Devlog - March 12th 2023

Steam page problematic

This week’s focus was on the game initialization process, a bunch of testing, research and planning.

I started the week by preparing the steam progress report for February which I published later during the week. After that the focus was on the mod loading process for the game initialization. This is now working nicely so the next step will be to add a couple more features to it that I planned this week which would further improve the ease of mod initialization for modders. More details about that when I added them. Since I released the steam progress report I also checked out some data about traffic, the wishlist etc for the game and noticed something that worried me.

To explain this I need to make a small detour. For a steam application you always need to specify a planned release date in the settings even if you don’t have one yet. I’ve always chosen one that is easy to remember for me so I change it to a different one if I get closer to it. The last one was January 10th, my birthday. I have changed the date over the course of the past years without any problem multiple times. All that is of course always internal and never shown to any user visiting the game page. This always shows coming soon now or until recently TBA & Wishlist which was a custom text I was able to set prior to steam changing this option in January this year. In December I got an e-mail from steam which notified me about my upcoming release date I set for January. It also said that I should change it soon if the date is no longer valid because 10 days before the specified date it would no longer be possible to change it. I did that right away the same way I’ve done it several times in the past. Now, my recent check on the data showed a very obvious spike in page traffic, wishlist entries etc starting on the 10th for about 5 days. After that the traffic more or less stopped entirely. I immediately assumed that something with the date went wrong and contacted the steam support. After some back and forth and me providing additional data they told me that the date was never pushed. I never got any information that game was supposedly released now, the game still shows as coming soon and without my own research I would have likely not found out until much much later. There would be more to talk about here but to make things not go on for longer I’m gonna leave it at that. What does this mean now? There is essentially no more traffic and wish list entries since that apparent release in January. My assumption is that the algorithm internally now handles the game as released even though there isn't a game. Given that and no game sales happening it considers the game to be not of any interest because nobody is buying it. This is obviously not possible because the game isn’t out yet. Without interest, the game is not being shown to many people essentially rendering it dead before arrival. I haven’t even uploaded a single build on steam yet, not even for my personal testing so I don’t know why the internals would even consider it released but that is the only explanation I can come up with when looking at the data. With the linear growth now gone that always happened before January this is the most likely explanation because otherwise it should have continued with the growth it had for well over 1 and a half years. Given all that, I’m currently considering my options and believe that the best option is to create a new app project on steam for essentially the same game and start from scratch with 0 wish list entries. Given the fact that the game's art style and a big portion of the overall vision has changed over the course of the steam page being published, this blank project might even be good in the long run - who knows?! With that in mind I will shift the focus in the direction that brings me closer to a (tiny) demo covering the major aspects but in a very limited and basic manner. For that I took time this week to plan that out which I will hopefully be able to finish by the end of next week. I’m looking at this as a chance to start off stronger and use a demo that can much better convey the direction of the game than a handful of pictures can. I will be talking about the plans for that in more detail in next week's devlog when I have fully planned out my next steps.

Notable tasks this week:

• Posted Steam progress report for February
• Extended game initialization process
• Planned creating a new steam page for the game and demo due to problem with the game’s steam page (Details above)

Wishlist on Steam

Join the Discord

That’s all I got this week. I hope you are all doing well.

Stay safe out there and I’ll see you next week.