Devlog 4/24/26
Welcome to Devlog #3!
Lots of great feedback over the last two weeks! Our focus has been continued marketing and direct feedback through Reddit. That's translated to a gradual-but-steady climb in users, and it's surfaced a few pain points we want to address head-on.
The feedback we get most when people hear the pitch for the first time is some version of: "But the real wiki is already good enough."
Canis was never meant to be a wiki replacement. The kind of structured data a wiki collects isn't easy to capture or format by voice, and it was never the goal. Canis aims to collect a new kind of player data the we feel is not currently stored anywhere. The experiential tips and tricks players discover mid-game but never take the time to write down. "A wiki you can talk to" was meant as a shortcut to gain interest, leaning on a concept gamers already know. In practice, it framed us as competing with wikis instead of complementing them.
So, we're pivoting the narrative to match what Canis actually is.
Product Shift
From: "A wiki you can talk to" To: "The Field Journal for you and your Crew"
You'll see a good amount of reworking across the website to reflect this. Pardon our dust over the next couple of weeks while the construction continues.
Two pieces to the shift:
- Wiki → Field Journal. Repositioning Canis as a Field Journal (rather than a Wiki) should better convey the intent: a place to store the discoveries you make mid-round, not a replacement for the structured reference material wikis already do well.
- Your Crew. This isn't just a nudge to tell your friends about Canis (though you should!) it's a new core feature.
New Feature: Crews
Up until now, every note you made with Canis went into your personal journal. The only way to surface it outside of your own journal was to publish it to the web-wiki. This gave a level of visibility but published notes were not available to Canis to answer the queries of other users. So the only way your discoveries could be shared by Canis to other users was if enough other similar notes were taken and a Community Note was created. With a small user base and a large discovery surface area in ARC Raiders, this meant that not many Community Notes were being created and most queries were stuck with relying only on your own journal and the game knowledge Canis has built in.
To solve this issue we are introducing Crews!
A Crew is a private group you form with friends. Any member of the crew can log a field note, and every crewmate sees it in a shared journal that Canis can pull from mid-round. Captains create the crew and invite teammates; members pick which crew is "active," and Canis uses that crew's journal as shared context when answering questions.
The introduction of Crews is critical for Canis as it aims to solve a major problem we've seen through our user data:
Most users treat Canis simply as a Q&A bot. Over half of our users have only taken a single note, usually during their first session, and after that have only asked queries. By introducing Crews we believe that users will be more inclined to take notes that will be immediately shared with their friends. Increasing the amount of data Canis has available per-user and helping to get Canis' discovery data flywheel in motion.
Head to the /crews page for more info and to create your first Crew!
Example Crew Journal
Continued Marketing Efforts
We've largely exhausted the main ARC Raiders subreddits for marketing, so we're shifting focus to short-form video for a bit. We'll still post to Reddit as new ARC Raiders content drops, those moments are a natural fit for showing Canis in action, but short-form has been untapped for us so far, and we want to see what kind of traction we can build there.
You can follow along on our YouTube and TikTok below. Nothing's posted yet, but we're queuing up videos to support a consistent schedule.
Socials
- YouTube: canisgg on YouTube
- TikTok: canisgg on TikTok
Coming Soon: Game Expansion
ARC Raiders has been our game of choice for the last few months, and it's been a phenomenal proving grounds for Canis. Now we're starting to expand the catalog, staying true to the original roadmap and stretching Canis' Star-Chart to new galaxies.
We're currently scoping candidates, and we're aiming to launch a few games at once to cast a wider net than we have so far. If there's a game you'd like to see Canis support, drop it in our Community Discord Channel. We'll have more to share abut this in the next devlog!