Hello radicals!
Let's start with the most important thing: If you like the game and the demo, please let other people know! So if you want to support Crownbreakers, please review the demo on Steam, follow the upcoming crowdfunding campaign, and tell your friends or favorite content creator :)
So with that out of the way, let's dive into some numbers!
The Crownbreakers Demo has been out for almost a month and the feedback so far has been great. Both the notes I got through the feedback form as well as the tone and content of the steam reviews (40 reviews - 100% positive!) have been incredibly positive and encouraging. I'm happy to hear that so many of you were having a great time with the demo!Unfortunately the numbers in general are a tad lower than I would have liked. In this day and age, where so many impressive games are released every day, it's incredibly difficult for one game to stand out. With me being a one man studio the amount of energy I have available to pour into marketing is always going to be limited, which makes it hard for Crownbreakers to reach its audience.So let's talk about these numbers for a bit:I first launched the Demo on itch to give it some initial feedback. Thankfully I got featured on the store's front page, which is a big deal. You can clearly see it in the views graph below. The initial bump when being featured, a first drop in early February when the game dropped off the first page of featured games, and the second drop in mid-March when it stepped down another rung of visibility.All in all, the Crownbreakers demo got almost 3.600 downloads on itch.io since launching at the end of January.And as for Steam: Learning from the feedback on itch I launched the updated Demo as part of the Turn-Based Thursday fest. Visibility during that time was much improved, since it got a little featuring too, but overall it led to only around 24.000 views of the Crownbreakers page, and around 400 wishlists on the game itself.Looking at the stats of the demo directly, so far it's been about 2.100 downloads, with a little short of 670 players.These numbers are nice but by no means stellar. Getting your game in front of people's faces is just a really hard thing to do.So, where do we go from here?
As you can see ,the amount of control I have over who the game reaches is limited. It's a very indirect thing. So for the sake of my mental health I try to focus on the things I can affect directly. So here's what I'm working on:
I am currently reaching out to potential publishers to see if we want to collaborate
I am planning the upcoming Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign
I am working hard on an alpha version of the game
Let's talk about that last bit.
My vision for the alpha is a version of the game that can be shared with people, even if it only contains a subset of the final content and visuals. Currently my plan for that includes:
Two playable characters
Two playable districts
A limited stretch of the meta gameplay
This is why I spend the last few weeks overhauling and rebuilding the game's progression structure. While I'm still working on that I'm also going to start looking at the relics this week. My goal is to look at what's in the game to simply the set and make them more useful or interesting. If you have any thoughts on the relics you encountered in the Demo, let me know! Any feedback is useful to me.
And that's it for this week!
Thanks for checking in,
🔥 Martin