Another year, another monthly Dev-Blog!
First off, happy new year to everyone!
Retrospective
The game has now been released for more than one year and has been in development for almost 2 entire years
(This section is large and will speak about the creation of the game and Sales count).
Game origin
The game development could be said to have started as far back as February 2022.
Originally, the project name was Idle-Wave, and it was meant to be a very different game.
The idea was to have an idle-type game with a village to build, and you had to do runs to collect some resources to collect resources or even monsters to do monster husbandry to help progressing in the idle part.
The idle part of the game allowed you to start later in the wave, accelerate time, and overall be stronger for the run part.
It started with a prototype on which I worked with a friend.
I was doing the run part, and he did the idle part on his free time.
I had a pretty good prototype base for the survivors part (prototype that can be downloaded from the museum channel on the discord)
After around 2 weeks, we started to explore using ECS and DOTS from unity; this could allow for insanely large amounts of stuff to happen without performance issues, but it's a programming paradigm that I didn't understand back then, in addition to been really buggy at this time.
After a few days of no progressing at all, the game idea being refined and looking more like Vampire Survivors with a glorified Meta-progression than a proper game, a divergent view on the game with my friend, and a new contract I had to work on, this put an end to the development of the prototype.
There is nothing out of the ordinary for game-dev; ton of prototype get killed super early for a vast number of reasons.
Around 3 months later, during April 2022, I was watching a video of the game Round-Guard (which is basically Slay the Spire and Peggle combined) around 30 minutes into the video It all clicked in me and I thought of making a mix of Slay the Spire and Vampire Survivors.
The idea looked unique enough to me to be worthy of being developed, as making a simple clone of VS wasn't really worth it to me.
So I went back to the prototype I made back in February and worked for a few days to make a Slay the Spire style map generation.
This is what it looked like back then:
Pretty barebone, there was no shop, no boss, chest was just a card selection, same for event, icons were placeholders. but it was playable, and it was enough to know the concept was worth being worked on.
Then I implemented shop, artifact, worked on the graphics, made UI, and did a ton of polish for the next 2 months.
It was super intensive (and quite unhealthy); I could easily work 12 to 15 hours a day, taking a break only to eat or sleep.
But I achieved to make something worthy enough to be made a demo for Steam.
The demo then got published on August 7, 2022.
That's more or less how the game was created.
Since then, the game evolved a lot, while it was looking polished compared to the early prototype, the game released back in September 2022 was very rough compared to the current state of the game.
Player Count
A tool often used by game developers to track player counts over a lifetime (for both its own game or other game) is SteamDB.
This was a very precious tool to analyze which game did work or not, what did bring players or not. I obviously used it a lot to track player counts on Rogue: Genesia, so this is the player count graph of the game during its lifetime:
As you can see, R:G had a loooot of players during the reason, and even for the whole end of 2022, reaching a minimum concurrent player count of 500 during late December.
But the player count slowly and gradually declined, and that's entirely normal for a single-player game. The game today is usually hovering around 100 concurrent players, which is still a pretty good number.
The pike you can see on the game are the major updates the game received,
- 0.7 update boosted player count from 1300 to 3100
- 0.8 update boosted it from 300 to 1400
- 0.9 update from 170 to 600.
Medium-sized updates do a small bump to player count, but they are barely noticeable.
My interpretation is that most players are now waiting for the 1.0 of the game to return to it.
So I better make sure the game is as good as possible for 1.0 release and not rush the game release.
Price increase and Sales Count
Looking back, there is a lot of misconception players make about the sale count for video games. Players think that an update increases the sales of the game. Or that a huge increase in players after an update means there are a lot of sales happening.
Similarly, I remember that when I announced the price increases for Rogue: Genesia, I often heard players being worried that the price increase would drastically reduce the sales count of Rogue: Genesia, and that it would kill the game, so let's look at the evolution of sales count during the lifetime and analyze them:
Sale count followed a similar course, with a very big early spike and a continuous and slow reduction, but in a more pronounced manner than player counts:
86.3% of all sales count of Rogue: Genesia was done between the release and the first January 2023, and only 13.3% of sales were done.
That means the price of the game reduced the sales count right ?!
Update 0.7
Here is the sale count graph from release to December 2022, and in red, the day the price increased from 2.99$ to 4.99$ when update 0.7 was released:
As you can see, this price increase did not significantly affect the sales count of Rogue: Genesia. Similarly, the update which boosted the player count by x3 did not increase the sales counts.
One may say that the price increased compensated for the sale increase from an update?
Update 0.8
Let's see what happened when update 0.8 was released:
You can see an increase of sale for the following 3 weeks until it slows down back to a normal level.
However, there has been a -10% discount going on starting on March 16, and the actual effect on the update was the following:
- In red is the decaying effect of the update,
- In green, the moment the -10% discount started Now, the part in red wasn't just the update increasing the number of sales miraculously; it was due to Content creator making video on the game when the update dropped (to name them, it was both Sifd making a ton of video and Wanderbot releasing a video just after the release). The 0.7 update did not have much simultaneous exposure (and there has been a lot more copies sold at this time, so similar exposure wasn't noticeable)
Update 0.9
The 0.9 update received close to no exposure at all (Wanderbot did a video on 0.9 about 2 months before the update dropped, so it wasn't really relevant anymore), and the price increase didn't have any effect on sales, same as 0.7:
- In blue, you can see the Wanderbot video of July 2023 and the slight increase of sale that followed
- In red the release of 0.9 update and the price increase from 4.99$ to 8.99$
- In blue, you can notice a first increase; this is due to the bundle with Lethal zone for its release.
