Our Plans, and a Festival Post-Mortem!
Hello friends, new and old alike!
As part of the last Steam Next Fest, we unveiled Sweet Surrender to the world. The reception was more than what we could have expected. It's taken us two months to write up our notes!
We'd like to share our plans and next steps as well as some thoughts on:
We signed up to Steam Next Fest at last minute. We'd been hard at work on the game for over a year but we weren't sure if we'd have a solid build ready. In the end we decided that, worst comes to worst, we could always just pull our demo from the festival.
A couple hours before the festival started we pressed launch with almost no fanfare, just a few tweets. We didn't know what to expect. And then the Steam Fest machine picked up.
It's always a nerve-wracking event when you share something you've been working on for so long. We really didn't know how it would be received. The feedback started flowing in and...and wow, it was so much fun to read. A few (many?) players did run into issues unfortunately, but almost everyone seemed to have fun and wanted more.
We received tons of feature requests, bug reports and great ideas. Thank you for all your feedback! You helped us identify many areas of concern and potential improvement. We collected the wishes and suggestions in a dedicated internal Trello board.
(As an aside: it was quite interesting to observe the disparity in what players comment on in comparison to what we notice (or obsess on) internally as a team. It was fun to see players delight and long-forgotten details we added months ago.)
Thank you to all the players who took the time to give us feedback, reporting bugs and sharing ideas for fun new features. This was one of the biggest wins from this festival...high-quality feedback. Thank you.
[h2]The Issues[/h2]
As an in-development game, we knew the build had bugs. Most of the obvious issues we were already aware of and had planned fixes.
Some players experienced absolutely game-breaking issues like inventory out of reach or crashes. This was quite disappointing to experience. To those players, we're sorry you were not able to experience the demo as expected. Please know that we did our best to test on a variety of devices, even with limited resources and the general challenge of sharing VR devices across a distributed team.
All these issues have been fixed now in the current demo, but at the time it was a bit heart-wrenching.
(As another aside, we were quite happy to not have received any particular requests for comfort settings. Everything was covered. It's nice to finally get the basics right.)
[h2]Feedback Policy[/h2]
Just so it's clear, we pride ourselves on listening to all politely-shared feedback. We may not address or act on it, but we appreciate people taking time to tell us what is important to them. It helps shape our plans and decisions.
We received so many cool ideas and suggestions. We have so many fun things planned for Sweet Surrender and we believe that we are going to have a fun time together. We are excited about the journey ahead.
[h2]State of the Demo[/h2]
We've already fixed many bugs since the festival. We took down our demo for a month, made tons of improvements and re-uploaded with fixes to many of the major issues reported.
The new demo reflects a huge jump in quality since the festival. You can try it out now! And you should make sure to grab it quick because it will soon no longer be available.
Most of the core systems our in place and now we are focusing mainly on stability and balance, while fleshing out the rest of the game world.
Our target release date is *Late 2021*. Beyond the release, our plan is to keep expanding the game by introducing new content and mechanics in a series of regular, free updates.
Stay tuned in the next months for further updates on our progress.
Most advice about launching games on Steam says to focus on getting quality wishlists numbers up. The Steam algorithm generally rewards games with high wishlists at launch.
We always found it interesting to hear about how other developers do at these festivals (like these awesome devs for example). Alas there's not much data out there for VR games in particular, so hopefully other developers will find this section interesting. Here are a series of events around the festival and their impacts on our wishlist:
In this first shot you see two spikes:
We were quite surprised about the 2nd spike. Definitely share your new game with your older fans.
The Steam Festival starts and here is where things get interesting. It's a bit difficult to pull events apart from each other but here goes with our best estimate of what happened:
[h2]Our Observations/Recommendations[/h2]
As a technical note, this is the stream setup we ended with: Discord private video chat, one person on VR streaming to both discord and local OBS, shared mic capture in Discord (piped to OBS), the whole thing piped to Restreamer which fed it to both Twitch and the Steam page.
A couple days after the festival ended, another big VR youtuber posted their exciting playthrough of the demo. That video again brought a lot of smiles to faces internally. It was very fun and capped off an awesome festival. Thank you Soul Fox!
[h2]About the Press Showcase[/h2]
Even though Steam offered it, we didn't apply to participate in their press showcase. The reasons for this where:
[h2]Festival Conclusions[/h2]
For developers out there who might stumble on this post when prepping future Steam showcases, here's what worked and didn't work for us for the festival.
[h2]Panic-launching the Steam Page[/h2]
We waffled back and forth setting up our Steam store page leading up to the registration phase of Steam Next Fest. We knew we wanted to participate, or at least register interest on the back-end while still having the option to drop out.
What we missed is that your page needs to be approved and public before you can register for the festival. We only realized this 2-3 days before the deadline and had to panic rush our submission as well as reach out to support.
