Slay the Spire: Success through Marketability

start off this talk my name is Casey and this talk is called aspire success through marketability and this is a presentation about our journey and how our team found and kept up the success or satisfier this talk is kind of like a post-mortem and also a general information kind of thing for how we approached our 3-year development cycle I don't think it's too technical and so it should be easy to understand for everybody if the practices that I described in this talk don't apply to your game I hope that at least you'll get a good insight into how and why games like slate aspire work out alright okay did I go next next ok so first a little bit about myself my name is Casey ah no and I worked with them Anthony Giovannetti and the two of us formed mega crate

games we made one game through mega crate games and that's inspired there's a developer email address if you want to contact us for like whatever reasons you know enquiries wanting advice or you wanna grab a cup of coffee a little bit of background about us in general is that um back in early college days Anthony I were inspired by the success of a very few very small game development studios there were games like Cave Story aquaria untitled story under a bunch of other flash games that were generally made by solo developers so we were inspired to like make our own video game and we formed a company called QQ Inc and we released two games over the course of a few months I think it was one summer maybe like sophomore year of college and these games didn't do very well so we took a break from making video games for a bit we kind of finished up college and

then we kind of went our separate ways and found jobs in a software industry out of college I worked as a QA engineer a place called amazon.com as some of you may have heard of and I worked there for I wrote four years on my slides it's actually five years I was a contractor for one year and I was full-time for four years and Anthony who went a separate way also worked as the QA but on a different company and like we never really talked about it but it's very interesting that we both have ended up doing the same thing well working Amazon i tinkered on and off with some before game development on the side I guess I was more into me video games but after time and Amazon there was a kind of restrictive game development policy and the company had this kind of grey area and a lot of developers I wanted to make games there like I was like a hobby we're kind of demoralize and it was kind of strange and so a few years of this of like tinkering with games but not really know if I can publish it kind of retired

and a board on my job so I just kind of quit and then I rechecked with Anthony I was like Anthony what are you up to and he was like I worked at this company and I want to make video games but I'm working now so it can't and so I'm like okay well I quit my job and he was like why well I make video games or what do you think we're crazy people so so you know and we started working on a third game slaves fire on the picture you see up on these slides over here Oh Alan seems like okay um this is from our flash game our first flash game I think it was like our resolution was like 600 by 600 that's her logo and then a screenshot of the game it was a flash game shoot-'em-up called god laser is really cool it got maybe ten thousand views or plays or whatever metrics flash games used back then and that was online congregate and a few other like flash game portals we also made a ninety nine game $0.99 in games

$0.99 iOS game that got about 200 downloads and that was on the Apple Store we also start working on third game there's a rhythm game except the time that was never completed because I think it didn't work out with our musician or the performance wasn't good there's all sorts of small reasons while it is interesting to talk about these older projects I think the gaming landscape has changed quite a bit since then and so this talk will mostly just focus on state aspire okay so what's the Aspire it's actually quite difficult to explain what's latest fire is and this is kind of gonna be like a recurring theme for this talk just so you can experience it our elevator pitch slash short description on our steam store page kind of goes like this says we fused card games and roguelikes together to make the best single-player deck builder we could craft a unique deck and counter bizarre creatures discover relics of immense power and slay this fire anyone know that the game running I

guess if you come to this talk you know what the game is but if you but um there's actually like a lot of complex mechanics and words alike if you're not used to them you wouldn't understand and right like it's like what's a roguelike why are you squeezing them with card games and what's a deck builder and why is a card game single-player there was a bunch of questions like this and I think that was going to be a start of a few problems in the beginning however a game was released on Steam early access on November 14 2017 and then he reached for release just two years ago so we finished the game and today we sold over 1.5 million copies and so it's been about 7,500 times more popular than our iOS game which is so this is screenshot team and if you the score of 99 percent which is incredible and it's something that's like to me as a developer is something I'm very proud of I think even

if a game doesn't sell well a good users for alludes that the developers like very conscious of what their player base wants and needs and I think that's something we should all strive for I think this philosophy on game development differs from most studios negative user reviews you know our things that happen because players feel that they can't talk to the developers so they can't reach the developers and so it's kind of a way to like email the developers and complain because if they feel like they're not responding and that's the only way they can gets them as someone who always reads reviews before making any and all purchases whether it's like Steam or amazon.com I felt that making games or any product successful in long run should have a heavy emphasis on customer feedback loose and maintaining proper expectations at Amazon there's a principle called customer obsession and well I don't agree with everything that

happens on did it is the only company I ever worked for and so I suppose some of these principles have been kind of like nailed into my psyche alright so back in 2015 around the time I started working on site aspired I decided to approach game development a lot more seriously and with more discipline than our previous games because you know they failed so I read up a lot of articles every single day and this was walls working on the game and just have a good baseline and understanding of game development what's going on in the game development world and just get as much perspectives as possible many articles during this time I thought the spotlight was about marketing it's like a basic definition it's like marketing refers to the activities of the company associated with buying and selling private service it includes advertising selling and delivering products to people and why I crossed up the selling and delivering

