Release Date Announcement

The Lean Simulator: Desperation Demo is now no longer available as it's no longer October.

In lighter news though, the full game will be released: NOVEMBER 9TH. Just a week away! (Assuming nothing goes terribly wrong last minute lmfao you never know)

I hope to see y'all next week. So I want to use the rest of this post to announce the full release additions:

1. ACHIEVEMENTS The Demo felt a bit aimless, it was more accurately just a "main gameplay showcase". The addition of Achievements means you know how much content there is to see in the game as well as a percentage of how far through you are. It just gives a bit of an end-goal and a way to gauge progress.

2. PROFILES I felt it was unnecessary for the Demo, but the full game allows up to 3 save slots. It also allows you to re-name your currently loaded Profile. One of the things that people were bothered by in the Demo was the requirement to enter your name every single time, whereas in the full release you can just set your Profile name and that will be the name used by default.

3. EXTRAS The Extras Menu contains 4 sub-menus: Statistics, Cheats, Glossary Entries (which you may have noticed you were already unlocking in the Demo), and the Model Viewer. Most of these are self-explanatory. Statistics shows a few misc stats about your game, Cheats let you enter in Cheat Codes to help skip through parts of the game (as a reward for actually reading this, here's what they are: cheatmode, kcrimson, and imthirsty), and the Model Viewer is well, significantly less self-explanatory. You're going to have to figure that one out on your own if you really want to know what its deal is.

4. 3 NEW LEAN STORAGE CHALLENGES In the Demo you were able to acquire a Key that let you access the Lean Storage - An area of the game that gives you challenges to complete which lets you find keys which give you a Special Lean Type to help you in-game. Grean is given to you right away when you first access the Lean Storage but otherwise the only Special Lean Type that was available was Goldean. The Demo only had that 1 side challenge. The full game has the other 3 challenges and their respective Special Lean types. I'm very curious to see if anyone will unlock the final one.

5. AN EXPANSION TO THE MAIN GAMEPLAY I wanted the Demo to be an accurate portrayal of the main game, so the main gameplay is almost entirely unchanged. However I wanted the full game to have 1 new surprise that the Demo did not have. I just wanted SOMETHING new, y'know?

6. POST-GAME CONTENT I realised that in the Demo, there came a time where the game became trivially easy. Since the game is a "last as long as you can" type of game, the fact it can get to the point of becoming easy was actually not great in my opinion, it meant runs would start lasting literally hours. It was obvious that I needed something else, once you've seen everything the game had to offer, there had to be entirely new challenges to make sure the game remained at least somewhat challenging still even if you have mountains of Bonuses. Which is why there are 3 things that are made available to you after you've seen everything the main game has to offer, these are the final things that are unlocked from just playing normally: A Secret Bossfight (I wonder if anyone will find AND beat it...), Custom Game - which allows you to alter the variables of the main game to enable/disable mechanics as well as make things easier/harder to your liking, and one ultimate final challenge - The Craig. I really don't think anyone will "beat" it legitimately (i.e. not using Cheats), but if you can prove me wrong I'd love to see it. Maybe I'll do something cool for the first person to complete it, I won't put too much thought into it right now though because I really don't think it will be "beaten".

7. POST-RELEASE SUPPORT The Demo is (obviously) not supported anymore. There will be no more Demo Builds, no updates or hotfixes. The full release however, I will continue to update for a while. I had a LOT of feedback from the Demo and honestly, I have not actually applied it all. There's a lot of features and improvements I want to add to the game later, so I'm going to be confirming exactly that - Not only will there be hotfixes to the full release but there will also be more major updates, overhauling parts of the game I think are particularly weak, as well as adding NEW CONTENT to the game in free updates.

I'm also going to answer another question I feel some of you would have: Why make the Demo unavailable? The answer is because the Demo was never intended. I only made the Demo for Steam Next Fest. I didn't really want to keep supporting 2 versions of the game. I also feel like the full version isn't really substantial enough. I thought a lot of people would not bother paying for the full version because the Demo is free and still had the main gameplay (which is the important part in my opinion). I can literally count on my hands how much more content the full game has over the Demo and it's not because the Demo gave too much away (it was just barebones main gameplay) - It's because the full game is incredibly small and shallow. I hope there's some more enjoyment from the full release (I particularly think Achievements and Post-Game content are very good inclusions) but a part of me feels really greedy about making it a paid game when it doesn't really feel significantly larger than the free Demo. I'd make it free, but the problem is I spent too much time and effort on this project to do that. Hopefully some more content added later will help make the game feel more worth its money, but as of right now I'll be the first to admit that a big part of it is just greed. There are far bigger and better games that are completely free out there, and I feel very sorry for anyone who feels like the game is a scam. I might make my next project free to compensate, we'll see where that goes.

Finally, I want to close this off with a lighter note just saying thank you for all the support. Lean Simulator: Desperation was a game made as a fun continuation of something one of my friends made. It wasn't meant to be profitable, it wasn't even intended to be fully finished and realised. It was just a for fun thing that got a bit out of hand. This game is very small and had very little attention drawn to it but I think considering the circumstances around it and its development, it has performed very well. A project this niche, made by someone so unknown, yet I still managed to have the honour of watching multiple people play it (AussieDanDan, Chillidan06, Craigzie, MillicentNankivell, Valo, misc irl friends) AND have a small community (GamerTunic, Valo again, some irl friends again) to interact with. While I'm shouting people out, I also want to give a special thanks to HemAndWatch who didn't stream my game but did play it off-stream and gave me some insanely good feedback on how to improve. I didn't get around to most of his suggestions right away (because a lot of them required larger internal changes that would have significantly delayed release) but a decent chunk of my post-release to-do list come from his suggestions from playing the Demo. This game achieved what it set out to achieve and more. Even if it's not profitable, I would still consider this game a success.

So thank you, and I hope to see you again next week.