When the devs at Fantastic Pixel Castle reference the community building around its MMO Ghost as a den of “wholesome chaos,” it’s clearly done with an affectionate tone. Thus opens the latest video podcast from the studio that features Community Manager Faye V. to talk about how FPC is managing its community and Ghost’s open development.
Faye discusses how she navigates the challenges of tech letting players connect with devs more than ever before, what she sees in terms of the game’s in-house progress, how she translates feedback to the devs, tactics for managing player aggression, and the impact of how community spaces don’t always tell the whole story of what players want.
The devs further talk about specific design choices for Ghost like making stopgap solutions for problems that arise in playtesting such as party members using a flare to find one another (since there’s no minimap) or how to guide players without handholding, particularly in the case of quests in the randomly generated blue zones. The question of AI tools also comes up at one point, with the devs agreeing that those tools have their uses but only for “grunt work,” leaving creativity up to humans.
There’s also a point when the benefits of Ghost’s open development and FPC’s approach is brought up. It’s at this point when studio head Greg Street notes that public playtesting likely won’t happen this year, but when it does, there likely won’t be an NDA in order to gather additional feedback.
Speaking of Ghost’s progress, the podcast opens with Street noting that development is “a little ahead of where [he] hoped to be, which is great.” The project is now at a point when it’s ready to do monthly playtests outside of the studio for at least the next four months. These tests won’t be open to invites or requests and will be “really small” – the first test in September will be only 25 people – and are primarily going to start off with technical matters like connecting to the game outside of a VPN and account management.
Street also mentions that the blue zone concept has been more fleshed out and functional, noting how one playtester excitedly shared a screenshot from one such generated zone as a high point in that process.
