It’s been quite a week!
I released Beacon on Sunday. Within hours it’d been downloaded a few hundred times, thanks to word spreading via Twitter and a few prominent indies gracious enough to retweet my game to their audience. On Monday I sent emails out to a few sites, notably Rock Paper Shotgun, only for RPS to tell me that they’d already heard about it! It seems that, even at this tiny scale, games sell themselves through word of mouth probably better than ever before. I love you guys.
Of course, Rock Paper Shotgun’s article brought in most of the actual traffic and views. Since that went up, Beacon’s been downloaded over 5,000 times. Only a handful of those downloads have been the Mac or Linux versions, but that’s my bad for not having them up early enough! The good news is that I can probably knock out these ports in a day flat now for future games, so I’ll have them done in advance.
Beacon’s now taken on a life of its own. It hasn’t received any major English language coverage outside of RPS and a quick mention on the IndieGames blog, but I have seen traffic from various forums and foreign-language blogs. It’s just gone up as a pay-what-you-want game on YAWMA, which seems like an interesting setup. I also believe it’ll be on a major Italian PC gaming magazine’s cover disc at the end of next month.
I’m sure there’ll be other coverage and people will continue to discover Beacon, but I think I’ve done everything I can for it and it’s time to move on. I’m currently thinking about other projects. I have a few ideas in mind, but most importantly my next game is going to be more gamey and commercially-oriented. It’ll probably target Flash, iPhone or XBLIG (though always with a PC version!).
One idea I’m playing with, as an example, is Drunken Spaceship Pilot. It’s a top-down spaceship flying game with pretty weird, simulated controls, with the goal being to navigate precision obstacle courses against the clock. It’s simple, but I think it could be a decent game on any platform. 😀
Anyway, I promised you some more recent music. Here’s a track from last year: