We’re Coming to Steam!

So we’ve finally got a release date! Rogue Islands will be coming to Steam in early February 2017. Less than 4 months from today.

Our initial release will be an Early Access preview with a complete and (relatively) polished single-player campaign. Subsequent updates will add co-operative multiplayer, additional content and polish as we head towards a final release in Summer 2017.

We breezed through Steam Greenlight in just 8 days. During that time, our pitch was viewed by over 11k gamers on Steam. We garnered a lot of feedback, suggestions and commentary.

Sanity Still Intact! (mostly)

It was pretty stressful to be honest. The barrage of comments, emails and attention was a stark contrast to my normally quiet days spent actually developing the game. But it was also exciting and energizing.

Game development can feel detached at times.

Long stretches spent staring at code and wrangling bugs can easily kill the sense of connection with your audience. But Greenlight has really helped with that. And most importantly, it helps us validate our pet theories about what a game like Rogue Islands should be.

Focus Focus Focus…

For example, we found that people really want the spells to be more than just “simple projectiles” to spam enemies with (ie. dressed up guns).



Rogue Islands is an opportunity to do ‘shooting’ differently.



We’ve always known that our spell attacks are key to the whole experience, but it’s nice to see that the community ‘gets’ Rogue Islands. By and large people know what we’re doing and they’re reiterating a common theme: the enemies and spells have to be awesome.

In light of that, we’ve refocused on the core gameplay elements; movement, spells and enemies. These are the core ingredients of our gameplay loop.



We’ve dropped a lot of filler. We cut all spells that were functionally equivalent or only differed in superficial ways (ie. by rate of fire, or damage, or visuals).



Our enemies are faster and more aggressive. The movement has been smoothed and we’ve added more inertia so the levitation feels like it has weight.

These are just a few of the ways that Greenlight has helped us find our focus. We really mean it when we ask for feedback and suggestions. We use this as a sanity check and to set our development priorities. Game development is as much about what you cut as it is about what you add; a focused product with 5 stellar features is infinitely better than a hodgepodge of mediocrity.

Let’s Finish this Damn Thing

From pre-production, to development, to Greenlight, this whole experience has been a marathon. And our reward for getting this far? 4 months of crunch followed by a post-release battle to add co-op.



As much as this kinda, sorta terrifies me, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Many thanks,

Kiaran