Trying to get myself in the habit of doing weekly updates instead of monthly ones.
By the time I get to the end of the month I forget half the stuff I did during it.
Last week’s update was just a Patreon Post, but after going through all the trouble of making this dev blog site I should actually start using it to dev blog, eh?
Anyway, here’s what’s up:
1. The Little Black Bestiary: The Salted Cookies of Carthaginia sold about 200 copies in it’s launch week. My goal sales number to consider it “successful” is 1000 copies sold, so we’re about a fifth of the way there! I guess by some standards that’s not a great launch, but considering the low budget, scope and content of the game and the fact that we’ve done minimal marketing I’m not too worried about trying to fit the “explosive launch” paradigm games publishing tends to strive for. My plan is to try to keep interest alive by adding more scenes in an (early) August and (early) September content update; tying to keep a trickle of sales going, and then meet or exceed that sales goal on a wave of Haloween marketing in October.
2. On that note, been working on the script edit for that part 2 update; and got the first draft for the part 3 update back from Elizzyviolet as well.
3. Also been working on prototyping minigames for the next LBB mini-episode. Not much to screenshot yet and nothing in a state that can be shared publicly, but basically it’s a sort of rhythm-based “tap to the beat” sorta minigame. Something I’ve been playing around with the concept of is a rhythm game that *doesn’t* use a “note highway” like DDR or Guitar Hero do that relies as much on “pure audio” feedback as possible. A rhythm game seems like a real natural fit for an erotic game, except the part where you can’t actually look at the visuals because you need to laser focus on a UI. Unfortunately the beat-tapping game didn’t quite meet my hopes for being all that fun on it’s own, so I’m trying out a few other minigame ideas for my prototypes.
4. Job Hunting: On a personal note one of the things hampering game dev progress at this point is my day job. It’s the 1-2 punch of being low pay at high-ish hours, so it’s eating into dev time without really bolstering my budget enough. In order to go full time on game dev I’d need at least 10x our current sales/patreon revenue. (I need enough to survive *and* still pay artists and others. Hence the “at least”) In the meantime, I’m hoping to find some higher paying work that’ll either be on a better schedule for getting game dev time in, or at least give me enough money to hire more regular help to get that game dev time in. I found a couple local openings that are a big step up from my current job on both those fronts, so here’s hoping.
5. Also the prototype for that action game is coming along nicely. Still not ready to reveal the details yet, but hoping to reveal it by the end of the month.
Side note:
I’m thinking maybe I should just disable the comment feature on here because literally the only comments I get are things like THIS lovely gem:
{twitter post}
Yeaaaaah. That’s some serious SEO right there.