Wow, almost three weeks passed since the release in a glance.
A lot has happened with me and KREEP, but I wasn't really active on these weeks
...I think it's kind of time to talk about KREEP in past tense, though it's story is not over yet, but I'm focusing less and less day by day on it and starting to move onto new things. First a little shameless promotion, than I jump onto a postmortem kinda thingy and future plans:
KREEP got released, sold practically none in it's first weeks (as I predicted, so it was expected), but got some nice view and demo-download numbers, at least compared to my previous hobby project. But a rather pleasant happening lately:
KREEP got into a groupees bundle!
Groupees - High and Strange bundle - curated by Remute
A couple of days are still left, so if you would like to get the full version for dirt cheap + some other goodies go go go
!!!Heard bad stories about how this devalues your product etc., but in hindsight it wasn't a bad decision to participate. KREEP was never intended to be the next Minecraft or Fallout 4 (its a cool game though
), especially not financially, and it resulted in a lot of people who tries out the game and a lot of greenlight votes which is really nice!It got a little press presence for which I'm really thankful and now you can reach it at multiple stores (+ more to come):
itch.io
IndieGameStand
Mini-mortem:
KREEP was my second more serious hobby project which I intended to finish. Looking back, my older projects were more like "free time spent well", but never really got serious about actually finishing anything, so again, the final verdict is SUCCESS! My original plans were more humble though. I got a little carried away with features around mid project when I was locking down the final feature set. From that point of view it was bit of a failure, since it took much more time to complete, than the original vision. This happened due to me deciding to try steam greenlight at that time, because I thought, that the game is pretty fun even in a half-finished state, so with some extra features and more polish it may actually could make it + why not. In the back of my head I actually knew, that plans about more content will not be enough for that, but still went with it. It was fun though
, maybe next time will work out even better!Some numbers & facts:
It took from start to finish close to 430 hours to make, spanning over 6 months.
From this, programming and testing was around 190 hours, it took 140 to produce the content and around a 100 went into "marketing" (haven't made that much stuff on marketing front but I count here every media material preparation, so as an example writing this blog, or creating the trailer too).
The code is a little bit over 5000 lines in C#, sitting on top of a bigger pile of code which I named MagicItem. It is a bunch of code I've been "developing" for years now in spare time, running games using XNA/MonoGame, but while making KREEP it was mostly left intact.
My final Assets folder contained 142 files (without sub-directories and only pre-processed content) from which 39 were images, 23 were sound effects and the rest 80 were general purpose resource files (tile-maps, animations, fonts, strings etc... mostly in xml).
Used the following tools for development:
Windows PC
Visual Studio 2013, XNA/MonoGame
Notepad++, GIMP 2, piskel, Tiled, sfxr, Audacity, Bosca Ceoil, Fraps and blender
I'm generally really happy, I deem it as a success. For a I time I hoped, that it would get on steam, because it would have been a wonderful achievement as a creator and a really cool learning experience. It may still happen, thanks to some colleagues, friends and bundle people
I received a lot of votes lately. If it does, I will jump back to the drawing board and fill the game with steam achievements as + goodies. For now, I'm already focusing on my next game, starting out with some MagicItem "framework" developments, which I will showcase soon because it is fun/useful.See ya in a few weeks with new ideas!
