Orestorm Factory 1 Year Update

Orestorm Factory 1 Year Update

This is going to be a summary of the last year of Orestorm Factory, there is an accompanying YouTube video with footage of the current experimental build I've been working on. I hope you find this story insightful. When I released the Demo for Orestorm Factory a year ago, it was my first real game, and overall I was very happy with the results. I put it on Steam, Crazy Games, Armor Games, and Itch.IO.

The results

Itch.IO

On Itch.io it got 209 plays, with a single comment that was vaguely positive but complained about the difficulty.

Crazy Games

On Crazy Games it got 8k plays 323 upvotes to 65 downvotes resulting in and 8.3/10 which I was very happy with.

Armor Games

On Armor games it got 19k plays with a rating of 4.8/10 which was troubling, but understandable once I realized the game doesn’t really warn you that it’s unplayable on mobile. Whereas Crazy games prevented you from playing on mobile. And the comments made it pretty clear this was the case.

Y8 and other sites.

Also weirdly enough it got uploaded to a bunch of other flash game sites, the biggest of which being Y8 with 4k plays and an 8.4/10, the ratings of which show up when you google the game which was weird to me. But my goal has always been to show people a thing I made, so I'm really not fussed if people share it.

Steam

And finally on Steam it has 300 plays. As only the demo is out, it doesn’t have reviews, however, I added a bunch of achievements to the game which gives surprisingly good analytics for these players. Of those 300 players, 55% finished the tutorial. 24% survived to wave 4. 21% bought an upgrade, 15% survived to wave 8, 10% survived to wave 13, and encountered the boss, 9% beat the game. And last but not least. 3% of players beat the game without upgrades, by playing as Sferic.

So to those 9 people. Good work, that’s a seriously difficult challenge. I think myself and only 2 playtesters managed it.

The big takeaways

Web vs desktop

The big takeaways from this starting experiment was. It’s really hard to convince people to download and play a game. And because of that, the majority of players played on web, which the game wasn’t built to play on. This led to a lot of people complaining about the game crashing when too many objects were spawning. Secondarily, half of the players weren’t completing the tutorial, which is great information, as it shows the tutorial is too complex and not fun enough. This completely blindsided me when the game came out, as all the playtesters had all finished it reasonably comfortably, but I had overlooked their obligation to get through it. Orestorm definitely wasn’t hooking players in fast enough, and I think a lot of players wrote it off because I couldn’t convey to them what made the game fun.

Difficulty

Secondly, the game is just far too difficult, and not in a way the majority of players found fun. I found the specific flow state very interesting, concurrently testing the micro and macro parts of my decision making in a way I’d only seen in games like StarCraft, but players consistently found the difficulty impeded their fun, rather than adding challenge.

The definition of a roguelike

Thirdly, it turns out people have very strong opinions on what a roguelike is. My logic was that restarting from zero, but with minor upgrades made the game work as a roguelite as every game you had to build a new base on a new map, then once you’d beat the game, you could try to beat it without upgrades, kind of like how hades does it. The actual definitions of roguelike and roguelite are a bit up in the air so I thought it was fair to call this a roguelike/roguelite. However, I got a whole lot of angry comments that it wasn’t. I think that comes down to what people’s expectations are for the genre more than the actual definitions, but either way, I’ll probably drop the term roguelike for future releases to be safe.

Getting negative feedback

And finally, people online can be very critical, and whilst it's very understandable to criticize, I didn’t expect it to be so severe for a free experimental game demo. It took more of a toll on my enthusiasm to keep pursuing the project than I anticipated. My goal was always to make a game that I enjoy, and if other people like it that's great. But I’m not interested in making a game for mass appeal. 

The future of Orestorm Factory

All in all, I learnt a lot of things with this project, and with the ones I’ve done since. The codebase isn’t great, as I was still learning Godot as I made it. As such, I don’t think I’m going to continue development work in the long term. So instead my plan is to finalize the game this year and release it for a buck or so on Steam.

