Demo Time - And Tooth Extraction

The empty space where a demo should be. Soon to be remedied.

We've been up to a lot here at Go On. We've updated tons of game art, refined UI, balanced the economy endlessly, all kinds of good stuff. And yet, for quite some time there has been a missing piece. You see, we once had a demo way back in the day. That old demo got us a lot of learnings and got us "on the map". It gave us a presence. It took us through the small version of a real release on Steam.

And then we killed it when we went into Early Access with the real game.

In my Steamworks dashboard, it's anointed spot still sits vacant... not unlike the space where I had a molar removed earlier in the year.

It was easy to remove the demo. We knew the game would be changing dramatically and maintaining a demo during all of that change would have been a crazy burden for a two-person studio. We just went into the dashboard, clicked a button, did some confirmation stuff and poof the demo was no longer.

My molar was much more difficult to extract. What should or could have been a 15 minute procedure took about an hour-and-a-half. You know things are going sideways when the first dentist calls in a second dentist to not only consult about tools usage but also apply additional physical force beyond the capability of dentist 1.

"The problem is, you have good bone structure in your jaw" - Dentist 2

In an era of mewing and chad worship, an old man who has never obsessed over jaw structure at all has found himself exceptional in terms of his jaw. The reward? 1.5 hours of wrenching and pulling (I learned what an elevator is in the process!) and listening to exactly what it sounds like to crush bone.

I do not miss that molar. Not one bit. It's absence is always present as I tend to eat and talk and do things that put my tongue in contact with that hole. I do not miss the process it took to remove that tooth, despite how much I learned about extraction in the process. That molar was giving me woes and it had to go.

The tools of the trade are nuanced. The two dentists discussed luxators like folks debating which golf club to use to get out of a particular patch of thicket. I think that dentists play golf because they like this sort of tools debate.

I do miss our precious demo. Not the demo it was (well maybe a little) but rather what it gave us. Unbridled feedback from folks that paid nothing is pretty priceless. The opportunity to give players a taste of some pretty novel play, without risk, before deciding to purchase the game is pretty powerful. Having that gap filled in the Steamworks dashboard... oh that would be nice.

So we are almost there with re-establishing a demo for CRUFT. It will be one that stands the test of time as we now really understand what the game is. It will take with it controller support and some other accessibility improvements that will let a lot more players mess with it and kick the tires. It will let anyone "give it a go".

While making a new demo is a lot of work, it is not "pulling teeth"... for sure.