What a wild ride leading up to launch and everything that's come after!
📜We had a great time making Quest Giver, and the project is now entering the maintenance phase (small polish updates and bugfixes).

I (Darzington) wanted to take some time to discuss what Zalinius and I learned from the experience.

The Project Goal

• Make it through an entire game development cycle without serious stress or burnout or crunch time
• Experience all the hurdles of launching our first Steam game:
  • founding a company
  • learning the SteamAPI
  • working from home
  • managing the entire project with deadlines
  • setting up continuous integration and the build pipeline
  • building custom tools in our engine of choice (LibGDX)
  • and in Darz's case learning how to program by voice

Our Marketing (or Lack Thereof)

🤫 Since we knew from the get-go that this project was going to involve a lot of learning- and likely a lot of mistakes along the way- we wanted to do so in a low-pressure environment. To that end, we deliberately avoided marketing the game during development.

• Don't get me wrong, we put in the effort to make a nice Steam page and we told friends and family about it, even distributed a few keys on Keymailer, but commercialization definitely wasn't the focus of the project.
• With that in mind, we declared that we'd be happy if we sold at least 10 copies (we figured we must know at least 10 people, right?)

Sales & Wishlists

• Launch day, December 1st 2023, saw us with just over 100 wishlists: a number that I gather is disastrous for serious commercial games but which we found delightfully/confusingly high given the lack of marketing. (Do we actually know 100 people...?)
• We launched with a 15% discount. This translated into 40 sales within the first couple days of launch, well past the 10 sales we aspired for. Mission accomplished!
• Since then sales have continued to trickle in most days, and at the time of writing there have been 169 units sold (January 14th 2024)
• With the game currently at ~1,100 wishlists, we're curious to see how our first 20% discount sale goes, coming... at some point!

Results & Lessons Learned

💲 Evidently this was not a money-maker for us, but I have to admit that it was really nice to go through the whole experience with minimal stress. We've seen enough devs burnout and struggle to finish their games, and we really didn't want that to be us. The month before launch saw us both very nervous and definitely scrambling to get some things done in time, but at the same time the deadline kicked us into gear and got us to actually finish the project.

💖 We definitively confirmed that we like working from home, and we like working together! We will absolutely be making a second game and trying to elevate the company above the level of "fun, but unprofitable time-sink".

⏰ Quest Giver took roughly 14 months to make because of all the learning it involved. A major bottleneck was for me to learn how to program by voice: in the first few months I could only handle working 1 or 2 hours a day before my brain started to melt. Another serious hurdle was setting up controller support for menu navigation. Our engine, LibGDX, doesn't have this by default and it's a necessity for me due to RSI. So on one hand, those first few months of learning & tools investment are already done for the next project, but on the other hand it's a reminder that we should scope even smaller to be realistic about what we can get done. (For reference, Darz works full time on this and Zal works part time around another job).

🆘Since the game started as a jam project with a GameBoy theme, we launched Quest Giver with a neat pixelated font. We also included a curvy fought for easier readability, if people wanted. We quickly found that most people preferred the curvy font, since the game involves so much reading. We've since changed over the default font to be the curvy one: it was kind of a big job to redo all the store assets and we could have saved everyone a lot of pain by realizing this earlier through playtesting. Style versus functionality, it's tricky!

Next Project Goals?

⏰ We are challenging ourselves to scope way smaller for the next project in terms of development time, since there's still so much for us to learn about game development and seeing a project through to completion. More like <6 months rather than over a year. Quest Giver has 3-15ish hours of gameplay depending on a if it's a main story run versus a completionist run: we'll have to accept that a game made in a shorter time frame will likely have less overall playtime. (This can be true or not depending on the genre of course.)

📈 Since marketing is essential and was an under-explored aspect during Quest Giver, that's be the focus for a next project. This means doing things like:

• Making a demo and a web build for better discoverability on itch and steam
• Getting the store page up as early as possible
• Using Keymailer again, but also making a point of reaching out to youtubers and streamers who play similar games
• Starting a discord server?
• Participating in the Steam next fest?

🎮 We also want to focus more on testing, both in terms of code and playtesting. Quest Giver was only seen by a handful of players before launch: a lot of bugs and hiccups could have been resolved beforehand with more testing, resulting in a better game.

❓ We're toying with the idea of making a game that has no text in it. This has the advantages of making the game playable by anyone worldwide, and saves us the pain of dealing with translation and typos. We anticipate that a major disadvantage will be figuring out how to communicate game mechanics without text, and this restriction certainly limits which genres we can make. Quest Giver is a visual novel with management-sim game play: is it completely nuts to stray so far from that for our next game, or is it wise to explore different genres while the company is still young? Let us know in the comments haha 😅

And that's it! Thanks for reading, we hope you've learned a bit and maybe this got some thoughts brewing about your own next project, and feel free to reach out if you have any questions or comments.

-Darzington & Zalinius ❤️