Since the earliest days of Bowmen's development and consistently throughout its existence, I've largely gotten two major pieces of feedback from players:
1. The game would probably succeed best on a mobile device platform (such as iOS).
2. The game would greatly benefit from full controller support, in addition to support for a mouse and keyboard.
The second piece of advice I also received from Valve, since a large portion of PC gamers also own a controller and use it regularly for playing games. However, initially I wanted to stick to a mouse and keyboard for a few reasons: First, the original game concept design was to be that of old school PC games like the ones I played back in the day, such as Gunbound, Warcraft, and Diablo. For a lot of these games, they had a chat feature upon the initial game menu that allowed you to talk with other players that were currently in game, which I greatly enjoyed. This was implemented for Bowmen after months of development, but I wasn't quite sure how to morph this function to be useable on a controller (which, to be honest, I am still working on). Second, these types of games often utilize "mouse over" tooltips, which was also problematic for a controller (I could make a "gamepad" version of the menus, where the tooltips are stationary, but it would take a lot of code rewriting and a UI overhaul). Lastly, all of these features would need to be reworked again for iOS touch controls, and porting the game to something like the Nintendo Switch or an iPad would cause me to lose all access to the Steam platform for those ports, which my ranking system for Bowmen heavily depended on.
Cue the Steam Deck
Then recently, I learned through a friend about the Steam Deck, which simultaneously appeared to answer all these problems (how the Steam Deck managed to slip passed my radar is either a testament to how much I've been working these days, or a testament to the metaphorical rock I've been living under). Regardless, the Steam Deck was a godsend, because it allowed me to add functional support for a controller to Bowmen while also simultaneously preparing the game for a "mobile" release. Not only that, unlike the Nintendo Switch, iOS, or other potential port options I was considering for the game, the Steam Deck would allow me to keep using all of the Steam APIs for things like a friend's list, ranking systems, leaderboards, usernames, and everything else that Bowmen relied on. It has been a daunting task to make all of these changes to the game over the last few months to say the least (and that definitely is NOT and understatement), but I am finally closing in on completing controller and Steam Deck support for Bowmen. It will likely take a few more weeks for me to conclude play testing of the game to ensure a bug free end user experience on the device, but we're finally in the home stretch to where I feel confident I can formally announce it and start prepping everything to be pushed to players.
Therefore, I am pleased to announce that soon we will be pushing an update for Bowmen that will formally add support for the Steam Deck as well as controller support on the PC. We will be focusing on Xbox 360 / Xbox One controller support initially (which appear to be the major ones used by PC gamers), as well as the Steam controller, but we are open to suggestions for more controllers to support as time goes on. There is not a currently scheduled official release date for this major game update, but you should expect it to drop roughly within the next few weeks to a month. Until then, stay tuned!
Thank you for playing Bowmen!
Ethereal Gem Development Team