Hi all,

We would like to talk a little bit about what the past ten months have brought us and what we intend to do in the next two. Early Access has been great to us as a company as a whole and for Turmoil specifically. Thanks to you.

When we brought Turmoil to Early Access it was because we needed help with a few things: input on the game, and a larger player base.
We knew that the basis of the game; finding and digging oil, was solid. But the game as a whole lacked substance. Turmoil wasn’t far enough yet to be solid release worth $10. This was felt most notably by us when we thought we had a decent campaign going and players got to play the game and said: “That was one fun evening! Where’s the rest of the game?” We totally overestimated the content and underestimated the pace at which you consumed the game. A nice problem to have, but a problem nonetheless. Feedback Along the way you constantly kept us informed on ideas for Turmoil. And we tried to do the same for you. We updated almost weekly. In the weeks without updates we posted our ‘In The Pipeline’ series, trying to give you a clear picture of what we were working on. Some of your ideas, and a lot of our own, didn’t make it into the game. Multiplayer and infinite mode for instance. We tried to make it clear why features were left out. And mostly this was met with understanding. The problem with larger features like multiplayer is that we have a very small team: 1 programmer, 1 artist, 1 sound designer and 1 musician and 1 game designer helped now and then by others. And everyone part-time! That makes things like multiplayer an impossibility. We did add a lot of other features that originated with your feedback: such as the Gas and Thermal dynamics, The Stock Auction (End game), AI improvements and Diamonds as well as countless other small tweaks and additions. The problem with some of the big game design ideas from players is that very often they would require a new system to be built; adding a huge chunk of work to our already substantial workload. If we can give you a Game Design Tip: try to think of new features and changes that fit in the framework that already exists. It will make it far more likely that a developer can take on your idea. Compare it to a house that is halfway through being built: If you want a new window or a change of colour, that is possible. But if you ask for 2 extra bedrooms and underground parking, when the foundation is already built, there is very little the builder can do. Community Another big part of Early Access for us was generating a larger player base. The player based that was genereated through Early Access slowly morphed into a real community. A community that doesn’t only give input, but helps each other and had a very positive vibe. For us as a company that community transformed into more followers on social media (Twitter and Twitch especially). We don’t have a huge Twitter following, little over 900 now, but it’s a couple of hundreds more than we had when we started. The community is also the reason why we started streaming on Twitch. We started off with 2-3 viewers every week. After posting the Live events in the Steam Community we went up to a peak of 50 and now we have a solid 30 viewers every week. You can imagine the other stuff that a community does for a small developer. It helps your game rise up above the large amount of smaller games trying to make it big and lays a foundation for the release of Turmoil and other games to come. Money Along the way we also made money. Yay! We estimated Turmoil to be in Early Access for 6 months. But because it went better than expected we were able to keep developing and release a much better game after twelve months. Or at least that’s the plan. The money we earned during Early Access has gone back in development for the largest part. The other part has gone to living, eating and developing the business. Overall Early Access has been a blessing for us. And it wouldn’t have been possible without you. We’ve gotten a large amount of useful feedback, ideas and inspiration. We were able to build up a community that was not available to us before. And we earned enough money to spend more time on developing and doing what we love: creating pure and accessible gameplay. Release Now it’s time to get the game ready for release. We are still working on a few new features, but more and more of our time is spent on polish tasks like Steam Achievements and Trading Cards. We believe that we have created a worthwhile and fun game experience. The game’s approval rating is constantly hovering between 90-91% after 426 reviews. In about two months we will go out of Early Access and into the wild trying to build on what we created. But rest assured we also have plans for after release, in the form of free content updates. Early Access has been very valuable to us. We value our interaction with the players enormously. hopefully you feel the same. Thank you. Gamious

[ 2016-03-24 10:01:25 CET ] [ Original post ]