Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2023-05-05

It's me, "next week me" from last week. Here with the Sunday Friday Rambles. Please excuse my lateness.

Well, first things first, ENDLESS MONDAY: DREAMS AND DEADLINES, the game I've been making for the past 5-6 months, is now LIVE! I was able to release on Thursday as planned, and then spent the next couple days doing post launch support and social media marketing. And now the high is wearing off and I've become a crumpled husk, blowing away in the breeze.

Have you played the game yet? If you haven't, I'll wait here if you want to go and check it out...

Let's start with what's happened in the time after the last update.

I made all the art and wrote all the dialogue and coded all the new stuff needed for all the endings. In four days. Remember two weeks ago when I said the game had 36000 words? The final game has 56,000 words! I wrote like a third of the content of the final game in like a week! And during that time Chance made like two more songs for me that the endings required. 

And then in the two days after that, up until the last day before launch, I was fixing bugs found by playtesters (who were all so incredibly helpful up until the very last minute and during the post-launch support, and without whom the game would not have been in a state ready for release). Then, the last night before release, I played through the game one last time to record footage for the new gameplay trailer, and then made the trailer in like an hour. Then I spent an hour drawing a launch announcement comic. I was getting roughly 3 hours of sleep a night at this point.

I honestly don't know how we pulled it off, but everything was ready in time for launch. With my heart rate resting at around 120 beats per minute, I pushed the big green "RELEASE GAME" button on early Thursday afternoon.

The Launch

I made the launch announcement posts on Twitter and Insta but some people had already bought the game after Steam sent launch notifications to people with the game wishlisted. Thankfully, it didn't seem like there were any terrible game-breaking bugs that made the game unplayable or anything, although there were a few annoying bugs that I hotfixed pretty quickly.

Later that day I was super surprised to see the game had gotten on top of the New & Trending section on the FRONT PAGE of Steam, lol.

It stayed on the list until earlier today, so maybe around ~72 hours of Front Page exposure. As of this morning the game sold enough copies (in around 3 days) to reach the number I was considering my "dream goal" for the first week of sales. 

Steam unlocked profile and community features for the game at around 50 reviews. Now you can put the game and its achievements and stuff on your profile showcases!

Above screenshot from a fan's Steam profile page. Just look at that! Endless Monday characters on a Steam profile page! And coming soon: Trading cards, profile backgrounds, animated profile pictures, and the works! Can you believe it?

Anyway, I spent Friday and Saturday continuing to get 3 hours of sleep a night and hotfixing bugs and refreshing my Steam stats pages and looking at reviews. Speaking of reviews:

100%...? I honestly didn't know this was even possible on Steam, but here we are... I'm so honored and humbled by the reception this game has been getting, and it made all the hard work and late nights worth it. Some of the reviews were so heartwarming and encouraging and only confirmed that I am absolutely sure this is what I want to keep doing now, forever.

Anyway, now that the game has been out for a while and I'm able to take a break from the rush to fix bugs and do promotion, here are some random thoughts.

1. I didn't set out to make a game that appealed to the greatest number of people, but made something that I personally wanted to make, with a story I wanted to tell. I'm so happy that it resonated with so many people. I think a lot of them appreciated that I just straight up poured myself into the game and played it straight (including all my dumb absurdist humor) without a bunch of cynical winking to the audience. But I probably also won't be going viral or anything either. I don't think I want that, anyway.

2. The game makes for a boring Twitch stream if you don't want to read a bunch of text spoken by a bunch of characters you don't care about lol. Just sit back, get cozy, digest the words, and enjoy the experience without worrying about entertaining an audience. That being said, I did watch a few VODs from a few streamers on Twitch that genuinely enjoyed the game, took it slow, and was able to relate to the situations and talked about their own experiences in their life and jobs and stuff, and that was a joy to watch. Also, I found some bugs that I needed to fix while watching them too.

3. The excitement and stress of having launched a game wakes you up after 3 hours of sleep no matter how tired you are. And lack of sleep makes your body behave in weird ways. 

4. I officially launched a game on Steam that people are actually playing! Am I officially a game developer by title now? Can I put that on my LinkedIn? Can I make a stable income doing this? Anyway the income from this game alone won't allow me to rest on my laurels or anything. So lucky for the people already clamoring for a sequel, I'm going to have to make one soon to stay self-employed as a gamedev in any case :-)

5. I've learned a lot about how to use Steam and how it works as a platform. I should go into consulting for game dev. Sell shovels, you know? Just kidding. Or am I?

What's Next

Okay, so, the game has finally launched, and the next steps are gonna be:

• Fixing remaining typos and bugs on my todo list for the next hotfix
• Sleeping
• Finishing the community/point shop features
• Getting Mac build to work
• Implementing localization features to allow for fan translations (or actual official professional localizations, I don't know if I'll be able to afford that yet)
• Planning and starting on the free content updates I want to make for the game
• Not working 20 hours a day if I can help it

Okay, well that's it for this week. I can't believe it's done. Back when I started my sabbatical, I never expected I would actually start gamedev, and finish a game, and launch it on Steam, and get 100% positive reviews from 130 people. I'm pretty sure the launch has exceeded all my expectations in every way possible, but I'm too tired to fully grasp the situation or appreciate it right now. But I think it's safe to say that I, "next week me," am happy.

Thank you all for being here with me on this journey! And as always, thank you for the support!