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[melos]

aaaaaaaand.... it's out now!!!! GET IT TODAY!!!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/265470

[melos]

Still out! Sales are okay, kind of weak as expected, but everyone who plays really likes it.

[Grog]

I don't know if this helps at all, but I wasn't super interested in this game at first. But saw some tweets about the game launching and checked out a lets play. I really like the dual energy mechanic overall, and how it's explained in game (x/y,color,light/dark). I'm not sure if it's too late for something like this or how effective it may actually be, but it could be worthwhile having a gameplay trailer that clearly demonstrates how this effect works and showcases it more clearly?

Either way, congrats on the release! I'm broke right now but will likely pick it up in the future!

[HIDEJI]

Still out! Sales are okay, kind of weak as expected, but everyone who plays really likes it.

Why were weak sales "expected?" The game looks pretty good to me! Hopefully sales pick up when word of mouth starts circulating.

[melos]

I don't know if this helps at all, but I wasn't super interested in this game at first. But saw some tweets about the game launching and checked out a lets play. I really like the dual energy mechanic overall, and how it's explained in game (x/y,color,light/dark). I'm not sure if it's too late for something like this or how effective it may actually be, but it could be worthwhile having a gameplay trailer that clearly demonstrates how this effect works and showcases it more clearly?

Either way, congrats on the release! I'm broke right now but will likely pick it up in the future!

Thanks! We're thinking about including something like that on the steam page, but our previous energy video got zero press coverage. We might edit that video a little bit, but I don't know how effective it will be, if at all.

Still out! Sales are okay, kind of weak as expected, but everyone who plays really likes it.

Why were weak sales "expected?" The game looks pretty good to me! Hopefully sales pick up when word of mouth starts circulating.

The press (as a whole) has never really been interested in it, even though it's really innovative in just about every respect! Oh well. I think word of mouth might help. Generally it was just hard to maintain any momentum over the 3.5 year dev cycle, so that's definitely part of it. It might just end up as a cult classic or whatever, which is sort of fine by me as long as we make enough $ to scrap by.

[melos]

bump!!! it's... literally never too late to try out even the ocean!!

https://seanhtch.itch.io/even-the-ocean

[melos]

Sales are still pretty slow, but reviews by players are good, so that is good.

[dukope]

Just played through.

The story didn't resonate with me but the music and overall vibe have this nice surreal calm feeling that I really enjoyed. One small thing I would've liked is [SPOILERS] to  at least hear the huge explosions after setting them off.  Against a white screen, fading to the aftermath shot maybe. As-is it's a little *too* calm there - some contrast to the serenity would help.[/SPOILERS]

The core mechanics are great. Movement controls are spot on. I don't think there was much consideration of "fast OR high" on my playthrough, but the dueling energies led to a lot of great setups. Felt a tiny bit like Ikaruga. You combine all the mechanics in better and more complex ways as the game progresses. Some of the later setups are especially cool. Overall there's a nice mix of puzzle/dexterity to the challenges.

The art is nuts. All the background layers, characters, environments, and screens are great. I was worried it would feel static but you've got enough parallax and animated sprites cleverly sprinkled around to make it pop. And seriously the quality and variety of Joni's work is unreal.

Great work guys!

[melos]

thanks for playing, lucas! yeah, the energies are more to just let people do things and approach each level as they wish. the variety of the art in the areas is really nice - it'll be interesting for the next game b/c were planning to go back to a much easier to scale 2d approach.

 I hope more people play ETO, we are not really getting coverage but then again we did release in November, so there's that. we're hoping for some dec/jan coverage now that things are quieting down - or - fans of anodyne trickling in and finding out about ETO.

now we're sort of wondering what to work on next... doing research and the like.  i think we're interested in moving more towards less fantasy settings for things.  we'll see! hopefully it won't be 3.5 years again (well, it definitely won't... right?)

[kittakaj]

thanks lucas!!

[Capntastic]

The Waypoint Radio podcast has been talking about this for like three episodes straight so I'm obligated at this point

[melos]

ooh yeah! i wish they would all try the game out! danielle's been really nice with helping to promote ETO.

[melos]

3-Month Post-Release Update


Mini reflection

I might write one of those 'post-mortems' some day - though I'm growing a bit more iffy about that term, it's not as if the game/work is 'dead'. Maybe a "post-release design reflection" would be a better way to phrase it. Since release I've developed my own critiques and views of the game, though generally I still like Even the Ocean a lot (thankfully.) I sort of anticipated this change in view, as the development process was a sometimes drawn-out 3.5 years, and as you'd expect, you change a lot over the years.

Overall I'd say that I probably will never do a 'traditional' level-design-y game like this again, at least not for a long time. As far as my future game designs go, they may have elements of level design but I don't think I'd do a straight up platformer or whatever. I'm also not sure if I'd approach weighty themes through the sort of ETO's fantasy anymore - instead I might look for alternate game designs or even non-game social practice - but I'm generalizing a bit on future plans that don't exist, so.

Reviews

As of writing we only have one "Metahegemonic" approved scores. But Steam shows 53/55 positive reviews, so that's good. And there are some positive reviews floating around on other sites. Negative criticisms tend to be the expected - complaints on difficulty being too low, mixed feelings about the writing, pacing running a bit slow near the end.

On to numbers!