portion was because Anthony and I initially thought well we'll sell a game on Steam and then we'll deliver the game over the Internet so in the context of this definition I think that marketing was about advertising your game getting the game known heard making a game look appealing so that players will eventually buy the game for those of you who are trying to sell your game outside of steam such as your own website or the new stores that are coming up I think it's possible I'm not quite sure how that works but you look you know like minecraft did it and escape from tarkov is also succeeding so but I don't have too much advice on that all right I'm just some just for some visual examples here's an image of press awesome I see here I don't know where this eyes are gonna be so but put some random images of like what I consider traditional marketing in the top right no it's wrong in the left

or in the left side there's an image of a press release by Apple which is like sending email or having a web page that says look we're releasing this new an exciting product guerrilla marketing is of course like when you have like something unusual and people go ha the people who did this unusual thing also have this other product which is not really related but I should look into it I don't really know how it works look at this giant coffee cup oh there's McDonald's guys I sure do you want a big night now and the Twitter logo I put that out because Twitter and Instagram is like a great place we post pictures and gifts the gifs the gifts of shifts just as peanut butter gifts is probably correct and they put hashtag so people can share your cool pictures and hype up the game for you it's great so and then Facebook ads is like I just put it there I don't really know how it's worked since I that block but advertisements

have been around and they're not gonna go away and so there are other types of ads outside of Facebook to physical ads sponsorships things of that sort so some of the examples of traditional advertising of course are things like um there are some unintentional advertisements I feel like like a developer blogs which highlight interesting interesting things about your game or its development process I'm not sure if somebody would write a dev diary or dev blog for themselves sometimes you do for like an archival purpose but I think a lot of them have an intention to be like this is we're working on this is why it's hard this is why the game is gonna be interesting and I do think that they are interesting and they are the art form of selling the game for sure and lastly of course is like game trailers and screenshots making those look nice is definitely a form of like marketing that you're trying to help out your game of course right you want people to know what your game is start to buy the game okay so we start working on the slate

aspire prototype in August 2015 it's in development for a little over two years before our early access launch so it's actually a really quite a long time just some advice if you think that you want to release the game that will take about one year it will take to my handi craziness how long do you think it'll take multiply that by two all right so so while we create the prototype and either it on a design and fleshed out visuals we hired a few contractors so although it's a team of two people we definitely got help from a few other people these are people like artists and illustrators who created our professional-looking backgrounds media illustrations for we have events in our AGame and those all have like still images there's a contractor that we also worked with a very talented composer named Clark from Australia and he also looked at those help us get some voice actors there is some voice acting in the game they're very like and thank a good

request we had for one of the voice actors was um there's a character called occultist who's wearing like like a mask and they're like worship pros and we told the voice actor to say ha like like that and like you have to sound like a man in a crow suit and those are the notes and he and he did it a few times because we weren't satisfied just in matching somebody in a studio saying caca over and over again so that must have been very exciting so yeah so once our game felt presentable on we one promoter game for a few months before we released into early access we worked on a trailer which was released around April 2017 so this was about a year and half in we set up a website we used to press kit I think that's a known thing right it's called press kit it's gonna say like TM press kit parentheses and we're participating in things like

screenshots Saturdays on sites like Reddit and like Twitter and like hashtags and things like that we tried post interesting gifts and this was between February and April 2017 so results from that our website didn't really get any visitors and we had an email subscription like a sign up for newsletter and we didn't really get too many people on that I think we got some family and friends and our social media posts had maybe about 100 to thousand impressions I think thousand was like really good for us thousand people so the sound development was really very exciting so that's our character the silent it's gonna make a pun but nevermind alright so what we were posting these things our game didn't really stand out from the crowd during this previous promotion phase I tried making interesting

progress screenshots and gifts but we couldn't compete against the other visually fantastic games like um manifold garden or games like inside and cuphead Ori and the blind forest and much much more like games are like beautiful now everyone's think it was really talented so so the game's landscape fell extremely competitive at this time than these masterful visuals that we couldn't like touch we're very we're very much a problem for people like us a lot of technologies in art and like articles about technologies were mostly about like VR or like the ever-growing mobile market and we weren't in the mobile market or during VR things like eSports were happening comparative games are getting much larger and they're still getting larger Battle Royale was becoming a thing so we weren't really like on like any of these trends so ah so not only was my game not really visually fantastic but it's also not too exciting on paper either I

