Looking For Heals

Ludum Dare 37

Moonlit game development has become a passion of mine since I enjoy both the craft and the challenge of the hobby. I'm often working alone on these projects but for LFH I partnered with a local game designer and brilliant coder (no joke) Jason Hillhouse.

LFH started as a 72-hour game jam project where we tried to distill the MMO boss fight experience from the stressful (and often comedic) perspective of the party's healer.

Out of the thousands of Ludum Dare entries we won 3rd place in the 'Fun' category. All of the positive feedback inspired us to join forces to turn the concept into a fully realized, single-player rogue-like.

(You can try the OG game jam version here.)

Indie Megabooth @ GDC 2019

First, we needed to create a vertical slice (a small, fully functional segment of the game that would showcase core features, gameplay mechanics, and a polished UI and artstyle) so we could start showing off a proof-of-concept to see what kind of interest we could generate.

After, an intense few months of development we got accepted into the Indie Megabooth for GDC (Game Developers Conference) we knew this would be an incredible opportunity to network with publishers, talk to press and generate steam wishlists.

After a few more months of rigerous game designing we launched LFH into steam early access while we were being featured on the Kinda Funny Games e3 showcase in june 2019.

(as a rookie marketer it was thrilling to have a "AND IT'S OUT NOW!" moment)

Early Access

With early access came the expectation of regular updates so it went from a hobby project to a small business overnight. We chose early access because we knew aspects of the game design were still shrouded in mystery and we hoped to generate feedback from real players.

We succesfully leveraged A/B testing, gameplay videos and discussions between players. This led to a lot of bugs getting squashed, a more polished UI, and ultimately a better game.

However, community management is a full-time job and we grossly underestimated the strain it would put on the team and the distractions it would cause.

Full Release

After 2 years of updates we finally launched the full release and while we quickly broke even we were definitely experiencing some burnt out. The good news is breaking even is actually a lot more impressive then it sounds as 90% of games on Steam run at a loss and on average 8 out of 10 games don't even get released.

Reflection

I think Early Access is a really powerful tool for a small team's toolkit as long as they know how to use it correctly.

Next time, we would hold off until the core gameplay is finely-tuned and launch when it's at the polish stage as a way to build hype towards the full release. The thought here is to mitigate too many changes that could leave a player wishing for an older version that they liked better while still uncovering all of those pesky bugs.

Still, I couldn't be prouder of our charming dungeon crawler that makes the healer the hero of the story and maybe given enough time we might return for a sequel. :)