Accidentally Exploiting Steam, Rooftop Adventures - Devlog 30/04

Whoops

I noticed a strange uptick in my steam page views a few days ago, apparently from the home page. I was a little surprised by this, because steam doesn't typically push indie games until they release, so I checked my page settings. Turns out steam thought I was releasing on 29th April, so it put the game right to the top of "Popular Upcoming".

Steam requires you to give it a release date, even if you don't have one yet, so I just entered a random date a while into the future and forgot about it. Releasing always requires a manual button push, so no harm was done and I got them to change the date just fine, but I did benefit quite a bit from the extra exposure.

On this wishlist graph, red X is the spike from the latest reddit post, while blue Y is the spike I got from the upcoming page exposure. I think it would have been higher, but because my release time was set to the early morning and steam removes games from the list after the release time passes, it didn't spend as long up there as it could have. All in all I got about 1000 wishlists from it. Not bad.

Mall Progress

The mall level is coming along very well; most of my time this week has gone towards building the main indoor shopping area. I'm really excited to see people playing the new level, I think it takes a lot of things to the next level and there's a lot of verticality in the different rooftops of each building.

Here's a sneak peek at the mall building. On its own, it's already around twice the size of the house level, so with the other external buildings this is shaping up to be quite a big area. I still need to add some extra bits of trim and decor so it doesn't look so flat.

And here's my favourite part, the skylight. For when you want to enter the mall in style. There isn't currently a good way to get down into the mall from the skylight though, since the rope launcher can't fire directly down. I might add some new item to help with that, let me know if you have any ideas.

The indoor area has a bunch of space for stores, which I'm still yet to fill out. Eventually there will be a few randomised varieties for each store, but there may only be one each for the May test. Again the walls are still a little flat and need to be decorated.

And earlier in the week I also made this arcade room variety for one of the external stores. You can clean the room out fully, but a lot of the stealables are pretty weird shaped and take a bit of effort to get out.

Polish

Finally, I've been adding some general polish to the game. The non VR toolbelts have been improved to have a little animation when switching items, VR climbing axes have been made easier to use, and a bunch of bug fixes (including that hand-stealables no collide bug finally) to prepare for the next test. There will be an announcement coming soon with the date!