TBF #12 – The Numbers

Thank You So Much!

For those who played the prototype build: thank you so much for all the kind words, the feedback, and the criticism, but above all, thank you for playing the game. It's been a blast for Janie and me to watch you play and enjoy it. If you want to send us more ideas, please reach out! Use Discord, send us an email ([email protected]), or reach out on any of our social media channels. We'd love to know more about your experience!

If you haven't played yet, don't worry: the game is still available on itch.io. Just click the link below and play directly from your browser. No need to download anything, unless you want to keep your progress.

The Numbers

We expected around 20 to 50 people to play… We got over 200 players who joined us on itch.io to celebrate and check out the release of the prototype. We were added to three public collections. We’ve been viewed by over 350 people. We got featured on Itch's new & popular page on Day 1. This was absolutely fantastic.

Day 2 was absolutely craaaaazy!

On top of that… you (if you played, of course) had fun. The game came as a surprise to most, who weren't expecting it to be more than a simple pair-matching game. Don't get me wrong here: we've got work to do on many, many, many things! Still, the biggest piece of feedback we've had is that the core gameplay loop works. We've reached our goal!

The Feedback

We heard you! We've had plenty of requests, changes, and ideas coming from all over the place. Let's address the biggest feedback directly.

• The ability to play without waiting for the card animations to finish: this is already in progress. We're working on it as you read these lines, and it'll be the subject of the next blog post.
• Replayability: many of you felt that the replayability was null and void after finishing one ascension. We feel you. When we planned the prototype release, we were ultra-focused on just validating the core gameplay loop. Now? We want to push for that. This is crucial for the next steps!
• Balancing: some of you just abused the bad randomness in the game to finish with four Kings, three pairs of Eyes, and two Oracles. We're fixing those to prevent that kind of roll from happening. If you managed to pull that off deliberately: good. If the game's too easy because it offers you such good choices every time: that's bad. We'll keep harnessing (even more) the randomness.

Those are the big elements. There are so many changes on top of these 3 (and feedback you've sent us) that are coming as well; the next demo will be insane!!

The Next Demo?!

You read that right! We plan to release a second (and final) demo on Itch.io to validate whether the game is ready to ship on Steam later on. This time, it'll be much closer to the experience you'll have in the commercial release: the correct structure, replayability, a background (!), even better card art, and many, many more improvements.

So far, we're planning to ship at the beginning of autumn, but as always, things move and change during development, so you never know. Still, a second demo is coming on Itch. We'll keep the current Itch.io page up, which will give you a good comparison of the progress made over the summer.

Once again, thank you so much for playing our prototype, and see you… next week!