Demo Post-Mortem & The Future of The Great Beyond

Firstly, I would like to thank everyone involved with the early prototypes and the demo for giving feedback. It has been extremely helpful and the game has come a long way since the first time I sent it out to the first tester back in April.

After taking a break from game development for the last few years, it has been wonderful to be back on Steam again pushing builds and writing update blogs!

Demo Post-Mortem

The demo was a mixed bag. Overall, people seemed to enjoy the game! Once players got the hang of the digging and construction mechanics, they started to have fun. There was also some coverage on YouTube, which was great to see.

However, the main criticisms were:

1. UI Confusion. I definitely improved this a lot, but there's still more work to do here.

2. Earlier versions of the demo lacked freedom and the tutorial was frustrating to play. The newest version cut the tutorial almost completely, and certain game mechanics were not explained well enough.

3. Various bug reports.

4. A number of people assumed that the thumbnail image was AI generated. I hired an artist to create this, but I can see how with the main image looking so different to the game's graphics that people may assume it was generated with AI.

5. The game's visuals not matching the tone of the gameplay.

The last point is a huge one. To move away from cartoony visuals to a more serious aesthetic would be an expensive and timely move. It would require a huge amount of work from an artist or team of artists, require a lot of investment of money, and would require reworking the game's lighting and changing all of the assets.

The Future of The Great Beyond

I have decided to delay the game's launch by at least one year, in order to overhaul the visuals and to have time to raise funds for it.

I hired an artist to create a "pilot" of some of the game's new visuals. I have attached screenshots at the bottom of this post! There's already very good progress on it.

His name is Janiru Hettiarachchi and he's from Dream Canvas!

What is Happening Next?

There likely won't be any updates to the playable demo until 2027. I appreciate that this is a long time, but updating the game's art, user interface, and gameplay mechanics will require a lot of effort and it will be difficult to do partial updates to the demo during these major changes.

This is also going to require a lot of money, so two things are happening in parallel:

1. I'm going to start seeking investment from publishers and hope that they love the new direction!

2. As a backup plan, I'm currently working on a mini-project that I can hopefully turn around in the next couple of months to earn some additional income. More news on that later!