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Indie Sonucido: The Mage - A turn-based Dungeon Crawler

Tyranicon

A Memory of Eternity
Developer
Joined
Oct 7, 2019
Messages
5,875
It's hard to sell games in today's market, period. There is so much saturation and competition on the Steam store that you really need to stand out, or spend real marketing dollars.

The unfortunate reality is that a dev's first game almost never sells well unless they're "7+ years in development, 1000+ hours of gameplay" type games.

My first games sold horribly too.

Oh, I did not answer that one, I wanted to but it just slipped through.

I personally do not like the idea of that it is a saturation/competition problem. There are like 50k games on Steam and that sounds a lot but on Amazon KDP there are like 9 million books and you can still be a writer. The floodgates theory is imho just big time cope. My game did not meet a certain threshold for most players and that is just my fault but on a positive note: I made the game I wanted to make and that is a giant win + learned a lot + still makes money, just not as much as I hoped.

And that's fine, you keep iterating and learning.

But my conclusion is the same +M

Saturation/competition is a problem for marketing, not in terms of quality.

Steam's algorithms prioritize traction. If you sell a lot of copies during launch week, you will continue selling more because of how steam's visibility cycles work (supposedly, steam's tight lipped about them).

But there's only so much space, so you end up competing with everyone to get eyeballs on your product.

Devs who can afford it pump huge amounts of money into marketing, because that's how you sell games. It's a pay to win industry, unfortunately.

Yes, a high-quality produce with zero marketing will get by on word of mouth, but unless you have a popular streamer cover it, this will take a very long time.

It's a slow long march, but we'll get there.


:brodex:
 

Moaning_Clock

SmokeSomeFrogs
Developer
Joined
Feb 7, 2021
Messages
655
Released the 1.0.2 Update. It adds the requested player portrait (just place a player.png in the game folder) and fixes/improves a few things!

Custom Portrait, few fixes

One player requested that you could add custom portraits to the game and I thought why not, even though the game doesn't have any portraits for the character. If you want to do it, place the picture of your choice into the game folder. It must be named player.png, otherwise it will not work. I also took the time and improved the game a little bit in other areas.

Full Changelog
- Custom player portrait
- A couple improvements to the German text
- Fixed a part of the dialogue of the old man which did not show up properly if you had the inventory open
- Added code which changes the sound volume for one platform, it played sounds even if the volume was set to 0
 

Moaning_Clock

SmokeSomeFrogs
Developer
Joined
Feb 7, 2021
Messages
655
Right now, I'm working on a new update for Sonucido: The Mage to fix a few issues, I will release the 1.0.3 version very soon. There is one bug in particular which needed to be fixed.

There is a collection of stones on which you can hurl a bomb to get to a new passage. If you throw the bomb through the hotkey it works fine but if you use the inventory icon it didn't work. The German streamer I posted about further above had this particular bug. Took a while to hunt it down but now it is fixed. It also didn't work on doors - even though it would be extremely wasteful to open doors with bombs it is still possible and now it works properly.


Along the way, I squashed a few typos in the German localization and made a couple other improvements. I hope that I can finish the update tomorrow or the day after - we'll see!


The game is 40% off at the moment - again!
 

Moaning_Clock

SmokeSomeFrogs
Developer
Joined
Feb 7, 2021
Messages
655
The update will become quite a big meatier than I initially expected. There are still a lot of issues (most of them minor) which I found while testing the game again. Getting a bit of distance to your game definitely helps to find problems. Especially the German localization will be a better experience but the game will be more polished all around, even though it was pretty stable/bug free for RPG standards to begin with.

Feels good to work on Sonucido again! :positive:
 

Moaning_Clock

SmokeSomeFrogs
Developer
Joined
Feb 7, 2021
Messages
655
It'll take another day - I want to finish an English run to make sure everything works fine and to see if I find another thing to improve. To give you a rough estimate of the update: the 1.0.1 update had almost 50 items on the changelog while this update is now at almost 40.
 

Moaning_Clock

SmokeSomeFrogs
Developer
Joined
Feb 7, 2021
Messages
655
The 1.0.3 Update is out now!

:yeah:

You can get the game right now for 40% off!



Also on Itch!


Here is the Steam post:
Hey!

It has been quite some time since the last update but I certainly didn't forget about Sonucido. A few months ago, I decided to get a part-time job to get a stable source of income. This means that I don't have so much time for developing a new game and focus instead on improving the already released games! I detailed this in blog post.

I watched a livestream of Sonucido and saw that there was one passage blocked because of a bug. This meant to me that I needed to update the game and I also used the opportunity to polish the game even more. While testing I found a couple of bugs which are all squashed now. What started out as a few fixes and improvements turned it this big list of changes. Many of them are small but it still adds up to give you an even better experience.

