Survey results + future plans + other news

Hi everyone! Hope you're doing well. I'm back from summer vacation and now it's the perfect time to enlighten you about some of the news and plans for Crumple Zone.

Ok first off and better late than never - Crumple Zone now has a Twitter account @CrumpleZoneGame The steam store page and community hub will still be the main focus for major updates but Twitter might be a cool place for everything else such as gameplay videos, off topic stuff etc. Also, if you like Crumple Zone and retweet the occasional post, it could help spread the word about the game.

Survey results

Anyways, now to the probably more interesting topic: The survey about the future of Crumple Zone is closed - thanks to anyone who took part! I'll show the most important results and tell you what it means for the game's road map.

Major new feature

This one surprised me the most. I could have bet that online multiplayer wins but it actually came in last. Ok, it needs to be considered that there are probably some players who haven't bought the game because it lacks online MP and they did not participate in the survey. So I still think it's important but I find modding support very interesting too, so I will start with that. More on that in the road map.

Minor new feature

Pretty close, but two features stand out, Photo Mode and Opponent Back Stories / Profiles.

Content

"Tracks" were leading here for quite some time but were overtaken by "Cars". Still quite close though, so I will try to add both in the future.

Platforms

This is quite interesting, Android is the clear winner, but Virtual Reality, although being a niche sort of thing, came in second. That's cool, I got a VR headset myself and enjoy the technology, so I might try something out. With both Android and VR though, it's more of an experimental thing - if I find the time, I'll check out how much effort is needed to port to those platforms and whether it's feasible at all, while updates for the regular PC version always have priority.

Development Roadmap

With the insights gathered from the survey results, I plan the following updates for Crumple Zone:

1. Minor update in September I want to release an update this month which includes the 2 top "minor" features from the poll, a photo mode and opponent profiles + some smaller fixes and improvements
2. Workshop integration with custom paintjobs After the minor update is done, I'll look into integrating the steam workshop API and as a sort of proof of concept, I will use it to allow you to upload and add custom paintjob graphics to the game. This will be a very simple use case that is perfect for getting the workshop system to run before adding more complex modding capabilities.
3. Track and/or car modding support Once the workshop integration stands, I'll work on a way to integrate custom tracks or cars. This will be some time at the end of this year probably. Although cars got more votes, I might start with tracks because they are less complex and specific to the game, so they should be easier to do. I could even imagine an in-game track editor.
4. Other platforms and online multiplayer I will start working on these but not before next year

I hope this gives you a rough idea about what to expect in the future, I will go into more detail when the time is right, so stay tuned and happy crumpling!