We are now accepting applications for our player advisory council. If you’re interested in volunteering for this opportunity, you can apply online right now.

We will collect applications from now until the 30th of January. We’ll update everyone on the progress of our evaluation by the end of February. Keep an eye on this space for details.

What’s the point of this Player Council thing anyway?

If you’re like me, and you’ve been playing games for more years than you care to say, the idea of a “player council” may seem a little odd. It certainly did to me when I first heard it. The more I thought about it, however, the more sense it made, to the point where I now consider it an intrinsic part of the culture we want to build around Heatwave.

Since many of us have extensive online game development experience, we understand all too well the importance of the community to the long-term success of any game. We foresee the industry moving toward involving players earlier and earlier in the dev cycle. And we want to blaze the trail by building a dedicated cadre of volunteer players and engaging them as early as it is reasonable to do so.

So what will the council do? The best explanation I can offer is by way of an example. Many authors have a group of what are commonly called “first readers.” This is a trusted circle of friends who are the first people to see a completed draft of the author’s work. That author knows that their first readers can be relied on to offer useful feedback on the plot, characters, structure, pacing and so on.

Our player council will function a lot like our circle of “first readers.” They will have an opportunity to see our products at various stages in development and offer constructive criticism. Sometimes, because the development process can take a long time, development teams can become insulated from the outside world. We want a group of dedicated “fresh eyeballs” who can point out things that are obvious to anyone who doesn’t work on the game every day.