We also made a mistake re-using an old steam app id that had somehow been marked as Free to Play. We had to again reach out to Valve to get someone to help us adjust this setting on the back-end.
Takeaway: plan ahead.
[h2]Setting up the Demo[/h2]
In spite of the extensive documentation, setting up the demo and pushing it live can be confusing. You have to setup a second page for your demo (like your main page) and have to go through the same back-end as a normal page, but most of the content is not required. Then you have to link your main page and your demo in several different places.
Finally, there are odd restrictions with owning both the main app (even as Dev Comp) and the Demo. We recommend using a different, non-developer Steam user to test that your demo is accessible, downloadable and playable.
Takeaway: leave a few days for this, make sure to set your demo live before the festival starts. You'll want to double-check your demo is really reachable.
Once again, thank you for your support, and for reading this far! If you want to chat with us or other players, please join us in our Discord. You can also follow us on Twitter for more frequent, smaller updates.
Stay tuned for more news "very soon"!
As part of the last Steam Next Fest, we unveiled Sweet Surrender to the world. The reception was more than what we could have expected. It's taken us two months to write up our notes!
We'd like to share our plans and next steps as well as some thoughts on:
- The Demo and your Feedback!
- Some Stats and Technical Details (because numbers are fun!)
- Steam Next Fest Retrospective (maybe interesting for other devs)
Demo and Feedback
We signed up to Steam Next Fest at last minute. We'd been hard at work on the game for over a year but we weren't sure if we'd have a solid build ready. In the end we decided that, worst comes to worst, we could always just pull our demo from the festival.
A couple hours before the festival started we pressed launch with almost no fanfare, just a few tweets. We didn't know what to expect. And then the Steam Fest machine picked up.
It's always a nerve-wracking event when you share something you've been working on for so long. We really didn't know how it would be received. The feedback started flowing in and...and wow, it was so much fun to read. A few (many?) players did run into issues unfortunately, but almost everyone seemed to have fun and wanted more.
We received tons of feature requests, bug reports and great ideas. Thank you for all your feedback! You helped us identify many areas of concern and potential improvement. We collected the wishes and suggestions in a dedicated internal Trello board.
(As an aside: it was quite interesting to observe the disparity in what players comment on in comparison to what we notice (or obsess on) internally as a team. It was fun to see players delight and long-forgotten details we added months ago.)
Thank you to all the players who took the time to give us feedback, reporting bugs and sharing ideas for fun new features. This was one of the biggest wins from this festival...high-quality feedback. Thank you.
[h2]The Issues[/h2]
As an in-development game, we knew the build had bugs. Most of the obvious issues we were already aware of and had planned fixes.
Some players experienced absolutely game-breaking issues like inventory out of reach or crashes. This was quite disappointing to experience. To those players, we're sorry you were not able to experience the demo as expected. Please know that we did our best to test on a variety of devices, even with limited resources and the general challenge of sharing VR devices across a distributed team.
All these issues have been fixed now in the current demo, but at the time it was a bit heart-wrenching.
(As another aside, we were quite happy to not have received any particular requests for comfort settings. Everything was covered. It's nice to finally get the basics right.)
[h2]Feedback Policy[/h2]
Just so it's clear, we pride ourselves on listening to all politely-shared feedback. We may not address or act on it, but we appreciate people taking time to tell us what is important to them. It helps shape our plans and decisions.
We received so many cool ideas and suggestions. We have so many fun things planned for Sweet Surrender and we believe that we are going to have a fun time together. We are excited about the journey ahead.
[h2]State of the Demo[/h2]
We've already fixed many bugs since the festival. We took down our demo for a month, made tons of improvements and re-uploaded with fixes to many of the major issues reported.
The new demo reflects a huge jump in quality since the festival. You can try it out now! And you should make sure to grab it quick because it will soon no longer be available.
Next Steps
Most of the core systems our in place and now we are focusing mainly on stability and balance, while fleshing out the rest of the game world.
Our target release date is *Late 2021*. Beyond the release, our plan is to keep expanding the game by introducing new content and mechanics in a series of regular, free updates.
Stay tuned in the next months for further updates on our progress.
Stats and Press Coverage
Most advice about launching games on Steam says to focus on getting quality wishlists numbers up. The Steam algorithm generally rewards games with high wishlists at launch.
We always found it interesting to hear about how other developers do at these festivals (like these awesome devs for example). Alas there's not much data out there for VR games in particular, so hopefully other developers will find this section interesting. Here are a series of events around the festival and their impacts on our wishlist:
In this first shot you see two spikes:
- 1. Steam page launched: when we (panic-)launched our Steam page, some (minor?)promotion algorithms kicked in.
- 2. Sharing on other Steam Pages: we saw a bigger than expected spike when we posted announcements on our other Steam pages(like so).
We were quite surprised about the 2nd spike. Definitely share your new game with your older fans.
