State of the Game #231: Moving along now

Another week down! Time sure does fly! If you haven’t noticed, MAV is on sale! This is the single biggest discount ever offered on MAV and likely won’t happen again for quite some time. So snap it up while you can!

But, Cyber, didn’t you say MAV would never go on sale?

Yes, I did say that. And I feel like it’s time I give a bit of an explanation to you. You see, I have been trying to position myself in such a way that I could transition over to working on MAV full time. That’s the dream of every indie developer, right? Take your passion project, release it into the world, and spend the rest of your days working on it and improving it forever.

~end dream sequence~

To do this, I needed to gather a BUNCH of data on the real feasibility of this. It would be a MASSIVE, LIFE CHANGING risk, with incredible consequences if I took that leap to early. So I needed to see what a sale would do. I needed to treat MAV as a business and see what it’s legs were like.

The results, were very amazing. Did MAV make a million dollars? Not exactly. Did I see a community rally around the game, embrace new players, help promote, and just genuinely melt my heart with the support and care? Yes, I did. I can genuine say seeing how the core community has been over the past two months has been nothing short of amazing. It was seriously one of the nicest things that anyone has ever done for me in my whole life. I genuinely love this community.

So, I am starting full time on MAV. No, unfortunately I won’t be able to make that switch quite yet. But that’s ok. Development will carry on and when the time is right, that switch will happen. In the mean time, I learned a LOT. Not just about the community, but about what was important to me, the game, and quite a few other things. You will see some decisions in the near future that will reflect a lot about what I learned. In the mean time, I am hard at work on 0.6.7, which will be a bit of a User Experience update. However, I have a new company ‘motto’ that I would like to role out. As you might have seen in the past, Bombdog Studios had the motto of ‘Making awesome games, every day.” Here is the new mantra: “Community comes first”.

It seems very simple, but there are a lot of implications to this change. It will guide me as I make choices on in-game features and as I make business decisions. For it is because of the community that this game exists. This is our game. Let’s get back to that.

See you next week 🙂