One year ago today I released my spare-time game Positron to Steam Early Access! To celebrate, it's currently discounted 33% until December.
I've sold 176 copies of the game, about half of those sales in the first month after hitting Early Access. I've added the new Snake game mode (to compliment Maze) and whole bunch of levels. I added full reflections in the walls reflecting the world, bikes, trails, and particle effects (old school stencil reflections, my renderer is super basic tbh). I've optimised for lower end machines and it runs great on Steam Deck.
Driving traffic to the Steam store page has been hard. Using what limited time I find on weekends occasionally to work on the game, to keep updates coming and keep engagement.
I have two contributors who signed up to work on the XNA version of this game, 14 years ago. Both to receive 10% share of anything the game makes. The caveat is that payment is made when game revenue breaks £1000, which it hasn't... yet, but based on what I believe the sales to be for October I think I'll be able to finally send them their first £100 in the coming week!
I did have a third contributor too, Neil, who concepted the bikes, and created the Positron logo. He unfortunately died a while back (he was actually murdered abroad), so I'll be donating his share to a charity of his family's choosing.
Right now I'm trying to drive the current players to review the game, as well as building up more social presence with scheduling and more short form video content to try and lure in players.
I have a few big updates I've been working on over the last few months, and I intend to use this sale/anniversary period to push them out! A whole new mode, Arena, adds deathmatch vs AI play. Splitscreen local multiplayer to be played in all three game modes. Then, a full rework of the game's progression system! Lots of big changes incoming, and I'm well on the way finishing porting my engine to run fully on Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation too for the inevitible 'full release' and exit of Early Access!