Future of Festivals

Hello, my name is Stacy, and I’m the Game Director for Star Stable Online! I hold the game’s vision and direction, guiding the team as we navigate through familiar (and unfamiliar) territories, crafting an unforgettable gaming experience. 

Festivals are some of our most exciting times in Jorvik! Citizens come together to celebrate, participate in themed activities, and socialize in ways different from their regular, everyday routines. Just like in the real world, festivals emphasize tradition and nostalgia, and it can be challenging to change things up!

You may remember that one of our main goals with festivals was first to get a handle on the pipelines and workflows when it came to their creation and delivery. We had a great number of festivals throughout the year, and many times, the most we could deliver was straight-up reactivations across the board, and even this left little time for our team to work on anything else. Players were unhappy with the lack of new content in and around festivals, and our team was frustrated with stressful productions. Something had to change!

We focused on limiting the number of festivals we did each year and putting most of our attention on the heavy hitters - the festivals that players engaged with the most and were the most excited about when they released. We also wanted to emphasize how these festivals fit within the lore and world of Jorvik. So, we challenged certain festivals such as Valentine’s, Easter, and Midsummer while highlighting others such as Equestrian, Halloween, and Winter. It’s easy to look back fondly now and remember the positives of festivals such as Easter, but at the time, they were also buggy, challenging to work with, and sometimes not so fun to play. Through analyzing our internal data, we saw this clearly manifested through negative sentiment trends and lack of engagement. They needed to be paused.

We continue to look at all of these factors for our current festivals to prepare for those tough calls for changes when they arise. Last year, we down-prioritized work on the Rainbow Festival by only doing a reactivation, which meant that our team could focus on the new Western content at Starshine Ranch and the new gameplay in Hollow Woods. This was the right call, with Rainbow Festival being one of the festivals players engage with less. Knowing this, there will be some additional changes to Rainbow Festival this year that allow us to prioritize other exciting things on the horizon that will deliver more of what players have been asking for!

There are also opportunities for us to take content released during festivals and add it permanently to the game instead. The Western content last year, while treated like a festival, was our first attempt at adding particular types of gameplay to Jorvik. Seeing the positive reactions, we felt this content should be integrated into Starshine Ranch permanently, and we’ll be doing just that in the coming months. Lunging and dressage are other examples of content tried in festivals and proven to be popular, so they’ll start popping up around the world to stay!

And of course, this doesn’t mean you won’t see the return of past favorites such as Valentine’s or Midsummer ever again, but they may return in different forms throughout the years. Sometimes highlighted on social media, sometimes as small activations in the game, or maybe their future lies in revamped festivals down the road. Creating structure actually gives us more flexibility to be creative and proactive within these organized processes, and we want players’ interests, in-game actions, and voices to guide us in those choices!