Games: Indies and Dawnmaker
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Boiling Steam ☛ BitSummit Drift 2024: Indies Come to Japan, Again
It’s July 2024. And it’s super hot outside. Hot and humid, the bad kind. Step outside, and your body will very quickly let you know ‘Man, you should not be there, get back in!’ in various ways.
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Adrian Gaudebert: 18 days of selling Dawnmaker
We released Dawnmaker 18 days ago, and I'm due for a report on numbers. Everybody loves numbers, right? Here are ours!
First a little context: Dawnmaker is a turn-based, solo strategy game mixing city building and deckbuilding. Basically, it's like a board game but digital and solo. We've been working on this title for 2.5 years, as a team of two people: myself, doing game design and programming, and Alexis, doing everything art-related. We've had some occasional help from feelancers, agencies and short-term hires, but it's mostly been just us 2. Dawnmaker is our second game, the first one being Phytomancer, a small game we made in 6 months and released on itch.io only.
We did not find a publisher for Dawnmaker — not for lack of trying — and thus had a very limited budget. The main consequence of this is that we skipped the production phase. We had a very long preproduction (about 2 years) and then went straight to postproduction in order to release what we had in a good state. Effects of this decision can be felt in some reviews of the game, complaining about the lack of content. We had big plans for new mechanics, but cut most of these in order to ship.