Thank You: A Word From the Team to Our Day-One Players
This article contains no announcement, no guide, no stats. Just something we've wanted to write for a while: thank you. Thank you to the Dovion community, to our day-one captains, to everyone who believed in a small French indie game before it had proven anything. This post is for you.
You were there when it was rough
We haven't forgotten where we came from. Dovion's earliest players saw versions we blush a little about today: rough mobile interfaces, shaky balance, bugs we'd rather not detail. And yet, you came back. You reported problems instead of just closing the tab. You explained EXACTLY what was wrong, sometimes with a precision that saved us weeks.
A multiplayer game has one cruel quirk: it needs players to be fun. An empty sea, however beautiful, is still an empty sea. Our day-one players gave us a gift that simply can't be bought: they populated the world while we were still building it. Without you, there would simply be no game.
We'll never tell you "thousands"
Notice we never wave around flashy numbers? "Thousands of players," "an exploding community"... we leave that vocabulary to others. Not because we have nothing to say, but because we made ourselves one promise when we opened this blog: never lie to you, not about the game, not about us. Dovion is a small game, carried by a small team, with a human-scale community — and that's exactly what makes every player visible. When a regular switches their favorite lineage, we notice. Try doing that with "thousands of players."
What you've already changed
Concretely, your fingerprints are all over the game:
- field feedback that guided the mobile HUD redesign — the best bug reports came from your phones, not our test machines;
- balance reports that fed into smoothing the XP curve and tuning lineages;
- ideas, constructive griping, and encouragement that decide, more than we'd like to admit, what we're working on come Monday morning.
And since the forum opened, this conversation finally has a real home — if you haven't stopped by yet, your ideas shape the game there, literally.
If you want to help us (without spending a cent)
People sometimes ask us how to support the game. The most useful answer costs nothing: introduce someone to it. A game like ours only grows through word of mouth, and we even built a tool to reward that: the "Challenge a Friend" referral program — when your referral plays for 10 minutes, you both earn +250 banked XP. The how-to is in our referral guide.
A match shared with a friend beats any ad campaign. You are our distribution.
The last word
We're going to keep building: tweaks, community ideas, long-term projects. There will still be misses — we'll tell you about them — and wins, which we'll celebrate together. But today, no roadmap: just our gratitude, sincere and unadorned.
Thank you for playing, thank you for complaining, thank you for staying. The sea is more beautiful with you on it. And if you're reading this without having set sail yet, come see what this community is made of: Play Dovion for free.