Survey results are here! Some thoughts and plans for the future!

Hi everyone! General Krukov here. First of all, I would like to thank everyone for participating in the survey! It was my first attempt in doing so, and I was absolutely surprised with the data I managed to collect through it! You've all contributed to the future of Victory Road positively! I would like to take the opportunity to go over some of the survey results as well as my thoughts on them.

According to the survey, it seems like about 60% of the people found this game through steam itself, and 40% from YouTube and twitch. It's really interesting how so many people actually ended up stumbling upon this game randomly on steam. I was also reminded that indeed no one really knows about this game's existence outside of steam. This is mostly my bad on not doing much marketing at all, but I find peace in current state of the fan base and rate of new players coming in. Victory Road is not a finished game, and there are things I have planned to include in the game already. So I think the game needs to be in an unknown state until it's ready for the wider audience. The game is, in my opinion, perfectly playable at current state, but I do realize a lot of improvements can be made. I plan to include enough features in the game within this year to confidently market this game to more people!

Now let's go over some fun details. Here is the pie graph for favorite style!

As you can see, infighter is about 50% of the entire player base with other styles split almost in half. This is exactly what I wanted to see as Infighter is a style meant for beginners while other fighting style requires careful planning and execution to shine. Very happy to see this result.

And here is the favorite attack pie graph!

I'm surprised to see straight only having 9% popularity, as it's an attack that covers the most range and it also gets even more range buff if you are an Outboxer. I can see how bodyshot gets a similar job done with extra effect of taking away max stamina. So maybe I should possibly give straight a buff.

Here is the difficulty graph for victory road. As you can see, 58% of the people answered it to be around normal difficulty. I'm very happy to see this as it probably means I balanced it just right for most players.

Here is the graph for what annoys people the most. As I suspected, food planning takes the number one spot here. I plan to do something about this by adding a sort and auto meal plan button, but we will see how it goes. For Item usage, I can add some option to turn it off, but I'm not sure if that's entirely positive for the game experience as a whole. I can see it will please the players who want a more realistic experience, though. Hot dog minigame I don't really have much intention to change, since that's just one way to earn money in the game. People can choose to seek alternate ways to earn instead if it's not their cup of tea.

Now, the most exciting part of the survey. New feature graph! I know this graph is almost impossible to read. I will let you know that the top three features picked by the community is Rival system, Dojo, and better random events. As a result, I'm actually writing this post while taking a break from working on the Dojo. The functional aspect of Dojo is already finished, but I need to take some time to draw the necessary art assets for the new feature. Such is the life of single member game developer, I guess.

As for the road map, I plan to roughly update the game in the following order for now.

dojo part 1 -> tourney -> rival system -> random events -> extra AI behavior system - > dojo part 2

I've separated dojo into two parts mainly because I want to strengthen the reward aspect of dojo to something beyond just stats in the future. If you don't see what you've voted for in the road map, do not worry. Despite the fact that I asked you guys to pick only three, most of the things I've initially mentioned in the survey have a very high chance to make it into the game(unless something happens and I lose the motivation to go on, but that isn't very likely for now). I've noticed multiple people requesting more blood in the game as well. So to those of you who asked for that, that's in the works as well.

Lastly, I've left a final question in the survey asking about opinions/criticism/impression about the current state of the game. I was honestly bracing myself for massive amount of criticism, but instead, I got surprising amount of praise and words of encouragement. Thank you all very, very much. This really motivated me to keep going with the development with a very positive attitude. You guys are the best! Keep in mind that, if your point was not mentioned, do not worry as I've actually taken the time to read every single thing that was mentioned in the survey and they are all in my head. So you may see them in some form or another in the future! Now, we don't know how much stuff will end up going into Victory Road beyond the things mentioned, but let's all hope that it sells enough later down the line for me to justify spending more and more time on it! Thank you, friends!

P.S. I'm actually moving one more time on 25th to finally settle for the next 18 months. So if you don't see any updates, that is the reason why(although I'm trying my best to push one out before that).