This is a special one!

I released the Scrabdackle demo on September 1st last year, after working on it just occasionally for two months, and then pretty heavily for another two.

The past year has been... absolutely wild. And my life's very, very different for it.

I hoped my demo would get maybe 10-20 downloads, some helpful feedback, and maybe if it did really well crack 100 DLs. Instead, it skyrocketed to the front page of Itch for a straight month, and... well, how to summarize?

Let's start with just the stats.

• The demo got 4000 downloads in that first month, and currently has about 13,000 total.
• In one year, Scrabdackle still has not had a zero-download day, running the occasional slow patch but typically hanging at ~12-15 daily downloads. It sometimes gets as low as 5 daily these days, but that's four months after the last update - it's incredible it's getting any with that long an update/promoting gap.
• The project has received 110 ratings on Itch and an average 4.84/5, with 93 five-star ratings, 14 four-star ratings, and 2 three-star ratings
  • (...and a single one-star rating by someone who said they liked the game but thought the art was 'kiddie' 🤷)
• No Discord server existed until about 2 weeks post-demo (by demand from some interested players), and now is an incredibly warm, supportive, fun, and active community at around 580 members.
• My very new Twitter account that had maybe 100 followers before the release now has 4,800 followers
• I ran a Kickstarter campaign that cleared 185% of the asking value, which secured 13 months of development funds to focus on the game full-time.
• I've been approached by a good number of publishers at this point, some interested in committing six-figure marketing budgets to the game.

A clip from the opening cutscene that was added for the Kickstarter launch, fully hand-drawn and animated in-engine.

What about some less-tangible things?

• Whether or not I can sustain this as a long-term career - which is yet to be seen based on how the game sells in a year - I've completely left my old line of work in technical consulting for the manufacturing industry, and have switched over to being self-employed as a game developer, composer, artist, and writer for what was once just a casual pandemic hobby-project.
• I've met and became friends with a huge number of other indie developers, including some from projects I was interested in and following even before I planned to release a demo.
• I uh, may or may not have raised a lot of awareness of predatory indie publisher industry practices with a Twitter thread that exploded a few weeks back, garnering 5.9 million impressions on a conversation on Twitter and which led to a variety of articles being written about it 😅 (including Kotaku and PC Gamer).
• There's been a surprisingly huge amount of fan art, which has been incredible in both quality and volume. I haven't been able to even save it all to a folder anymore; it's so rapid.
• And, uh... people really like the world I'm building. A lot.

A tiny snippet of the incredible volume of fan art generated by the community - in order, artist credits to Chepedukduks, ACarr, DM, and Shaq. The #share-your-work channel on the community discord is absolutely jam-packed with a stream of amazing and fun art - there's far too much to share here!

...and don't even get me started on the memes. THE MEMES.

It's kind of hard to say that last part about people liking the world like it's factual, because being a creator often involves being the hardest on yourself and being unable to see anything but the flaws in your work. And yet - the reception of the demo (or rather, of its potential as a full game) has come continuously and passionately enough from such a large number of external voices as to be undeniable. So, thank you, truly.

How about the game itself?

Back where things started when the demo first released - this was as complex as it got

Well, when I released the demo it was pretty rough. Not everything was fully animated (Dust Motes and Trash Bandits didn't even have idle animations), and there wasn't all to much to do (in my opinion). You could get maybe 20 minutes of enjoyment out of looking around, doing a few challenges, and fighting one miniboss.

A snippet of some more recent development, with 6 enemies using much more complex abilities

I released demo updates over the next seven months that added a village, another region with several enemies, more polish (especially to the dialogue system), the lore book and Scrying ability, a "luck trading" secret mechanic, a complete UI overhaul, and finally the game's first major boss. Past those demo updates, I've also gotten way better at animating and character design, have written much of the full game's soundtrack, drew >50 Kickstarter backer character designs, and planned out a full world with a huge number of bosses and abilities and a surprisingly emotional central story. I'm no longer a hobbyist just fiddling around while looking for a real job... this IS my real job now.

There's a huge amount more in the works, with a scope of 10-15ish hours of gameplay, tens of bosses, and plenty to explore and discover about the world. I've been trying to write monthly devlogs to Kickstarter, which you can find here: May - June - July (August isn't written quite yet). If you want to know about the huge amount of work involved in creating a 3D height system in a 2D engine, or how the level editor was created, or about the new minimap redesign, or sneak a peek at the over-fifty custom Kickstarter backer characters designed - you should definitely check those out!

Interested in the game? I've finally gotten a Steam page in place a year in, and wishlisting helps me get promoted within the Steam marketplace to other users. I'd really appreciate it if you're at all interested in the project!

I'll get back to some updates direcctly here on Itch soon, but whether you've tried the demo before or not, I appreciate the time and interest you've shown in this project - it's all paved a very strange and unexpected path towards changing my life in an odd but unquestionably good way.

Cheers everyone. Thanks for a great year.

Art credit to Bubbly from the Scrabdackle discord