Remy's December Newsletter - 🗿📈🎥🚀⚖ (Patreon)

Hi everyone! Happy new year!

As anticipated in the last newsletter, most of what I did in December was related to releasing Explorers! And then I took some time to rest and celebrate the holidays with my close ones.

Explorers was released on December 11th. It has a release trailer which was made extremely hastily on that same day. (managing time when under pressure is hard)

Prior to release, most of my time was spent on either:

• Making last fixes and tweaks to the game
• Making promotional assets for the game
• Making the desktop pet and the wallpaper for the Deluxe pack

That last week before the 11th (a Friday) was particularly intense, but not overly so! I'm happy to say that during that week I still took time for myself to take a much needed hot bath, read books, and spend quality time with my cats. The week was still intense and heavy on my mental, but these things really helped!

The last minute fixes and tweaks are not super interesting. I tried to make the waves sound a little better, I fixed a bug that had the moai spawn only on the upper two-thirds of the map, I added the scrolling credits at the bottom of the title-screen, and I saved more Pico-8 tokens to make all that possible. The truth is that I had already spent a lot of time fixing things ever since the jam version from September. So, thankfully, there really wasn't too much work remaining on that front.

The promotional assets are a more interesting subject! When talking with Lisa (@silversober) about marketing Explorers, she told me to make gifs. Funny gifs, interesting gifs, to have fun with the game. She gave me the idea of a "pause the gif to get your explorer" gif, which I did! And that inspired me to make an Explorer interview, which admittedly didn't get a lot of views, but I'm pretty happy with it anyway!

There's also all the assets for the itch page, and the assets for when it's linked, and when it's featured, and the webpage icon,  and the thumbnails for videos, and

Those are all either rendered from the game, or edits of the wallpaper included in the Deluxe edition. The webpage icon is the icon I made for the game's executables. Here is one such edit of the wallpaper:

There you can see most elements that can be seen in the full wallpaper. I made a big background with dithered gradients that make up a sunset, then filled the thing with sprites from the game, with just tiny edits and some palette swapping. The result is not quite perfect, but I'm honestly pretty happy with it. It is the first time I make such a big pixel-art piece, and I feel like I learned quite a few things while making it. And also, with that sunset, it makes for superbly eyecatching covers and thumbnails, which is perfect!

This is the desktop pet also included in the Deluxe edition. There's also tiny birds occasionally flying across the screen, which isn't shown in this gif, but is really quite nice.

This is my third desktop pet, after DISCTOP and the additional newsletter desktop pet for that month. So this went quite well! All the elements react to the cursor in some way. There is one raft that is always following the cursor, but will stay at a distance to not hinder you, and it will stop to chat with other rafts if they come close enough. Moai pop up randomly and can be moved with the mouse. Birds will come in flocks and individually move away from the cursor. And the whole thing can be customized in a config file, to make it less (or more) of a hindrance, if wanted. Making this was fairly straightforward and I'm happy with the result!

And finally, the trailer, as well as the explorer interview, are modified copies of the game! Because I couldn't find an easy-to-use video editing software in time, the trailer is a litteral one-shot of me running "explorers_trailer.p8" and hoping that all the procgen would give me nice things. After a few tries, I had a satisfying recording, and that was the trailer! A few days later, I bought a video editing bundle from Humble Bundle, and included were two pro softwares. I downloaded one and used it to get some fades (especially audio fades) in the interview video!

While this one-shot trailer I made (and also the previous, similarly-made, announcement trailer) is very rough, and basically just 45 seconds of me playing the game, I do feel like this was a very important first step for me in creating trailers! This was my very first game trailer, and honestly the next ones can only get better!

And on that subject, this project, overall, for me, was a way to experiment with two things: Selling a game, which I hadn't done in 4 years, and then releasing a game for free along with a premium version which includes bonuses. And I have learned a lot!! From that perspective, it is a success!

Let's look at sales now:

• The game can be played for free, but the Deluxe edition costs 5$, those are the sales I'm looking at here.
• I've had 29 sales on the project, with multiple tips, amounting to 181$.
• I've had 6 additional sales on the Holiday bundle which groups Explorers with Pixel Session Vol.1 and the Embrace executables for 6$, amounting to 30$.
• That makes up a total of 211$ gross revenue since the game came out, 24 days ago.

And a look at views on the project's page:

• The project's page on itch.io has amassed 5000 views over the last 31 days. (since I set the page live)
• Half of these (2500!!) are thanks to the project being featured on the front page, with the trailer, the game's description and a few screenshots. An additional 700 came from other places on itch io, through the tags I set on the project, or by recommendation from other projects, or from their user feed for those that follow me.
• 600 are from Twitter, which is by far the place where I did the most to promote the project.
• 100 are from Lexaloffle, the Pico-8 website.
• 70 are from this one rockpapershotgun post where Explorers was featured along with other projects on a #screenshotsaturday round-up.

211$ gross revenue is not great news for 3~4 full weeks worth of time on this project. But it is something already, and I will be setting the game on sale every now and then, meaning it will keep on earning me some money over time, which is good. And, again, this project was an experiment, and the game itself is playable for free.

All in all, I am happy with this project. Aside from all those numbers, I am happy with the game itself, it is in fact true to what my vision has been for it, and that feels great. It was a fun project and I've learned a lot that will be useful going forward!

