Steam Next Fest! | Patreon Weekly #133

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, here are the results for Patreon Poll #24:
Levelgen Additions: 69%
A New Item:                  38%
New Badges:                35%
Interface Shops:        35%
Levelgen additions is the clear winner here, with a lot more relative support than I was expecting! As mentioned in the poll, I don’t there’s enough design space to add any major algorithm changes like in 0.9.1, but I will look into a variety of other adjustments. Poll #25 might give you guys some more specific choices on exactly what sort of levelgen stuff you’d like to see.

This weekly also has an audio component! Go ahead and give it a listen if you’d like. I answer 7 questions in this one, but it’s unfortunately fairly short this month as I’ve been strapped for time.

As for Shattered work, I’ve been busy in the last week with real life stuff (as mentioned before), but I do have some news to share about Steam!

Steam Release and Next Fest

As I’ve covered before, I hope to release Shattered on Steam sometime in the first few months of 2022. The release will include a bunch of desktop-specific improvements, such as a better UI and controller support.

Releasing on Steam is tricky though, because unlike the App Store there isn’t a huge existing demand for the game, and there’s even more competition from other high-quality games. Because of that it’s extremely important for me to take advantage of promotion opportunities whenever I reasonably can. This is one of the reasons I participated in Roguelike Celebration 2021, as their Steam feature was very helpful in terms of getting wishlists.

Now there’s another promotion opportunity: Steam Next Fest! Next Fest will run Feb 21-28th and should be an excellent opportunity to showcase Shattered to a new audience! Shattered will have a demo available by next fest, which will be based on 1.1.0 and will include as many desktop-specific improvements as I can make over the next 2 months. My hope is that after next fest I will be able to fairly quickly transition to a full Steam release, possibly with a disclaimer that a few desktop improvements are still to come.

This means that those desktop improvements need to take priority when it comes to the development of v1.2.0. I plan to get working on the UI improvements right away, so hopefully as many of them can be ready as possibly by February 21. I’ve also already got native desktop builds mostly working in private, though there are some kinks to iron out.

Expect to hear more about this soon in future weeklies, though weekly 134 in particular will probably be fairly brief, given that it’s right after Christmas.