Monthly Update #46 🌦️

Happy April 31st, Sleepyheads… wait a second, that’s not right. Oh no… it’s May 1st and here I was thinking today was the last Friday of April. Okay, so this update is coming a week late since technically I should have released it last week. Sorry about that! But the updates will continue as we barrel on forward getting Little Nemo ready for its Switch release 😊

But first, let’s take a moment to celebrate Little Nemo and the Guardians of Slumberland’s release on PC!

Little Nemo is OUT now on Steam! 🎉

The game came out just after I released the last monthly update. I spent a lot of time just getting things settled there, making sure the build was all set to go and things were up to date on Steam and itch.io. But once the game was launched, the reviews started coming in and I’ve been thrilled with how positive the reception has been! We’re currently at a 95% Very Positive rating on Steam, which for those unfamiliar is a very fantastic review score for that platform. We quickly hit the threshold of 10 reviews for our rating to be “Positive” and then shortly after reached the 50 review threshold to be considered “Very Positive.” The next threshold we’re aiming for now is to reach 500 reviews while maintaining the 95% rating, which will earn us the “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating (the highest possible rating of quality Steam users can bestow on a game).

And critics and content creators have been immensely enjoying the game as well. I’ve been keeping track of write-ups, videos, and streams so that I can share some of them with you. First some great reviews and recommendations:

  • Wes Fenlon at PC Gamer wrote some very kind words about Little Nemo (he even liked it enough to also give it a mention in his Read Only Memo newsletter). Wes writes “Little Nemo and the Guardians of Slumberland is pure joy.”
  • The Metroidvania Guru called Nemo “one of the most charming metroidvania adventures in years,” in his review of the game giving it a 9.5 out of 10.
  • Thunderstash Gaming similarly called Nemo “one of the most charming games that you’ll play all year” and fully recommended the game in his video review.
  • And Digital Chumps gave the game a 9 out of 10 in their review saying Little Nemo is “meticulously designed and executed brilliantly to make the genre proud.”

But I also spent a lot of time hanging out in streams and just watching players engage with the game, and it was really moving to see how much joy it brought so many players. Here are some of my favorite streams I was able to catch:

  • Pumpkin Potion’s playthrough (in two separate streams, watch them while the VODs are still up on Twitch!) was very moving for me personally because she was frequently overwhelmed by all the little details throughout the game.
  • Burr’s playthrough was a blast to watch as well, and can be found on YouTube now!
  • You should definitely check out Rift Blade’s archive of playing through Little Nemo over five separate sessions on Twitch. I have downloaded these VODs because there were some moments I need to go back and clip when I was lurking in chat and seeing him truly appreciate all of the callbacks and subtle or not-so-subtle nods to our shared gaming histories.
  • Sl0nk0b0mb played through Little Nemo as well, and although the VODs aren’t available, I did manage to download them and get some good clips I shared with her permission on Twitter.

Just watching streams and following along with coverage probably took up most of my time for the first week after launch. I also have been doing some interviews this month, most of which haven’t been published yet, but the interview on Lost Snow’s channel was live and you can see that one here on Twitter.

So as you can see, the reception to the game has been very positive. Thank you to everyone that reviewed the game, streamed the game, or otherwise just generally shared the game with friends and family. These reviews validate that we’ve made something really special, so now we just need to get the word out!

Bug Fixing Patches 🐛

The first thing to do after launch was to immediately start addressing the various issues that popped up. So in the first couple of weeks I did two bug fixing patches (you can read the patch notes for 1.0.2 here and 1.0.3 here if you want to see everything that went into them). There are still some issues I’m going to be tracking down in the near future, but thanks to reports from users and some of them sharing save data and player logs, the most problematic bugs and crashes were addressed.

And after the most pressing issues were addressed, I turned my attention to finishing up the achievements work, which was recently pushed in the 1.0.4 patch (which of course also included a few bug fixes). So let’s dig a bit more into that stuff…

Achievements 🥇

This was a feature we unfortunately missed for launch, but I had been planning for them for some time now, so all of the data needed was already being stored in the save data. This means I was able to make sure the Achievements were backwards compatible (so the achievements register as soon as a save slot is loaded if you had already played the game on an earlier build).

imgA capture of some unlocked Achievements on Steam

So most of what delayed this feature wasn’t technical, but simply that I wanted to make sure to get these right. I’m not much of an achievement hunter myself, so I made sure to talk to lots of people and get a sense of the various commonalities in what people were after. And of course I wanted to make sure the achievements made sense for what the game is already about. And then there’s also achievement naming which is an important step. What good are the achievements if they don’t have fun and relevant names, ideally with fun jokes or references worked in.

