So…. we are finally here after all.
Steam Next Festival is around the corner and with that our biggest milestone so far: the public demo release.
That was on our minds the last months and took a great deal of planning to reach just in time. Let me outline the most important points before I dive into some details about the past development.
Steam Next Festival
Steam Next Festival is starting in 2 days on Monday the 5th and will go on up until the 12th, so 1 week in total. StarBoost will hit the stores with a first ever release to the public with a free Demo – so you are all invited to take a look, jump into the tournament and get a feel for the game.
StarBoost on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2471590/StarBoost/?beta=1
The demo will release on Monday morning 6 am UFC time.
Not all went smoothly…
Allright, so what kept us busy the last months? Well certainly not enough devlogs and marketing as we had initially planned, that is for sure. We stumbled into the same trap that you read all over the place from indie studios: marketing is neglected and gets a back seat, lost in the midst of all the development and planning that has to happen.
That is one point we hopefully will do better from now on but we were sort of OK with that happening since now with the demo publicly available there is something for people to grab and relate to, everyone can test out what StarBoost is and if it’s of interest. That is much different compared to only reading about it or seeing a screenshot that is hard to contextualize.
Milestone reached
So this is a major milestone for us, and we hit it quite in time and with (almost) everything we originally planned in, which is a huge success for us and we are proud to have come so far. Now will begin the next phase: preparing for EA release mid of 2024 and taking into account all the feedback we get from people playing the demo and analyzing trends we see there.
To reach that point was truly an immense effort. I think the hardest part is to adjust the planning and the development on the fly to new ideas and make decisions on wether that fits the vision or not AND if that is at all feasable and realistic to chase after. Everyone has heard enough about “feature-creep” to know what I’m talking about. And it’s easy to forget to remind ourselves that we are only a team of 2 after all.
Compromises
There is always a balance you have to nail on compromising time and energy on new experiments and directions you want to try out and on the other side maybe risk some stability of the rest of the established features and also the more abstract idea of the game. It can get watered down at some point. For instance in StarBoost there is quite a balance between grindy highscores and more casual action. And we tested a lot of different aspects to swing it the one or the other direction with the idea in mind that it should be enjoyable for most players, even for people who are not used to playing that kind of game or even with controllers.
Wrapping this phase up meant a lot of tweaking:
UI usability, comfort features, exposing settings, integrating more features into the racing system to keep the player engaged during the tournament, working on reward systems and balancing the progression overall, finishing all levels we want to have available for the Demo, tweaking 3d models, taking care of performance, code and asset optimizing and so on…
It’s a long list what goes into any game but now we reached a point where we are very happy with what StarBoost is and how it’s ideas are conveyed to the player.
Moving Forward
From here there is only one direction: Forward and heads on to releasing StarBoost in Early Access with more features, more levels, more powerups and upgrades to the racers and then looking a bit more into the future: Content-wise we aim to have more planets with each showcasing a unique visual theme and on the feature side we definitely want to integrate a couch-coop system. We feel like StarBoost could really be a fun title to play together with a friend or partner. Also: targetting more platforms! But more on that in another post.
That’s all for now. Fingers crossed the demo release will go smoothly and no major bugs surface or god forbid users will have install problems – a nightware which is haunting me at this point 😉
We value your support
We hope we’ll see you in there, also look out for streams during the next week.
Don’t forget you can help us tremendously by wishlisting the game and also if you do want to take part in the development let us know about any feedback or suggestions you have. You can easily do that here: https://starboost.boldheadstudio.com/feedback/
Your StarBoost team
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