Diary #41 – Release Approaching!

Iron Village releases on Steam in 4 days – March 24th at 9:00 EDT (GMT-4)! I’ll have some release notes for the final build later, but for now I wanted to take an opportunity to talk about what’s going on now. I want to capture a snapshot before the actual release, and take a bit of a look back at how things got here. It’ll be interesting to compare to how everything goes after the release, and how that potentially changes my views of things, but this will more accurately capture my thoughts before further hindsight comes in to mess things up.

To start, why have March 24th as a release date? Well, back in September I signed up for Steam’s City Builder & Colony Sim Fest – basically a special sale page on Steam that shows games that fit the genre, including demos. The festival starts on… March 24th. Given that games on sale get the most prominent position on the page, the best way to take advantage of the opportunity would (IMO) be to launch with a release sale: a built-in Steam feature that allows you to set a sale of 10 or 15% off for 7 to 14 days upon initial release.

Setting a hard deadline is fairly scary, but also it was far enough away that I figured it wouldn’t be an issue at all – but of course, I originally thought this was only going to take a couple of months. So eventually, the desire to make things as well as I could meant that I only actually finished the end game content a couple of weeks ago. This is very much not ideal, since it interferes with the time needed to thoroughly test and balance the game, as well as getting a complete product to YouTubers and Twitch streamers. The net result is that while I think Iron Village is still a good (and most importantly, fun) game, the balance may be a little off, and marketing efforts definitely suffered. The hard deadline also meant annoying the translators a little – instead of being able to request translations in bulk, I ended up making some last minute requests along the lines of “these are the last two strings, I swear”, only to be wrong a couple days later.

There is a little bit of polish (for instance, villager working animations) that is not getting done due to the hard time limit, and some last minute changes aren’t getting tutorial text on launch due to the need to get them translated. I’m listing all these negative aspects of setting a hard date, so what are the positives? Well, part of the hard deadline is a motivational factor to actually get this game finished. I don’t really get the option of indefinitely postponing the release, since I would lose out on the visibility the festival offers. While I can’t tell the future, I can make some rough guesses based on Next Fest last month. Getting that spotlight in the Steam store was enough to take Iron Village from 1025 active¹ wishlists on February 23rd to 1897 on March 3rd. (As of March 19th, we’re at 2289 active wishlists.)

1. As in, wishlists that haven’t since been deleted or converted into sales. For transparency, there have been 204 wishlist removals as of March 19th, and 1 conversion: Thiago Mania, who has been translating Iron Village into Brazilian Portuguese. ↩︎

Will the visibility of the City Builder festival be worth all of those negatives? I think so, but only time will tell. I can say that I’m not planning on doing that again, the stress of having a side project with a hard deadline and a full time job, plus actually making time for my family, is too much to do all over again. If I can turn game development into a full time job, then sure, there might be a situation when setting such a deadline so far out makes sense. But otherwise, this is a one time thing.

To wrap up this dev diary, I’ll talk a bit about what I’m planning on doing post-launch. Some of this definitely depends on how the launch actually goes: if reviews turn out to be quite negative, or there’s lots of issues that I’ve managed to miss, then it’s all subject to change. However, the rough plan of releases is as follows:

1. Initial Bugfixes. Depending on how many of those are needed, and how urgent they may be, this could be anything from a same day/next day emergency patch to an update a week or two later with quality-of-life tweaks.
2. Android Release. In order to focus on the Steam launch, I pushed the Android release out to an ETA of April. Most of the work there comes down to two things: UI improvements (it’s a small touch screen, so while everything works, it can be better.) and Google Play Games integration (mainly for the achievements).
3. The First Big Update (1.1). I’ll talk more about this later, but the plan is to get:
   • Some more quality-of-life changes that didn’t end up in the first patch(es).
   • Improvements that require translated text, such as improved tutorials.
   • New Buildings: A few more variations of existing buildings, as well as a couple of projects that have been conceptualized but did not end up in the main release.
   • A “Soft Ending”: Right now, there is no well defined end to the game – you build everything, get a decently efficient economy running, and then just run out of things to do. It would be nice to tie things into the backstory and add some sort of final project/event, even though you will still be able to play beyond this ending.
4. Two themed updates (1.2 and 1.3). I have some ideas for larger thematic updates, kind of like free DLC.

I’m not planning on working on Iron Village forever (I’ve got too many other game ideas bouncing around in my head for that), but I figure there’s still plenty of room for it to grow.

If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’ve already added Iron Village to your wishlist – but if not, go ahead and do it so you can be reminded to buy it when it releases. Alternatively, you can just set an alarm for 9 in the morning EDT (13:00 UTC) on March 24th, but then I don’t get to see the wishlist line go up on the Steam charts 😥.