Update

I'll keep the update short this week. I did actually add a decent amount to the game during Next Fest. The most notable is that I've now got a language selection in the game. There's very little text in Space Duck: Escape on purpose. I'm not trying to make a game with huge narrative. It's a platformer. Because of that I was able to translate the 50 or so phrases in the game into 7 languages fairly quickly. I'm not sure that I've got every translation perfect, but I had a few friends who speak these languages double check it and got a general thumbs up. Hopefully this allows me to reach a slightly wider audience, but who knows.

Its worth noting that Godot makes this incredibly simple to do. It would have been easier had I planned it well from the start. All you need is a simple spreadsheet with keys that need to be replaced by specific language values. The engine largely does the key replacement automatically, which is awesome. So my advice here, if you know you're going to translate things... start with a translation spreadsheet to begin with. Even if the only values in it are English.

Anyhow, that's all done now and hopefully done well enough that non-English speakers can at least get by.

Lets Chat Next Fest

First, I just want to express how greatful I am for anyone who tried my game or wishlisted it. From my perspective Next Fest was a massive success for Space Duck: Escape. I was able to see a few people that I don't know try the game out, and verify some assumptions. The general traffic to my steam store page was way up, the traffic to my website was notably higher, and I secured a relatively high number of wishlists.

So lets talk wishlist numbers. Before Next Fest started I had 25 total wish lists of my game. Not great, but I'm mostly on my own web site yelling into the internet every couple weeks. My marketing presence is very low. On the first day of Steam Next Fest, my wishlist numbers more than doubled to 58. The second day to 75, the third day to 91, and then we sort of leveled out settling in at just over 100 by the time Next Fest Ended. That's over a 400% increase in wishlists. We also had a few people remove it, but only a grand total of 6. I don't know what a good ratio there is but 6 removals and over 75 additions feels like an ok rate. Overall I'm happy with these numbers. I know that if I had a little bit bigger of a following prior to Next Fest, I'd likely have seen a large gain here.

Moving on to total players of my demo. In total, 42 people have played the Space Duck: Escape Demo. The median time played is only 4 minutes and of the people who played it during Next Fest, only 1 added it to their wishlist. None of those are super good numbers if I'm being honest. Its not nothing, but its also not a flying success. What I learned here is that my demo was likely too difficult. This is making me rethink my difficulty mechanism. I'm likely to rework Easy and Normal to not be permadeath, with your run ending. Allowing you to start just that level over again if you die.

The next thing I noticed is that because no one was really getting through the first level or so, they weren't experiencing the equipment mechanics at all. So again to get people more familiar with that I may also have Easy mode start with all of the equipment unlocked.

I'm still going to leave the Demo up, and I'll likely be updating it with some of the changes. The only thing I won't add is any new levels and items.

Sign Off

That's it for this week. I'm going to get back to making new levels and a few of the changes I mentioned above. Hoping to have something polished up soon that's in line with my initial plans for this game. We're nearing the end stages!!

Thanks again for reading and following along!

Lee