Fest Upon Fest
The Steam Next Fest has come and gone. There's a bunch of numbers I've spent a lot of time analyzing, but at the end of the day, I'd say it all was a moderate success. I had peak viewership of about 800, which sounds amazing, but I think a lot of my stream's viewrships numbers were heavily bloated or rather hollow viewers. Just people who were browsing Steam's event page getting counted as a viewer or something.
That's ok. I did have a some people join the Discord and say very nice things about the game.
Also, the livestream was a lot of fun. If you didn't see it, you really missed out some amazing wardrobe changes and prop design. Truly.
Behold, the Block Buffet!
A Flock of Dogs Minigame
You can play 1v1, 2v2, 1v1v2v3v1. Race to feed your team's whale the most blocks. Defend and attack other teams with the beloved Flock of Dogs arsenal of mops, umbrellas, balloons, and boxing-glove lances!
Block Buffet Features:
- A cornucopia of gigantic tetrominos*
- Dogback jousting
- Hijacking (in the Halo sense) your enemies' flying dogs
- Umbrella defense
- Aggressive ballooning
- A diegetic lever and roster UI system that...like, it's cool
- And plenty of bugs to discover...........!
*Note that tetrominos are just the 2d, 4-square instantiation of the generlizable polyomino structure. For those interested in math lore, look it up on Wikipedia. Flock of Dogs blocks aren't really tetrominos because of a few attributes actually. See if you can figure out why! Tell me in the Discord!
Today. Thursday.
4 pm - 6 pm PST 7 pm - 9 pm EST Come alone, come with team, time to MINIGAME!!!
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/maaaaxaxa Discord: https://discord.com/invite/fYZFNTB
(I will start the steam at 10:30 am PST, fixing bugs from last night playtests)
I've known I really wanted to add minigames to Flock of Dogs and I know I put that as a Kickstarter stretch goal, which I didn't hit. However, the idea of making a (few) minigames now and then putting it on the Steam store for free would provide (1) martketing and (2) more people to network test the game. Also, I thought I could get it working in a week.
While, I kinda did, I also have just discovered all these ways to improve my network code that I've been dealing with. I feel like I've been cleaning the gutters of my netcode for a month now, scooping out gunk. I don't love it, but it's so satisfying. And only now is it beginning to start to shine. No one reported any crashes during the Steam Next Fest, but there were definitely desyncs and clunkiness. Anyway, I AM SUPER EXCITED ABOUT THIS MINIGAME.
Anyway. don't you love all the colors!!!!?