Hi there!
Those were some very busy days filled with news and events, I am sorry if we were a bit missing but hey, let’s recap everything that happened!
Of course the first bad news was the unsuccessful end of our Kickstarter campaign.
We kind of saw it coming, I think the main issue here it’s that we are good developers but terrible sellers, it’s just simply not our line of work. We have a solid product with very good feedback from our testers but we lack in marketing skills and consequently our campaign lacked in visibility.
I also deeply overestimated Kickstarter internal campaign exposure: it turns out that the main source of traffic for a campaign is not from Kickstarter browsing but from views from outside links and leads. Marketing is a key factor for this, so we decided to start some talks with a couple of agencies and friends to get some professional help on this topic (and relieve me the pain of thinking about tweets and FB posts instead of being able to develop our game full time 😉 ).
With the failure of the campaign the morale was not so high, not to mention a cold that was spreading among us (I am currently its next target…), so we decided to take a small break to breathe and recover from the last month and our working long hours.
Then during last Friday and Saturday we attended the Codemotion Milan, a great annual conference I know from years with dedicated speeches for game development topics.
We spent two very intense days, the speeches were very interesting and we talked with a lot of guys, things that were fuel for our mind with an explosion of a lot of great ideas.
I strongly encourage all of you to find similar events around you and places to share ideas and experiences, those are really important for our minds and our jobs (in game dev, software dev or whatever dev you are!).
So… what’s next?
We still completely believe in Dealer’s Life, we know it is (and will be) a great game and despite having not reached the funding goal on our Kickstarter campaign we will go on developing and building it! Monetize our work in order to keep developing and keep bringing you an even better game is of course one of our concerns. We are evaluating our possibilities and you will surely have some news if you follow us here!
We have also just recorded a gameplay video so that you can all see a couple of days of Dealer’s Life, its core mechanics and the current state of the art of the Beta version.
It’s nice, isn’t it? 🙂 The next step will be to record a couple of small videos where we explain some key features, but those are really time consuming, we are trying to find a time frame for them.
Speaking about development, we are now currently working on end game and win/lose conditions, we are also doing another balancement pass (this time on player characteristics) and further graphics improvements with more polished sprites.
So, as you can see we are still working hard and we’ll keep working hard till we can bring you our game!
Last but not least, I want to send a huge THANK YOU to all our Kickstarter supporters and our friends, we are working for you and your faith in us will be rewarded!
See you soon and don’t forget to follow us here, on Twitter and on Facebook!