zimventures

Last Tuesday (a week ago today) I clicked the magic button on Steam and released Dungeon Rustlers into the Early Access program. It's been a whirlwind week with many lessons learned. A few Youtube and Twitch streamers asked for review keys and I was grateful to get their feedback.

A few high level take-aways from the last week

• Watching someone play your game live is an amazing way to learn what's good and bad about your game
• Even though Dungeon Rustlers is in Early Access, some people were put off by the lack of "polish". Something to note for the next game
• We *definitely* didn't do enough pre-release promotion. With only a 2 month dev-cycle though, I'm not sure how much promotion there was to be had.
• A 2 or 3 month dev-cycle is too short!
• The game played too easy for some people, and too hard for others. More time should have been spent on play testing a prototype...but again, 2 month time frame, not enough cycles.
• Holy crap are there a ton of scammers trying to get free game keys. Unreal!

So, what's next? Well, today (just a few minutes ago, actually) I pushed up a build to Steam which contains the second playable class for the game: The Mage. It adds a much more challenging class to play in that it has much less health in exchange for more firepower. Will be interesting to see how it's received.

We're continuing to integrate feedback from players as new feature ideas to add as we progress over the next month. As an example, one user said it was difficult to tell when the player was hit by an enemy and suggested some type of screen shake. It took less than an hour to implement but it made a HUGE difference in terms of feedback to the player.

The challenge during the next month will be to balance the existing features that need to be created in order to "finish" the game with the feature requests coming in from users as they play test the game. Certainly a fun problem to have!

I am a bit curious how sales volumes will compare after exiting the EA program and moving into the fully released category. Currently the EA sales volumes are, to be honest, abysmally slow. Again, we didn't do a TON of promo but we're starting to "pound the pavement" to get the word out now. Time will tell.

Time to get back to work. There are features to be written!