Hey Everyone,
WOW! what an awesome festival NextFest is; tons of incredible games and ideas all collected in one place for consumer convenience. THANK YOU Steam! And a HUGE THANK YOU to all our fans and gamers that tried EONWAR over NextFest.
With NextFest now over and only the fond memories of demo playthroughs to accompany us into the next few months of grind, it's often overlooked how much work is needed to stand out and build a community amidst the sheer number of quality titles on the horizon. We want to share our successes (and failures) with the community in order to help indie developers like ourselves align better with community expectations and understanding of the road that ultimately leads to a title release on Steam.
Please note since this announcement Giovanni (Lead Dev) and myself have been working in a near fulltime capacity on EONWAR for just over 3 years.
ANALYTICS
We had 193 users over the official course of the Steam Festival - though this doesn't include any users that may have downloaded and played a game outside of those dates. This was a surprise to us and we are extremely happy with the result. We hope to continue adding innovation over the next few months to increase this number during our next available demo. The numbers actually exceeded our expectations as we had relatively little, to no marketing.
OBSERVATIONS
One of the main observations we made from our gamers was their initial understanding of what they should actually be doing in each match- i.e. how to win.
Although we made efforts to explain the win conditions on the main loading screen and pause menu, it's obvious that these were not digested as easily as we'd hoped or understood as being the win conditions at all. We are well aware of the necessity to incorporate a fleshed out tutorial and it is on the roadmap, however our focus was to refine the systems we'd had inplace in the run-up to the festival.
With all that said, we have decided to breakdown the vast number of options available to the user into smaller bite-sized chunks that should minimise the player feeling overwhelmed and provide more structure as to what they should be doing. Here are some mockups of our new GUI that should perform in this bite-sized manner:
The mockup above illustrates the proposed changes we are considering. We have separated the actions available into 2 categories: those that use a commander card, and those that don't. We have also removed all instances of on-board actions and GUI that do not directly relate to the action-type selected (circled in blue). We believe this makes for a less confusing experience but as always, remain eager to hear your feedback whether or not this change feels better or what we can do to improve.
Above: separation between free and special actions (non-commander/ commander required) to communicate a more streamlined number fo choices.
SCHEDULE
in light of these changes there will no doubt be some impact to our
development schedule but we believe the changes are necessary and welcomed. Our planetside battles development may have to take a step back for the time being but without a solid core game we'd be doing our community an injustice.
Let us know what you think at:
eonwar.net
or
EONWAR Discord Channel
Til next time, stay frosty soldier!
