The Highlights

- Released Sonucido: The Mage
- Learned a lot about my development

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December 31 arrived. Time for another postmortem! I finally released my game!

Sonucido: The Mage

I finally released my two-year-project Sonucido: The Mage. I participated a second time in the Steam Next Fest in June. I pushed the release date back a few times and in the end I decided to release the game on December 2 which actually worked out. This was exactly the two year mark after the start of the development.
When I started the game directly after the release, there was a weird graphical bug. The first picture of the story took too long to load and on the death screen letters were missing. It was concerning but not unplayable … but then: The game crashed! I had very few crashes while developing the game, stability and fixing bugs was always a priority. But now, it crashed. Again and again.
I tested the game on the computer of my fiancee and asked a few acquaintances if they could test the game. There was one minor issue with the fullscreen but nothing major and especially no crashes. In the end it was an AMD driver issue that caused the crashes. I didn’t had the normal drivers installed but the optional new and recommended drivers which were unstable unfortunately.
Frequent crashes after a release are really a nightmare for every developer, thankfully, I could track down the issue and reproduce it. I opened a thread in the Steam discussion forums and hope everyone who has the problem finds it. Maybe the next version of the AMD drivers will fix the problem.
Today, I released the 1.0.1 update for Sonucido: The Mage. When I released my previous game Bring Back The Sun, I updated the game relatively fast after the release for a couple of times. This time I decided I wanted to compile a rather big update which addresses a lot of minor and bigger problems. I tested the game myself a few times and watched let’s plays of the game. There were a lot of minor things but also a few game breaking bugs. Additionally, I used the time to polish the game even more and improved the wording in the English localization but especially in the German localization. I think the game is now in a very good state.

The game didn’t sell as many copies as I hoped but it is still a small step in the direction of fully living from game development since it won’t sell many copies but a few from time to time and every bit helps! It earned more than Bring Back The Sun.

What I’ve learned

I learned a lot about development. Focussing more or less exclusively on my game changed my productivity in a major way. It’s not only the extra time you spend but you can also think about the game a lot more. In October and leading up to the release, I got so much stuff done in a very short time. Having multiple projects is just not for me – I knew this about games but also other types of longer projects should be done in a block of time instead of working on it an hour a day or so. Doing everything in a few days or doing very little (a few minutes) every day are the best options for me.

All the rest

I released another small update to Bring Back The Sun in June and made reading a habit this year.

The future

I will continue working on new games! They will have smaller development time frames. Two years was quite a long time.

I hope you all have a great 2023!

Daniel

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