Have fun!
incline


Full Changelog

- Fixed various bugs which were related to throwing bombs - many things only triggered if you used the hotkey and didn't work with the inventory button, this is fixed now (aside from a serious case in which a path would remain blocked this also affected every (!) closed door in the game)
- Q previously made you turn left and draw your weapon - now you only turn left
- Changed the scale of two doors from 0.85 to 0.87 and of one door from 0.9 to 0.87 which were leftover when I did the rest of the doors in 1.0.1
- Adjusted the position of a door slightly
- Fixed a minor bug which didn't remove the inventory overlay if you walked into the dialogue of the swimming guy
- Changed me to us and the German equivalent in the thank you message of the farm woman
- Added a missing German localization of the message you get if you already visited the tavern
- Fixed a bug where you could get stuck on the platform which elevates forward above the water if you hit a turning key exactly the wrong time
- Fixed a bug where you could get only a half block down on a stair in specific circumstances in one level (and also fixed it in a potential case in another level)
- Added another sentence to the laybrinth guide
- Added a block to the layout of the labyrinth
- Added blocks to two of the elevators at the start of a level because with high fov values you could see the basic gray background
- Also added blocks to one section where the light comes from above and changed the position and intensity of the light so that you can't see the gray background with high fov values and also can't see unlighted space (which wouldn't make sense if the light comes from outside)
- Added a missing German localization of one note
- Added a missing German greeting to the armor lady if you are sick and changed the greeting she had in the English localization
- Fixed a bug regarding the level cap - if you got in any way to level 26 in a stat (this could only affect luck and strength if I'm not mistaken, unless you are cheating) and found a level up potion you could get to even higher levels. Now the maximum level you can obtain through level up potions is 25
- Fixed three light bleeds
- Fixed the wall light bleed in a couple instances where you walk towards a wall where a torch is and on one side it shows a white line for a moment (in one case black)
- Aligned the both sides of a broken wall passthrough properly in one instance
- Removed a node which was there to remember me to add a health potion which I already did at another place
- Fixed two shadow bleeds
- Fixed one instance where you could see a jagged line with MSAA 4
- Fixed a minor bug in the dialogue of the son (if you chose the not helping option and left the dialogue you would get a blank dialogue bar if you got back to him instead of a greeting)
- Fixed a bug if you opened a particular door in a special way
- Fixed the timing if you removed the boards with a bomb in Level 2 even though the player can't have a bomb at this point (unless he's cheating)
- Increased the health of the wallmonster by 3
- When you let the blacksmith improve your sword a few turns will be skipped - even though this happened, it was only shown after you left the conversation - this is fixed now
- Increased the turn number which get skipped at the blacksmith to 30 (instead of 20)
- Increased the time for which one sentence is displayed of the dialogue of the imprisoned cousin
- Increased the time for which one sentence is displayed of the dialogue of the chronist
- Increased the time a little bit until the guard of the city steps aside
- Increased the time a little bit until the food monster steps aside
- One of the pictures of the Rocpus incidents was unused and one repeated, this is fixed now
- Minor technical improvements to the dialogue of the leader of the city
- Added a missing German greeting to the soldier if you are infected (the one after the child, father, grandfather puzzle)
- Removed a word from a German sentence which was too long to be displayed fully
- Improved a few English and German senteces
- Fixed a couple of typos
- Minor code improvements
 

Moaning_Clock

SmokeSomeFrogs
Developer
Joined
Feb 7, 2021
Messages
655
Sonucido is now one year old!

Released an update to accompany its anniversary +M



Sonucido: The Mage is now officially one year old!

A few days ago, I started to craft this small update for the anniversary. I used the spellchecker of LibreOffice to get rid of the last few typos in the English and German story texts. It was not much but it's good to have them fixed now. I didn't check the dialogue texts with LibreOffice yet.

Aside from the typos, I also fixed a potential softlock and removed some unused stuff in various levels. Also, I made the disappearing of the fountain walk back button a lot faster which looks better.

Thanks for everyone who played the game!

Full Changelog

- Fixed a few spelling errors in the English localization
- Changed a few words to an alternative spelling in the English localization
- Fixed two typos in the German localization
- Choose an alternative spelling for one German word which is a bit more formal
- Fixed some gap lines which were visible when msaa turned off in one particular level
- Weakened one enemy because with certain stats and low health it could be a softlock for the player
- Removed an unnecessary test variable which was part of many scripts but didn't do anything
- Removed a few unnecessary walls, and some unused objects and creatures in a couple of levels
- If you now leave one of the holes where you can put potions in, the moving back button disappears faster which looks better
- Added LibreOffice to the additional credits
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1535240/view/3895113407867206735
 

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