Hello,
This might be the first time you hear from the developer, so hi, I'm Arek, the guy behind this game.
I'm not really into public announcements or building hype, but I thought I should write something about the demo you probably played last week.
What's different in the upcoming Early Access on 8th November?
1.Demo was quite buggy.
Took me 1-2 weeks to get through all of the bugs you guys reported.
Collectively you put in more than a thousand hours of playtesting.
That would take me 3 months of work, so I'm really happy you found those bugs!
Just big shame it was in such a sad state.
2. Polish.
Rule of thumb - my games aren't very good, but they are very polished.
Demo had missing effects and some problems with unintuitive interface.
I hope these things are fixed now. There are some BIG changes!
I'll be working on polish as we go. Updates are already schedules for every week.
3. Campaign.
Winter Falling is an old-school campaign-based game.
Early Access at this moment has only 1 campaign. Takes 1h - 1.5h to beat.
It's not the campaign from the demo.
I'll be adding more campaigns as we go. My goal is about 5 campaigns.
They are quite easy to make. You can make them yourself!
There's a folder inside the game "StreamingAssets". There are no special modding tools.
The entire game was made with basic .png art and a spreadsheet.
I will create a guide how to do that properly.
4. Level Editor.
Some of you used the map editor!
I've made some improvements already. But it still needs a lot of work.
Obviously the game needs more content, I will be adding that as we go.
My goal is to make a map editor that makes nice maps and you can print them to play actual good wargames.
5.Gamedev Stats.
Here's some info for other developers.
SteamNext Festival gave Winter Falling unprecedented visibility.
It doubled the wishlists. Gave me players.
It's the best thing that happened to the game.
Interesting how many players player the First Prototype in 2019 and still remember the game, even though they never wishlisted it.
It's a shame games can only participate once. I wish I spent more time marketing the game, but I always felt the game wasn't ready yet. Suddenly it's ready and there's no time for marketing!
Considering we're at 5000 wishlists, the theory is 20% should buy first week. It should sell 3000 copies in the next 12 months. Every copy is $10. After taxes and Steam cut I should make $5 on every copy. That gives $15k for 12 months, which is quite okay in my poor region on the border with Ukraine. I'm sure I'll continue the development in 2023. Really happy I won't have to look for a new job. Fingers crossed, may the theory be correct!
Thank you for reading,
Arek