I created a doc (major spoilers in there, so proceed with caution) that I shared with people in our Discord server, so a HUGE thank you to everyone that shared suggestions for new achievements as well as naming ideas for them. There are some really fun achievements or just great names that wouldn’t have happened without your input, thank you! I think they came together very nicely. We may add even more achievements as well in the future as some more post-release content gets added, but for now, I’m really happy with where we landed.

And one final detail that’s kind of interesting, although currently the game only supports Steam achievements, they’re built in a platform agnostic way so they can also work on other platforms, even potentially platforms which don’t support achievements. So something I’d like to do for the Switch release is to introduce a custom Achievements UI so that Switch players will also be able to go achievement hunting as well!

Localization 💬

Also currently on the list of things I’ve been working on this month is localization (which I usually shorten to l10n), which is prepping the game to be released into non-english speaking regions. The game has already been released worldwide on Steam (that’s just how the platform works), but Steam users in other regions don’t have any option to play in their native language.

Luckily, I’ve already handled a lot of the difficult work of l10n, which is making sure the UI can handle text changing size and adapting accordingly, as well as pulling the strings (short lines of text) out into a central source so they can easily be translated and swapped in to replace the English strings.

But it’s not just a technical consideration. I need to figure out how to best get these UI strings and the dialogue text all translated into other languages. This stuff can quickly get quite expensive, so I’m talking to different vendors as well as exploring options for crowdsourcing translations. So if you’re interested at all in helping to translate Little Nemo into other languages, please let me know! Having a general sense of how much interest there is in translating into different languages will help me understand the feasibility of crowdsourcing translations.

Marketing 🧑‍💼

As I mentioned above, right now I’m trying to make sure to get the word out, so I need to do some focusing on ~marketing~ stuff. Currently I’m working on coming up with a new trailer that can perhaps be a bit more enticing as well showing off some of the accolades we’ve received from reviewers and players. Making trailers is generally fairly time consuming, so that’s already taking up a good chunk of time just getting a general idea of what I’m after and isolating various exciting quotes from the coverage we’ve received.

I will also probably make some tweaks to the “About this game” section of the Steam page. That content is still more or less just what I wrote for the Kickstarter campaign so long ago, so I think I could do a better job of helping the players understand the appeal of Little Nemo and the Guardians of Slumberland.

This stuff is probably pretty boring to read about so I won’t dwell on it, but I just wanted to make sure to give it a mention since it’s going to definitely occupy a good chunk of my time as I tried to find exactly the right messaging the resonates with potential players so I can make sure we have a good idea of how to bring in players in anticipation of the Switch release later this year.

What’s Next?! 🔮

I’m working on the Music Player right now, so that will be the next update coming to Steam. It is fairly close, so it’s mostly just about balancing that dev time with the tasks I mentioned above. And following that, I’ll turn back to bug hunting. Even though I tracked down and fixed the worst offenders, there are still some bugs that are causing crashing, performance issues, and other side effects. These particular bugs are quite tricky to track down, but that’s gonna be the next step to ensure the game is as stable as possible.

And once we get there, I can start focusing on performance optimizations which will help with both the Nintendo Switch prep, and improving how the game runs on any low-powered devices. I’m not going to get through all of this by the time the next update rolls around, but this is mostly just to give you a sense of how I’m thinking about priorities.

Kickstarter Friends 💚

I just wanna give a shout out to the Super Debt Kickstarter campaign which ends in a matter of hours! This one comes from the maker of Garbanzo Quest, which is a fantastic platformer I also recommend checking out.

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In SUPER DEBT! your health is money, your stamina is money, and even the very air you breath is money. This creates a very tense and thrilling game where every second counts and you’re constantly making decisions on how to spend your money in order to survive! 💀💸

Until Next Month 👋

I just want to give another round of thanks to everyone that made this possible. Not just all of you Sleepyheads who helped by backing the game, but also everyone that playtested the game, reviewed the game, shared the game with friends, helped with achievement naming, and everything else. You’ve all been such a supportive community and I really appreciate it. 🙌

Oh, and a quick mention: you’ll notice this post is public. I’m going to be going back to public posts again now that the game is out, and all of the Kickstarter posts are also available on the DIE SOFT website devlog going forward (with no more six-month delay)!

Thanks for reading all the way down to the bottom, Sleepyheads. See you again soon!

-Dave