Wow, nearly 3 months since my last post. That regular blogging yearly goal will definitely not be met. Although the reason for the gap is all the work being put into meeting another of those goals - completing Concealed Intent. Today marks a huge step towards that goal - the ability to purchase Concealed Intent through Steam Early Access. For those not familiar with Early Access, it is for games that are not quite finished, but are playable, and which would benefit from player community feedback. Concealed Intent definitely qualifies.
I hope to soon get back to regular posting here. In the meantime here is an edited post announcing the release on my “work” blog at Jarrah Technology
Republished from http://www.jarrahtechnology.com/2015/11/19/Alive/
It’s alive. I mean it is live. This morning I set Concealed Intent to “published” on Steam Early Access. As the page informing me of success suggested: “insert confetti here”. If you go to the Steam Store page it is possible to pay actual real money for it. It feels very weird that people might do so (not many though after just a couple of hours:).
Of course, the game is not finished. Not by a long way. This is more of a start than an end. Hopefully the feedback more players will provide will help make the game better. Already I have seen a number of good suggestions (from prerelease copies) - and no bugs yet!
There are four things I really want to get done before release (but Steam says not to promise anything, so these are not promises!):
After those four I’ll hopefully have time to add more features as prioritised by the community.
There have also been a couple of YouTube Let’s Play videos posted.
Speaking of YouTube and prerelease copies. I’m getting a ton of key requests. Strangely, today is the first day I haven’t woken up to 10+ key requests. On average I refuse 80-90%. Usually because: a large number of keys are requested; the email address is unverifiable; the requester has no videos in the last month; I don’t see any similar games reviewed; or, they have very few views (I look for around 80-100+ views on videos a few weeks old). I’m not sure if any of this is normal, but in the Steam discussion groups many gamedevs seem regretful of profligate key giveaways. However, I’m still checking all of them taking 5-10 minutes each.
That adds up. With all the other little unexpected release tasks, the time allotted to development has greatly suffered in the last week. I’ve probably only managed the equivalent of two previous workdays progress over the last 8 days.
Oh, and one last pro tip. Upload your game music to YouTube as private videos well before your release date, to ensure people without any rights haven’t somehow managed to “claim” your music! This happened to me and wrecked my weekend as YouTuber’s will not post videos of games so encumbered. Lucky, it is all fixed now and the copyright is back where it belongs.
Now back to emails and hopefully some dev work too. And definitely not hitting refresh button on the sales report, no, no, no…