Author Archives: Matt Roszak

Summer Holidays, kind of

Hay guys! It’s been a while since I’ve done any work on BH2.
I’ve been taking some time off to celebrate EBF4’s success in the Steam Summer sale, and it was also my birthday last week.

I’ve made a lot of progress on my “To Play” list of games. Most of them were indie shoot-em-ups on Steam (Market research! I’ll blog about those soon), and fighting games (For fun mostly. I’ll blog about those later too).

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Some other notable games I’ve played are:
Child of Light. (pictured) I wanted to play this because I heard that it uses the same art engine as the recent Rayman games, and it was indeed a very beautiful game, visually and musically. Gameplay-wise I didn’t find it particularly engaging, but I’m glad I played it through to the end anyway.
The Tiny Bang Story. A very accessible point-and-click adventure, that was mostly about finding items. I thought it was pretty relaxing, and some of the puzzles were a lot of fun to figure out. Even got my mum addicted to it.
To The Moon. Not much of a game, more like an interactive story. Which is fine because I haven’t played a game with a memorable story in a very long time, so this was something different for me. Ended up enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. Lots of feels. Great use of music to set moods.
TowerFall: Ascension. Great local-multiplayer action game that I played at a party with some buddies. It’s amazing how polished the mechanics are. Everything is well-balanced, the level designs allow interesting strategies, and the controls are flawless. It looks like a simple game, but a lot of thought clearly went into the design.

In terms of other hobbies:
I have Ghost peppers now! My Ghost pepper plant is finally producing fruit, after I’ve had it for over a year. Haven’t tried one yet, but I’m already dreading the thought.
Been watching The Wire! Took me a while to get into it, but now I can’t stop. Almost finished Season 2.
I cycled 62km! That’s my best record so far. Took 4.5 hours, and although I felt super tired afterwards, I recovered very quickly, and felt almost normal the next day. Hurray!
Climbed a super steep hill! Me and my buddies went hillwalking, and although we didn’t tackle anything massive, the slope was almost as steep as stairs for about 300 meters! Was even steeper on the way down, and we had to slide down on our asses most of the way, for fear of slipping otherwise. 10450807_794453113921098_7266763032288894625_n
For my birthday my family just made a somewhat fancy dinner. It was kind of nice. Especially since my brother’s moved out now, and seeing the whole family together is more of a special occasion.

Anyway, getting back to work now.

EBF4: Steam Sale Results

Yesterday, Epic Battle Fantasy 4’s group won the Community’s Choice vote on Steam, meaning that EBF4 and the other games in it’s group were selected for a huge discount lasting 8 hours, and featured on Steam’s front page. It was smart of Valve to bundle EBF4 with Final Fantasy 7, as fans of FF are very likely to enjoy EBF too, so I got a chance to leech some players from a very popular game series! 😀
votechoice1This little bit of luck turned out to be huge for me, because in just 8 hours, the total number of people who had bought the game on Steam had almost quadrupled!

So I’ve got a huge number of new players, many of which probably won’t even have heard of EBF before, and the response from them has been pretty good. Besides a few technical problems, no one’s told me that they hate the game. So that’s cool.

Sure, many players who buy games in Steam sales won’t actually end up playing those games, but that’s fine, it still works out to a lot of extra fans (and cash!) that I wasn’t expecting.

I’m not sure how Valve decides what games get featured, but I do know that not all of them get a chance, so I must be doing something right. (EBF4 was also featured on the front page in Europe, the day after launch)

So it looks like I’ve got a good future ahead of me on Steam, and hopefully getting a game through Greenlight won’t take 6 months next time! 😛

Steam is now my primary source of income (with Kongregate premium sales being second), and what this means is that I’ll definitely be focusing on larger games with paid content, rather than completely free web games. But I’ll continue to make free web versions too.

And yeah, I’ll probably make EBF5… someday.