Taking Down The Second Draft Demo! (And Some Fun Reflections)
It's time.
On the 6th of December, 2023, I released what I called the Second Draft Demo, of Esoteric Ebb. It was more or less a polished and updated version of the First Draft Playtest, (hence the name) which featured:
I'm still shocked at how playable it was.
And best of all, it turned out to be actually kind of fun. In the first couple of weeks, a couple of hundred people were trying it out. Mostly those of you that tried the First Draft Playtest (the OGs!) and came back for more. It was great to spend that time releasing bug fixes and optimizing the build, but while the reactions were positive, it didn't end up receiving too much attention. That is, until February 2024.
Ted Litchfield tried the demo. He kind of liked it and wrote an article for PC Gamer about it. I remember waking up that morning with a bunch of notifications and messages about people seeing it in their feeds, and whatnot. That got me in a real good mood- and considering the previous mentions Ebb had gotten in PCGamer, I figured this would give a big boost to the game's visibility. At the time, Ebb had around 8000 wishlists, so I expected to gain maybe one or two thousand from the article.
It got 30,000 wishlists. In two weeks.
Now, that's not an insane amount on the grand scale of things. But for a tiny game like this, it was most certainly a kind of sort of almost life-changing event. Thanks, Ted.
To compare, those first eight thousand took me over a year to gather. All of a sudden I had a massive and clear indication that, on some level, I was doing something right. Which, after about five years working on this thing, really meant a lot. So here we are. It's been eight months. Nine? Something like that. After all this time, the Demo has finished its run. I'll be taking down the Second Draft Demo on Sunday, August 18th. At what time? I don't know, let's say 12:00 CET.
That means: now's the last chance to try it! If you've been following the development you've probably seen that the current state of the game looks VERY different from this Demo. As you can imagine, a lot changes in a year. Also, collaborating with a bunch of amazing artists tends to increase the visual fidelity of a game.
I can't wait to show you what I've got COOKING.
And of course, as you can imagine, me taking down the demo means that there's some stuff in the works that I am eager to share with you all soon. So stay tuned.
Ultimately, the demo has gotten 20,000 downloads (actually it's more like ~19,500 but let's say it's a nice round number), and over 300 of you filled out the survey. Many of your write-ups and feedback there have been invaluable in designing the current iteration of Esoteric Ebb.
So I want to give a big final thank you to everyone who's played the game, talked about it with their friends, sent over feedback, and ESPECIALLY thank you for enjoying this stupid thing I've put together. One of the things I've enjoyed the most over the last couple of months is watching people play it on streams/Youtube. Every time I see someone cheering when getting a nat 20, or laughing at some silly joke, it feels like it was all worth it.
-Christoffer Bodegård
The Cleric sends his regards as well.
On the 6th of December, 2023, I released what I called the Second Draft Demo, of Esoteric Ebb. It was more or less a polished and updated version of the First Draft Playtest, (hence the name) which featured:
- 11 characters
- 15 very cool inanimate objects
- Thousands of apples
- 3 quests branches
- Over 50k words written
- ~1 hour of gameplay on average
I'm still shocked at how playable it was.And best of all, it turned out to be actually kind of fun. In the first couple of weeks, a couple of hundred people were trying it out. Mostly those of you that tried the First Draft Playtest (the OGs!) and came back for more. It was great to spend that time releasing bug fixes and optimizing the build, but while the reactions were positive, it didn't end up receiving too much attention. That is, until February 2024.
Ted Litchfield tried the demo. He kind of liked it and wrote an article for PC Gamer about it. I remember waking up that morning with a bunch of notifications and messages about people seeing it in their feeds, and whatnot. That got me in a real good mood- and considering the previous mentions Ebb had gotten in PCGamer, I figured this would give a big boost to the game's visibility. At the time, Ebb had around 8000 wishlists, so I expected to gain maybe one or two thousand from the article.
It got 30,000 wishlists. In two weeks.
Now, that's not an insane amount on the grand scale of things. But for a tiny game like this, it was most certainly a kind of sort of almost life-changing event. Thanks, Ted.
To compare, those first eight thousand took me over a year to gather. All of a sudden I had a massive and clear indication that, on some level, I was doing something right. Which, after about five years working on this thing, really meant a lot. So here we are. It's been eight months. Nine? Something like that. After all this time, the Demo has finished its run. I'll be taking down the Second Draft Demo on Sunday, August 18th. At what time? I don't know, let's say 12:00 CET.
That means: now's the last chance to try it! If you've been following the development you've probably seen that the current state of the game looks VERY different from this Demo. As you can imagine, a lot changes in a year. Also, collaborating with a bunch of amazing artists tends to increase the visual fidelity of a game.
I can't wait to show you what I've got COOKING.And of course, as you can imagine, me taking down the demo means that there's some stuff in the works that I am eager to share with you all soon. So stay tuned.
Ultimately, the demo has gotten 20,000 downloads (actually it's more like ~19,500 but let's say it's a nice round number), and over 300 of you filled out the survey. Many of your write-ups and feedback there have been invaluable in designing the current iteration of Esoteric Ebb.
So I want to give a big final thank you to everyone who's played the game, talked about it with their friends, sent over feedback, and ESPECIALLY thank you for enjoying this stupid thing I've put together. One of the things I've enjoyed the most over the last couple of months is watching people play it on streams/Youtube. Every time I see someone cheering when getting a nat 20, or laughing at some silly joke, it feels like it was all worth it.
-Christoffer Bodegård
The Cleric sends his regards as well.