Its been a long time since I've written anything, and I want to write stuff, so I will. I've spent my time these last few months working on The Diviner, an RPG with Visual Novel influences. Its been a ton of fun, and its really made me evolve as an individual. I had to rewrite the first sentence three or four times because I fell back into my "professional voice". When working with Two Crowns Entertainment and posting on their behalf, I have a particular way that I form my language, that is significantly different from how I normally talk. I use terms such as "I wanted to take this opportunity" and "I felt that this was a good time". This language reeks of an official message, and while that isn't an issue, its not who I am - most of the time.
When talking with our backers, I make sure not to promise anything that I can't guarantee. I don't want our supporters to become disillusioned with us, so I need to make sure that we keep the expectations reasonable. Furthermore, for the duration of our Kickstarter, we were in early development, so most mechanics and a lot of how the game actually works was in flux. When somebody asked how a particular element was going to be implemented, I did want to communicate with them our current plans. Something that I appreciated from both Riot Games and Blizzard Entertainment is their communication with their players, at the very least including their thought process behind any decisions they make. However, I needed to be sure that any messages I sent out were clear in their language indicating that the current designs were not necessarily the final designs so that nobody would expect something that we cut.
Since I want to avoid lying, I couch my language in loopholes, saying things along the lines of "Our current plans are..." or "We hope to do that in this way" which makes it look the same as if I was giving false information. Of course, some of the information I did disperse was false, because we changed our designs, rather being false due to maliciousness.
I do enjoy the challenge of framing my language properly, but it isn't what I enjoy most. As our "Communications Director" I get to read all of the comments and mails that we get. The excitement and curiosiity of the backers is invigorating. When we get an email saying "I just wanted to say you guys are doing great work!" it makes me glad that I'm doing what I'm doing.
I also am in charge of running the surveys and analysing the data we receive. I use the information that I get from these surveys to help inform the decisions we make, but I trust in our instincts more than the masses. However, when our instincts are stuck between two options, the opinions of our backers is very helpful. They let us know what they expect, or want, and, as always, we want to make them happy. Its really awesome when somebody says "I was excited about the game before this decision, but what you said here makes me even more excited."
The best part of the surveys though, is once the data has been collected and I make a decision, I explain the choice that we make to our backers, including the data from survey and how that affected our thought process. I've gone with options that were less popular in the survey, but after explaining why, multiple backers have said "I voted against that option, but after reading your explanation, I am glad that you chose that path." Getting further support from backers is incredibly gratifying.
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