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Steam News16 May 20242y ago

Launch Week concludes with Version 1.03

[The changelist for version 1.03 is at the end of this post.] I want to start by thanking everyone for your support during this past week as Instruments of Destruction launched into version 1.0.

Full notes

Full Instruments of Destruction update

Read the full published notes in a cleaner layout. The original post stays linked below.

What changed

2 fixes0 additions1 change0 removals
  • Balance
  • Fixes
fixedVersion 1.03 is the last significant update we expect to make to the game for a little while. We've been getting through as much feedback and suggestions as we can from the past week while working on fixing bugs and trying to tweak the game to be the best it can be. Despite the stress of launching the game, having Alan helping to troubleshoot and fix issues has made this past week go a lot smoother than it otherwise would have. He's fixed a number of important, challenging bugs, which has allowed me to focus a bit more on the balance and fun of the campaign.
changedCampaign Tweaks Versions 1.01, 1.02, and 1.03 have each brought with them some updates to vehicles and missions to improve the campaign. The biggest area of concern was the Boulder Bay missions, which went too far into the "moving boxes" theme, and was just not as much fun as other areas of the game. Two of the Infernal Isles missions also needed some vehicle adjustments, and missions with turrets/drones needed to be tweaked as well. The Kraken also got a bit of a nerf in terms of move speed in 1.03.
fixedOverall, the game is supposed to be fun and varied more than it is particularly challenging (or frustrating or tedious). I feel more confident that the campaign achieves that at a consistent level compared to v1.0 last week. We've also addressed the majority of the technical and control issues that have come up, and the number of negative reviews (angry ones in particular) has diminished compared to the weekend.

Instruments of Destruction changes

fixedVersion 1.03 is the last significant update we expect to make to the game for a little while. We've been getting through as much feedback and suggestions as we can from the past week while working on fixing bugs and trying to tweak the game to be the best it can be. Despite the stress of launching the game, having Alan helping to troubleshoot and fix issues has made this past week go a lot smoother than it otherwise would have. He's fixed a number of important, challenging bugs, which has allowed me to focus a bit more on the balance and fun of the campaign.
changedCampaign Tweaks Versions 1.01, 1.02, and 1.03 have each brought with them some updates to vehicles and missions to improve the campaign. The biggest area of concern was the Boulder Bay missions, which went too far into the "moving boxes" theme, and was just not as much fun as other areas of the game. Two of the Infernal Isles missions also needed some vehicle adjustments, and missions with turrets/drones needed to be tweaked as well. The Kraken also got a bit of a nerf in terms of move speed in 1.03.
fixedOverall, the game is supposed to be fun and varied more than it is particularly challenging (or frustrating or tedious). I feel more confident that the campaign achieves that at a consistent level compared to v1.0 last week. We've also addressed the majority of the technical and control issues that have come up, and the number of negative reviews (angry ones in particular) has diminished compared to the weekend.

[The changelist for version 1.03 is at the end of this post.]

I want to start by thanking everyone for your support during this past week as Instruments of Destruction launched into version 1.0. It's been a stressful time, for reasons I'll go into below, but it's also a time to celebrate.

Version 1.03 is the last significant update we expect to make to the game for a little while. We've been getting through as much feedback and suggestions as we can from the past week while working on fixing bugs and trying to tweak the game to be the best it can be. Despite the stress of launching the game, having Alan helping to troubleshoot and fix issues has made this past week go a lot smoother than it otherwise would have. He's fixed a number of important, challenging bugs, which has allowed me to focus a bit more on the balance and fun of the campaign.

Campaign Tweaks Versions 1.01, 1.02, and 1.03 have each brought with them some updates to vehicles and missions to improve the campaign. The biggest area of concern was the Boulder Bay missions, which went too far into the "moving boxes" theme, and was just not as much fun as other areas of the game. Two of the Infernal Isles missions also needed some vehicle adjustments, and missions with turrets/drones needed to be tweaked as well. The Kraken also got a bit of a nerf in terms of move speed in 1.03.

Overall, the game is supposed to be fun and varied more than it is particularly challenging (or frustrating or tedious). I feel more confident that the campaign achieves that at a consistent level compared to v1.0 last week. We've also addressed the majority of the technical and control issues that have come up, and the number of negative reviews (angry ones in particular) has diminished compared to the weekend.

A Successful Launch? The launch of the game has been a success by many metrics, but launching on May 10th turned out to be a less-than-ideal time to launch. Hades II stealth-dropped a few days earlier, and then Animal Well also launched suddenly as well. The week was devoid of big games when I chose May 10th as a date, but both of those games garnered a huge amount of buzz and made it harder to get coverage from many outlets and YouTubers.

The game still got some great articles from places like PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, PCGamesN, and Level 80, but I don't know of any sites that have reviewed the game, and YouTube coverage has been a fraction of what it was for the Early Access launch. A couple Reddit posts I made went semi-viral, and one I put on Imgur went very viral. But Imgur is *not* friendly towards indie video games in 2024, and the post has like 35% downvotes and way more angry comments than supportive ones.

Combined with the sometimes-quite-angry reviews that really didn't like a specific thing or two about the game over the weekend, as well as the skewed wishlist-to-sales ratio (way more wishlists than sales, which surprised me), and I haven't really enjoyed this launch as much as I wanted to.

I've had 2nd thoughts about not using a publisher for a while, and this launch has only solidified the feeling that I should have used one. Alan has been a great help in terms of finishing the game itself, and it would have been great to have a partner to help with promoting the game. Promoting the game is something I just do not enjoy. I'm only

Source

Steam News / 16 May 2024

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