- 3. First UploadVR Coverage: for months we have been actively tweeting with gifs and videos of our in progress content. When we announced our Next Fest participation, this was noticed by the folks at UploadVR. It led to this preview article which caused both spike 3 and our collective jaws to drop. It was so awesome to be noticed through our multi-month grassroots twitter marketing.
- 4. Showcase: in turn, UploadVR invited us to their showcase, which was a very fortuitous event. We managed to finalize the alpha trailer we were already preparing for the festival, which led to a showcase spot and led to another spike (4)!
The Steam Festival starts and here is where things get interesting. It's a bit difficult to pull events apart from each other but here goes with our best estimate of what happened:
- 5. Steam Festival starts: wishlist count immediately spikes up as the Steam showcase algorithm ramps up.
- 6. Stream 1 - we do our first Festival live stream: as part of Steam Fest, Valve will feature up to TWO streams of your game in their main stream/showcase page, or in the category sub-page. TBH we are not exactly sure where but it lead to a lot views! We peaked at 1000 concurrent viewers, which is just kind of crazy!)
- 7. Stream 2 - we re-stream Steam 1: for our second stream, we simply re-streamed the previous stream. It was crazy and led to 1400 peak concurrent viewers. This was a super cheap way (time and energy-wise) to leverage our previous stream for more views.
- 8. Youtube video 1: at some point during the festival, our first big letsplay hit. This was such a pleasant surprise for the team. It drove further buzz around the game and it was a great feedback video. Seeing the positive reactions to all the little details in the game was extremely validating. Thank you Wolf!
- 9. 2nd UploadVR Article: this final spike seemed to be linked to the posting of this second UploadVR article, this time with a hand's on review of our demo. It's cautious, yet very encouraging because it covers all the points we are actively focused on.
[h2]Our Observations/Recommendations[/h2]
- Absolutely participate in streams. They are a huge visibility boost. Even if it's just gameplay
- Set up your demo and your store page as early as possible. It's tricky.
- Steam stream chat is a bit buggy. We imagine it's from overloading.
- If you're going to stream, practice a few times beforehand with your technical setup. In spite of multiple tests, we still had audio balancing issues. You'll also need to carefully follow the Steam docs to setup permissions to stream to your page.
As a technical note, this is the stream setup we ended with: Discord private video chat, one person on VR streaming to both discord and local OBS, shared mic capture in Discord (piped to OBS), the whole thing piped to Restreamer which fed it to both Twitch and the Steam page.
A couple days after the festival ended, another big VR youtuber posted their exciting playthrough of the demo. That video again brought a lot of smiles to faces internally. It was very fun and capped off an awesome festival. Thank you Soul Fox!
[h2]About the Press Showcase[/h2]
Even though Steam offered it, we didn't apply to participate in their press showcase. The reasons for this where:
- Its deadline was one week earlier and we were unsure we'd be ready.
- You don't know which press are involved. It makes it difficult to coordinate with your own reach out.
- You're not assured to be selected, which means you can't count on it anyways.
[h2]Festival Conclusions[/h2]
- The festival drove a lot of wishlists. We are very happy with the result. Based on Chris's analysis, we are average overall but at the higher end for VR.
- It gave us a lot of valuable feedback and concrete validation that there is a demand for our type of game. We can't express how motivating that has been for the whole team.
- These festivals work well if your game readily lends itself to a replayable demo that leaves you wanting more. It's not for every game.
Technical Retrospective
For developers out there who might stumble on this post when prepping future Steam showcases, here's what worked and didn't work for us for the festival.
[h2]Panic-launching the Steam Page[/h2]
We waffled back and forth setting up our Steam store page leading up to the registration phase of Steam Next Fest. We knew we wanted to participate, or at least register interest on the back-end while still having the option to drop out.
What we missed is that your page needs to be approved and public before you can register for the festival. We only realized this 2-3 days before the deadline and had to panic rush our submission as well as reach out to support.
We also made a mistake re-using an old steam app id that had somehow been marked as Free to Play. We had to again reach out to Valve to get someone to help us adjust this setting on the back-end.
Takeaway: plan ahead.
[h2]Setting up the Demo[/h2]
In spite of the extensive documentation, setting up the demo and pushing it live can be confusing. You have to setup a second page for your demo (like your main page) and have to go through the same back-end as a normal page, but most of the content is not required. Then you have to link your main page and your demo in several different places.
Finally, there are odd restrictions with owning both the main app (even as Dev Comp) and the Demo. We recommend using a different, non-developer Steam user to test that your demo is accessible, downloadable and playable.
Takeaway: leave a few days for this, make sure to set your demo live before the festival starts. You'll want to double-check your demo is really reachable.
Thank You
Once again, thank you for your support, and for reading this far! If you want to chat with us or other players, please join us in our Discord. You can also follow us on Twitter for more frequent, smaller updates.
Stay tuned for more news "very soon"!