- In green, this is the first time Rogue: Genesia got a discount of -20% during the Bullet Heaven Fest followed by the Autumn Steam sales.
The part in Green may look huge, but it's around the daily sales I was doing back in December 2022 without any discount.
Youtube vs Twitch
Before going to the conclusion, I want to speak of the difference in sales impact between Twitch and Youtube.
From my observation (both on Rogue: Genesia and other games), Twitch usually leads to a sudden spike in sales, that instantly stops when the streamer stops playing it, contrary to youtube videos which often have a small spike but have a long sale tail.
I'll take the 3 days AdmiralBahroo played Rogue: Genesia in the livestream; this happened just before update 0.8 was dropped:
As you can see, there was a huge spike and it quickly dropped down to normal value afterward, contrary to the spike that follows that was longing for additional days.
Usually a medium-sized YouTuber that makes a video on a game will have as much impact in total sales than a large streamer playing a game for 2 hours.
Conclusion
As you can see, the increase in price did not have an impact on the number of sales the game did; the number of sales naturally decreased over time, with a huge impact for the release. Content creators making video/stream does increase the sale of a game for a short time.
What mainly affects the lifetime sale of a game is how much Steam is willingly pushing it to new customers. And this is greatly affected by how big is the biggest wave the game did.
For most games, this wave happens at launch, so it's SUPER important to a lot of wishlists for game-developers before releasing their game and make a powerful impact on Steam so the algorithm continues to push your game to new customers for a long time.
Work-time balance
Before finishing this long section of retrospection, I want to talk about my work-time balance.
As many know (I've always been open about it), I worked an unhealthy amount of hours daily without taking any day off I managed to greatly reduce the amount of time I spend on working since then. Following the advice of people in the comment, I've taken a whole month off after 0.9 update release, and now I'm managing to keep an almost healthy amount of work time, trying not to breach the 8 hours a day too much or too often.
Plan for 2024
I originally planned for the EA of Rogue: Genesia to end by the end of December, but no amount of unhealthy work time will allow that, and it's better to slow down and take the time I need to reach it. Ultimately, it pushes back the next game I want to work on to mid-2024, but it should be fine. R:G is still bringing in enough money so I can continue to work on it, and I still believe the 1.0 release of R:G should bring in enough money to peacefully budget and work on my next game.
I also want to slightly change the release plan of updates (and consecutively the prices increase).
My original plan was to make update 0.10, increase the game price to 12$, then do update 0.11, increase the price to the final price of 15$ as it would be 1.0 version in terms of content, then focus on polish for 1.0 and have a -33% discount for the release.
However, a lot of things that I wanted to do during the 0.11 > 1.0 update ended up being done during the 0.9.1 update.
New plans
0.10 Update is unchanged, but it won't have a price increase to 12$.
After the 0.10 update is released, I'll start working on the 1.0 version of the game.
About one month before the 1.0 release is finished, I'll increase the game price to 15$. When the game is ready for 1.0 (and the discount cooldown is finished), I'll publish the 1.0 update with a -33% discount (for a release price of 9.99$ during the discount).
Update 0.9.1
In the last blog post, I hoped for the update to be done before Christmas, but as you can see, it's another delay!
I likely caught Covid (didn't got tested, but the fact I've lost a part of salt-tasting is making me think it was Covid) at the beginning of December, seriously slowing down the development of the update.
Then came the Christmas period, and then...
I got sick again since about one week ago... (and still a bit sick)
I'm still advancing on the update, just slower than I would like, but it shouldn't be far.
I'm focusing on fixing the last few bugs I know about and the small little nitpicks left in the update.
I would even have said ready for the 15th of January if I wasn't sick, so expect it to drop during next week.
Since the last blog post, some cool stuff has been done:
Challenges Level
Challenges can now get stronger!
Well, some challenges can now be increased in difficulty.
This can have different effects, like increasing the rank of the challenge or increasing the effect it has, but also increasing the soul-coin reward for completing it.
You need to complete the previous level of a challenge to give a try at the next level of it.
This new feature is aimed at the most experienced players who are always looking for new, more crazy stuff to accomplish.
Steam Achievements
I know a lot of players were asking for more Steam achievements, and OH BOY!
They are gonna love this update.
All the achievements in the game are now added to Steam.
There have been 2 reasons why I didn't do it sooner:
- Steam put a limitation on the number of achievements a newly released game can have, and I knew that Rogue: Genesia had many more achievements than this limit. I just discovered recently that I could go above this limit (no, there was no notification of when I could).
- Steam has no tool to add in bulk large amounts of achievements. There is a way to massively edit localizations of achievements, but for adding new achievements, you have to manually add them, one by one, and upload both the locked and unlocked images manually. This means at best 2 minutes per achievement, so for R:G, which has about 200+ achievements, this is days of work that would be spent on it.
But after pushing it back for a long time, I ended up "hacking" a website testing software to automate the achievement uploading automatically from a Json file and images file.
Card Tree
A small QoL addition I originally planned to make for 1.0.
A tree of soul-cards to easily see which cards are required or built into which card.
This should make card requirements or evolution much easier to understand for players.
White thin lines mean that it requires any of the cards,
Red line means it requires this specific card.
There is still space for improvement, but this is a great addition.
Trailer
Rogue: Genesia never had any trailer.
Well, Steam asks for a trailer to publish the page, but I simply put a small gameplay video randomly taken because it's the only thing I had.
And it's funny to see video using this as if it was the real trailer of the game (especially today at how outdated it is)
But this will be part of the past!
The official trailer of Rogue: Genesia is complete and will be published at the same time as Update 0.9.1.