Hello keepers of the dome 🙂
PAX
We are entering a hot phase now in April! We'll fly over to Boston to be part of the great indie game conference PAX East https://east.paxsite.com/en-us.html
We'll show and reveal a lot of cool things then. For one, we have a shiny new trailer, that should give a good impression on how the game feels now. We will also reveal the name change, which we planned for so long. Dome Romantik was really only a pun that lived much longer than anticipated, although i appreciate that many of you actually like the name! On our booth there will be a few stations where the current version of Dome can be played, and where we'll hang around and chat. There is another big reveal about to happen there, which i won't spoil yet 😄
Demos
I can also tell we'll be part of the Steam Next Fest in Summer, in which you'll get your hands on the new demo. That demo will look and feel more like the Steam Release we are working on, and not so much like the (expanded) game jam version you've been playing as a demo so far.
With the start of PAX, we'll also finally take the current Demo offline on the 17th ofApril. Initially we announced to only keep it up 3 days, not 60. So there will be no Demo for some weeks, until the Next Fest rolls around. This is because we think some people might see the game on PAX and the new Trailer, and then might look for the Demo, which doesn't fit anymore. We'll do some playtests here and there, organized over on our Discord - come over and hang out, it's a lovely community!
the wtf part
Exactly 2 months back on the 14th of February, when we were still young and innocent, we put the Demo of Dome Romantik live on Steam. We decided that on a whim, spontaneously a few days before the Midweek Madness Event Games from Germany started. This Demo had been sitting in our hands a few months already, and we were happily working on it in our spare time - we were hobbyists back then. We had a good time and were testing the build with our small but amazing community. We expected a small bump from that event. But oh boy, we had no idea.
Fast forward to today and 75.000 people spent a combined 224.000 hours in the demo. On some days, over 5000 people played it. Our Discord exploded from 270 people to nearly 4000. So many fantastic youtube channels and twitch streamers covered Dome, that we couldn't even keep up watching it.
Sometimes we still stop, look at each other and ask ourselves: How insanely awesome is that? That our little game jam entry finds so much love with you? You wouldn't believe how much that powers us to push and push, to make a worthy game, to make this the best we can. In January we switched to working full time one Dome, and i like to think: if we could make something you liked that much in our spare time, what can we do when we can focus on it 100%, when it's not in the late hours after an exhausting day at the offices?
Anyway, i'm just feeling so thankful and happy to be able to work on this with all I got, and i know the team feels a similar sense of fullfilment.
See you at PAX, or maybe some time on a Dome Stream :)
Have a good time
:)