Improving Communication: The Development Manifesto (Please Read First!)

Communication is Important
At Grinding Gear Games, we've always treated communication with the community as a priority. I spend several hours of each day on external communication (that's not counting answering emails), but feel that we can still improve the way that we communicate with you guys. This article explains some of the ways that we're planning on improving communication in the short term:

The Development Manifesto
The purpose of this development manifesto forum is for us to open topics on specific issues that we're working on so that we can explain how they're going to work. It's also a great place to discuss specific design philosophies that we base many of our decisions around. Please note that there are still plenty of topics that will be posted! This initial set are just the ones that we have ready in the first pass. More will be added in the coming days/weeks.

How Manifesto Updates Will Work
Initially, the manifesto will be updated by adding more topics. As they become out of date, we'll update the existing posts to make sure that they always accurately reflect our current line of thinking on those issues. When there's a meaningful update to a manifest post, I'll mention it in the daily news. Keep an eye on both that forum and this one to stay up to date :)

Explanations in Patch Notes
Starting with update 1.1.2b, our patch notes have included much more detailed explanations of changes than before. A lot of thinking goes into any rebalancing that we do, so we're going to be as detailed about this process as possible. In some cases, a rebalance may be foreshadowed by a post in this development manifesto forum, so that people are aware of it in advance.

Daily News
We post an update in the news every New Zealand weekday. Sometimes it's about a new game feature, other times it's about an upcoming patch or microtransaction. I'm very proud that we've kept this routine up for so long, because so much of our feedback comes from news posts. They're a great place for us to reach out with updates about small topics or to call out awesome community efforts. We will continue these daily news posts.

Build of the Week
These are an incredibly powerful marketing tool, so we've resumed releasing one per week.

Note: We love reading your thoughts on our proposed changes or design philosophies. Replies are enabled in the Development Manifesto forum, but please only post constructive on-topic discussion in each of the threads. We may remove posts that are low on content or contain hateful non-constructive sentiment. This forum can be an ideal place for a dialogue about upcoming changes!