mentioned the elevator pitch earlier but we were making game full of unusual poor mechanics what's a roguelike what's the deck builder right compound this with the fact that we have no reputation as in developers besides these failure games from the past and so much more new game developers rendering space engines like unity were lowering the barrier entry for developers and this is great but I think we're also all competing for like the front page right we didn't give up too easily because there was one thing we did confirm over and over throughout a development and that was that the game is fun so how do we reach this conclusion that the game was fun one we had a gut instinct you know we were like this game is fun because you know we played it and spun and we all the things that we wanted it to all of our friends which mean by reading to our secret play testing group we're having a great time they were having a really great time like they were having problems and so

and friends can be too polite and sometimes you know they may or may not tell you if the game is actually good or bad or not fun so you also have to showcase your game strangers so it's go game outside and so after a year or so development it was ready to go outside we took it to several events Expos and festivals these are all in Seattle because that's we're located there's a nice group of folks that run something called the Seattle Indies and yes whoo anyone comes and once yeah I don't mean these events they're really like oh yeah oh okay um turn during year one and between after year one of development and until we released early access we probably took your game to around ten in-person events just a picture which said this this is a picture of our monitor and laptop style booth that we exhibit these events people who sat down on these

booths were in trouble so sorry some people came back to play a demo we had a demo you just play the first level and it took about thirty minutes and we had some people come back over and over again to play the first level over and over so we were like I think we've got something here and what we didn't get any like noticeable noticeable press from these events so anybody talking about us we did make a lot of connections we talked to a lot of people we got a feel for what kind of processes and practices were good for game development and also just having people play the game was useful for all sorts of reasons like streamlining in your face finding issues and things of that sort there's also really motivating just to like have people play your game and enjoy it like that's like a good motivator to work on a game especially if you're in like a development phase where you're not getting much feedback it gets it gets pretty tough to work on a game alone I think well it is two of us two of us alone so even with total

strangers having fun with their game we were having difficulty getting traction on the Internet which is where we were planning to sell the game on the Internet so before we released the game in early access we created and published three separate videos the first video is the trailer I talked about earlier this was the teaser trailer we made another trailer just for early access launch and this was called our early access launch trailer and when we released the game we also decided to create a supplementary video in an attempt to explain the games mechanics and why we you know thought it would be fun this was a 15 minute explanation video of Anthony playing the game and explaining the game's mechanics it currently to this day has 982 views this kind of to be expected as we're not streamers with exciting personalities or following but you know miracles could happen so and the first two videos the

trailers the early access trailer and the teaser trailer were created by two separate professional video game trailer makers trailers are still a necessary asset for store pages but they weren't really helping us out too much and so the view counts on these videos when they came out were very very low it was very disheartening and we were starting to worry maybe there's no game maybe there's no audience for a game like slate aspire on top of all this we were quickly approaching you know our early access release date and about 2000 people what wishlist did our game der Steam we found organized and verified a list of 300 press and content creators from various websites and decide to send out a press release then we attached links to set up in this press release we attached links to appropriate places like where to buy in the game links to our teaser trailer we attached some cool custom gifts and then we sent them out and this was in April

so this was for the teaser trailer and a few months later a month before early access launched we actually sent another wave of press release emails with early access launch trailer let's take a look at how these emails went okay so that one went into the void so it's not very good so that's okay so surely if we could get some influential content creators on board they would maybe help us out and this didn't make the gaming press recognize us there were a lot of streamers and YouTube content creators at the time that we followed personally and so we decided to write some personalized emails in the hopes that maybe either help us out and try the game that we worked so hard on for two years now let's take a look at these emails they all they also they also went into the forehead so in total we sent over 600 emails before we release the early access and we had done zero responses additionally before release we wanted streamers to pick up our game

because streaming is obviously becoming a big thing so before we release the game we want to certain streamers and content creators to get a sneak preview of Slate aspire to hype up the game this was a strategy done by I believe trust me in this studio the guys I did dead cells and so we'll do that we heard of a tool called key mailer and this is a website slash tool that allows you to send out steam keys to content creators if you pay about I think there's like a pro version that you pay like $150 for this lets you search for streamers based on what kinds of games they played what kind of games they streamed you can also see like how much followers or subscribers they have so we decided to give that a go and sent out maybe 200 keys or so to people we thought would like our kind of game these are people who have streamed similar games or made videos on similar games these games are like her stone or FTL darkest dungeon and so forth so and

then the day finally came we released an early access on November 14th we were on early access and anybody in the world could buy and play our game leading to this I made a countdown gift of like like our game is releasing in seven days and I like we're on Twitter and the next day I said I came just in six days and then I forgot there were some cool blurbs it was like you can play cards and fight a guy in a shell and it's really cool so making gifts is a lot of work so those seven days I feel like I spent like a quarter or like a long time making this we also to all of our friends and family and we made our now it's me on the steam store page of the game itself we sound tell those press emails we sent out the steam keys through key mailer and this latest bar sold twenty two hundred copies in the first two weeks yeah hello snot it's not too it's not too

