After two years of intermittent streaming I (Jasson) am finally committing to a schedule. I am really excited about this schedule and sharing development with more people. Spread the word and be sure to join – the first scheduled stream is tomorrow!

Siege Games Channel

Monday, Wednesday, Friday 1PM to 4PM PST

Mega Monday – Miscellaneous work on Crea including features, new content, and bug fixes.
Workshop Wednesday – Work on workshop (modding) support and once workshop is live this will be dedicated to teaching and helping with modding.
Feedback Friday – Come provide feedback for Crea and watch me implement feedback into Crea!

Unscheduled Streams

I often spontaneously stream various aspects of development. The best way to be notified of these streams is to follow this stream and @SiegeGames.

Steam is quickly transitioning from a tightly curated store to an open market where more games are being released than ever. This has triggered many to debate about the indie bubble bursting or if there even is one. Regardless of all of this, the truth is that being a successful indie developer is still the same – make a good game and get it noticed. Developers simply must look elsewhere to find the visibility that Steam once granted. This has left many developers wondering how much visibility does Steam still offer and how well can a game still do when launching on the service.

Last month I was one of those curious developers when I released Crea on Steam Early Access. I had very little idea of what sales would be like. In the past a few developers have been open with their sales figures, such as Hitbox Team and David Pittman of Eldritch, but nothing for this quickly changing Steam world. I want to continue this spirit of open development and share what  the first month of sales on Steam has been like for us. First some context is needed before we get to the sales figures below.

Crea launched on Kickstarter in July 2012, shortly after the popularity of games on Kickstarter exploded. We managed a successful campaign of $28k thanks to some news coverage, Kickstarter cross-promotions and heavy Kickstarter traffic due to Ouya’s and Castle Story’s campaigns.

After the Kickstarter campaign we kept our community updated but otherwise stayed very quiet while we worked on our game. We remained quiet even a year later when we released an alpha version of Crea through Humble Bundle to start getting player feedback as early as possible.

Working with Humble has been a great experience. While the number of sales was sometimes, well, humble, this stream of income was crucial to keeping food on the table while we worked on Crea full time.

It was not until the launch of our Greenlight page in October 2013 that we finally began attempting to make some noise. We reached out to a few youtubers and some news sites; however, by then Greenlight had lost its novelty among news sites, and we mostly went unnoticed. Despite this lack of coverage, Crea was Greenlit by February 2014. Our next goal was to get Crea ready for Steam Early Access.

We continued to incorporate our beta testers’ feedback to improve Crea. We spent most of the month of May preparing for the Steam Early Access release. With the help of the wonderful Mary Kish we made a new game trailer and reached out to as much press as we could. I also put Video Game Caster to good use and contacted many youtubers about Crea. We got some great responses from small to medium-sized sites and youtubers but we did not get any coverage from any large sites.

Now we get to the interesting part! What do sales look like for a game launching June 3rd, 2014 on Steam Early Access with little press coverage?

So far these sales have been great! We made $500 in the first hour of being on Steam, and $18,000 in the first week. Sales have slowed down since the excitement of our initial release, but have continued to bring in at least $300 per day. (All numbers are gross profit.)

We decided to not participate in the Steam Summer sale and we expected that our sales would drop during this time. However, as you can see, our sales actually got a small boost during the sale.

Crea was featured on the front page of Steam for Mac and Linux – which is amazing, but even with this prominent feature their sales still have only accounted for 20% of our total sales.

To put everything in perspective, here are all of the gross sales for Crea – including Kickstarter, Humble Store and Steam. Of all the money we’ve made from Crea over the past two years, roughly 35% of it has come within the last month.

At this point, we’re very happy with the sales and all the positive reviews of Crea on Early Access. These sales mean development funding for many more months and enough to hire an additional developer. So while the Steam marketplace may be becoming more and more diluted with games, it’s still powerful enough to bring a significant amount of sales to a relatively unknown title such as Crea even in Early Access. We hope that this information can help shape the expectations and plans of other indie game developers. May it be a light for you when all other lights go out.

We finally have a release date for Crea’s Steam Early Access launch – June 3rd. That is 1 week from today! This is indeed exciting times, worthy of a party llama.

Once Steam approves it, we will have our coming soon store page up. In the meantime, we invite you to start participating on Crea’s Steam Community Hub. When the store page does become available we would love for you to write and rate reviews, good or bad, to let potential players on launch day know where Crea is at now.

Oh also expect a juicy “Whats next” post soon~!

Jasson is currently at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, networking with other indie game devs from around the world and spreading the good news of Crea. He’ll be back next week!

We are back and on a new host! Hopefully those that would have connection problems will no longer and that we will be free of the evil malware that plagued us before. Expect some real news very soon!

