Fresh new year, fresh new website layout. We didn't change much but I like to make minor quality-related changes every couple months if I find ways to improve the look and feel!
We've got plenty of goals and hopes for this year of 2018, it is entirely possible we could have another game released by the end of the year or at the very least be well ready for a 2019 release!
At the very least if Great Gun Gauntlet gets some more interest we'd possibly consider releasing some updates for it either as a fully featured version for what we'd consider its full price, or a heavily discounted "Early Access" type version that we would update over the course of several months. We aren't entirely fond of the idea of releasing an incomplete game but we are confident that if we did release it as Early Access that we'd be able to quickly complete it and that the discounted price would make it worth the number of features available during that period of time.
Of course, the sad fact of the matter is Great Gun Gauntlet is a somewhat hard game to market with a seemingly niche level of interest, due to this it may stay in its Demo state for quite a while before we deem it as having enough interest to warrant updating.
Moving back to the topic of future projects, while the previously mentioned possible 2018 release is Mystery Project #1, we also have another Mystery Project #2 being worked on currently. It isn't quite at the point where I have any nice looking visuals to tease it with like Project #1 had, but I can't wait to start teasing it when the right time comes. Project #2 could certainly take a while longer than Project #1, I imagine you wont be seeing more than teases until 2019.
One oddity of game development I would like to learn more about and to improve at this year is the marketing side and getting games noticed to wider audiences. As we are currently still no-budget developers we don't have the cash to hire anyone to help market for us and we can't afford ads of any kind, with this in mind it is up to us to handle our social media, tell people about the games, and find platforms to get our games noticed through. Certainly the strangest part about this is how hard it is to market a free demo like Great Gun Gauntlet, people love free games but at the same time it seems a lot harder to get free games noticed? When a game is free you can't entice people with sales, when a game is free it doesn't have a price tag for people to associate with worth. Certainly an odd market to work with but I hope I can learn to flow with it!
That is most of what comes to mind to put in this oh-so-long blog post, hopefully this year I'll make sure to make more of these! Either way, stay tuned. We've actually got one more quick company-related update that you should hopefully see in a couple of days!