Weekly Update (8-12-2024) (Patreon)

Not as productive of a week as I'd have preferred, but not a terrible one, either. Making progress overall. The section I'm working on now isn't the most exciting thing ever, but I think it's important (and it will ultimately probably be more interesting to play than to write). I did a bit of promotion, as well. I always try to post a thread on r/Game's Indie Sunday with new updates. It gets more views there in two days-ish than the whole week of elevated impressions after a major update on itch. Hard to tell exactly how much real traffic that drives, but it feels like one of the larger venues available for SFW advertising.

Aside from that, Steam metrics are slowly creeping up. The median time played passed 1h recently, which was a neat milestone. I might have to try another pass on steam curators at some point. Honestly, sending it to them with the old art was probably a mistake, considering that I only got like 1 review out of that. >.>; But, this is all somewhat of a learning process for me, so there's no point in dwelling on mistakes made early in the process. "A path not taken is the same as a path that never existed in the first place," as Rau le Creuset would say. Though, admittedly, he probably didn't play many multi-route RPGs. XD

Speaking of art, Mimo is finally feeling better. Seems like her illness had a longer tail and was a bit more serious than she had let on, but thankfully she seems to be fully recovered now. I'll probably post an art preview for the $10 tier sometime this week, since I have the first colored draft. I've also been contemplating looking for someone to make a map for the game. As someone pointed out last week, it could make for a cool promotional material. If so, definitely thinking a paper map style one, like you'd find in the front cover of a fantasy novel. Ideally, right now, I think one showing the political divisions of Versalia would be most appropriate. I have a good sense of those for Calistrae and Ekestria now, but no point in setting those in stone now and precluding better ideas before they really come up.

Speaking of maps, going to close this with the updated version of one of my favored promotional shots. The updated pixel art wall map hasn't been backported to Elysios or other places in the current public version, but it will be next update. For now, though, back to work.