Hey everyone! A week after announcing the Rebel Story, I wanted to bring a devlog summing up what we’ve done and showing off some gameplay.

TL;DW:

• Bullet Hits
• Smoother Controls
• New Enemies
• Destructible enemy projectiles

Thanks for your support so far! 🙂 Stay tuned for more updates next week.

Translation by KSS! Hoping to bring it to as many languages as possible so that more people will be able to enjoy it 🙂 If you want to help out by translating the game into your own language, please let us know by sending a letter to contact[at]coldwild[dot]com!

Lead the robot H-34-RT and his allies on impossible mission against O’Xelg fleet! Are you strong enough to lead the rebellion? Lazy Galaxy: Rebel Story is a new game in Lazy Galaxy universe. It combines shoot-em-up and roguelite genres by having you take control of the fighter squad, each with its own abilities, and go through 8 different challenging missions.

Pick up weapons, choose bonuses, unlock new ships and allies! The controls are similar to the shoot-em-up genre, except you have a fleet of fighters: that means you can swap between two formations to better destroy or avoid enemies.

The closed beta is going to be launched in our community soon (more than 50 people already!), so if you want to get the beta access first, find our more about the game and follow its development: join our discord channel!

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/533050/Lazy_Galaxy_Rebel_Story/

Best,
Vladimir

Hey everyone!

After a month of work, we are happy to bring you the next game update.

Most major thing: Korean Translation mod by player Skynet, built-in into the game. You can now play the game in Korean language! 🙂

Apart from that, the game has the following changes:
– Cooking Queue
– Double Craft at once
– Repeat Craft
– Tortoise Supportive heal based on percentage
– Galaxy Conqueror upgrade adjusts the infinite combat max level according to formula: 20 * star systems conquered * (galaxies conquered + dimension number). Should make the late-game much less repetitive and you won’t have to cross first hundreds of levels again
– Updated game fonts: should be a bit more readable + added French characters (who knows what might happen? 😉

As usual – if you have any comments or suggestions, you can join our discord chat.

Happy playing!
Best,
Vladimir

Hey everyone! We’re back from vacation and I’m happy to share what has been going on the previous week.

Check out this 5 minute video:

In short:
* One more patch with focus on crafting!
* Discussing potential new game ideas

Keep being awesome!
Best wishes,
Vladimir

If we assume that Post-Mortem is written when the game has died, then I don’t consider our game dead yet. 🙂 Our game, Lazy Galaxy, went into Full Release from Early Access on March 22nd. 3 weeks after, it’s a good time to sum up the development process, what we’ve learned and what’s going to happen next.

If you have games that sold 5000+ copies, I don’t think you’ll learn much from this post-mortem. For others: I’ll describe some points that I don’t see touched in other post-mortems. We’re a small game development studio in Latvia, treat it as our perspective on things.

First, about the game:

Lazy Galaxy is a mix between classical incremental game and real-time strategy game. You build your base in clicker mode, but fight battles in a tactical strategy mode. The idea is that your ships can fight by themselves, but in the beginning of the game it’s much more effective to micro-control them. Of course, the longer you play, the more automated process becomes.

Steam page here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/724470/Lazy_Galaxy/

We’ve started developing the game with two of us, with another programmer joining the team close to the early access release.

Quick Data at the current moment:

• Can’t disclose sales due to NDA, but you can check steamspy (http://steamspy.com/app/724470 )
• Approximately 50% breakeven
• Current median time played is 6+ hours (current number, was much higher during early access). >10% of players played more than 40 hours. ~5% of players played more than 100 hours.
• 58 people on discord, around 15-20% of them are active

What went right:

* Prototyping – took some time to find the right formula, but it ended up pretty good.
* The game idea – it turned out well. The game was genuinely fun to play for us as we kept developing it.

* Early access: it really helped building the audience and introducing the features that players wanted.
* Player engagement. Most devoted players had ~600-700 hours played. Some people played 200+ hours, it’s not that rare.
* Discord: it’s a great tool to talk to community. Use it. Grow it.

What went wrong:

* The palette choice could be better. I’m very happy with the art, but the gamma turned out a bit dull.

* UI is a bit clumsy. We’ve spent three weeks working on tutorial, but it did not help much in the end.

* Monetisation model: people just expect incremental games to be free. I still think it was the right decision when it comes to game design: I was able to afford better art and we did not put artificial slow-downs that would motivate the purchase of premium currency, but business-wise it was not smart.

* Apart from regularly posting devlogs for the game, I’ve devoted my 2 full-time weeks before release into marketing the game: it was not enough. I’d say take a full month if you are serious about it.

Now, my own “revelations:”

On Indiepocalypse

The mentions of indiepocalypse are popular and not entirely unreasonable. The market did change.

