Hello everyone!
Today is the day to talk a bit more about our demo, what it means for us to make it, and whether it “pays off”. Last time I mentioned how we need to change or twist whole processes to be able to make a demo version. One part I haven’t mentioned yet but absolutely needs to be moved forward is the user interface.
That’s a lot of work, some of it for the design department (not as much as you might think though), and a lot of it for the concept art department. Someone also needs to finalize all the art and create an asset atlas, that will be called by the processes in the game and finally, someone needs to code everything about how the menus, cursors, and everything will behave. If you look at the pretty pictures, we included this time you can see a sliver of different stages and variants that we need to go through before the UI is ready (and mount Teide).
Now, if you were following our updates dutifully you might have noticed two interesting things:
a) The demo of our game came out as part of Steam Next Fest
b) Our devlog did not come out after Gamescom
Let me start with point b) I had a great vacation in the Canary Islands namely Tenerife: sun, beaches, cute animals, and mountain trekking. Look at how majestic Mount Teide looks (and forgive me for not putting out this devlog sooner, pls? ✨).
Now, let’s slowly forget there even was a point b) by focusing on its second part - Gamescom. Gamescom was a great experience for us. It was very hard and tiring work, but it was also great to see so many people enjoy our game and give direct feedback through both how they played the game and what they told us after. A lot of fans came to say hi and that was extremely motivating. It was also fun to see other indie devs and what they were working on in the bits of free time we had here and there.
Meanwhile, another part of our team was in the business section of Gamescom doing… well… business stuff, I guess. Not sure what to tell you about that but it was a great success all around for us. Thank you, guys.
As you might remember we had to fast-track our demo to be able to use it at Gamescom. The advantage was that we could just directly put our players into the middle of it and talk them through it. In the case of Next Fest, this is no longer possible as the demo needs to be completely stand-alone. We needed to finish all the menus, and basic functions of the options (so people can at least change their preferred language), we had to work with our localization team and give them all the required texts. Another part was to use some of the feedback from Gamescom to make the experience even better. But being part of Next Fest is also something new for us. So in the end it is an experiment… one that went very well.
During Next Fest more than 10k people played our demo. We received a lot of feedback. We had a lot of publicity thanks to streams and news articles. Many people added The House of Tesla to their Wishlist and our little community is just a little bit bigger thanks to all this. So, will we do something like this the next time around, even if it is hard and time-consuming? Absolutely. Also, if you haven’t but feel like it -> try our demo.
Until next time
Viktor
Lead Designer of The House of Tesla
Blue Brain Games