Hey everyone! My roguelite, Blade and Burden, participated in Next Fest.Now that it's been a week since it concluded, I wanted to write out a retrospective to appraise how I did and determine if I took full advantage of the event.

Let’s start off with numbers, here’s a graph of visits and wishlist on each day of the festival:

In total my game received 1,321 visits and 101 wishlists (not dalmatians unfortunately). The most successful single day was October 15th which saw 248 visits and 41 wishlists. The event definitely gave me a boost in visibility as the number of visits was a 65% increase versus the prior week and the number of wishlists was a 1,200% increase versus the prior week. These numbers were nice but not as high as I had hoped and the stats I got from my demo weren’t exactly stellar.

Speaking of which, my demo had 70 unique players during Next Fest with a median play time of 7 minutes (which was marked as “well below average” by Steam). That median playtime is nowhere near I’d want it to be, but there is an explanation for that I’ll get to later. Alright so now that we know the numbers let’s break down what I did right and what I did wrong (spoiler: I did more wrong). 

 Good stuff:

1. I created a new trailer that focused more on gameplay and released it on the first day of Next Fest
2. I hired a pro to make me capsule art and it really improved my store page’s look and it even gave the game its own little boost when I updated it a few weeks prior to Next Fest
3. A large chunk of people who played the demo also wishlisted it (well the people who actually played)

Bad Stuff:

1. I was unaware that demos also get a “release push” that increases their visibility for a few days after release, AND that this push can stack with other visibility pushes. I released my demo on Steam months ago, had I been smarter I would have waited to release the demo until Next Fest to combine the festival and launch visibility.
2. MY DEMO WAS BROKEN (for the first day). I decided to update my demo right before Next Fest to include some more features and add some beautification. Unbeknownst to me I had not uncommented a line of code I was using for testing which meant players could not progress past the first room of the game. This is likely the main culprit of the low median play time.
3. I didn’t reach out to any streamers, youtubers, etc. I know how important this can be but I was unsure if my unfinished product was worth sending to content creators. That fear definitely held me back and hindered my performance.

Overall, pretty good, but lots of mistakes and missed opportunities. This game is much more about passion and I learned long ago that indie devs must be motivated internally rather than externally. So screw it, we ball. My game is coming out in December!