I wouldn’t really be myself if I didn’t reiterate my thanks for the support you give us. It applies to all of the time and energy focused on Dying Light, but I’d like to give an extra special shout out to those who extended such a warm welcome to our Community Ideas initiative. We’re really making history here, and it’s only possible because of you.
For the uninitiated – Community Ideas is a special place, where you can submit your requested features and stuff you’d like to see added to our game. You can find it on our community hub, Pilgrim Outpost. We set up the beta version at the end of June, with the full version of the Community Ideas subpage launching in October.
As it is the case with every innovative idea, we had to learn some things the hard way, on the go. We’ve been perfecting and polishing this formula – and much of it thanks to you. On our side, Magda and Wojtek are among the people who take care of the Community Ideas behind the scenes. It’s definitely a collective effort, with many people across different departments contributing to make it all come together. Wojtek Michalak, our Publishing Digital Solutions Lead who conceived this idea, has his eye on the quality control. He says:
“Keyword search bar, extended categories filter, multiple language support, and entry translation powered by Google API are just some of the features we’ve implemented – on your request, but also because it made so much sense to do so. We will keep on upgrading, so finding cool ideas and voting for them is as convenient for you as possible.”
While we have been gradually adding functionalities to the submission page, you were also pretty busy. Since June, you’ve been sending us thousands upon thousands of ideas! Magda Marcinkowska, Techland’s Digital Producer that put this project into action, says:
“I’m not gonna lie, we were totally floored with the reception. Delighted as well, to be sure, because the enthusiasm was huge! The thing is, with such a large number of entries, some ideas were bound to be repeated. So, we checked the submissions in order to detect duplicates and weed out potential redundancies, which makes it easier for you to vote in the end.”
In total, we received almost 10 000 of your ideas! Now, remember that all of them needed to go through this cleanup process, and that’s a fair bit of work. We know some of you have been waiting for quite a long time to have your idea published or receive a notification about its status. I’m glad to report that as of now, all initially submitted ideas have been reviewed and the accepted ones are published on the site. We’re talking about 2.5k entries here! We’ll give those yet another pass, so that we can be sure the ideas that we keep are not only great, but also feasible to implement.
You can go on and browse the database to find the ideas you support, share them on your social media channels, and vote for them to be moved to the dev review stage. If you come up with something that hasn’t been published yet – good news! We’re reopening the submissions, so you can send it to us. Note that if you send us a duplicate of an existing idea, it won’t get accepted, so please check thoroughly before creating a new entry!
There are thousands of ideas, and it somehow turns out that the most popular ones, those you simply love voting for, are usually real heavy hitters! A lot of them take a huge amount of effort to be implemented, so I’d like to give a shout out to the Devs who work on them, on top of other things. Check out what’s already in the game and what’s currently in development on the dedicated Community Ideas page!
As I was saying, when your ideas get accepted, they end up in our development schedule. But there are times when we really like a concept, but realizing it would be a huge time and resource commitment on our part. As a consequence, it’s not always possible to introduce such submissions to our schedule right away, so we’ve created another tab, called Backlog. It’s a place for us to temporarily store concepts that we really like the sound of, but can’t commit to implementing at the moment.
In the near future, I’d like to devote a couple of blogs to talk about some of your ideas in detail. We will share the ins and outs of their implementation, how we approach realization, how much time it takes and why so long, and so on. Maybe we’ll also talk about some of the rejected ones, to paint a fuller picture of why we won’t be doing them.
In my opinion, Community Ideas is a fantastic initiative – one we’ll be continuing, no doubt about that. It’s pretty unique on a global scale, meaning that not many – if any – of the developers in the entire industry have attempted something like this. Well, you know that we are very big on community-driven collaborative development, and Community Ideas is a perfect tool to bridge the gap and get to know your expectations.
