Hi everyone!
Road to Vostok launched into Early Access five days ago and it has been quite a ride.
Here's some info related to on-going launch and few other topics as well.
Launch Stats (ATM)
Copies / units sold: ~140,000
Review score: Very Positive (~3k)
Daily active users (avg): 25,421
Twitch peak viewers: 31,891
For a game with a zero-marketing budget, this launch has been extremely successful and secured the entire development roadmap for Road to Vostok.
Thank you for all who have purchased the game and trusted me as a developer. I will do very best to make sure that these resources from the launch are being utilized in a responsible and smart way to take this project to its next phase.
Solo-dev Dilemma
Being a solo-developer has many perks and benefits, but also a lot of limitations when it comes to things like launching your game to a semi-large audience.
One of these limitations is your capacity to handle upcoming information. For example, I currently have ~11k unread emails and most of my communication channels are pretty much "running away from me".
In practice, this means that when I answer one contact form email, by the time I have replied to that, there's 4 more and while your a sleep and you wake up, you're +500 messages behind and so on.
The most logical solution to this problem is that I start hiring some additional help, but unfortunately that option becomes available only next month when I can start utilizing these funds from the launch.
This being said, if you have sent a bug report or tried to contact, there's a high change that I haven't managed to answer yet (sorry for that), but hopefully you understand the one-human limitation here.
Disclaimer: Some of this information flood is linked to key-request bots, but they are really difficult to filter out completely and since this was my first time launching a game I had no prior knowledge how to prepare for those.
Upcoming Hotfixes
I'm already tempted to start making hotfixes and tweaks but there's few "lessons learned" topics involved.
One of those topics is related to my prior experience working under heavy-load and "foggy" mental state. Getting to this early access required pretty insane work hours and stuff that I would not recommend for others, but I made those decisions since I wanted to give this product the best change for the launch and I hope the effort shows in the game.
And how is this related to hotfixes? Well, based on my prior experience if you start making tweaks and especially code-changes under this heavy-load, you can easily fix one thing, but you accidentally create two new problems or some unexpected issues when you are not running on 100% mental clarity.
Since the game is performing really well on Steam and works like intended for majority of the players, I really don't want to screw things up by making accidental mistakes. I have decided that I will have this initial personal recovery first and only after that I will jump back into the code. I think this is the most reasonable and wise thing to do.
Of course for someone who is trying to launch the game and experiences a crash, you want that hotfix ASAP but since this project still relies on one full-time developer, we want to keep that one developer in working condition for many years to come :)
I estimate that it will take me around one more week once I have caught up with all the bug reports and I'm ready to start implementing certain hotfixes and tweaks for the release build.
I already have a good bug category / priority system in place and I have watched a lot gameplay from the early access, so the plan for this first hotfix is pretty solid and well-though out.
Once I manage to implement these hotfixes, I'm also going to take a proper break from the development (never had that in 4 years) before I start working towards the Build 2, meaning the AI overhaul and next major additions to the game.
Final Thoughts
I'm really happy how this launch is going and seeing people enjoying the game!
I think that I managed to find a good price point (and launch date) for the release which is fair and aligned with the current feature-set. I also think the game launched at a good state for an early access title, consider the response and how I feared those hardware related launch issues which turned out to be really minimal in large picture.
Once again thanks to everyone who bought the game, provided feedback, left a review and provided me this opportunity to secure the entire development roadmap for Road to Vostok.
Thanks,
Antti (Developer)