Welcome to our June Edition of Ember's journal, in which we are so excited! If you're in Adelaide, come play our most recent game build and meet at at AVCon: July 5th-6th, Adelaide Showground.
Off the back of a few showcases, events and some incredible AlphaBetaGamer coverage ('highly recommended', yewwww!), our wishlists experienced their first spike, really ever:
Off the back of this we have just cracked 3K Wishlists! Thanks everyone for their support and encouragement, it's been so great as we can now see a path towards our visibility goals for demo and full release.
Also huge shoutouts to The Horror Games Awards Summer Showcase, Frosty Games Fest, and Games to Get Excited About for including us, as well as all the streamers and VTubers who have shown off the game. We are really feeling the love, thank you so much.
We seem to have reached a tipping point where others are into the game enough that they are posting on our behalf, which is kind of a dream come true. Really this all started with AlphaBetaGamer, whose playthrough video got 13K views and heaps of comments:
They followed up by including in their showcase and have said multiple times that they love the game, so we are hoping for some good coverage when we have demo keys available.
On that - if you're a content creator interested in collaborating with us, please hit us up on any of our socials or email us as we'd love to work with you.
Of course, with all this going on at the surface level, development continues unabated as the dev team have been working on our 'AVCon 2.0' build. (Because it's the second time we've done AVCon. Phewf, has it been a year already?!)
Dan has added a lot to the tutorial/introduction section, and Eli has been implementing a new projectile system, AI system, and doing so many other Magical Cave Wizard things we can't keep up.
Important point: we will be shifting our build updates to be playable on Steam from now on, so the Itch version will just remain static (or we might pull it). This isn't a full release or even a demo or early access, it's just part of a gradual shift to more community playtesting and more activity on Steam.
Related, we are now recruiting for playtesters! This is all run through our Discord community so please join us there and react to the call for playtesters: Discord call for playtesters.
After all this, if you haven't seen our new trailer yet, check it out:
While the core Bad Plan team (Dan, Eli Chad) have been pulling together, we have realised there is a lot more work on the technical side than we originally thought. So, we have asked for help from Adam Schmidt (Technical Consultant) and Matthew Pannell (Programmer) to help make the game as robust as possible on the technical side. Thanks folks!
In sum, things are looking good for Ember! This has been a major breakthrough that has really encouraged us that people are into what we are making. Thanks to you all for your support so far, and keep making noise!
Love yas,
Dan, Eli, Chad, and Ember
xx