great so first two weeks 2120 200 copies not too great it was really exciting on day one we sold about 300 copies on day two we sold about 400 copies but then on day three we already we already started selling less and less copies we sold 200 and then 150 and then 1 or 20 and then 90 so at this time there was a tool well the tool still exists but we'll talk about that another time but um the games that we looked at on this tool had a lot of information about sales data and how much general sales that you would expect games to have during like certain time windows and we had noticed that a lot of other games whether it's full release or early access it doesn't really matter most of the sales happen in the first two weeks and so we were like hmm what's gonna happen so what were we doing doing what were we doing during these two

initial weeks nothing too special actually although our sales weren't very good we just kind of kept working after all the game is in early access it's not done yet I'm sure the game will surely the game will be successful once we get into full release working on the game was comfortable because finally instead of promoting the game we could get back to working on the game and that's kind of like what we wanted to do is whole time right is work on the game and finish the game so we were kind of tired of all these like making these promotion gifts sending out keys finding people to give keys to setting up a store setting up the store requires a lot of things description the screenshots things like that and so and on top of this since the game was in early access we promised to release a patch every single week this was to keep adding content balance the game fix the bug and get the game to completion so nothing had really changed we went back to working on the game and we were doing everything exactly the same way except we were pushing new builds to steam every single week funny

story about nine months after early access release we found out that our early access blurb on the steam store page said that we would be patching every two weeks so we decided apparently to patch twice as often so we noticed that a lot of reviews mention that they saw their favorite streamer play the game so to encourage them to buy the game and so this was probably a key Miller so he said a good job he Miller so put a little promotion here this is chemo is great five out of five if you work for key Miller you may use this quote okay so this so this encouraged us to send out more keys via email this was probably our best investment when it came to time in terms of like what we were doing to like promote the game I'm money wise which was $150 when it came to marking slash advertising key Miller also felt like a more genuine way to reach players reviewers didn't need to leave positive reviews they were just

given a free key and they were we just explained what the game is and they were given a free key if they want if they didn't want to play a review it they didn't have to so and nothing implied that had to be positive so if they wanted to play the game they would play it YouTube content creators started making some videos and then a few twitch streamers also started streaming a game quite regularly these were like recurring streamers so someone who started playing earlier would still be playing the game for a few weeks and then there's and then turns out the streamer commute is actually pretty tight-knit which is a good thing their friends started streaming the game and then their friends started streaming the game I'm not too sure what compelled the first few people to start streaming our game or to create YouTube content generally what they said was I was given a key to this game and it looked interesting it's a bit it's a bit vague but maybe a combination of our trailer elevator pitch for screenshots there

but keep in mind that we did send keys to people who had played similar games and those key words like broke like deck builder and single-player games like single pair of roguelike games I think at the time were very fun and exciting so I think that was I think that was it but I can't say for sure so our initial our initial success actually came on week three after our early access launch there was a very high-profile streamer in China that played our game is a very high-profile streamer the video of the stream went past a million views in a couple of days and suddenly our game was splattered with a lot of Chinese players who wanted a player game thus they were having a hard time because the game was only available in English at the time more people in the US became interested because it started showing up on like the global top sellers list many of the streamers who received the game before early access were still playing and all their streamer friends also started playing and eventually it reached more content creators and then we showed up on top sellers list on Steam and then

showing up on like a top sellers list on Steam apparently like changes everything because we went from pretty good sales to like crazy sales around the same time we also went on sale and so apparently having game on sale is also good so these all kind of compound them together and then and then this happened this blue line spike happened and it was great and everything was the game was very popular suddenly I would say another endorsement by myself just so you know so so I would say that most of our success actually came from people genuinely playing the game and enjoying the game um I think that twitch and products like twitch are godsend for games like ours a game that isn't usually visually beautiful or even interesting on paper can now become wildly popular um and there's also another game that's similar right now which is fairly unknown or maybe you

just know it's a mod for a game called dota 2 and it's called Auto chess and although on paper it sounds like a mess it's like it's a mod for a video game and the art style is dota 2 and you should play it and that game is is really fun and so people are playing it and people like can't name like twitch streamers off top line tell me yet like amaz and stuff are playing the game on twitch and it's doing really well because streamers talk openly about what they're thinking about I feel that users can play vicariously through steamers by watching them on top of this if these games continually become updated and polished why would you ever stop playing them while we intentionally design still aspire to be fun to watch it was of great coincidence and luck for us that twitch was and still is growing as a platform so if your game is popular in a format where people watch people watching other people play watch what did I type here okay look what yeah

