Producer's Newsletter: September 2014

Discussion in 'Dev Blog' started by teddy.bear, Sep 4, 2014.

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  1. teddy.bear

    teddy.bear Board Administrator Team Farmerama EN

    Howdy Farmers,

    Here is the Producer's newsletter for September 2014, we hope you enjoy it!

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    Hello Farmerama players!

    Since I’m very much new here, let me begin by introducing myself. My name is Varun, I’m an Indian born male who recently joined Bigpoint and moved to Hamburg, Germany. I’ve been on Farmerama for a little less than 3 months now and I’m starting to feel at home.

    Prior to joining Bigpoint, I was a Producer at Zynga. During my time there, I had the opportunity to Produce various casual, arcade and mid core games. I was based out of Bangalore, India but my job involved a lot of travelling to San Francisco and Los Angeles. This however is my first time in Europe and I’m slowly settling in. My friends and colleagues in the Farmerama team have been very supportive. I started my gaming career as a forum moderator on some role playing and MOBA games. I used this experience to eventually start a full time role as a Community Manager in my previous job. This experience has led to me having a good relationship with the community. As someone who is a passionate gamer, I understand and empathize with the community and understand the frustrations involved. I will try my best to keep you all happy and I hope to provide the best experience for you all on Farmerama.

    I must admit, this newsletter will be short and it might not touch upon in detail all the topics that you would like me to address. However, I will assure you that this newsletter will be sent out every month. The community managers and board teams collected all open questions and forwarded them to me and will of course continue to funnel your questions to me in a direct way. I would like to express my vision for Farmerama in this newsletter. However, these are my immediate priorities for the following months:​

    1. Bahamarama 3/Coral Reef:
    I’m happy to announce that we’ve finally started full production of this massive feature. We took some time to plan out our tasks and have a solid tech infrastructure and plan in place before beginning full development. I wouldn’t want to share too much of the feature details in this newsletter cause I plan to touch more upon it next month’s newsletter. I did however; want to share with you a sneak peek of the feature.​

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    This image was put together by our 3D Artist who has been working hard on this for the last couple of weeks. We hope you like it and look forward to it as much as well do. Here is a short summary of the feature for you all:

    The coral reef barrier is suffering from an ecological crisis. The Bahamarama harbor will now allow players to launch expeditions and help the local communities rebuild the ecosystem of the coral reefs surrounding their islands. You will need to find surviving sea life samples in polluted waters, plant these organisms in the local aquatic life centers of the islands, plant healthy sea life of all sorts to rebuild the ecological diversity of the coral reef.

    Unfortunately, I can’t tell you when exactly this feature will release and be available for you all to play but I’m confident it is going to be sooner than most of you all think. I hope to have a release date ready for you in the next newsletter. I’m trying my best to not make any false promises :)

    2. Stabilize Weekly Event Releases:
    We’ve been working hard on this during the last few weeks. Unfortunately, our weekly event releases currently involve a lot of effort and require a lot of man power. This stops us from being able to work on improvements and long term features for the game. I’ve been working hard with the Tech Producers and Lead Engineers to find a solution for this. I hope over the coming weeks this falls in place. In addition to this, I’m working with the designers on providing the right balance of events and sales for you all. I’m sure you’ve already noticed some of the changes we made to our sales schedule. My direction to the design team is to try as many things as we possibly can. Our long term players strongly need a challenge in the game. A challenge which can be provided with the right variety of existing and new content. I’ve also been focusing on improving certain existing mechanics, Barnyard Bills Prices in the game, usability issues and some historic bugs that exist in our weekly event releases due to old code.

    My Vision for the Game

    For the last month, I’ve worked hard on establishing a vision for the game. I want the game and the team to work towards one direction and one goal. This goal is to provide the best farming experience to our players. To ensure that playing Farmerama is the best part of your day, the thing that our players look forward to the most.

    These are my next set of priorities:

    1. Fix Balancing and Pricing Issues
    We’ve heard numerous times from our players regarding the balancing issues in the game. New players find some of our quest tasks too hard whereas the long term players are starting to lack a challenge in this game. We’re working on a solution for both of these problems. After taking over the game, I’ve prioritized the development of certain new features and mechanics. We’re also working to bringing some the popular mechanics that were introduced recently and applying them to a wider variety of quests.

    2. Provide Content for Long Term Players
    Through my conversations with the team, I’ve reminded everyone that our long term players are our biggest priority. We appreciate the amount of time and effort you’ve all put into playing our game through the years. We’re currently conceptualizing a new event mechanic which will cater exclusively to our long term players. What exactly will the event involve? More details soon! Our long term plans also include more content update releases, new quest mechanics. We are also working on finding a way to sink stars for our old time players. This has been an old community request and we will try our best to deliver a feature which will serve this need.

    3. Provide More Space
    Having played Farmerama extensively over the last few months, I know one of the biggest player frustrations is the lack of space or real estate in the game. This to me is a problem that has been ignored for far too long. While we would like to launch new playfields, this requires months and months of work and is not easy to implement. However, we’re currently conceptualizing a feature called “Storage Quarters” which will let you all store your stables, Breeding pens without having to turn them inactive. This is just a concept for the moment, more details are coming your way in the next Producer newsletter!

    In other news, I’ve started enforcing a culture of honesty and transparency between the game team and its players. On this regard, I would like to share some news regarding the mentoring rework. Unfortunately, we ran into a lot of technical issues during the development of this feature. These issues did not have a quick or a short term solution. The team collectively decided to put development of this feature on hold. It is my wish that our features and our releases are of the highest quality and I did not want us working on a feature that could potentially involve future rework. I assure you all that we’re not cancelling development on this; it is just on hold at the moment. Once we have the adequate resourcing and tech infrastructure in place, we will proceed with this. It was a difficult decision for us, but we hope that you trust our judgement. I hope to bring you better news on this topic with the next producer newsletter.

    Thank you very much for your patience and I hope to interact with you more often. I will be active on the English forums and I hope to interact with you a lot more often. The Team and I are looking forward to making this game the best experience we can provide you all.​

    Regards,
    Your Farmerama Team

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    SuzieQ and aleksandra_kogerman like this.
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