Far From Home and Feature Upvote

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Far From Home is the Wrocław-based studio behind Forever Skies, a post-apocalyptic survival game set on an ecologically ruined Earth. During Early Access, players had plenty of ideas about how that world should evolve, and the team turned to Feature Upvote to help make sense of them.

We spoke with Greg Cummings, Social Content and Community Manager at Far From Home, about how the studio identified ideas with wider support, turned player suggestions into in-game features, and what other developers can learn from their experience—including why he wishes they’d introduced Feature Upvote sooner.

Key takeaways: Help your community shape the game from the start

“If you establish Feature Upvote from the very start, it gets them using it straight away and they get used to using that.”

What other teams can learn from Forever Skies:

1. Start early to establish a home for feedback from the beginning of Early Access.
2. Educate your players on searching for suggestions, voting, and sharing one idea per post.
3. Manage expectations by explaining that popular requests still need to fit the game’s vision.
4. Bring evidence into development discussions with vote counts that show support for player ideas.
5. Act on community suggestions to show players they have a real part in shaping the game.

“It’s really hard to understand just how popular a suggestion is”

Early Access invites players to play from the get-go and help shape the game as it develops. It’s about more than spotting bugs—you want players to feel like they’re part of the development team. For Forever Skies, that meant a steady stream of ideas, requests, and opinions.

But how does the team decide which feedback to act on?

One of the challenges Greg highlighted was distinguishing a widespread concern from the opinions of a particularly vocal group:

“Working on an early access game especially, you get players constantly bombarding you with feedback or ideas and suggestions about the kind of content that can go into it. And that’s really great on one hand, but also at the same time it’s really hard to understand just how popular a suggestion is.”

After looking at several tools, the team chose Feature Upvote to give those suggestions a shared home and make support for individual ideas easier to see.

“It was a way to actually fully gauge and understand player sentiment with each individual idea or bit of feedback that players had.”

“Make sure you do it from the start”

If Greg could share one piece of advice with teams preparing for Early Access, it would be to introduce Feature Upvote from the start.

Forever Skies adopted Feature Upvote roughly ten months into Early Access. By then, players were already accustomed to leaving their suggestions in other places, and introducing a new process took work.

“It would have been good on my part to make sure that I had this platform set up at the launch of early access, but I didn’t launch it till about maybe 10 months after the start of early access.”

If your feedback board is ready on day one, players know where to share their ideas, and community managers know where to find feedback and send players who have suggestions.

For Greg, starting early is as much about building a habit as it is about choosing a tool.

“Now we’ve got into a really good rhythm of it”

Since the game was already established, players were used to leaving feedback across different channels. Helping them get familiar with Feature Upvote took some guidance, and Discord moderators played a big part.

When someone shared an idea on Discord, moderators directed them to the Feature Upvote board to see if it had already been suggested. Players could then vote for the existing suggestion or post a new one. These reminders helped the community get used to using the board.

That effort paid off. The community has settled into a good routine, with players now comfortable finding suggestions and using the board effectively.

“Things are certainly a lot more organized now because players have really got used to how to use it and how to use it effectively.”

“Here you can literally see the data”

Greg prepares player sentiment reports every sprint, roughly every two weeks. Feature Upvote gave him concrete figures to bring into those conversations.

“It’s made my life easier to go back to our dev or production team and say, look, I know I’m saying that players like this but here you can literally see the data. The amount of people who have upvoted this one suggestion, clearly this is something that people want.”

For feature requests, having the idea and its votes in one place made it easier to show the team what players were asking for and how much support it had attracted.

“It’s such a simple idea”

One suggestion that stood out to Greg was proximity crafting.

In many survival games, crafting means collecting the required materials from storage and carrying them in your inventory. Players suggested allowing crafting to draw directly from resources stored around their base instead.

“That was one thing that I personally hadn’t really thought of. I was like, yeah, it’s such a simple idea, like why have I never really thought of that as a thing? And lo and behold we did actually end up implementing it.”

It was a simple but clever idea that players got behind, and the team added it to the game.

“It doesn’t always necessarily mean that it’s guaranteed to make it into the game”

But not every popular idea makes it into the game. Some suggestions get plenty of votes but don’t fit the direction the team wants to take—and it’s important to help players understand that.

“Sometimes the development team might look at the ideas and go, well, it doesn’t really fit in necessarily with the vision of the game.”

A suggestion further down the board could still have considerable support while being a better fit for the game. The team made this clear to players: votes help inform development decisions, but the most popular request isn’t automatically the next feature they’ll build.

“I would miss having that one stop shop for player ideas”

Asked what he would miss most if he had to return to his old way of managing feedback, Greg pointed to having one place for player suggestions and being able to show how much support each one had.

With Feature Upvote, those suggestions became easier to bring into development discussions. Greg could show what players wanted, the team could explore ideas with visible community support, and features like proximity crafting made their way into Forever Skies.

Building your game with player feedback?

If you’re a small indie team or solo developer with a playable build, our Beta Partner Program offers selected games free access to Feature Upvote and help getting started. Check it out!