Casey so to make games are popular for like streamers and people who play the game instead of focusing on marketing we focus on something called marketability and this is a bit different from marketing marketability is the ability of a video game to be sold or marketed so our lack of response from trailers our screenshots our press emails our website work was very small in comparison to the response we got whenever we updated the game so we finally got to market ability but it's really important and that's because the context of why we did the game the way we did is so important we've been making games a very old-fashioned way and the combination of three things which is streaming communities and the fact that we could update easily allowed us to take as tap

this path of marketability rather than try to market the game before we sell the game so we wanted to do was the product sell itself which was like I think this is I think this is the dream for developers because we just get to work on the game and so in order to accomplish this dream need to have a strong pipeline I guess to put it simply it would be having a good method for acquiring feedback pushing out updates and a good way to talk to your community all right and so for pushing updates slate aspire got an update every single week on the main branch during early access between November 14th and then January 23rd which is when we did the full release the game was patched 57 times one month after early access we also created a beta branch so that players get a sneak preview of upcoming

content bug faces and so forth and we can test out things like experimental features we think that having a beta branch is necessary for week B patching because we don't have a dedicated QA team whenever we add or anything there's a risk that things could break and sometimes we would be pre late accidentally breaking stuff and then we would fix that but then that would actually break it more and then be like why not just roll back and then if you roll back you don't have new features and that was not exciting so we broke the game a lot and I don't think people should be afraid of breaking the game it's part of at least early access if it's full release then should be should be pretty stable some pros and cons of weekly patching new stuff is always happening so new stuff players always getting new stuff there's always excitement and it's very fun what players want and expect from a new patch and it also gives us ideas sometimes were about to work on something that we

think is exciting but then the player is like no would be really great if they worked on this thing and everyone's like yeah I bet they're working on this thing and then we're like yes we are working on that thing that's that's exactly what we were working on and so sometimes you know what people want is what drives what we work on also if you patch weekly it's good time to address problems and discussions that people are having about the game so you can be more transparent I can discuss what's coming soon and of course if you need help towards anything such as for us we had started localizing the game and we needed more people to help us community translate the game and so during these weekly announcements we can ask for help and be like we're looking for translators and we need to get a lot of translators but we'll talk about that on the localization slide for con scoops whoa there calm down for oh it's

too zoomed out alright for cons of weekly patching I would say that there are just some features that take longer to make one week and so if you're working on something like that or if you're working on content that is not ready to be revealed you're going to have a patch that's not very exciting and so you can have some slow weeks another one is writing up an announcement and getting it proof red takes a lot of work and then you have to push the patch and then you have to monitor the patch for issues so we was actually costing us one day of productivity a week so if you work five days a week then you're losing 20% of productivity just by pushing out weekly patches if you were to get sick if you were to get injured if you were moving or you were on jury duty or maybe somebody got married I'm married and these can make weekly patches pretty

pretty rough so my solution is if I could do it again I would do two weeks every two weeks like I said I would so okay so when it came to talking to people through steam announcements that was a very good thing because that's where one buys the game so I don't actually read those announcements which is fantastic whenever we posted announcements on Steam it would be crossed posted to places like discord Twitter and our Facebook channels reddit is community driven so you don't to post anything there somebody will find it and post it and then I think twitch streamers also if the game is patched they will briefly go over the patch notes which were available in-game so they would just read off of it and be like oh the game is completely different now now it's way harder or way easier so it's not way harder easier minor balance patches so so from these announcements we try to funnel people into our disc or channel because that's when we preferred we found it to be the easiest format and where we can

communicate with our players in real time if the issue is taking post pictures they can ask questions we can answer and follow-up questions we can answer we also had an internal internal testing tool during our private testing and this was a bottom called feedback bot so the feedback bot is very useful but apparently I'm talking about it in the next slide so in terms of usefulness of each of these different social media and community channels I would say that for issues we generally try to funnel people to steams discussion boards where we had kind of like a troubleshooting guide and then if all else failed you would ask them to email us at support and make it calm if you want to talk about the game or work on localization we'd be exchanging files all the time that was usually done at discord and then places where like chaos and like crazy things happen was like community driven sites like Reddit so we didn't control anything in reddit things just happen on the internet and that's like where it happens apparently so I think if anything goes wrong we always tried

to acknowledge problems or issues that are happening in public if there's a bug we just fix it and then we just push out a patch that's something that only small teams can do I know that if you're on a much larger team it can't just be like here's the bug and I'd be like I'll fix it and push it now let's fix in 20 minutes but that was something that we were allowed to do that was very fortunate for our small team so talked about the box earlier so we had a bot whom you're doing internal testing and this was called feedback box and feedback bot is very great one of our play testers during internal play testing actually made it for us and what this does is it allows you to talk to a bot by saying things like bug cooling and then you write something like bug this enemy is too strong and then our feedback bot which is renamed to spire bought for discord would say thanks for your feedback I was gonna point out the slides and read off them but it turns