Despite most of the problems I’ve mentioned so far having less to do with the game itself, and more to do with business decisions around the game, the key thing I can change moving forward is trying to make the game the best version of itself it can be. Since that initial release, every few months I have come back, and tried to make Orestorm Factory the best it can be by making some radically different versions of the game.

I tried making it a tower defense game, where you feed ores into the turrets. But it felt like it was veering too close to Mindustry and Two Timin’ Towers, and it couldn’t take full advantage of the things that make it unique.

I tried a survival game, where you had a home base you had to fill with ore to keep the monsters away, but you had to leave the base into the abyss to find more ores to send home, but I never found a good way to stop the player’s best course of action to be from AFKing in base without making the game more stressful than the current version.

I tried a game like raft or Minecraft Skyblock, where you catch ores in the air and slowly build a bigger area to traverse. But dodging the ores on a constricted platform wasn’t very fun, and felt like it took away from the key goal of making a big complex spaghetti base.

Finally I tried making a real roguelike, where you can shoot ores out at enemies, pickup powerups, and have to work your way through 4 floors, with a boss fight on each floor. Whilst I’m still not fully happy with this one, it’s definitely stood out as the most interesting so far, and that’s the one I’m currently working on.

If you checkout the video attached to this, you'll see the current development build. In this footage, you can see each level has 3 altars which now require a specific recipe to be turned on, turning on all 3 altars spawns the boss. Killing the boss starts the next level, resetting the players ore counts and dropping them on a fresh floor. Each floor has harder enemies, and a new boss. Culminating in floor 4 which currently makes you beat all 3 of the previous bosses at once.

I really like this basis, except for how cumbersome and unclear the mechanic to spawn the bosses is. If I can figure out a way to make that work, I’ll likely spend the time making item shops and trying to design more interesting power ups than basic attack boosts and hp and ore drops.

Other features

In the meantime I’ve been focusing on a couple other features now, so that i'm better prepared for the future. I’ve started focusing on designing for accessibility, with my key concern being making sure that I’ve always got controller support.  I’m yet to figure out a way to make controller support viable with the current controls scheme. In my test version I’ve added a cursor that can be controlled by the right stick, but it's horribly cumbersome, and will likely still cause some mechanical strain. So whatever the final version of Orestorm looks like, I’m going to make sure that it’s playable with a controller, or at the very least, couch co-op where player 2 can use a controller to help out. But that's a last resort I’m hoping to avoid. 

Command recording and replaying

Secondly, I’ve built in systems for a ghost player, who can walk around the map and place buildings based on a string of commands. This might be for multiplayer, a replay system, or for some form of time loop shenannigans where you’re previous self is placing stuff and inconveniencing you. Either way, the current version is built such that actions can be stored and replayed, so that future changes for things like multiplayer will be far easier.

Visual Updates

Finally, I’ve been dabbling with some visual updates. One thing I noticed is that games with distinct and consistent styles do better. And the fact that my pixelart that doesn’t snap when moving was likely also putting a lot of people off. So I’m considering some radically different art styles. I never ended up deciding between topdown and sideon art, because I liked the enemies and players being sideon, but the buildings needed to be topdown for visual clarity, so in my testing I’m planning on making some radical changes to the aesthetics too, which may mean saying goodbye to the wizards. But time will tell.

To conclude

This has been a long rant for a long overdue update. If anyone did make it this far, thanks, and I hope you enjoy Orestorm Factory when it finally comes out. Also just a quick shout out to the people who do leave positive comments, it really does mean a lot. Especially to Dracibatic, your recent comment inspired me to finally formally write this up.

If you haven’t wishlisted the game on steam yet, it would mean a lot. And if you’re looking for similar games to play in the meantime, I’d recommend Atrio, Factorio, Mindustry, Satisfactory, and Shapes.IO. Also UnPaws Games recently dropped a video of them designing an automation-based dungeon crawler, that explores similar ideas in a very different way. 

Thanks.