Lazy Galaxy made me think that a good game will get noticed. It’s our third self-published game and its results are different from the previous two. We’re not there yet (see what went wrong above), but the game seriously showed me that the niche audience found it, gave it a go, and enjoyed it enough to join discord and engage in communication with me. When it comes to digital presence: there are no borders anymore, nobody cares who you are and where are you from as long as you make an interesting game. For a guy from a small country with few indie games, it’s reassuring.

In the end, approach making a game like you would approach a business venture. There’s no magic here: know how you are going to market the game before you start making it. Know your competition, who succeeded and who failed. Leave space for art, but apply calculations before you start. If you want to make a living, you don’t have to invent crazy-lootbox-microtransaction-dlc-hidden-casino-scheme to succeed, but you need to be reasonable and focus only on those creative ideas that you think will be more financially successful. It does not mean killing your creative side, it means only giving a go to ideas that are both creative and potentially successful.

1) Have appealing aesthetics
2) Have solid gameplay to back it up
3) Tell the world. Every game marketing campaign should have a good game at its base.

On Mod Support

Took us three weeks to introduce mod support. In our case, it was worth it (there are 10 game mods in workshop at the moment). I’m an avid supporter of modding, but still consider it as a huge risks. I’d say normally go for mod support when you have 2000+ copies sold, otherwise it might not pay off:
– if you workshop feels empty, it gives a vibe that no one is playing your game
– you spend a lot of time to program it and write the guide. Again, if no one uses it and nobody does anything – you’ve wasted your time. Realistically, less than 20% of your players are going to use mods. I think it’s safe to say that less than 2% of your users is going to make mods. In Lazy Galaxy, we had maybe 5 people trying to make mods.

On Early Access

It worked for us because the game offered a lot of content. I think Early Access mostly fits games with replayability. Don’t do it with the plot-based games. Pit People is the only successful exception that comes to mind.

On Marketing

Youtubers were much more receptive towards it compared to our previous games. The bigger press sites pretty much ignored my press-release, but we got featured by a few smaller outlets, which felt good. Again,

I have a love-hate relationship with marketing. When I started developing games, I looked at it like a chore. Lazy Galaxy felt different: we were in love with the game and I did not feel like I’m pushing the product. It felt like I’m telling friends about that awesome game I’ve recently found and want them to try it.

Another important thing is the attitude towards social networks: most of us think it’s a chore, but I disagree to it now. Twitter is great when you don’t follow the devs simply for the purpose to be followed back. The successful formula for me was to follow only those people who I am curious about. I’ve removed about two hundred people from my following list and it became much more pleasant experience. This naturally created an opportunities for dialogue / communication. Post some of your things occasionally and comment on the things that others do. When you follow the right people – it just comes naturally.

For Facebook: videos get more engagements than text. I had a youtube channel with devlogs, but I’ve reuploaded videos to Facebook and it helped engagement/views.

The main advice: stick to the platforms that you can regularly update / participate in. No point in having your website / tumblr / facebook / twitter / etc if you are not going to update them in a timely manner. If you are one man team: pick one and try to post at least once per week. I’ve actually scrapped our website at one point because I was not able to update it in a timely matter (the last news were from Jan 2017, pretty insane to look back).

What’s next?

There will be a few more minor patches for Lazy Galaxy. In the end – the project left me hopeful and I can see that it’s possible to succeed if you work hard. Every game you make should be a stepping stone towards the next one – save all the contacts / reviews / emails and let your fans know that something new is coming!

As for us – we’ll either work on our own small project or will look for a freelance job as a team. If you need a 2d game made – I have a full team that can do anything (we’ve done commissioned work before) 🙂 E-mail me at contact at coldwild dot com if you want to find out more.

Additionally, you can follow us on our twitter account: https://twitter.com/ColdwildGames

Hey everyone!

Vladimir writing. Sorry you haven’t heard from me in a while, but with development in progress and constant devlogs, I did not have time to update the page (I took it down and it actually lead to our facebook page for some time).

At the end of 2017, our team was joined by Mihail, a talented programmer, and it made my job a bit easier: now I can focus on promoting Coldwild Games and creating content, rather than throwing all my power towards programming/game design. You’ll hear about our further plans soon 🙂

Best,
Vladimir

Great news, Frequent Flyer is now available on Google Play! Get it here: Frequent Flyer on Google Play. In addition to all previous features, it introduces google play achievements and leaderboards!

Please vote for us here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=744697163 – we’re trying our best to polish it at the moment. A lot of attention goes to controls and player experience. As a huge shoot-em-up game genre fans, we do strive to deliver the best possible game we can!

Starting today, you can play unblocking in your browser! Check it out here: http://coldwild.com/unblocking/

We’ve also made a special group on facebook for feedback / comments / recommendations: https://www.facebook.com/ColdwildUnblocking/

Have fun playing and we are definitely looking forward to hearing from you!