Steam Release! | Patreon Weekly #146

Hey Patrons!

Before getting to the weekly, there’s a few things to cover:

• There’s a new Shattered Secrets! This one gives a rough overview of the unique mechanics I have planned for the two new heroes.
• Next week’s weekly will also have an audio Q&A segment! Feel free to ask questions either here or on the Patreon discord.
• Lastly, we have the results from last week’s Patreon poll:
  Top-Left Enemy Info:                                         57%
  Better Secondary Game Screens:               57%
  Button Navigation for Menus/Windows:  57%
  Radial Menus:                                                        43%
  Better Controls Tutorialization:                    21%
  A three way tie is certainly interesting, but what’s more interesting to me are the raw numbers behind these results. This poll had very low participation, and the winning options at 57% mean there wasn’t really a lot of enthusiasm behind any choice. I do still plan to work on UX improvements in future updates, but the clear message to me here is that you guys are a bit sick of them. That’s pretty fair, seeing as they’ve eaten up most of 1.2.0’s 3-month development time.

For this weekly, I’m going to talk about the shape shattered is in headed into the Steam release!

Beta Adjustments

I’m going to be releasing a (hopefully) final beta update in another few hours. I’m making a couple of content improvements along with the usual bugfixes. For example, I’m making a few tweaks to sacrifice rooms to make them a bit less tedious. When you’re in the presence of the sacrificial fire, the level will spawn a new enemy if none are currently alive, even on the first floor. This should cut down waiting for enemies on a cleared floor. I’m also tweaking the text size on the depth and challenge indicators, as some folks were having trouble reading them.

Steam Release!

When planning for the Steam release, I’ve always kept in mind that Watabou told me the original Pixel Dungeon did poorly there. I’ve wanted to try and succeed on Steam where the original Pixel Dungeon struggled. That’s why I’ve put so much effort into porting and marketing for the Steam release.

Aside from all the porting and UX work, I’ve taken advantage of promotional opportunities for the game wherever I can. I’ve already talked about Roguelike Celebration and Next Fest, and now some additional promotion is coming from content creators and the game’s imminent release. Shattered is currently showing up on Steam’s “popular upcoming” category on the front page!

The game is all ready for release on Wednesday (I’ve passed final approval) and looks like it will launch with about 20,000 wishlists. In terms of which promotions made the most difference, here’s roughly how much wishlists I’m attributing to each source:

Roguelike Celebration: ~8k wishlists
Featured on “popular upcoming”: ~5k wishlists
Regular Store discovery: ~3k wishlists
Next Fest: ~2k wishlists
Let’s Play Videos on Youtube: ~2k wishlists

Being able to stand alongside only a few games on the front page (Roguelike Celebration and popular upcoming) seems to clearly have been the biggest boost. Not every wishlist will become a sale, but the total number is so, so much higher than I was initially expecting. If even a quarter of those turn into launch sales, then Shattered will be on track to have more success on Steam than all other platforms combined.