Updates!

It’s been just over a month since Gravity Flux was released, and, well I can tell you about the experience after releasing a game. It’s a relief, but also somewhat nervous and weird.

Sales Report 📈

I won’t give away exact numbers, but basically 25-50 “units” have been sold. Which I’m personally happy with. A lot more than if I’d put the game on a certain other platform (starting with I). Not to say that other platform is bad, it has other benefits. It’s just not as good if you want to sell as much copies as possible.

Scammers! 🙄

Yep, I’ve been targeted by scammers. I have had quite a few emails with the content saying something like:

Hi, I’m streamer Jimbob and I have a streaming channel with 5K followers. I enjoy streaming of any genre. My streams get over 500 views.

I just saw your game Gravity Flux and did check it out on Steam, I like to give it a shot. If you could provide a Steam copy it would be great!

<Links to Twitch/YouTube>

A few things, firstly they write it up in an extremely lazy and poorly-written way. Big red flag. Then, their email address sometimes doesn’t match with their YouTube channel (Mega big red flag). They don’t provide a way to authenticate themselves, like please send me the key via Twitter or something. There is no way I can validate their identity just by email address unless it matches some public profile. Which so far it hasn’t.

My first response to the scammers was to send them a long email with some questions, of course it got no response. A game dev friend, Jon, suggested to make a “Review Key” form, which is now on this website. If you want a key, that’s now the only way you’ll get it. I will not give keys out in a reply email any more. Not even sorry.

No Dosh From Steam 😭😭😭

Sadly, Steam tells me they won’t send me the sales for the game as it has not made over a certain amount. Let’s just say I need to sell the same amount of units I’ve sold already since launch to make the amount. Double it. This is a bit crappy, since I never intended to make a lot of money from the game, but more than that other platform. They say it’s because of costs with sending and receiving funds (transaction fees?? How much are their transaction fees? Geez!). It may be more like, if you game doesn’t sell well, we don’t care about you. I’m not sure that’s it but it’s a theory. Oh well, please take this as an opportunity to buy the game if you haven’t already to help the chances I’ll get paid for the game..

“Missing Steam Store Page Assets”

Steam tells me I am missing the “Vertical capsule” store page asset. Well, I’m not super motivated to fix this as they are not paying me. I may fix it eventually, when I feel like it. Sigh.

Achievements!

On a more positive note, I am quite surprised that people are out there trying to get achievements for the game. Someone has managed to get all of the achievements, maybe that was a bug, dunno. Quite nice to see.

Keep up the good work, gamers!

Updates

I’ve addressed some initial feedback from people who’ve bought the game, and implemented some other important fixes though official Steam updates. Notably around the “StatsDB” internal database file for settings and statistics. It will now be able to be “upgraded” with new variables and data loss will be minimised. I’ve also fixed some UI/text issues to help people know what keys to press and when in the menus.

What’s next

Largely, I am just taking it very slow in game dev in general. No rush now. I’m working on some other projects, like a “Tas Tech Talks” website which is for collating all tech talks in Tas into a calendar and mailing list. Also building a Z80 serial console for a home-brew computer I bought. And playing with Ham Radio, notably the digital FT-8 mode. Something a bit different. Rest assured, I will be releasing the promised features for Gravity Flux, when I feel ready to work on it again. I’m sure I will. The negative things above do not deter me too much..