out it's very far so today we have 18,000 points of feedback from people these can be things like suggestions ideas and things of that nature I think that bugs are really important to make your product better you should always be thankful of problems and even if they're even if people file duplicates of issues it's like oh he's a guy's file duplicates it shouldn't be like that it's like wow this is a serious problem like 25 people are noticing this bug so duplicates actually like to know the severity of issues and so it's also good if possible with shots for more information that's why we prefer discord whenever anybody talked about an issue we would just follow up with them we'd be like how did this happen what is your computer like are you using an interesting game controller so I think we should always be thinking community for doing a job that requires a whole QA team and that would cost a lot of money someone who's working QA I would say I'm glad that people QA your

game for free that only happens in video games I think all right so to make our game more marketable we also had a lot of design considerations some of these things are about making a game with complex mechanics easy to understand and this is a really large undertaking and it could probably be a talk on its own we're gonna go over the just a few of them card games to the rich history of complex mechanics there's a bunch of different layers as much of different interactions fortunately for us we could leverage existing annex and terminology in these games for our game because slightest fire was always intended to be just the digital card game we were allowed to keep the visual clutter to a minimum some examples of digital card games are that the rules aren't forced programmatically so if you wanted to take a card and do something strange with it like if you want to take a card from your draw pile

and discard immediately you couldn't just do that because the game would say no because the code doesn't allow it right complex mechanics such as statuses things like keywords for each card these definitions would appear when you hover over a card so card can be like apply to vulnerable you feel like what's apply to vulnerable mean and you hover over it and say owner boy just enemies take 50% more damage you're like oh thanks keyword tip person so you can also show tutorials or blurbs if the player does something wrong in the gift here you can see that our player is trying to play these cards come on Luke please so it's like oh look we're playing a strike and we're trying to play this bash well we can't we're out of energy I'm gonna try again oh I know you can't you really can't so we show like some more like we show tips that have more words and try to make sure the player understand what's going on um if they continue to not understand something so that's something we've

gotten from just like play testing more in person because sometimes you would see like palpable that says I cannot play this sometimes do it ignore it so we added those kind of things things like what other things that are useful for digital card games you can view your deck instantly you just push a button and you'll see a grid of cards you see your whole deck you're not like fan through them individually the game shuffles cards for you things of that nature and a video game is also a bunch of other stuff you give you there's so much things you can do so much UX design I feel the closely at the image you can see things like um the cards that are playable have a blue outline the card is where you don't have enough energy the text is red and there's also audio and visual cues we make this sound when you can't play a card when you play a car to be a trail and the car will fly into like a discard pile when the card you know when cars need to shuffle you'll be like an animation all the cards going from discard pile into draw

pile so those kind of things here less words good it's what we mean by this is to make her so our game was focused a lot on its content and playing the game and wasn't very lor heavy however there is there is some more and you can get through this lore but we also didn't want to make it mandatory things like events in our game you don't need to read all the words you can just look at the options and the options tell you exactly what's going to happen and this was very important for the stream ability of the game because then players could look at the options that are available and then follow those options alright so for localization a localization if you don't know is translating your game to multiple languages so people in the countries can play the game this is our sales data from two weeks after the EA release to six weeks after release things are really important here is that China made

up 42% of all the sales during this time and if you combine all the english-speaking countries on this pie chart its 41% and this was before any localization was available in the game so there were a lot of confused players and so we started with localization efforts and the game is now translated to actually added one or two more recently so it should be around 16 to 18 languages so we moved for one year we can see what happens you definitely want to plan ahead for localization cue our programmer you understand what it means to hard-code strings don't hard-code strings we didn't although we didn't so and make your game localizable you should always try to make your game available to as much people as possible for sure there's also other considerations to makes like a lot of engines would render certain languages differently certain text differently certain fonts differently if you include

all the fonts your game can get pretty big pretty fast some thoughts have very strange text formatting rules such as lack of spaces and since our game also incorporated symbols and keywords that has special logic appendix them it was it was very very difficult to translate our game and I we're still working on a few languages as well so we worked with community translators we actually initially started with a professional localization company and because we released the patch every week with new content they would always be outdated it would always be behind by two or three weeks and on top of that a lot of the community translations were bit better because they played the game and so a game with a lot of technical like keywords in terms just made more sense for somebody who played the game and I think that it's very important for card games that anyone who translates it knows what's going on alright so lesson

here is um don't ignore China and trying to sell your game to a bunch of languages I was gonna point out to some stuff and be like wow look all these other languages that so there's a bunch of extra countries here that we're not available in the previous slide you can see in this slide that I can't see it anymore because my eyes are not that good but what happens is after you translate the game countries like Korea Japan Russia I'll start buying your game as well and they make up quite a sizable amount of players hardware compatibility no one wants a stuttery game so optimize your game so I think there's been a lot of different studies I wish I could just link all the studies learned I do that but like your studies like if a website loads slightly slower people are less inclined to go to that website what else there's a lot of compatibility requirements that need to be done so we

