Every month is a busy month nowadays but May felt particularly jam-packed for us. Kyle started out the Deleveled road show by taking our demo to the iFEST Indie Game Showcase where he got a ton of good feedback from real players. We followed that up a week later by working a table at PocketGamer Connects Seattle, which is much more of an industry trade show. There, we participated in a game-pitch event and ended up placing second, earning us a nice chunk of gift certificate to use for advertising later on. (That means our advertising budget is now officially more than $0! Our publisher is very proud of us!) We wrapped up the month by heading down to Renton City Retro, a small but very well attended retrogaming expo. There, we had a ton of fun connecting with more players as well as several other developers in the Seattle Indies community.
...and, boy, are our arms tired!
The hits kept on coming last week, though, as our publisher sent out a press release to officially announce to the games press that Deleveled: 1) exists; and 2) will be coming to both Steam and Nintendo Switch this autumn! Along with that announcement, we finally released our first trailer, which you can watch either on our store page or over on YouTube. We're very happy with it and hope you will be, too! (Not so secretly, also very happy to be working on other things now.)
In addition to the road show and the super-official publicity, we've submitted Deleveled to both the Seattle Indies Expo and PAX 10 and we're very hopeful that, one way or another, we'll be able to share the game with the PAX crowd this summer. Besides those events, though, we have no plans to be anywhere else, which allows us to stay focused on our very precise autumn 2019 release "date".
For the immediate future, Kyle and I are both working to release a small alpha build to some of our friends this week. If you're interested in being a part of that group, please do get in touch however is most convenient and we'll let you know what we're looking for! Longer-term, we're planning on launching a beta somewhere in the next four-to-six weeks that we hope will much more closely resemble the look and feel of a final product. Our to-do list has, roughly, one million things on it so we'll be plenty busy this month.
As always, if you want the latest updates and coolest time-lapse videos, @DeleveledGame is the account to follow. You can also follow Kyle directly at @ToasterFuel and myself at @jpnance. As well, if you want to literally watch Deleveled be developed, hit up Kyle's Twitch stream during business hours on weekdays and fire some Nerf balls at him.
Patrick