The game journalist has been making the game for 3 years and 9 months. 100 thousand people have played it on Steam alone
On February 6, in an interview with Gamasutra, the author of the Gunpoint stealth platformer Tom Francis admitted that it took him almost 4 years to develop his second game, the space indie bagel Heat Signature. He does not plan to delay the work like this anymore. But on Steam, the approximate circulation of Heat Signature for the first four months amounted to 100 thousand copies.
Tom started out as a game critic. For nine years he reviewed projects for PC Gamer. Of these, he spent the last three in parallel mastering Game Maker. The result of the experiments was a noir puzzle with Gunpoint stealth elements, which was released in 2013. The high sales of the game allowed Tom to give up working in the media and focus on game development. Today, the total audience of Gunpoint on Steam is approaching one million.
Tom did not plan to spend three years and nine months on the next project. But he started the development of Heat Signature alone. After six months of work, he attracted artists and composers to create the game. After another two and a half, the programmer, because He was already impatient to finally finish the game. Despite the increase in the team, the final improvements took another nine months.
Heat Signature
But they were definitely not in vain.
The fact is that Valve invited Tom to work on the game from their office. The skills of a new employee and communication with Valve helped to implement a number of new functions in Heat Signature, for example, searching for items of friends on Steam in the game.
The game was released on September 21, 2017. Already on September 29, the number of users of the game, whose price tag was $ 14.99, reached 44 thousand.
Unfortunately, Gamasutra did not ask a question about the impact of dating Valve on the sales of the game. However, the publication asked Tom about the main problems that indie developers are facing today.
“Visibility is what we often talk about today,” Tom said. “I think it sometimes reads like “How to promote my game.” But I don’t think it’s a big problem. It’s really hard to do something today that is worth more attention than the other 200 games that also came out this week. The bar is rising. And if you don’t achieve it, marketing is useless.”
“Everyone is worried today: what if my good game is drowned by the trash that is on Steam today. But in general, sales are growing. And people don’t buy trash. Therefore, the most terrible scenario for a developer is when his good game is not sold due to the fact that people like other good games more,” Tom concludes.
Tactical Breach Wizards
Francis is currently working on a new Tactical Breach Wizards game.
In it, the player will lead a squad of special purpose magicians. It is partly inspired by Into the Breach, the new FTL: Faster than Light game, which has not yet been officially released, but in which Tom managed to play more than 100 hours.
Also on the topic:
