Hey Unity brethren,
I wanted to share with you both my game and my experience with releasing it on Desura’s Alpha Funding scheme this weekend.
I’ll start out with the brand new launch trailer so you know what I’m rambling about: (1080p available and recommended if you can).
The whole process of actually getting it from ‘still alpha testing’ to ‘available to buy’ happened in a five day blur of unexpected crunch.
For the last few months, with the help of a team of fifty alpha testers recruited from the community, we’ve been tuning and balancing, and tweaking and polishing to get towards an alpha build that we were proud to ask gamers to pay to play, and help fund continued development.
About three weeks ago we felt we were about there and released the first ‘release candidate’, two weeks and three builds later it felt ready. On, Monday this week, I decided it was time to look seriously into where we would first launch. I’m not sure why but the first place I went was Desura. I know I didn’t want a huge launch because I’m a solo dev (excluding Python Blue who did the music and 50 alpha testers, hehe), so Desura seemed as good a place as any. We’d been on IndieDB for a few months also which influenced the decision.
Weirdly, by the end of Monday everything was 50% set up and by the end of Tuesday I’d uploaded all the builds (PC, Mac, Linux) to see if they were acceptable. I woke up on Wednesday morning to find it was not only all accepted but it was available to pre-order with a release date of yesterday (Sat 7th Sept). I’d already been in overdrive working two back to back 11 hour days and went into serious crunch mode to get everything else ready - website, desura page, forum rework, media stuff, new screenshots, bla bla.
Well, yesterday was one of the most emotional days I’ve had in my life. To release your first game is just a weird experience. One moment you are buzzing and excited that it’s happening, then you slump trying to stay grounded, then it happens! It’s released. Players are installing it. Then everything goes quiet. You want feedback instantly. Is everything okay? Does it install okay?
I ended up going to reddit to vent my emotions in a post on r/gamedev and it must have resounded with the other guys there because by the evening it had grown to point of being No.8 on the front page. That made me want to cry for like the 10th time that day.
I won’t ramble on any more about it now, but feel free to share your own experiences. It’s emotional but highly rewarding.
I’ll leave you with a review from one of the players who downloaded and played the game yesterday which is very much Unity related.
“mik3k 16hours 8mins ago said:
Awesome, awesome game. There is no way this uses the Unity engine. The world is too huge, too many AI flying around, the FPS is through the roof, the controls aren’t lagging and horrible, my GPU isn’t ready to melt, and the game is so fun.
10/10 - Shut up and buy this game.”
Pics and stuff here: http://www.neonxsz.com