looked at the steam hardware survey let's leave you this way we're selling on Steam so we're gonna look at the Steam hardwood survey we found that a lot of enlightening facts which is very publicly available the biggest one for us was definitely that so many users are playing on very low resolution and this is something we looked up very early on and it's very important because um this determines the minimum text size that you can have in a game I feel like that there are a lot of games out there right now we're developers assume that everybody's playing on 1080p and the text is very small and they just become little blurry smidgens on the screen if you get too small there are also other considerations like RAM which is a big deal so you know those are all effects here that I've got that I thought were important oh we also found out lakh people like playing games controllers so we do controller support all right so that's kind of all the things we did in terms of marketability I would say I

guess these days we're trying to make the game more available like I think we saw on the other slides that we made the game available in more languages we made it available on Mac OS Linux we did windows 32-bit that was maybe a mistake and that's because not not because windows 32-bit is bad it's just um I think anyone who still has windows 32-bit installed might have a computer that cannot run anything and so so these days were working on boarding and we're actually planning on porting the game to a bunch of different platforms from the beginning and intense which was announced or you're working on the game so we actually have to we actually need to I think work with a we are working with a protein company and it's gonna be probably on a different engine now things like mobile so not sure if you know the slightest fire can be totally played with just a mouse and keyboard just Mouse not keyboard Casey that's the

whole point and so II so something I noticed when making this presentation was that Anthony I attempted game development ten years ago and it feels spectacularly and then six or seven years later we quit our pretty good jobs and attempted indie game development again when we started the indie game development again we worked for two years without pay and it wasn't really any notion that we would be successful I think that it just means that if you really really want to make video games you're just gonna do it so I hope that anything that we write about anything that I say today can help you out and yeah thanks for playing a game and thank you for cleaning my talk [Applause]

yeah questions and answers that would sink you in it yeah Q&A hey uh when you were doing your weekly patches were you doing it on the beta branch and if so how often did you push the live vote good question so we always pushed an update on the main branch weekly and the beta branch do we actually push five times a week so which is it sounds like a lot but the beta branch the expectations are lower if it breaks it's kind of funny a lot of funny things happen in the beta branch we made a new character it was not ready yet we drew a bunch of art for it and the bad art people like the bad art the batter is actually in the game now that you can toggle on if you beat the game at the hardest difficulty but yeah we touched very very frequently to beta branch almost every day oh yeah yeah one of the key elements to the game I thought was the feedback loop that you had with the community could you elaborate on how you triage what part of

feedback or what players feedback you valued the most or anything around that process yes so whenever somebody typed something in discord like bug this is the problem an ant has an image every single thing that they type in any of the channels on the slightest bar discord would be funneled into a private channel called bugs and feedback this is a secret don't tell anybody but we also had some language parsing that determine if feedback was going to be useful or not or they were just trolling so there's actually a section called low priority feedback and we look at that as a joke but the normal feedback is actually not like 18,000 it's usually about about five or five to ten issues a day I guess in terms of triaging and prioritization that's a pretty heavy subject on its own but I would say you know you just have to go with what you feel is a easy to fix right low hanging fruit things that are easy to fix we

just fix immediately because it's like why not write like this they're just too high on this resolution it's like okay we'll fix it things that are hard to fix our did you know you have two partners how long it takes versus how much how much you'll be worth it I would say so bit of a hard question answer apologize thank you right so how well would their marketing strategy work for a game with a more finite time span like a narrative game or a puzzle game what do you think you would change hmm that's true I do I do definitely think that slightest fire because of its like roguelike nature kind of has like huge implications with updates right like things are always changing when you replay it I really I'm really afraid to give like bad advice on things I don't understand um it might be it might be best to ask somebody who's worked on early access game that does have a finite ending I think maybe the folks who worked on subnautica would be maybe a good place to start cool Thanks

how did you decide on the graphical aesthetics of the game were you considering the marketability at that point or that's a good question so so I did the art for the game and did the bad arts for the game and the okay art for the game and there are some illustrations I guess in terms of art what's most important for me is just that it's readable like contrast and those kind of principles are really important we kept the assets simple on purpose because we didn't have a huge budget and so so I guess to give an idea of the scope we have about 300 cards we have like 50 plus enemies 100-ish relics 50 events and like just a lot of content right and to just crank out that much content you have to have art that's like very simple not everything can be animated and fantastic and have beautiful effects so I guess that's kind of where it started when it comes to

like theme or atmosphere mood I would say that's a much longer talk but I hope that answers your question Thanks oh yeah it was kind of my questions like what really spawned the design the initial narrative yeah the initial design and then the narratives that grew around I see I would definitely say that the narrative came from just like it grew around the mechanics of the game where is definitely a mechanic's first game I think anyone who plays would kind of get that so that it's a bit hacked in but that's okay it's pretty fun because like we want you to start over and over so there needs to be a lore around that we wanted you to go up instead of down just to differentiate ourselves differentiate ourselves from like dungeon crawlers we wanted a dungeon climber the tower climber the initial design itself Anthony created the initial card game idea it was called card crawl I think that was the original name of the game

