Friday Rambles 2023-06-30 (Patreon)

It's the Friday Rambles. On a Friday, for once.

Wow! It's the last day of June! Can you believe it? 2023 is now officially halfway done. At least I actually have something I did this year, though, and by golly I'll talk about it.

Steam Summer Sale

The Steam Summer Sale has begun! You can get Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines on sale, for slightly cheaper than usual!

Above: I'm still busy with family stuff so I drew this in 30 second increments, it took all day when normally it would take less than an hour... my productivity...

I've confirmed with this sale (all 1.5 days of it so far) that the spending habits of Steam gamers are like this: 

• First week of game launch: All the super fans and people who really care about the game buy it
• Time between major seasonal sales: Only super fans buy it
• Seasonal sale: All the people who kind of care about the game buy it (if care > price - discount)

Which is pretty obvious and I probably should have been more aware of it before I got all sad about game sales cratering after like the first week, but it's nice to see that my dreams are not quite dead yet. And there's still the Visual Novel Fest and the Autumn/Winter Sales to go this year!

Indie Games

Now that I'm more plugged in to the indie game scene (thanks to some new accounts I've been following (eg: @nicolith, who helped with JP localization QA for EM:DnD, and is very actively posting about indie games I've never heard of)), I'm gonna get a bunch of the games on sale and hopefully expand my horizons and get inspired and maybe learn something. 

I've realized that that I really didn't know anything about the indie games scene, and made EM:DnD as a complete outsider whose only gameplay inspirations were basically Phoenix Wright, Va11-HallA, and my real life, but maybe being an outsider has its merits too, as far as bringing in fresh perspective and way of doing things. Whatever. Who cares. Anyway, I'll post about any cool new games I play, if I ever get the time to play any.

Talking about JP localization again...

https://twitter.com/horrorgamejp/status/1673624351470649345 

Above: GOTY...

The Japanese localization has launched, and Japanese speaking players are starting to play the game! I should shout out mimirin, the translator who worked at super speed, and sasazaki and nicolith, who did editing and localization QA, and horrorgamejp, who provided playtest feedback and found a few bugs to squish, and honored me with the above words about the Game being OTY. I was expecting the localization work to take much longer than it did, and we were able to finish like 3 days before the Steam Summer Sale, which in hindsight (well, 3 days worth anyway) was pretty key for marketing the game. And also, a huge thanks to them for putting up with all my stubbornness and micromanagement. lol.

So when the game first released, I knew I wanted to localize it into Japanese, but had no idea how I would find a good team to do it properly. But the entire crew were very familiar with the game (they had even 100%ed it), and offered their services first to help with the localization. I think it was super important that they knew the characters and context and the entire game for a proper translation.

And I worked really closely with them (probably to an incredibly annoying degree... sorry...) to make sure that the intent of every line of dialogue was properly conveyed in translation. As an aside, this is another reason why I don't want to think about localizing to other languages right now lol

In the end though, it all worked out great (at least judging from the feedback from the JP player base so far...), and I'm happy with the result. And now we have a team for the next game too!

JP gaming press coverage

Somehow, a bunch of huge Japanese gaming portals have found out about EM:DnD, and wrote a bunch of articles!

https://twitter.com/4GamerNews/status/1673505536543969280 

4gamer! 

https://twitter.com/famitsu/status/1673965756302888960 

Famitsu? Even I've heard of them!

https://twitter.com/gamespark/status/1674591357585993728 

Game*Spark did a whole review (okay, technically a "play report") on it! They liked the game a lot!

https://twitter.com/denfaminicogame/status/1674562555455623169 

Whoa, what a cool list of recommended games from Den Fami Nico Gamer... wait a minute... in the second column... is that?

Heh. Cool.

So, with that, I can't help but compare how the Japanese gaming press works with how it is here (at least anecdotally, for my game in particular). Basically, as an indie dev, you're not gonna get any coverage at all from a major gaming news outlet unless you send them a bunch of press releases with a bunch of free copies of your game, begging them to write something (or copy paste your press release) about it. As a matter of principle (okay, and laziness) I gave away zero free copies to anyone (not even to my friends lol), including any reviewer, curator, streamer, or gaming press, and so the only press coverage my game got is from independent reviewers who actually bothered to buy my game, which was like, 3 people reviewing my game on their own blogs, which is honestly really cool.

So it was a huge surprise to see a bunch of major websites in Japan write about the game, and even play it and recommend it, when I had no interaction with them at all. I don't even know how they found out about the game in the first place.

A bit of a culture shock, too, I guess. Whether that translates to a big increase in sales, well, that remains to be seen, but so far the trend looks good, and for "brand" "awareness" it can't be beat. I'm in it for the long haul, after all, until Goodsmile notices me and makes a Skye Nendoroid.

Other game stuff

I've had almost zero time to play games lately, but I downloaded the Pikmin 4 demo to get the special "Oatchi-Rider" outfit in Pikmin Bloom. I still have to complete the demo to actually get it, which has been a challenge, considering I can only play the game like 5 minutes at a time. I'm actually really enjoying it though, and the addition of Oatchi the Wonder Dog (whom I'm using as a tank) has really done wonders for my fear of losing my precious and adorable Pikmin to random monsters, which kind of hampered my enjoyment of Pikmin 3, the only other main Pikmin game I've played.

I still haven't played the new Zelda. At this point maybe I never will. I did watch a video of someone using an invention in the game to play the Corridors of Time theme from Chrono Trigger, though, which was cool.

Here, look at vanripper's fanart again.

Okay, okay. I've rambled on about games long enough. But this is all very new and interesting to me. 

Remember when this was an "Art" Patreon?

Anyway, thanks for your support, as always! See you next week!