Devlog 44 - Steam Next Fest

Published: October 11, 2022

I finally finished moving, have been continuing to work my new 3-days-a-week job, and have more recently been taking some much-needed vacation!

Somewhere in the middle of all that, an event called "Steam Next Fest" happened. This was a weeklong event on Steam for upcoming games to provide free playable demos and do livestreams to garner attention (and wishlists). Rhythm Quest already had a ready-to-go public playable demo, so it seemed like a no-brainer to opt into the event.

Dev Livestream

The livestream event itself went off mostly without a hitch (I say "mostly" because I initially botched the date when scheduling the Steam event, oops), and it seemed like everyone was excited to see all of the content that I had to show off, which included everything I've made thus far (so, much more than than what's featured in the public demo). You can view the video for that below:

Increased Visibility

While the livestream was great to do, it seems like the real consequence of Steam Next Fest has been increased public visibility for my game -- it seems like a lot more people are getting their hands on the demo (and consequently giving the game a wishlist). This was great to see, and I garnered more wishlists through this period than any other in the project's history, managing to recently surpass 4,000 wishlists:

It's been great seeing new people discover the demo and having good things to say about it; there's even some people posting in the Steam forums for the game now, which is a bit surreal to see. I've also been seeing a ton of Japanese posts about the game on Twitter, which is a pleasant surprise as well (JP players, rest assured that a Japanese translation will be included in the full game!). It's nice that the game seems playable even for non-English speakers -- means that my visual mechanic tutorials are working out so far.

This kind of stuff is great to see since I know garnering attention by myself isn't my strong suit, so if anything is going to get Rhythm Quest to spread a little more it's just going to be people enjoying the game then recommending it via word of mouth.

Mouse Cursor Hiding

Based on some comments that I've been seeing floating around, it seems like more people are playing the game with their mouse than I initially expected. I imagine this is partly because people are more inclined to click on buttons than interact with them via keyboard nowadays -- doubly so for the WebGL demo -- so they get funneled into the mouse version of the UI flow (though the UI will change wording based on whichever input device you're using). I saw some requests for the ability to hide the mouse cursor, so I'm adding a new option for that in the settings menu:

That was mostly a pretty quick thing to implement, though I still need to test it on WebGL builds to see if it makes sense to have there (it probably doesn't play very nice with browser restrictions and gives you some annoying popup).

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