Lately a lot of people have been asking about when they can buy a copy of Crea. We’ve created an email list, so that you can be notified as soon as we’ve made Crea available for purchase! Just click here to sign up. We will not email you for any reason other than to let you know when Crea is available.

The link to this mailing list is also on the right sidebar of this blog, under “release date.”

If you’re a Kickstarter backer, it’s not necessary to sign up for this list, as we notify our backers about all major updates.

Thanks for your interest in Crea! We can’t wait to share it with you.

My hands flew across the keyboard like a hummingbird flapping its wings; there was a peculiar beauty behind the maddening speed. I continued to churn out line after line of code. There was no tomorrow.  Occasionally, I would nervously glance over at our rivals. No one thought it would come down to the wire, but yet here we were head-to-head within reaching distance of the finish line. Every single second mattered.

A week before I suggested to a friend who was looking for jobs that he could apply to EA Games. While browsing the EA games website, I saw a link to some event I had not heard of before called “Hackathon Escape from /dev/null“. I found out that it’s a programming competition where each team (up to 3 people) would need to solve a series of programming challenges. I knew I needed to go. Putting together a dream team was easy since I am friends with some amazing programmers. With a little persuasion, I brought on board my friends and coworkers of MokaFive, Mark and Robbie.

The morning of the competition, we arrived at the impressive EA campus and learned about what was expected of us. We would be programming nonstop for the entire day and would use Python along with Crea’s engine. We were facing against 18~ other teams, and being in Silicon Valley, we knew the competition would be fierce. Mark, Rob and I believed that we almost certainly would not win. All we really wanted out of the competition was to hang out and have some fun. Oh, and I was on a mission to win a copy of the new SimCity for Kelley (wife).

We assembled in a large room, set up our laptops and cracked our knuckles. As soon as the flag went up, the team sitting at the table to our side sped ahead of everyone else. They were on the fifth challenge before half of the teams were done with the second. They quickly began to stack up small prizes and had a half dozen mini photo ops. How were they moving so fast? I had no time to seek the answer. I had hacking to do!

Blurry cell phone pic by Kelley

Mark, Rob and I began to fall behind the other teams. We were not fully prepared and at first resisted hacking things together, meaning sacrificing all structural integrity for immediate functionality. We said things like “Oh man, this is such a hack,” or “Don’t look at this!” These comments subsided once we realized we would have to fully embrace them. We had to become one with the hack if we were to stand a chance to win. This is when we learned the true meaning of a “hackathon”.

Time flew by and the day was a giant stream of colored text. Lunch was announced and by the time I managed to peel myself away from the computer, two hours later, what little was left of lunch was being put away. I fortunately managed to scrounge some food from the backroom and scurried back to the comfort of my laptop warm glow.

Mark and Robbie put together a great little Python engine run by the command line to perform most required actions while I worked on displaying the graphical data with Crea’s engine. We began to gain momentum. At one point we answered 4 out of the 16 challenges within 10 minutes. We entered the home stretch, but the leading team was already on the final challenge. We were closing in on them and you could feel the tension in the air.

Robbie worked his magic and within 15 minutes we had an answer to the second-to-last challenge. We looked around for a judge, but they were all crowded around the leading team. They must have had an answer for the final challenge. I was a little disappointed; we were so close! I thought, “oh well, even though it was stressful at the beginning, this event ended up being a lot of fun. I’m glad I came.”

Gameboard at the end. Each node represents a challenge.

But wait! The leading team didn’t fully solve the challenge. It was still on! We grabbed a judge and were moved onto the final challenge. Robbie and Mark began to work out the problem on paper while I continued to hack away. For a brief moment I felt myself enter a state of zen – like Neo at the end of the Matrix. Time and space warped around me as I frantically worked on a solution. Almost immediately I was calling for a judge. Robbie and Mark said “What? Already?” in amazement. But, much like the other team, we soon discovered that we hadn’t fully answered the challenge.

Approach after approach was made as we feverishly worked towards the real solution. A few minutes later, the winning team was displayed on the projector. We had won! Astonishment and disbelief swept over us. We were congratulated, presented our prizes and even interviewed. Although we had been programming for 12 hours straight, it all happened so quickly! I can still hardly believe it.

Prizes: SimCity, Crysis 3, Dead Space 3, and $1000. Everyone got a cool hackathon shirt.

Best of all, my mission was successful! Kelley is playing SimCity at this very moment!

I want to thank Peter Svensson for organizing this great event and EA for hosting! I can hardly wait for the next one!

Unbeknownst to me, this website was suffering from a malware infection. It was causing a few issues but the most noticeable one was mobile devices were being redirected to sketchy sites.

After receiving a second report of this redirection this morning I began to dig into the cause and am now pleased to say that I have cleaned up the site and upped the security. Please let me know if you see anything sketchy in the future though – it would be much appreciated!