Dead Exit came out on Halloween. It’s far too early to tell whether or not it did ok. We won’t really know for sure for a couple of months. Reviews have been fine. We’ve had a decent number of 8s and also a few 7s, so nothing to complain about there really. There is no way a complex game like this would please everyone, but overall the reviews are fairly pleasing. I also got some helpful advice from The Indie Gamer Chick which hopefully I can put into action. If I’m lucky she’ll enjoy the game and figure it out no problem, and if I’m very lucky, we can find the audience for Dead Exit and then everyone will be happy.
I was expecting some more aggressively hating outliers to be honest, because people don’t often say much when they are happy, but they’ll sure let you know if they aren’t. Maybe since it’s obviously a card game people who hate such things have just stayed clear, other than the occasional angry comment on a website. It’s a problem we had with The Living Dungeon you see.
Some people mistook it for some kind of action RPG and when they found out it was a tactical board game adventure, they were not best pleased. We also lost points to people who thought the game was all luck because it involved dice, and me pointing out that I’d done the math and it was less than 30% luck is hardly likely to change their minds (Perception being reality in such situations).
That kind of thing is upsetting of course and you need to have a bit of a thick skin. Some people will take a disliking to your game due to it being not what they expect, or they don’t get it, or any other reason that is very personal to them but irrelevant to the rest of the world. All of that is to be expected but it’s important to remember that people are different, and your opinion whatever that may be, isn’t likely to be the same as other peoples’. It’s easy to see this when looking at the huge titles. Person A thinks COD is the bee’s knees but Halo is worthless trash, and person B thinks the opposite. Both games by most objective accounts are good, so the phrase “Your mileage may vary” should always be kept in mind. Thankfully, most people are happy, and many find the game to be both challenging, and addicting. I can only hope that this continues, because I like to be able to feed my kids.
Moving away from the horrors of Halloween game releases, it was Gamebox this week. It’s a good chance to try and put all the difficulties from the office to one side and go have some fun playing games with other developers and students, as well as help them out wherever I can. I even got to play a video game and a board game that I hadn’t played before. Namely, Crawl, the multiplayer dungeon battle, and Tsuro, which is kind of a beautiful death race/knot.
So what’s next? Honestly. I don’t know for sure yet. I’m doing a few things while playing a solid game of “Wait and See”. In the meantime please help us on social media, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. and spread the word about Dead Exit!