Hey & Hallo everyone.
Finally i had time to do write a new blog post. This should have been a video but this is just to much work at the moment, so here we are, back with an good old blog post.
This time i want to talk about my experience with the Steam Next Fest and how it had an impact on some of the number of the demo of Crystals Of Irm. After that we’ll take a short look at the what happens next in the Crystals Of Irm Universe
First of all, the Next Fest definitly had an impact on the total wishlist of Crystals Of Irm, who would have thought it 😀
However, when we look at this graph in more detail, we see two significant spikes. The general traffic of the Steam page increased over the event but there where two events that are responsible for the peaks.
The first peak came with the start of the event a was pushed even more after a super nice LetsPlay video was published by the YouTube Channel Retromation which has over 200k subscribers. I doubt that without this extra push from the video, we would see such a spike.
The video by the way is so fun to watch and Retromation had such good words for the game and besides that, having a commented video like this, covering most of the content i build into the demo, is a crazy helpful resource to work with and helps improve the game.
After this high, the curve rapidly flattened out again. But i had two streaming slots left, which i decided to use on over the week end. The idea was to simply play the demo while streaming one hour directly to the event page at Steam.
Both stream had so much viewers, simply by being present at the event page. And these viewers had an impact on the total wishlists aswell, as you can see on the second spike. Honestly i had no idea that streaming gameplay over the game page directly, would have such an impact on the wishlist.
Thats definitly something i’ll do again! So overall the wishlists have increased five times over the week. Which definitly feels crazy. Thats a big win for the game and thanks to everyone who clicked that wishlist button.
One big thing i noticed after the event was that the demo was the best way to introduce you to the battle system. In the past I always had a hard time to explain it thru videos or gifs which mostly led to confusion. Communicating the whole thing through the demo worked much better in this case and I got a lot of positive feedback about the battle system.
In general, I’m very grateful for all the good criticism and overwhelmingly positive feedback. I didn’t expect that to be honest.
Besides all that i’m aware that the numbers COI is doing are all rookie numbers, but it still feels like a success and I have the feeling that Crystals Of Irm has a realistic chance to make itself comfortable in a small niche once its released.
In conclusion, I can say that the participation in the event was really worth it. Wishlists went up, there was reach through YouTube videos and streams and most importantly, it was well received, the main game mechanics worked for you and most of you guys had fun with it even if the version was partly rough.
Roadmap & What’s Next
So whats next? The main thing now is to fix bugs and polish the game. This will take a few more days. After that the rest of the features will be implemented, which are primarily related to the battle system and the dungeon crawl parts.
Once that is done, more content will be added and you can look forward to new impressions.
Since the Next Fest worked out so well, I decided to release another demo in the next months, which will be primarily about the battle system and the dungeons again. I think this is the best way to communicate what the game is and what needs improvement or what doesnt work.
So we’re doing our own little Crystal Fest in the near future
And that was it again with the blog post for today. I hope you had fun and got a little insight behind the scenes. Thanks again for all the great feedback and the good critique.
And with that bye bye until next time
David
