Every year in October Cryptic Conservatory runs a survey for all members, and last month we held a Town Hall to discuss not only what we accomplished over the last year but also the results of the survey and future plans. The 2025 survey had these specific goals:
- Who is a part of the Cryptic community?
- What needs do they have?
- Is what we are doing meeting those needs?
- How should we grow?
Over the course of 3 weeks we had 20 respondents, and since the Discord server (our primary communication platform) is only 66 members total this is fairly representative. Let’s go over the anonymized results:
Who is in the Cryptic Community?
Unsurprisingly our community is writers – since we are dedicated to helping new narrative designers find their voice this tracks. We are also mostly Hobbyist/Casual developers, which also tracks, but only a few Student and no Aspirational devs. Perhaps there’s more that we can do to reach out to newer folks, or maybe we should stay in our lane as Intermediate difficulty. To continue the trend of expectations, almost all of our community members are interested in making Interactive Fiction and Indie Games.
In the notes a lot of folks mentioned visual novels, a large number showed interest in printed games (TTRPGs & CYOA, perhaps we should have differentiated), and said that they wanted to learn more about collaborative production and trying new things.
“I’m especially excited by opportunities to innovate and explore cool experimental mechanics or concepts!”
While there are no real surprises to this data it is validating that our mission & community have a shared basis of experience – we’re reaching the right people.
What needs do community members have?
To explore our community member’s needs we asked them to evaluate & comment on their constraints: Time, Resources, Collaboration, and Financial. While we can’t give people more time we can be aware of our member’s constraints to develop projects and workflows that allow them to make the most of what time they have.
We have a pretty wide spread of time constraints but most described it as “Scattered” which was distinct from “Boom & Bust” (spending a lot of time one week vs. none the next). Descriptions echoed the same, as folks struggle to find consistent time for a game dev/writing hobby given life circumstances.
Resource constraints were similarly spread wide, erring on the side of Abundant but with the majority in the “Hit or Miss” category. When writing in folks describe challenges related to something specific to their current goal or outside their skillset and a lack of motivation/energy when evaluating those things. Because art & music were frequently called out as being outside the community’s skillset there was some appreciation of the free art assets given out as a part of the Nova Station game jam this past summer.
Collaboration constraints feel met, mostly folks said that they had what they need in terms of other people to work with, but there were several callouts that the Maze Gallery was an intriguing style of collaboration. Financial needs are similarly straightforward: the people who opt-in to this kind of environment are managing their financial situation and are not dependent on small game dev projects for their income, so the pursuit does not have a need for capital. That’s not to say that people are doing well financially, and many are using opportunities like this to increase their skills to find better work, but no one is expecting Cryptic Conservatory to be the factor that changes that situation.
Moonlighting means I have a day job, for now!
Are we meeting our community’s needs?
For this section we tried to have our 4 major areas of support be more comparable (see the recent Town Hall for specifics on how these projects went) but the results were less spiky than anticipated.
Our big projects garnered a lot of praise from participants, with several callouts for improvement on the organizational/production side of things (no surprise there, it was extensively discussed in the Maze Gallery postmortem). Game Jams were good, but some members were unable to participate due to time constraints. A few mentioned wanting more feedback/mentorship during/after the jam itself.
I don’t have aspirations to be a professional games writer, but what I learned about tools, having thematic pillars, tracking bugs, project management, etc. was useful for my own individual practice.
Events are similarly well received, I was surprised to see no one talk about a lack of recordings/post-event resources as many did lament that they were unable to attend because of schedule/awareness (though Seattle Indies’ Ludonarrative Panel at Hugo House was packed). The community is happy with the discord presence, and there is an itch to do more socials/discuss portfolios/work a little more often. We are taking this contentment with a grain of salt, since the most engaged people are on the discord and took the survey to begin with, whereas people who aren’t happy with it might not have enough avenues to affect change within it.
How should we grow?
With all of that in mind as we plan for 2026 there is a lot of confidence in the Cryptic Conservatory to continue what we have been doing and a desire to do more of it. We are going to try to be louder about who we are, what our goals are, and how we’re going to accomplish them: namely, by bringing on more volunteers and giving them more responsibility.
We will be continuing engagement within the Discord Community, producing another large community project focused on choice-based stories in an anthology format, starting our first commercial project, and expanding outreach via the blog & possibly other social media.
2026 Volunteer Openings:
- Emoji Artist – Discord Community
- Marketing Writer – Cryptic Correspondence Blog
- Production Lead – Anthology Community Project
- UI Technical Designer – Anthology Community Project
- Production Artist – Commercial Story Game Project
- UI Technical Designer – Commercial Story Game Project
There will be more on each of these in early 2026 as they kick off, but if anyone is exceptionally passionate to learn more the discord is always open to discussion & pitches. Thank you for reading, this has been a phenomenal community to help build and it is exciting to see this kind of year-over-year growth. Until something new sprouts, enjoy the turning of the seasons.