Personal Update

Starting with a bit of a personal update just to round this out. The last month has been stressful and busy. Between helping out my parents an in person trip for my day job and the holiday season, I have had very little time to do much of anything. Things are improving though, my parents are home and doing well. We're winding down the amount of extra help they need and slowly getting back to normal. My job is also starting to feel more comfortable and I think I'll be able to get back into a good routine again soon.

Game and Business Update

The exciting part here is that I did manage to launch on December 3rd. The launch went fairly well, I sold a reasonable amount of copies given how little I was able to market the game going into launch. Lessons learned, I want to get closer code complete much earlier instead of a cram to the finish. It turns out as a solo dev, if you're cramming on getting the game done, you don't have any time to do marketing. Specifically - My goal was to sell 10 copies of this game, and I've cleared that. I'll call it a success but not a massive one.

Another thing I learned through all of this is Steam's rules about launch dates and participation in their official sales. I was hoping to release and then roll right into the Steam Winter Sale, however there is a rule that you must have released 30 or more days ago to participate. Not the end of the world, and this is kind of the whole point of me releasing this game - to learn. Learning all of this on a smaller game is important. I can't imagine pouring years of time into this and then screwing up these small timing bits. I'll do better planning next time.

As for what's next, there's a few routes to go down. I had some plans to add additional end game content to Space Duck: Escape. I could also focus on heavier marketing and outreach for Space Duck Escape. Or I could break ground on the next game idea. Given the relatively low volume of sales this is a tough choice that I haven't entirely made yet. I'm likely to split the difference until the end of the year and hope I can get another handful of sales to recoup the hard dollar costs of making this one.

Long Term Plans

One thing I have decided I want to do as a personal challenge is to commit to making more games long term. My goal for the forseeable future is to create 1 game every year and release in early mid November. This sounds a little crazy but the constraint will likely help me create a tighter package that I can sell. Now that I have some experience under me, the business, website, socials all set up, things should be a little easier.

I hope this concept excites some folks. I obviously won't be able to make massive story driven games in that sort of time frame, but putting out smaller budget friendly games feels like the right call as a solo dev.

Sign Off

That's it for this week. Happy Holidays everyone!

Thanks again for reading and following along!

Lee