However, finishing Fireside will not be able with that budget. That is why our main priority is using the currently available prototype and data we gathered to find a partner with whom we can complete development. Until then, the project will have to shift down a gear, but we’re confident that we can finish Fireside one way or the other, so let’s see where this journey takes us from here!

See you in the next devlog

- Your Fireside team