Post to GameJolt

June is here, and with it an official early access release on GameJolt.

https://gamejolt.com/games/Hero/418275

 I'd like Hero to be a success, but I also want to learn about game writing and publishing, how the technology works and how the various portals work and so on. Lore has it that itch.io is good for very early games, game jam games, and early concepts. Lots of game devs and other content creators come here to meet each other and will look past some rough edges to see the effort and unique ideas behind a new game.

GameJolt is supposed to have fewer developers, more players, and to be good for getting more mainstream feedback and trying out ad revenue. They have an api including cloud saves and leaderboards that I have yet to try out. It doesn't look too complicated except for the message signing protocol … which seems trivial to reverse engineer and spoof from a prettified javascript download, but if it works it works.

Kongregate is supposed to have very high volumes of casual and unforgiving players. Buggy or imbalanced games that start here get low ratings and never recover, so I've heard the advice to either start elsewhere or relaunch on Kongregate with a slightly different title after patching settles down.

I haven't thought ahead far enough to Steam or mobile launches. I think of them as farther along the same trend.

I've put off cloud saves and multiplayer for another week. Initially, I want to enable one player to use multiple devices for the same game. You might have your band of heroes running on a pc at home, and play minigames on your phone while you're out during the day, or just want to use both screens. The next step might be using minigames to help another player, but that's still in the planning stages.

The design for minigame four (Defend) is shaping up with roles for classes of heroes, infrastructure, and tamed monsters.

Finally, I want to enable a rebirth mechanic that's typical of idle games, very soon now in the next few weeks. Rebirth will allow a player to improve the basic hero design, adding stats like Agility or Smarts that change hero behavior and unlock hero classes.