Game Update
This week has been difficult as I am pushing toward the 22 Feb early access launch for Six Aspects. Steam has not accepted me yet still, and I have submitted my documents 3 times now. I applied to Humble Bundle, Good Old Games, and the Epic Games Store. I kind of expected it might be more difficult to get on those platforms and don’t know a lot about Good Old Games but it was worth a try I figured.
I received a rejection letter from Good Old Games saying that Six Aspects is to niche and to small in scale. I feel that the scale is fair for now, but I feel that niche is why we are indie developers so that seemed a little silly. Then again there are a lot of things that are in the engine that are mostly hidden from the player that they won’t realize are happening.
I also looked at releasing on Amazon but it was difficult to understand what that would entail and it seemed like they want a monthly fee which I can’t justify if the game isn’t selling. Additionally, there were a bunch of varying cuts that they are going to take out of the product and it wasn’t clear what that was going to be. I can try it if I get a regular revenue stream going on other platforms, but right now I don’t feel like I can justify it, especially as this is early access and will change over time.
Finally after a suggestion from my mentor Chris I tried out Gum Road. It was so easy to set up and it looks like they host digital projects no problems. The only issue I found with the platform is that all the game related sales are for game assets and engines. It does give me the exact capabilities I’m looking for however. I’m able to push new updates as I make them to users that have a login account and have made the purchases already. So for now on Feb 22 “Six Aspects” will be releasing on Gum Road at a minimum unless some of these other platforms pick it up.
I managed to fix a bug on entering stages. Leaders weren’t reading correctly and halting the start of stages. I managed to fix the issue, but I might just put a work around in that will bypass and auto assign leaders instead of displaying an error message which forces players to make the assignments themselves.
I surfaced the cost of the army on the Force Organization screen. I think that creating these balance sheets should help players focus and realize that there is a financial element to the game. While I’m doing that I’m refining the money system in the game. I started to add more information during the stages but found out that enemy squads with dead members were getting counted for gold for the player every time the player entered combat instead of just when they die one time. Still working on fixing this but I have a way forward on it. I am considering removing gold received from enemies during combat but this leads to another issue which is that experience is likely behaving the same way. I think I can fix them both at the same time however.
Renamed the “Toy Box” to the muster area after speaking with my buddy Aron about it. I considered some other names too. I’m glad that I settled on this though. It seems a lot more accessible this way. I also added some more tool tips and extra information for the economy in the game. That turned up some more issues with the combat that I will fix this week.
Personal Update
Looking forward to next weekend with Valentines Day coming up. I have already put everything in place for that. I’ve been focusing on the game so much that it’s pushed out a lot of my personal stuff. There’s not a lot to update here this week.