Hey guys,
Steam Next Fest is over and it’s time to catch up on sleep, wash the dishes – and summarise our impressions. Here’s what happened during the event:
THE BEST STREAM ABOUT THE GAME
Hats off to SplatterCatGaming for recording a great overview of the current state of the game! This video, as well as the comments of the community, are spot-on, and provide a treasure trove of valuable feedback for our team. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion!
Watch it here:
As a small team, we’re spending 100% of our time on the development, with little to no chances to reach out to any streamers. Steam Next Fest made it possible for us to reach that audience.
NUMBERS
As of this writing:
- 15.000 people added the demo Spire of Sorcery to their Steam libraries
- 10.000 people have played it at least once
- 8.000 people have wishlisted the game in the recent week
The current wishlist of Spire of Sorcery went from 62.000 to 70.000 during the recent week, which gives us both the confidence and the motivation to keep improving things as we prepare for the Early Access release in August/September.
COUNTRIES
Here’s the countries where the ten thousand people who tried the demo last week came from:
Top 10 countries:
- China
- USA
- Russia
- Germany
- France
- UK
- Japan
- Canada
- Poland
- Korea
For being able to reach such an international audience, we owe the debt of gratitude to our localization partners who worked around the clock to deliver the translations:
- Akebono Translation (Aya Pickard, Cindy Kim, Niu Peng Fei, Loek van Kooten) worked on Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese
- Rolf Klischewski worked on German
- Words of Magic worked on French
Dear fellow developers, we highly recommend these teams – they are passionate about video games and bring a wealth of experience!
FEEDBACK
The closest analogy that we can come up with, is being a chef in a new restaurant, and serving the menu for the first time to the people who stopped by to try the food.
The good:
It was really, really great to hear that most players loved the visuals and the music and sounds.
The expected:
Our makeshift tutorial was better than nothing, but still rather confusing. We held no illusions about it, and yes, indeed, a lot of people got lost trying to learn how to cook Fermented slug jelly and how to concoct Dead man’s tears.
The unexpected:
We facepalmed like crazy when watching people play and seeing them confused about such things (obvious to us after 2.000 hours in the game!!) as how to eat Bloodfroth, how to lick a Giggler Skull, or how to combine Fire and Frost spells into a combo Damage spell... To us, these were the blind spots, since we know our game inside out. Seeing new players discover these things (often failing at the first attempt) made us realize which areas we need to improve the game in.
The excellent:
Several players shared their impressions in a way that was extremely helpful. It’s not about the level of details, or the specific suggestions, it’s rather about reading their stories and suddenly getting hit with a bolt of lightning about how to make the game better.
EARLY ACCESS
Thanks to the feedback from Steam Next Fest, we remain committed to our plan to release the game in general Early Access in August/September of this year.
In 8 to 12 weeks, you should be able to take control of the Spire, build kennels (or dungeon?) and engage with the first non-human tribes of Rund!
DEMO WILL REMAIN AVAILABLE
Even though the festival is over, we decided to keep the demo-version available on the Steam store page of Spire of Sorcery – since it’s the best way to explain just what exactly we are building ;-).
Please enjoy the demo, share it with friends and feel free to leave us your feedback! We will be updating the demo as we improve core mechanics (and the tutorial!) all the way until the Early Access launch, and even beyond!
Thanks for making the festival a special thing for us, and see you around!
