The 8-month mark

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It’s been a busy few weeks since the last update, I’ve been pushing updates twice a week adding a lot of new features to the game but also many tweaks and improvements.

A lot of those changes are thanks to all the pre-order and Early Access players, it’s sort of an interesting experiment for me. I normally create my games without any feedback, I just work on it for many months, then when I’m happy with it, I let a few people play-test the game, and basically release it only a week or so  after their feedback.

This time I have a game with people playing it on a daily basis and giving me great feedback and ideas to improve the game. I’m loving it!

 

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Every week the game feels more complete, with small changes like adding melee-weapons for smashing crates, to big changes like kicking the level-generator in it’s behind and now having a bigger variety in the rooms / levels being generated.  Strangely: no matter how many updates I push, my “ideas and todo” list doesn’t seem to get smaller!  So many idea’s on there, I will have to start removing some of them or else I’ll find myself in a extremely long feature-creep.

I started this game back in January, so I’m now already at the 8-month mark, which is the amount of time I wrapped up work for both Heroes of Loot and Gunslugs 2. From a business point, this is becoming a bit risky spending this much time on a game.. but we’ll see how it ends up when I release in January/February.

I’m not too worried yet, I personally think this is my best game ever, and I had others telling me the same, so we can’t all be wrong can we? The problem will be getting the media to write about it, and having people tell their friends about it. Basically that’s what either sells or crashes a new game release.  Hopefully the “turn-based arcade action” gameplay will be interesting enough for Youtube personalities and big game sites to check out that fun game called Space Grunts.

The upside is that there have been a bunch of people who bought the pre-order (thanks for that!) and others that bought the Early-Access version (also thanks!), with sales dripping in slow but steady.

Even better is seeing that all those people are enjoying the game for many hours already, and a single game-session seems to average to around 60 minutes, which is about 30 minutes more than I expected! Even with my own “arcade” gameplay style I still average a 45 minutes on a good run. Not bad.

Another interesting thing has been the nice Youtube coverage of the game, nothing very big yet, but all fun movies to watch and learn from. Also they hopefully help potential players to just grab the game even tho it’s in Early Access ;)

 

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