How do you bring back your seasonal updates?

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
#1

Dilemma:
Last year, your game’s christmas update was AMAZING!!! It took you longer than a month to create… you turned your whole map into a winter wonderland, made a cozy cabin, even a snowboarding slope with a special Santa event! Your whole playerbased loved it so much that they are expecting it to make a comeback this year again.

You want to bring it back, but the map/game has changed so much since then… after all, it’s been a whole year.

Do you boot up the year-old copy you saved, and try to copy pasta literally every little new change you’ve done in the whole year into the old map? lord knows i can’t even recall what I did last week much less what I did the whole year…
or do you try porting the old update into your current game? you realized just how much has changed when your christmas tree is now in the middle of the ocean.

What I do (bery bad):
most of time, i can barely even stand to look at last year’s creations. in my head it might be salvagable, til i boot the place up and see how much can be improved on (and now finally realize just how much i’ve learned in the past year) i dabble in fixing some issues for 10 minutes until i see more and more issues piling up… then i just end up just making it entirely from scratch because not only is it easier, more fun, but also fresh and new.

I still feel bad for scrapping content people loved… i like to say “it is better in your memory”.
buuut i don’t think im convincing enough.

how do you go about bring back old versions of maps when a holiday, or any yearly event, comes back around? what are your methods of integrating your old map into new content?

sidetracked question: holiday updates have taken up so much of my time its not even funny, when do you find the time to work on permanent updates?
here’s a basic rundown of my year long schedule: (spoiler alert, april is like my only completely free month)
september: working on Halloween/Dia de los Muertos
october: mentally recovering from the giant halloween update/get a little bit of permanent work done
november: working on christmas/putting game back to normal from halloween
december: recovery/working on big new years update
january: working on valentines/mardi gras/removing christmas
feb: working on saint patricks
march: working on easter/april fools day
april: omg finally some time to work on perm updates and not holidays!!
may/june: BIG SUMMER UPDATE COMING RIGHT UP!!
july: lets just stop what we are doing and whip out 4th of july/canada day real quick
august: mentally preparing for the update that is halloween/ some time to work
(repeat)

you’d think maybe i could remove maybe a smaller holiday like… saint patricks from the list, but no, our rainy day treasure update for st. p’s is one of the player’s most favorite holiday updates

please save me from this cycle

19 Likes
#2

Remember when there was a concept called familiarity and novelty? To apply this concept, you use a mechanic/feature that everyone is familiar with every single year, but always include a new feature. Feedback from the playerbase is also important, to avoid having the “bad” novelty to the addition.

DO

  • Keep the familiarity simple
  • The cherry on the top is the novelty

DON’T

  • Overcomplicate the experience; elite competitive-styled events
  • Unbalance the familiarity and the novelty(based on the playerbase)
4 Likes
#3

Personally I like to do this with a script, for example you make the map and then put it into server storage and it can replicate to the game when your ready.

2 Likes
#4

You should get the old map again, and move all the little trees and cabins ect. to fit the new map, so what i’m saying is move all the models and meshes to different places to fit in your new map :slight_smile:
And don’t stress. Don’t get overwhelmed. I know it’s a lot, but if you keep calm you could do it faster. You should get more developer members to help you with making the game. I’m not sure if all that will help you, but it might :slight_smile:

1 Like
#5

It seems like you have a lot of existing issues that lead to your question of how seasonal updates should be implemented into a game.

Workflow
Your example briefly mentions copy and pasting “every little chance you’ve done in the whole year.” If this example was brought up by the fact that you have to manually push out these updates on a regular basis you should reconsider how you publish these updates to begin with. @SolsticeDevs’s reply somewhat covers a solution for this problem: design your core game scripts to be scalable with Holiday events. An example of this would be to store map changes/effects in ServerStorage and have the game deploy them by either using a variable to set a certain holiday, or have it set to a calendar/timer (may be a little trickier but it’s certainly doable.)

Content
The first thing you need to do with this kind of stuff is identify what audience you want to have the most influence on. Do you want to expand your player base or retain your existing player base? Do you want to do both?

I’m not 100% familiar with your games but am aware of who you are and the type of games you make/who engages with them, but use this sentiment towards your updates to your advantage. Instead of purely re-using content from previous updates, expand on them a little bit, but not too much where players are no longer able to identify what they loved about previous iterations of the same content.