Soft and Quiet

Surprise. The CRUFT demo is out on Steam. Shhh... don't pop the champagne yet. This is a nice, little, quiet moment to fix bugs. The softest of launches. If you are curious, you can find the demo here.

Our target, my friends, is Next Fest. That is when we want to push for the game to get wishlisted.

That cow is going to make me rich. Getting rich is why we make games.

No harm done if you wishlist it now, but come Feb 24th I will perform a ritual summoning of every friend (and enemy) whose contact info I still have and try form a wishlist conga line.

Do check the demo out. i would say that it is in an alpha state right now. Very playable. Some bugs but not horrid ones (none that I've found yet anyhow!). A big part of this moment is actually going through all the hoops to get something on the Steam store. The effort in that regard is not too bad. I was pretty impressed with the rigorous review process. It is a lot to juggle while you are simultaneously fixing strings and rewriting a tutorial, but it is very doable.

A Few Learnings

• Verbiage on the Steam store gets critiqued pretty heavily, especially for Early Access.

  • There is a fine line between providing too little information and implying promises.

  • Expect a few back-and-forth edits with a day or two of lag time between.

• There is a lot of nuance between how your demo will live next to your actual game. E.g.: I chose to put in some demo-only achievements. They do not carry over to the main game. Why tho?

  • They proxy as light-weight, player-progression metrics. Not scientifically perfect mind you, but I can see how many players play long enough (or at least engage enough) to do certain things. THIS IS NOT A FUNNEL, but it does tell me a bit about what players do in the game.

  • I want players to get something for playing the demo.

  • By having no carryover to the main game, we reduce risk in terms of play continuity. I don't want the demo and main game perpetually tethered development-wise. The demo will one day go bye bye when it no longer makes sense to support it.

• Plan to spend a decent amount of time in Photoshop. Steam needs a ton of images and a ton of specific resolutions for various locations in the store and player libraries.

  • Plan on updating these pretty regularly while you are in development. Even with a tiny team the game looks different and hopefully better with great regularity. During dev, screenshots and marketing materials have a short half-life.

  • Steam does a pretty good job of supplying the boilerplate photoshop files that show you where overlays and other stuff go. The web interface to upload your stuff is... pretty good but not fantastic. Just be ready to spend some time really curating your assets. I have a lot of catching up to do here.

• Remind yourself of where you are at and check yourself before you wreck yourself.

  • There are grillions of games and demos coming out on Steam all the time. Once the game is up on the store, you will find bugs that really only happen once other people are downloading and playing. There should be issues you have never seen. Not a bad thing. Harden up the game.

  • Without any marketing, your opening moments of stardom are pretty quiet. Do not expect a landslide of downloads. This is a good thing. If this were a mobile title I would be soft launching in some tiny country on the other side of the planet. Treat your early days on Steam the same way and definitely do not pray to the little metrics yet. So tempting. I'm going to go over to the dashboard right now and look at the tiny numbers but I'm not going to put stock in them... much.

Anyhoo, I'm off to go fix more things, but do let me know what you think of the demo. There is a Discord for the game now too if you want to get in touch. The Discord link can be reached through the settings menu of the game. See what I did there?

Thanks for reading!