It has been over a week since the developers released Intruder in Antiquonia. they think it’s time to do a retrospect to understand how did it go, and what can be done better next time. They so amazed for the helped to reach 10 reviews in less than 24 hours.
Review of the developer about the Process of development
As of writing this, there are 33 reviews on Steam with 96% positive ratings. Most players are having fun with the game, and that’s the main purpose of a game after all! According to the reviews and the Community Hub, people didn’t find any bugs, so the testing strategy of the developer worked! They released the game with almost 4000 wish lists. That’s a great success considering that it was the first time they released a game on Steam and that point-and-click adventure games aren’t the most popular genre right now. They sold 128 copies on the first day, which is really amazing, although that number dropped quickly in the following days.
The developer that also luck
The developers said: “You can’t control which games decide at the last minute to come out the same week or even the same day.” They said further that, there weren’t many point-and-click adventure games released around her release date, and the only one that decided to come out on the same day had a completely different theme and narrative genre.
The developers managed to get on the front page of Steam 4 days in a row, although unfortunately only for users in Spain, and not even all of them reported seeing it. That happens also, because they told Ángel Martín, a Spanish reporter about the game, who shares his morning news on Twitter.
What needs to improve
The Steam page of the developers had 90,000 visits in the first week after release. However, between sales and wishlists (yes, they got a lot of new wishlists), they only collected 1900 conversions. That’s a conversion ratio of only 2%. Looking at the stats, they see that the average session duration during the release week was 9 seconds. In contrast, the average session duration during the Big Adventure Event (a Steam event we participated in, aimed at adventure gamers) was 30 seconds. This leads them to believe that Steam was showing the game to the wrong people during release week, most of whom have no interest in this type of game. If this is the case, it could mean that her Steam tags aren’t properly optimized. They have to experiment with this. Despite the great response from us, the feedback from the critics was mixed, and there were some recurring themes that the developers need to do better next time:
Puzzles are too easy
After unpacking this problem from various reviews and filtering the puzzles through some principles of puzzle design, the developers realized that the main problem is that the puzzles are mostly too direct. The game doesn’t require much lateral thinking.
Generic characters
Developers detected two areas for improvement here. First, the graphic design of the characters doesn’t convey a ton of personality. But secondly, and they think most importantly, they have very little dialogue, focused mainly on providing the clues to make progress. The player can’t keep talking to them to explore their personality.
Lack of voice over
In Point 1 developers tried to make the game as accessible as possible and overshot the mark. Next time, they need to course correct a bit to make them more interesting without raising the difficulty too much or slipping into the “moon logic” department. Particularly, they need to make the game require more lateral thinking through unusual (but sensible) object combinations.
Points 2 and 3 are a result of budget constraints. Adding more dialogue comes at a cost, both in terms of writing (the developers hired professional writers) and localization (they hired professional translators and proofreaders). Next time they’ll have to adjust the budget to make sure they can afford enough dialogue to bring all the NPCs to life. They think it’s worth noting that some of these points were also raised by the players themselves. While players left a positive review because they enjoyed the game, they also pointed out these areas for improvement.
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