Sugarplum Devlog: announcement/Ursa Major postmortem

So, Sugarplum Cafe has finally been revealed to the public! To announce the game, I updated the tea party illustration I drew last year. Vanilla's sleeves were bothering me, and so was the lack of contrast between the foreground and the background. (Old on left, new on right)

Since there was no Steam page or trailer, I consider this a soft launch - this announcement was less directed at the general public and more at my current followers, for whom I had been teasing a "secret personal project" for years. I was going to write about how pleasantly surprised I've been about the reception, but then 2 days later I lost my job 🥲

As I said last week, if I had not already announced I would have no motivation to keep promoting it after layoffs. Sugarplum is a passion project, but I know I need a full-time job to keep working on this.

Funny enough, posting about being laid off brought way more eyes to Sugarplum Cafe than my initial announcement. A game dev I had been following for a while (@KelaMakesGames) even reached out to send sympathies and nice words about my game! So at least there were some silver linings in this awful situation, and since I had already planned to make more posts about Sugarplum, it gave me something to work on besides wallowing in layoff gloom.

I also had the Ursa Major showcase to prep for that upcoming weekend, so let's talk about Ursa Major! It's a Japanese fashion convention with an emphasis on Lolita fashion, which is very frilly and femme and has nothing to do with the book. Pretty much the perfect audience for Sugarplum, right?

I had already planned to volunteer for the convention because my (now former) coworker was organizing it and asked me to help, but about a month ago I noticed the convention had a Game Lounge event where people could bring their own games and play together. And I had just gotten Sugarplum to a point where I was happy with the game loop, so I thought...maybe I could bring my game??

I reached out to the staff with some screenshots, and they said yes! They'd never had a request like mine - most ppl bring board games - but that they loved what they saw of the game, which was super promising! As long as the line didn't get too long or rowdy, because they didn't know what to expect.

So I trimmed down three hours of content into a shorter demo. The Ursa Major demo has way less ladies (I think 9 instead of 18?) and only the basic merging and tea mechanics, so no complex drinks or jams. I did want to keep Tea Parties as I think they are crucial not only to the game but to Lolita culture - they love their afternoon tea!

For marketing, I started plugging the game in the Lolita Discords before the convention and printed out business cards to hand out. If I met people outside of the Game Lounge and they mentioned interest in gaming, I'd let them know I was holding a playtest if we met before the Game Lounge and give them a business card if it was after. I was a little self-conscious of all the promotion, but according to staff I didn't spam too much, thankfully. The staff also kindly offered to project the demo on a big screen so everyone in the Game Lounge could watch.

To deal with the potential line issue, I decided to offer an option to give me your email and play the demo on their own time, similar to the process with the Patreon build. I didn't have any audio in the game yet, but this ended up working out in my favor as we didn't have to worry about noise problems or A/V tech issues.

And with that...the Game Lounge event (and my showcase) took place! I wish I had taken photos of people playing so that's one takeaway for future showcases, but here's a doodle I made of my fit. I wasn't planning on buying a lolita dress, but when I saw this magical girl outfit I couldn't resist! (Sorry, I didn't take any good photos...need to retake sometime!)

Many folks showed up because they saw my Discord posts, and having the gameplay projected on a big screen also caught some bystanders' attention. Not many people were familiar with the merge or crafting genres, but when I said it was a cafe game with no time limits, it got a lot of ppl interested. Everyone said really nice things about the game, and how they've always wanted a game like this, so it made me feel less alone about liking these sorts of aesthetics.

The demo definitely took longer than I hoped, so most people didn't even make it to the Tea Parties. There were lots of people interested who didn't get to play the game because the demo was so long and I only had one computer, but thankfully many people gave me their emails so they could play after Ursa Major.

The game broke a few times, but better to catch it now than at launch, and thankfully it wasn't too often. A couple folks purposely tried to break the game which was very funny and helpful, and we even figured out how to repeatedly reproduce some of the bugs which made fixing them much easier later on.

In total, I gave away 40 out of 50 business cards! About 7-8 people played the demo that day but 46 people signed up to play the Ursa Major demo offline (including those who played in person). My mailing list (separate from the demo signups) went from 10 to 30 subscribers because of Ursa Major too.

I spent this week fixing the bugs we found at Ursa Major and just sent the fixed demo to everyone who signed up, so I'm eager to see the feedback we get. I hope that with the luxury of being able to play in their own free time, they'll be able to see everything available in the game this time around!