Quality improvements
I did some updates over the past months. The 6th of Juli I did a minor update, and today the 21th of August, I did another update.
- More vibrant game play.
- I make sure the action is happening in front of the camera. Gnomes in view do more actions/minute.
- The visible triggers (shivering/runnig) updated. They had some issues: shivering did not trigger enough, and the panic running did not trigger consequently.
- More consistency
- If I need the player to click, I ask him to click. If there is nothing more to a mechanism, I keep to what it really does. So the expectations are now more clear from the text messages.
- The Chaos mechanism revamped so it guides you in how you have to click the gnomes. And it gives a reward if you do search careful and click controlled.
Sales
A small update on the business side of things.
I did find out what the massive increase in traffic on Steam was that I experienced during launch and the weeks after it.
Quite simple: Steam automatically starts a ‘visibility campaign’ of 1 month when you launch a game. Combine this with the ‘soon coming’ and ‘out now’ pages, and you have explained all the traffic boost I experienced.
So yeah, this ‘discovery’ of mine was a bit of a drawback. I hoped Steam did some underwater magic and had find some players that probably liked my game. (As they advertise they are doing.) But no, that’s not the case.
It is just… well… if you get increased organic traffic, Steam will introduce you to more players. Otherwise you have to ‘pay’ for more traffic by using the finite supply of visibility campaigns. (You get a finite bunch at launch and you can’t buy them)
And… I did my first sale. 10% off in the week of the 13th of August. That did work too! Got 4x more traffic out of it.
But I really have to get to work on my marketing. And start with a better Steam store page so I can turn the traffic into sales!
What next
I’m currently working on 2 projects.
- I’m working out how to improve Find the Gnome to get it to be a more fun game to play.
- I want to increase my profile as a game engineer and for that I’m updating my personal website to be more of a portfolio site. See https://erikderoos.nl/portfolio/
So my major gamedev focus is to improve the game-play of Find the Gnome.
This is because I think the game has some major issues that make it fun for a few minutes but not longer than that. Player feedback is also quite negative about the expectations the game sets and what it actually delivers.
I do have a couple idea’s laying around that originally had to be in the release. I’m quite sure they will improve the game, I just could not get them into the release because of issues that started happening in my personal life. So when my things get quiet again I will start by implementing them and just see where it will take Find the Gnome.
Reviews
I can’t build a game without people reaching out to me and to other players informing them about my game.
So, here is some more coverage on youtube.
And some text reviews:
GameFeelings 