Devlog #1

Hi everyone,

I thought it might be nice to share some (behind the scenes) stuff in a weekly devlog. We’ll start off with weekly post every Friday and we may transition to a monthly post depending on how much information we have to share. Last Thursday we had our Early Access release and I thought it might be cool to share some info about that. It was definitely a very exciting first week for us. We had some specific goals and expectations. We reached most of our goals and also had a couple of unexpected things happen.

Units sold

Our goal was to reach a wishlist conversion of 10%. This means that we were hoping that 1 out of every 10 wishlisters would purchase the game on Early Access release. I’m happy to say that we reached that goal! What did surprise us was that wishlisters amounted to 50% of our sales. This means that for every wishlister that purchased the game, there was also a Steam user that purchased the game directly without wishlisting. We are very happy with these results. No mind blowing numbers, but this influx of new players made us even more excited to keep working on the game.

Wishlists

We had not set any goals for the number of wishlisters that we wanted to obtain on Early Access release. So what happened with the wishlists kind of took us by surprise. We had an explosion of wishlists on release day and now we’re getting about 5 times as much wishlists per day as we did pre-Early Access release. A lot more people are finding their way to our game and that feels great!

Reviews

We were hoping to receive at least 5 honest reviews during the first week. It would have been ok if the reviews were negative. We want to keep making this game better and honest reviews help us out a lot. We were mentally prepared for negative reviews but… they were all positive. We got 5 reviews on Steam (excluding reviews from people we know personally) and some reviews on YouTube, so we reached our goal! All reviews were positive overall. It helped ensure us that the core gameplay of the game is good. However, the reviews also mentioned some aspects of the game that need to be improved. This helped us with prioritizing the roadmap and future tasks. The biggest point of improvement mentioned is the replayability. We want the game to provide high replay value and we aren’t there yet. This is something that will actively be approved upon with almost every update.

Feedback

We were hoping to receive a lot of feedback from our new players. We had set up a Discord server to make it easier for players to engage with us. The goal was to attract about 10% of the players to the Discord server. We added a Discord button to the main screen of the game to help achieve this. This was unfortunately a failure as almost none of the new players joined the Discord server.

We feared that this could cause us to not receive the feedback that we need. The developers of great games like Subnautica and Monster Train solved this be implementing an in-game feedback feature. As a response to this, we quickly implemented this feature for our game and pushed it live in v0.9.1. We greatly appreciate honest feedback as we need it in order to help us make the game the best it can be.

You can now press F8 in game at any