A few months ago, we decided to release our demo in January. Well, we effed it up, and we will tell you how it happened.
Dead Weight IS pirates, and pirates ARE Dead Weight. That's why we couldn't miss Pirates vs. Ninjas Steam Fest. We decided to participate in it with a demo version of our game.
Our team had been the creating demo since the end of November. Back then, we decided to turn all the gameplay sketches we created into an hour-long gaming experience. To do so, we had to stop developing new game mechanincs and focus on polishing the already existing ones. We even asked one of our testers to record a playthrough, which we broadcasted on our Steam page.
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of sake.
The application has been sent and approved, and the demo is almost ready, so what could go wrong, right? Right? We forgot to submit our demo for Steam moderation...
The festival is about to start, and our demo still hasn't been approved yet. We started to try to come up with a way out. Some of our colleagues told us the approval process might take up to two weeks. We got scared and even made a damage control post about how sorry we are that we have to postpone the release.
Soon, it dawned on us that we had already requested a few Steam keys to test our demo. So, why shouldn't we request even more keys, which we can give to everyone who's willing to play Dead Weight?
Immediately, we requested 1000 (!) keys and got them all ONE hour before the start of the festival. Here we faced one more challenge. How can we possibly give these keys to hundreds of people without spending hours doing it? Well, we found a way. With only a few energy drink cans, a dozen Youtube turotials, and a couple of calls, we made a chatbot that we used to give the keys to the players.
Thanks to this bot, 250 people got their keys in a week. After that, we got lucky again, and our demo finally got approved after only 5 days instead of two weeks, and we were able to release it with open access.
We got another quest. We were getting dozens of feedback messages from our players, which had to be analyzed. We had to do it manually... Every day started and ended with replying to the feedback we got. Players were willing not only to share their impression of the game but also to share all the bugs they found. We had no idea that some of them could even exist.
We are grateful for pointing out all the things we missed. Of course, we have a few dozen testers doing it for us, but having hundreds of new players each with a unique point of view helps us a lot.
Some players encountered optimisation issues. They reported that Dead Weight was using, surprisingly, a lot of VRAM. We strive to make our game as accessible as possible, that's why this issue has the highest priority for us.
The results of the festival
The festival ended on January 29th. Here are some results we got: 250 activated keys, 800 wishlists. 600 people played our demo, with a median playtime of 25 minutes. Some of them even spent up to 6 hours playing Dead Weight. Sounds cool, right?
Not really... Out of all 800 wishlists, only 80 were from non-Russian-speaking countries. We do love our Russian-speaking fans, but for a game to be successful it definitely needs to have English-speaking fans as well... It means that the festival didn't fulfill its goal of attracting foreign audience.
What's next?
Despite all the difficulties we faced and the unsatisfactory results of the festival, we aren't ready to give up. We are motivated by YOU and all the positive feedback you keep giving us! That's why we will continue to make and improve Dead Weight.
We decided not to delist the demo after the end of the festival since a lot of stuff went sideways for us and we couldn't achieve everything we planned. Some of you were saying that there isn't enough variability in the gameplay of our demo, so we are working on fixing it by adding a new enemy faction of pirate mercenaries.
Those who played the first ever version of Dead Weight on itch.io might recognise these fellas. Since when, we have had a new artist and wanted to change their design to match the rest of the characters. Now you'll have to fight not only goblins but also these experienced sky wolves too. It’s not gonna be easy!
Ready for battle!
Apart from the new faction, we are working on improving game visuals by adding various VFX. We are also looking for new ways to improve the core gameplay.
Moreover, we plan to add new playable characters to the game. Some of you might have seen their early concepts on our social media. We'll tell you a secret: we redesigned them. Try to guess what they look like now. Here is a small tip:
Can you guess the new characters' designs?
January in numbers
- 1 released demo
- 6 developers are tired
- 600 people played the demo
- 43 bugs were fixed
- got 2125 wishlists
- drunk 76 cups of coffee
- listened to lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to for 103 hours
- analyzed 147 feedback messages
- 1 new faction is about to be added