Two weeks ago “I hope she’s ok” took part in the Steam Autumn Game Festival. To be honest when I started making the game I didn’t plan on releasing a demo. I didn’t feel I had a good reason not to prioritise the full release as I thought working on the demo would take unnecessary development time away from me. This changed quite quickly when I received an email from Steam at the start of August informing me about the Autumn Festival. It seemed like great timing to receive quite a lot of extra promotion for my game so I decided to submit a demo and take part. I’m glad I did, it was a really good experience on all fronts. 

That being said things didn’t go all that smoothly at first! I was a day late in publishing the demo and I found a number of bugs over the first couple of days it was live that needed fixing. Since then however it’s been running very smoothly and I won’t be updating it before the full release.

The demo received really good feedback, which was very encouraging (and a huge relief) and I think it had a positive impact on daily wishlist additions. Players were impressed with the look of the game and there was enough content there to make them curious about how the story would progress. The controls are very intuitive but I did get some really good constructive feedback from a good friend on how to improve them further. For example, I had overlooked some game mechanics that could have a negative impact on playability and I’ve switched some of them as a result. Working alone on such a big project can easily make you overlook something reasonably obvious so having people try your game like this even before a beta launch is a really good idea.

In addition to the demo release I was able to get a taste for the pressure that pressing the release button creates. Is everything ok? No bugs? Did I test enough? Will it work? Is it good or bad or terrible? Will anyone care? Now I know that the world doesn’t end even if there are few bugs and the overall experience will make it easier to manage when I launch the full release. 

You can play the free demo by downloading it from the game’s Steam page. It’s short but I hope it gets you hooked!