Dev Update: Next Fest Retrospective

To start us off, we wanted to share a couple of articles that featured Spies & Soldiers. Was nice to get some press off the back of our Next Fest run!

Every Major Upcoming Aussie Indie Game You Should Keep An Eye On

9 Australian Games you can play for free during Steam Next Fest

Steam Next Fest finished a few weeks ago, an intense but amazing event that gave us the opportunity to put Spies & Soldiers in front of lots of new eyes. Our featured developer lives streams each pulled in over 2,000 viewers, which was a lot of fun and really helped showcase the game. We had a lot of new players join our fledgling community, checking out the game, and giving invaluable feeback. Our existing players where absolute champions, and provided constant support throughout the event.

In between promoting Spies & Soldiers, we did make sure to experience some of what was going on at Steam Next Fest, and we’ll include our favorite demos at the end of the blog. Our own demo, which the team worked so hard complete in time to premier at Next Fest, is still up on the store page, with all the new features we outlined in our last update.

Following some EXTREMELY busy weeks the team took a much needed break. Jim escaped to the woods for a few days for a well deserved rest. Luis took the time to play some games and recharge. And Ben has been able to step back and focus on family life. Maddy lurked around making tweets and keeping an eye on the Discord to make sure no one said anything too rude (not that they would, our community is very wholesome).

Another fun thing we’ve been up to is analytics. Not the most exciting in terms of development but a crucial part of deciding how we proceed in the future. Luis created an awesome set of live data for Next Fest and into the future, which will help inform decisions and aid us in putting the best possible game in front of all the people who want to play it.

Luis and Ben are now working on a stability build for all the new things included in the demo, which will be updated in game later this week. This has meant that the majority of dev work is currently hunting down and squashing bugs, and tweaking the generators now that we’ve been able to stress test their outputs.

And now, in case you missed Next Fest or just want to be recommended some rad games here are some demo picks!

Maddy – Atrio: The Dark Wild

“Atrio combines a spooky survival game with factory building, in an oddly beautiful corporate dystopia. The art is wild, and the process of collecting resources to make sleek automated production lines makes my brain very happy.

Luis – Aquamarine

“Aquamarine has an absolutely stunning visual aesthetic paired with a good narrative and morish exploration. Moving costs resources and I found myself wasting a lot of my mine exploring the world around me, totally worth it and no regrets, the world is so beautiful in Aquamarine.”

Jim – Sable

“A visually entrancing game that looks like a Mobius comic come to life. It’s evocative environments, mysterious characters, and deft speeder bikes, leave me eager to explore more of this world.”