Hellcard and Feature Upvote

Polish indie game development studio Thing Trunk uses Feature Upvote to engage their community on player feedback, moderate discussions up to 50% faster and prioritise what players want—and ultimately make Hellcard a better game.

While Thing Trunk excelled in developing games with novel mechanics and artistic direction, aggregating player feedback was a headache it struggled with for years.

The Polish indie game development studio would get hundreds of items of player feedback a day from multiple channels—and it couldn’t keep up.

So, when the studio came across Feature Upvote, a tool specifically designed for collecting, ranking and promoting discussion around player feedback, it knew this was exactly what it needed.

Now, Thing Trunk uses Feature Upvote to streamline its player feedback channels, cut moderation time by as much as 50% and make more informed development decisions based on quantitative player data for its cooperative roguelike deck builder game, Hellcard.

If you’re keen to set up your own Feature Upvote board to collect and get actionable insights from player feedback, sign up here or learn more about Feature Upvote’s features for game developers.

Otherwise, keep reading as Thing Trunk co-founder and business manager Konstanty Kalicki shares the studio’s player feedback management journey.

Fighting a “mess” of player feedback from multiple channels

Before Thing Trunk used Feature Upvote, player feedback could come from any of these channels:

• Steam forums
• Discord channels
• Emails
• In-game player feedback widget
• Social media platforms

Thing Trunk’s player feedback management team—namely, just Konstanty and a team member who helps part-time—did their best to catch all player feedback coming through. Still, they worried.

“We always had this fear that some ideas would slip by us because they would be reported on different channels and someone would forget to write them down or report them,” says Konstanty.

Gathering player feedback on specific ideas could also be chaotic.

On one occasion, the team invited players to share their thoughts on a highly requested feature on Steam and Discord:

People heeded his call—they provided lots of comments. So many comments and from so many sources, in fact, that organising the discussion took “a crazy amount of work”.

Konstanty had to manually shortlist the player feedback he found interesting and then reproduce them in the official discussion threads for others to consider. In his words, things were a mess.

Discovering the perfect solution via word of mouth

The pressure to keep feature requests under control got to the point that Thing Trunk had to do something. It runs game production in Jira, so getting a player feedback management Jira add-on made sense.

Konstanty found one, but “it was clunky. It was crap.”

The team considered building an in-house tool next. While researching this project, Konstanty messaged friends in a Discord group chat, asking if they knew of products with similar functionality.

One of them, a founder at another Polish game development studio, suggested Feature Upvote—shortly before someone else from a different small indie studio chimed in, saying they had also used the platform.

Encouraged by these recommendations, Konstanty checked out Feature Upvote. He was immediately blown away by its player feedback management features, which he praised as being a complete package.

“I was like, ‘Damn, that’s exactly what I wanted to create! And it’s already done,’” he recounts.

“I calculated the effort, and basically how much it would cost if I developed an in-house alternative to Feature Upvote and had to support it. And you know, it just made sense to go with Feature Upvote.”

Consolidating player feedback in one place

Setting up Hellcard’s feature request board was “super straightforward”, Konstanty shares.

“I think the setup and rollout took me an hour. The next day, I went public with it to see how it would perform and what the community reception would be like.”

The team took just two months of testing to reach a verdict.

“The tracker test is over, it’s awesome, it’s here to stay,” Konstanty wrote on Steam. “Please use it for all ideas!”

Hellcard’s feature request board does exactly what Thing Trunk needs it to do: it “focuses all the splintered communities” and gives players a starting point to engage in structured discussions.

“In the past, every time someone on our Discord server’s general channel mentioned an idea, somebody has to point them to a pre-existing thread on Discord or somewhere else,” says Konstanty.

“Now, this can be done by saying: ‘That’s a cool idea. Check out if it was already posted on Feature Upvote here.’”

Some users even automatically direct others to the Feature Upvote board, making player feedback management an even more hands-off process.

From juggling multiple player feedback channels in the past, Konstanty now has to monitor only one: Feature Upvote, and Feature Upvote alone.

The result? He moderates player feedback 30–50% faster.

Prioritising players’ most-wanted features

With Feature Upvote, identifying and prioritising popular ideas has also never been easier for Thing Trunk.

Previously, Thing Trunk followed a “rule of three” approach to prioritisation. If the team saw a suggestion pop up at least three times, they would seriously consider it.

This sounds straightforward until you think about the effort needed to manually manage and keep count of suggestions—especially across multiple channels.

On Hellcard’s Feature Upvote board, users get to vote on the ideas they want to see implemented. The ideas with the most votes automatically rise to the top of the board, increasing their visibility for both players and developers.

“One thing we added to the game is the ability to see card upgrades in the forge. People used to complain about it, but we never knew it was as wanted as it was,” says Konstanty.

“It’s the most upvoted feature request ever. So, it was obvious that we had to do this ASAP since it’s in very high demand.”

(And they have!)

“I would definitely recommend Feature Upvote”

At its core, Feature Upvote does just one thing—manage feature requests. Its “very focused” nature is also what Konstanty loves about it.

“Feature Upvote doesn’t do more than we need. Most out-of-the-box solutions are bloated with features that make them expensive, cumbersome and unfocused for both us and users.”

Konstanty’s only regret is discovering Feature Upvote so late—only after Hellcard’s official launch—because he finds it perfect for testing games during early access. But the team is correcting this.

Thing Trunk will be integrating Feature Upvote for the early closed beta launch of its next game, Book of Aliens, as soon as possible.

“I would definitely recommend Feature Upvote for companies that want to stay in touch with their community, be more agile and develop their products with current and prioritised feedback from their players,” Konstanty emphasises.

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