So let's talk going forward! With 2021 plans!!

Let's make this quick and efficient with a list! In 2021 I want to:

• Bring Sugar to a state where I can let other people work with it.
• Make at least one premium project with Sugar.
• Collaborate with other people on at least one project, using Sugar.
• Streaming in french! I'm going to be playing games I like and talk about them, in french!

These are my goals! Streaming in french starts on this Wednesday, and will be every Wednesday at 2pm GMT+1. If I get super comfortable with it, I may try streaming in english too at some point, but no promise. Still, this will be a good occasion for me to try something new and also indulge in playing games I've already played before.

There will be more news about Sugar next month I promise!

In December I haven't played too many games. In fact, there's just this one I want to talk about: Haven!

Haven is a sci-fi narrative/RPG game that is designed to be played by either one or two persons at the same time, where you play two persons who got away from their distopian home, and are in a romantic relationship which, in my opinion, is very well depicted. And it's no wonder! Because the main writer for this game is good friend Pierre Corbinais who has been a game journalist for quite a while, has worked on many small projects, often about relationships, he worked on Bury me my Love and made NSFWare. (<- NOT SAFE FOR WORK)

So I have lots of respect for Pierre and he wrote for this game, so I convinced my partner to play it with me, and we've been doing that. We're not done at all with the game yet. In fact it rather feels like we are at the beginning of the game, but there is no telling. We spent a little under 5 hours on it so far.

Annnnd I have good and bad to say. Let's start with the good! The writing is great! As a couple playing the game, a lot of the dialogue between the two protagonists feels authentic. The competition, the self-confidence or lack there-of, the bonding, are all very well repesented, which I think is a rare thing in video games. Another good thing is that the game looks and sounds great! The artistic direction of the game is very solid, and the soundtrack and sound effects really make it come alive, which is great.

So what is the bad? It's the gameplay of course. And that's why I usually don't play narrative games. Because those games are so focused on telling their stories through paragraphs of text, that the gameplay often end up feeling somewhat neglected. Well, here's what I found:

• The controls are confusing, use too many buttons. My partner who is not used to game controllers has a very hard time enacting what she wants to do. Some specific controls are barely explained yet super important and/or useful. (we came super close to losing the first boss battle because of this, we were very confused and frustrated, we stopped playing just afterward)
• The camera usually does well enough but is sometimes very confusing. The way it pans doesn't let you see whether or not you are the edge of the map. Sometimes it rotates super fast, sometimes barely at all. You're often *trying* to look at something.
• The movements lack subtleness. You either walk super slowly or you're going super fast. The lack of in-between is very frustrating, especially when tied together with the camera and controls issues.
• There are a few times we felt lost, not knowing what was expected of us, spending long minutes going over the same area becaused it seemed a piece of UI was telling us there was something more to be found.
• The auto-save only happens on loading screens, which only happens when you change areas, which only happens on an inconsistent basis. We had to speed through (quite lengthy) dialogues twice because of this, as the game had saved before those, but we quitted only afterwards. This isn't clearly indicated and the quit button doesn't warn you.
• The dialogues are good but their appearances are inconsistent. Sometimes you won't get one dialogue scene in over 15 minutes, sometimes you'll chain 5 in a row, and that is a lot. The problem with this is that, even with the occasional dialogue options, it doesn't feel like you're playing when reading the dialogues. You're no longer an actor of the game, but just a witness. And here is what I say about most narrative games: I'd rather be either playing the game, or watching an actual movie.

Of course, all of this is subjective. It certainly doesn't help that I usually don't like narrative games. And if you are comfortable with a game controller, then you'll certainly have a better time with the game than my partner and I in any case. There definitely is a lot of good things in this game. And since we didn't finish it yet, maybe I'll write an update about this in the next newsletter!

Just the one music recommendation for this newsletter. A duo whose music I've listened to over and over, for countless hours, ever since I started making games: Justice.

Justice makes genre-bending electronical music. Their first album, entitled "†", released in 2007, has been very influential, and dare I say, the pinnacle of the french-touch practice of doing anything and everything with audio samples. Maybe what's most interesting about this album, and the duo itself, if how it feels as much like hard rock as electro. It was unique then, and it still feels unique to this day.

Their subsequent studio albums 'Audio Video Disco' and 'Woman', are much less harsh, but still have this strong rock influence, on top of now touching on disco and EDM. Some people think those two albums are less good than the first, but I don't agree. They are just not more of the same, when those people wanted just that, more of the same.

Their live albums, however, really have kept something of their first album's energy. Each of these blends together their tracks, from all albums, in new ways, making for super interesting listening. The raw energy in them is palpable, it's great.

Justice has been my number one companion for most gamejams I've done. I love their music. Check it out. If you want the harshness, start from their first album. If not, then start with 'Woman'. 

That feels pretty good for this first newsletter of 2021! (even though it concerns the last month of 2020 - maybe I'll get better at this in 2021) I didn't write about many things but I wrote a lot about each, so hopefully that's just as good!

As usual, thank you very much for your support! I'm looking forward to telling you about Sugar and my experience with streaming in the next newsletter!

Have a great month of January and a great year 2021!
May it be better than the last for us all!

Take care!

Rémy🍬