Some games crack that number after a week, but hey, I'm also more than delighted after 7 years, because I expected maybe a few thousand sold units overall.
The Supraland Origin Story
Before Supraland I was working on Supraball for a couple of years (2012-2019). Playing it brought me so much joy, but development was not a good time at all. It's so hard to make multiplayer work right as the game is basically non-functional if there are not thousands of people online at the same time and you never know if players are mean to each other (they are all the time!) because competitive games attract toxic people, who were also treating me as a developer terribly. You can tell where this story is going.
It was such a relieve to just make a Singleplayer game where I can make sure people have a good time once they open it. I had all the cool assets from Supraball so it was easy to just get going. One key moment was when I was making a tutorial map for Supraball, which was a facility with a few NPCs and lots of trials and I was starting to hide secret areas with coins in it. It made no sense in the game, but that felt so fun and special to me, I knew that's what I had to do. Puzzles and secrets are just what naturally flows out of me and I can't stop it.
Supraball Training Facility (~2016):
I "accidentally" added a sidequest where you could unlock a secret room if you found 15 secret coins. It didn't even make sense for this game but I was so drawn to this kind of stuff:
So in spring of 2017 I just started because I couldn't be of much use anymore in Supraball development. I didn't know where I was going with Supraland because I have never programmed anything myself, but with Unreal's Blueprints and lots of online tutorials I did always get things to work the way I needed to. When playing you can't tell how messy the code is.
The Plan
In the years leading up to Supraland I wrote a huge pro/con list for many adventure-ish games I played. Those games were:
Batman Arkham Series
Zeldas Phantom Hourglass and Zelda Link between Worlds
Portal 2
Monkey Island
Paper Mario 2
Outcast
Dishonored
Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishment
Metal Gear Solid 5
Assassin's Creed Unity
Steamworld Dig
Metroid Samus Returns
Farcry 3
Talos Principle
Stacking
I wrote down all the little details that I loved and disliked and then I distilled those into a list of about 20 things my adventure game should do and what it should avoid. Tons of things from freedom, player agency down to little details like how it feels to pick up an item. Supraland is my interpretation of mixing all of these games into one.
I laid the game out as a metroidvania, not as a puzzle game at all. I made sure the abilities I picked had many different use cases, but those use cases were not planned as puzzles. It just always happened to not be so obvious to players what to do, so the puzzle thing just kinda happened and I embraced it like halfway into the game.
The abilities and their use cases as I've drawn them in 2017:
(The hook of course became the force beam because a physical rope kinda thing would have been too hard to make; also the magnet shoes became the float buckle for the same reason).
The initially planned layout of the world and in which order and where you get which ability. Many things stayed as planned, some are very different:
(I've blacked out the ones that we're now going to use in Supraworld; after Supraland was long enough I just decided to cut them out and leave it like that)
Making It The very first thing I built was this:
When I got the basic character controls and mechanics down, like jumping around, picking up coins and buying some upgrades, I noticed, this is going to work out and I think I can make this happen with my very limited coding abilities. Everything looked really rought at the start in 2017:
Starting to build Red Town and the player's home:
I have hundreds of screenshots and little clips during all of development, but that would go too far now. During the 1.5 year long level design process I took a monthly screenshot from above to one day (now) show how the world came together; here a little timelapse:
The game was not supposed to be a miniature world. That all just happened during development and above you can tell exactly when. The moment the sandbox surrounding came in when a huge part of the world was already built.
Absolute key to keeping my spirit and motivation up was the early access release in 2018. Just making something on your own quickly stops being fun. Having people play and enjoy it changes everything and it helps you polish everything. New parts were frequently added to the world, just as we do now with Supraworld, except now there is way more effort in everything.
Supraland players are all very nice; what a contrast to the characters we had to put up with during Supraball times!
Name and Keyart
The first name of the game was pretty serious: "The Drought". It's the main hook of the story but it was way too epic, so I changed it. I thought it would be funny to have all our games start with "Supra" so I just went with Supraland...
Now it feels just right, but when you're searching for any name, you're doubting all those decisions and you don't know if it appeals to anyone.
There have been many logos and keyarts before the one you know now:
Shortly before release in 2019 I gave up because I didn't like all my own attempts too much. I found the incredible artist Vukasin Bagic who started to sketch stuff that I all loved. You can see where the final keyart ultimately came from. They are all amazing but I had to pick one he would finalize.
I wanted to get the essence of the game in there: Puzzles, magic abilities, combat, miniature world... it's all there.
Don't they all look lovely? And knowing there is 0% AI slop makes me appreciate it even more.
Numbers
So now over 7 years after release I was surprised to see the Steam "Lifetime total units" at about 999.600. But I'm posting this now because the console sales (PS, Xbox, Switch) are also in the ballpark of 100.000-150.000.
All in all roughly two million people played the game (I think). Xbox Gamepass players were most plentiful without adding to sold units. Same on Epic where the game was free for a week where a couple of million players claimed it and about half a million played it there. So there is no easy official count for the actual units. A bunch of the Steam buyers are also Humble Bundle related and they don't know they own it and never touched it. The median play time on Steam is 4 hours 46 minutes.
From a marketing standpoint the many "free players" (Gamepass, Epic...) are like an investment to get people interested in our other and future games. I also don't mind people pirating the game. Pirates are not lost sales. People pirate because they can't afford it or they are unsure about it. I heard from so many of them who then bought it nonetheless because they loved it or at least bought all of our other games.
Supraland is still sitting strong in the "overwhelmingly positive" review category on Steam (95%+) and word of mouth is even stronger than years ago. In the concurrent player numbers on Steam I'm seeing a slight upwards trend since 2023. Very little but visible. It's certainly not fading out as one could expect.
The one thing I keep hearing in the reviews all the time is: "I expected nothing and fell in love with it"... ...well, and "combat sucks" of course. I even put "terrible combat" in the short description on Steam earlier this year to make sure no-one has wrong hopes!
Thx!
You can't imagine how gratifying it was, after all the years of suffering with Supraball, that people would suddenly love what I'm doing and tell all their friends to play this.
My target audience was really just me, a.k.a. people who grew up with the early games in the 80s or 90s, and are tired of the same old generic stuff where you always just run around and shoot or slash monsters, while there could be so many interesting things to do in a game world. It's so frustrating to see beautiful game worlds and they are nothing but meaningless set dressing for killing badguys.
I'm always trying to get players to actually look at the game world and be surprised by the things they can actually do and to get them to see the world with fresh eyes once they learned a new bit of information or got a new ability. Way more so in Supraworld than in Supraland.
During Supraland's development I was doing everything mostly by gut feeling. That often did well but many things could be a lot better. A couple of inconsistencies with the game mechanics have also sneaked in.
Now after all the years of practice, our principles for how to make puzzles, how to structure the game world, how to hide possibilities in plain sight, and all that, have evolved so much.
All the lessons learned are going into Supraworld which is going to be like 4 times the size of Supraland and offers way more freedom, surprises and interactivity.
If you actually read this whole thing: Thank you for all the support!
-David