I honestly did not expect this.
FEED THE AI has already sold over 10,000 (12.5k actually, 10k looks better xD) copies and reached 150 reviews with 95% positive.
Thank you so, so much for everything.
The game took off way harder than I ever imagined. I genuinely wasn’t even dreaming about half of this. We’re still on Steam’s Popular New Releases list, which is absolutely NUTS to me.
Release day itself was... interesting xD
I was so stressed that I literally barely remember what happened during the hour before and after launch. Apparently I should have also made a community post here saying the game was released, but that thought somehow never entered my brain lol
Luckily, so far you haven’t reported any serious bugs and I don’t need to rush out an emergency hotfix, which is a HUGE relief.
Once the dust settles a little, I get more feedback, and I finally get some rest, I’ll start thinking about what comes next.
I’m incredibly happy, and I think I’m only now slowly starting to process what actually happened.
On release day I couldn’t even properly enjoy it because my cortisol levels were somewhere in another galaxy.
I genuinely don’t remember pressing the release button xD
Thank you for playing, reviewing, and FEEDING THE AI. 🤖
A few small issues and notes I already know about and want to address:
Some Japanese characters don’t display correctly with the current font.
Also, if you played the demo and changed the language there, your language might be mixed up when launching the full game for the first time. I added more languages after the demo, which shifted the language indexes, and I forgot to reset that saved variable.
I also forgot to reset the number-of-playthroughs variable from the demo, so some demo players get a slightly misplaced tutorial dialogue about collecting Data at the beginning.
I also understand that the beginning of each chapter can feel a bit frustrating for some of you.
There are two reasons for that:
First, part of it was intentional. I wanted the difficulty curve to rise a little at the beginning of every new chapter. Every once in a while, I wanted you to feel weaker again, so that becoming ridiculously powerful a few rounds later feels even better.
But there’s also a problem with the way I spawn additional Data after every AI level-up.
That system worked really well for Chapter 1, but the chapter transitions are where it starts causing problems, because the amount of available Data can drop pretty quickly since AI doesn't level up.
That’s also why the Density and Data Value upgrades are so cheap at the beginning of each chapter. They’re meant to fix the pacing very quickly, and after just a few rounds you should be able to get back to roughly the same income you had before.
Unfortunately, properly changing the way that extra Data spawns would require rebalancing basically the entire game, and that would have been way too risky this close to release.
I still don’t think it’s a huge issue, because you can usually get the pacing back within a few minutes, and like I mentioned, some temporary slowdown at the beginning of each chapter was always intentional.
But yeah, I know that suddenly earning less doesn’t feel great. That part of the balance could definitely be better, and I’m sorry about that.
Fixing it properly would just require changes across the whole balance of the game.
And trust me, balancing a nodebuster is actual hell.
After playing the game for dozens of hours over one or two weeks, I was literally dreaming about Data at night xD
Nothing here is game-breaking, thankfully, but I’m still annoyed that I missed some of these things or couldn’t polish them further before release.
Sorry about that!
And once again: THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH! ❤️