It's been eight months since Helium Rain released in Early Access ! We thought it was a good time to look back and see how it went, from our perspective, and to share our future plans for the game.

A wild ride

Helium Rain has seen thirteen updates in Early Access already. We spent the first weeks squashing bugs day and night, with 70 issues resolved during the first month. Overall, around 300 issues were entered on our issue tracker. We've managed to bring the number of known issues down to less than 10.
As a reminder, all of the source code for Helium Rain is publicly available on GitHub. This isn't very useful to most players, but we feel like it's important to have the source code available, both for curious developers and dedicated players. We also maintain a public bug tracker and roadmap so that players can follow progress on their issues or requested features. Our initial Early Access roadmap announced a number of large features and we've been trying to live up to this promise.

• We redesigned all stations in the game and added station complexes.
• The separate Skirmish game mode launched early this year, along with upgraded combat.
• The user interface was reworked to ensure a smoother experience and more data to players.
• Linux is now a first-class citizen too, thanks to volunteer players who helped fix issues on their platform.

State of Deimos Games

We funded Deimos Games in the summmer of 2017, and we've completed accounting for our first business year. It's been a lot of work, both on technical development for the game, and on the legal & financial side of things. Under French law, company revenue is public data, and we're very committed to openness ourselves, so we decided to share our numbers with you. Here it goes !

• Deimos Games will be reporting revenue of 14,000€ ($17,000). This isn't a very high number, but it's close to what we expected, and we're happy with this early result as a new company.
• As you can probably calculate yourself, this amounts to around 2,000 copies sold.
• We've achieved 96% positive reviews on Steam. This is heart-warming, and makes all our efforts worth it !
• We're also happy to report that 14% of our lifetime sales happened on the Linux platform.

Game development is a very competitive field, with incredible games releasing every month. We're looking for happy players more than we are looking for huge sales numbers, so we're happy with the current state of things.

Update roadmap

Our current efforts are focused on a better economy model for the game. We'll show in more details what is coming to the game, but we can already show the upcoming the company log, which will make it much easier to fine-tune your company. Another new menu will provide yearly financial details to help you understand your company's budget. The irony of developing such tools while working on our own accounting isn't lost on us.
Once economy issues will be resolved, we will move on to another roadmap topic - new contracts, new story elements, new unique sectors to explore. You shouldn't expect a large scripted campaign here, but we'd love to bring a few unique missions, interesting areas and recurring content that helps with replayability. As usual, feel free to bring your ideas here ! The final topic on the roadmap is the fuel systems - an update dedicated to simulating fuel usage and engine efficiency. As of today, this is probably not going to be added to the game. We still feel like it would be a worthwile feature, but it raises a number of issues.

• Fuel systems would be an interesting and realistic feature, but it's unclear how exactly they could mesh into the game without punishing players in some cases. We're aware production issues on some resources are already annoying, but at least they're not preventing gameplay. Losing access to fuel would terminate your game, something we don't consider acceptable. Workarounds for such a core issue are problematic.
• The game is already very complex, including on our side as developers. We created a bit of a monster with Helium Rain: the game's depth is enjoyable, but it makes it very hard for us to create new systems or maintain existing ones. It also makes it harder for players to get into the game.
• Finally, we have now spent close to four years in development on this project, so the scope of new developments is starting to get under scrutiny.

Simply put, we should have considered this feature much earlier in the game, and it wouldn't do it any good now.
We plan on exiting Early Access and releasing as a final product at the end of this summer. We don't have a specific date yet - we will release the game when we are confident it lives up to our expectations and works without bugs. In the meantime, we're very open to new ideas, if they're small in scope, relevant to the gameplay and popular in the community. Thank you for supporting this project, and have fun with the game !

[ 2018-04-17 19:49:51 CET ] [ Original post ]