there no I mean he played a lot of board games he used to you know manage the pawn shop and he runs the net runner community site who knows what his ideas comes from thanks yeah I was just actually curious about how you went about organizing the community translations and how that transition was away from the more traditional sort of translation companies and into the community run thing and and how that works I see so we kind of have a hacked way of doing for many translations it's actually a bit technical I actually don't recommend that probably we do it is definitely good that there's community translations for all sorts of reasons like getting you know translations on time for release however there are definitely tools now that weren't available before like websites where you can see all the strings and they're beautifully organized and you write some stuff and he'll probably export to a beautiful format we didn't

do that we didn't have time because I've had weekly updates to set up like an awesome community translation server so we sent out raw JSON files and those were returned we wrote some scripts to validate them we wrote some scripts that whenever we created new strings you'd be automatically populated into the other languages and if the language either lost a translator or was no longer translated or behind they would just have English text for you know that content until is fixed I guess cool and you'd have like what or so people like who would volunteer and be your primary point of contact I was just I was curious about the human oh it was me oh cool I guess um there's a localization channel called localization files where I would be like these are new files for this update and I would type it and I would paste the file and then there was a different channel called localization discussions and then there was a channel for every single language and I just asked them to ping me when I was ready and so I guess anytime any translation wanted to be

updated I was pinged I downloaded the files and then I upped it and then I just updated them it was very manual there's a lot of work I highly recommend that tool that I don't know exists it probably exists where GDC will find them thank you hi I was just curious if through the iteration of early access you ever saw any tips in your reviews like for example when you introduce a new language and it wasn't quite ready anything like that Betty I know you had strong reviews throughout most of it but if there's a good question we definitely our reviews did go up and down not too much I think what's really important was that we were able to maintain expectations the whole time we were always explicit about what was broken and we actually kept a lot of content hidden from the main branch until it's 100% ready and that was kind of I think our understanding between the players and ourselves so it's always it's always about expectations like you have to communicate like reviews are

always about communication and and I guess if you don't fix something for a long time if you even if you communicate about it you know it's not gonna help so you do need to deliver on what you communicate yeah so you said you had about two years of dev time with basically no income and you were also at that time like contracting some stuff like sound design art design so I guess my question is like what were those additional costs and how are you budgeting and paying for them I see um I guess I'm very frugal and I don't spend much money and I was just saving up money while I wasn't working at Amazon and it was just out of pocket between Anthony and I what the budget is I think we did different types of models in terms of like how much we were going to pay contractors on a per contractor basis okay and how did you'd like to determine that number um numbers no I think for each one we did we did a bunch

of research look general we also um actually we use like game dev classifieds on like Reddit and Gamasutra and then we just got more people and they all have different quotes but I think it's up to interviewing is a very interesting process and it's very important I don't think you should ever go for the first person that you get we went over several different people for each contractor at least 10 illustrators before he settled on the one we did okay thanks hi uh how important was do you think mod support was for your marketing and design it's a lot support we were initially going to make ap is to allow people to mod the game easily and then we found out that our game was written in Java and turns out Java you can just inject code and mod the game however you want and so Martin kind of came in a very happy way where a lot of people wanted to hack the game to add content

because maybe we weren't working hard enough I'm not sure but um it happened that way and then the stuff that came out of it was incredible and so we were like this is modding now and a channel for almost a year and a half well I guess how long was development a year in a few months called unsupported modding it was called unsupported modding it was just an artificial discord channel and they'd be pasting cool stuff and it wasn't officially like the way we were going to do mod support but then we found out a way to get this code injection system as like a Steam Workshop method of getting mods into our game and so that officially became the official modding so modding is really intense for site aspire but if you like programming also all of our code is available it's not open source but it's again it's in Java you can just look at it it's kind of weird it just happened so that's the story of our modding I guess it's very important I think the mods are

incredible and it's been really good awesome thanks hey since slay the spire is kind of a weird genre mashup non-standard game what do you feel like was the best method to get people to understand what your game was ok that's a tough one people still don't get the game when I try to explain it so I guess the only thing you can do is is play it I was dreaming do you think people watching the game I think it's definitely people watching streams I think that's definitely a new way that people try to understand video games I generally don't try to start playing games that are very complicated immediately more yeah we never really improved how to like sell the game I would say it's still like really really word-of-mouth but it's but it's been doing well that way so I think we're gonna keep going that way alright thanks one more in your sales data after early access I saw that like 60 percent was in China mm-hmm is it still around that proportion is you

still have like sixty percent of your sales in China um let me go back to sign I think it's about 20 something percent 30 some it is still that yes that's very very recent oh okay do not ignore China there's a lot of people out there okay thank you okay thanks for coming here [Applause]