Summary
It's been over four months since our last update here. There were many reasons for this, but primarily, we've just been too busy working on the game and getting our heads above the water due to the coronavirus situation.
We went to PAX South, DreamHack Anaheim, and PAX East, all before coronavirus effectively destroyed our marketing plans for the year.
Here's a recap of what's been going on over the past four months.
Official Announcement Trailer
We finally created a proper announcement trailer for the game:
"Anxiety Relievers"
Using some in-game assets, we created funny little skits to hopefully get a chuckle or two out of people during these stressful times. The team had fun creating them as well!
Nekoman Needs To Pay Attention!
Nekoman vs Penguin
These are just the first two, a few more will be popping up on our YouTube channel in the near future, so make sure to subscribe!
Convention Pics and Random Stats
PAX South 2020
- Random 10x10 corner booth
- Over 600 demos
- 419 email signups
DreamHack Anaheim 2020
Best Casual Game
- We were part of Indie Playground
- Won Best Casual Game
- We were a Finalist in the Game Pitch Competition
- Over 400 demos
- 162 email signups
PAX East 2020
Part of PAX Rising
- Part of PAX Rising
- Sponsored by Razer
- Half-pod vs 10x10 booth
- Over 800 demos
- 150 emails signups
Surprisingly, we got a lot more out of PAX South than PAX East or DH Anaheim and there's probably a few good reasons for that:
- A lot of III/AA, AAA studios still showing off their stuff a PAX East, so it was hard to compete for attention vs PAX South, which is definitely more Indie focused.
- PAX Rising location was in a pretty bad position at PAX East, almost too far back from the front main entrance, too many goodies to distract people before they made their way (if they did)
- My PAX Rising pod location was also itself in a bad position, facing away from main aisles, and only 4 feet from another pod facing towards us and when things got busy, there was no room for people to hang out and wait, so they just left.
- A 10x10 booth (like the ones in PAX South and DH Anaheim) give you a lot more space to work with, especially if you're in a corner location (like I was for both events)
- DreamHack Anaheim 2020 was the very first time it was held, and with it being so new, traffic was pretty low compared to the other two events.
- At PAX South, we were next to PAX Together (facing directly at it), and those folks were getting quite a bit of media attention and traffic.
Overall though, I think any DreamHack event is worth it, DH Anaheim will hopefully just get bigger and bigger as more folks know about it. PAX South I would highly recommend for Indies. PAX East...I'm not sure about. Being PAX Rising, I thought I would get at least Tier 2 (hoped for Tier 1) Media/Influencer coverage, but that didn't happen. Perhaps if I had a publisher or decent public relations firm backing me up, it could have gone better. Cost-wise, I haven't actually had the chance to do proper post-mortems for these three events yet (they practically happened back to back), so I'll do in-depth post-mortems in the future.
Game Progress
If I were to put a percentage on how far along we are in development, I'd say it'd be around 75% complete.
We blocked out and complete the Flameylands (formerly Hell) biome, started work on Fluffylands (formerly Heaven) biome, reworking Junglelands (probably will be renamed as well) biome. So that leaves finishing up Fluffylands, Spaceylands and Pirate Ship biomes.
Bosses are coming along nicely as well, player controls were reworked a bit, tightened up some more. Art assets and sounds are being reworked or added if they were missing.
Wishlist
Please make sure to wishlist us on Steam, we'll be updating the demo on there and here periodically as well.