Sales Figures

Even the Ocean has sold a little more than 1,000 units since release. (1,073, to be exact). As you might expect the majority of these sold at a 15 or 20% off price, ~75% of them from Steam. This amounts to a commercial failure if you compare it to the person-hours put into it, but I teach at an art school now and Joni has a job, so we have supplementary income, and we're not really poorly off. Anodyne still sells well for us.

Exact numbers:

Steam: 767
GOG: 99
Itch: 92
Humble: 37
Pre-orders: 53
Greenmangaming : 25

One fun thing was the "friend pack" that GOG graciously allowed us to do. For a DEEP discount ($20), you can get two copies of the game. Fun concept, but we only sold 9 of these packs. Everyone, please make more friends! (Joke).

We also tried a "Book report edition" for ETO - where you get a free copy if you email us your thoughts after buying on Itch - but no one has done this yet! Oh well.

Another cool thing I added was a permanent bundle for Steam. Steam now lets you bundle your games together, and lets people get discounts if they "complete the pack". I made it so if you own Anodyne or ETO, you can get 15% off of the other. I'm not sure why I didn't do this earlier (Regret.. just missed the holiday sale), but it might help with the MANY people who still have Anodyne on their wishlist and who buy it during each sale. Also, it shows Even the Ocean on the Anodyne store page, so that's nice.

As some sort of proof this works, during last week's Steam sale we sold 34 ETOs by themselves but 57 ETOs as a part of the bundle, which I assume were people who owned Anodyne already. This may be some strange benefit of having been in the gigantic humble bundle for Anodyne back in 2013 - people discovering ETO again.

We'll see how well this helps out over time.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack is available in 4 places: Steam, Itch.IO, GOG, and my Bandcamp, all at the same price point - $6.99. I've seen far shorter OSTs going for $9.99, so this feels like quite a good deal. I might change it to $9.99 some day, but perhaps no one would ever buy it (despite it having ~5 hours of music or so.).

I've sold 119 copies of the OST so far, which is a decent amount for music. Itch IO and GOG tend to have the highest ratio of buyers - 21 copies each. Steam, 38, bandcamp, 34. These were sold from $5-$7 based on the sale time.

I'm still quite happy with the music despite most of it being 2-3 years old. It would be kind of neat to see some pieces scored in a classical orchestra but I don't quite have the popularity of a Disasterpeace/Wintory/Toby Fox release, etc. I'm probably not doing a remix album. I'd be interested to get a critic's eyes on it, but the number of music critics that look at games is pretty low, or if there any they only tend to hear music from games that are also selling millions of copies or use live instruments.

http://htch.bandcamp.com/

Press
I believe we've had around 10 or so let's plays that have completed? And much more one-off videos. Always exciting to see those.

The traditional press has been a complete disappointment to us: the ignoring of Even the Ocean outside of a few writers. But what can you do? At least we made some top-10 lists - Danielle from Waypoint and Chloi from IGN. We also got a few essays here and there that are reviews, but I don't believe we've received a substantial critique or "thinkpiece" yet. Which I'd welcome.



Future Plans (Even the Ocean)


We do have some console porting in the works, but I'm not allowed to say much more. In theory this will include a few localizations.

I'd like to do Japanese and Chinese localizations some day, but ETO has 40-50,000 words, so we can't really afford it at the moment.

What we're up to

Joni has a new solo game in the works, not sure about the ETA on that or how much I can say about it. I'm not involved. It is looking to be quite interesting!

I've been doing a few things in Real Life not related to games (thankfully!) . The past few months I've been researching various things and planning a few games. I started working on one a week ago or so, in Unity. It will be a solo project, possibly with some musician friends helping, but I'm not saying much else...! Expect it to be odd and hard to describe.

Outside of those I am still teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in a game development/design/critique. It's a bit of a challenge to balance as it covers a wide array of things, but has generally been fun/rewarding (and it pays :~) ). I also have some teaching plans for the summer I can't quite reveal yet.

I've also been working on music constantly. https://soundcloud.com/seagaia

I have a secret side project I'm posting music to, but other than say, music for the aforementioned Solo Game, I'd like to do a release of non-game music with some kind of netlabel - Orange Milk Records for example, and others too, but I'm not too privy to how the whole music press/release sphere works or where to start with that.

Aaand... started posting writing on http://seagaia.wordpress.com/ recently.

Cool games

I've really liked some of these games recently:

David Kanaga's Oikospiel - http://www.oikospiel.com/ Billed as a "Dog Opera", it's a 3D Adventure game that has a ton of little interesting ideas, especially musical/sound ones. The narrative's kind of confusing so read David's interview with Gamasutra, it'll make the experience better.

1979 Revolution - Set during Iranian Revolution - interesting moral situations and historical exposition.

Dandy Dungeon - A mostly good (it gets bad in endgame with grinding) F2P RPG for your phone.

Detention - Taiwanese 2d horror game. wrote a short essay on it.

Kentucky Route Zero - I finally got around to playing this, it's sure nice!



Conclusion
That's it for now! In a few months tune in for probably some kind of design postmortem or whatever.

[sergiocornaga]

Thanks a lot for posting about this in such detail! It's a real shame a game of this calibre hasn't sold more copies so far, though it's good to hear that Anodyne is still selling steadily since I love that game too.

Regarding the soundtrack, I'm a big fan of the game's music but don't feel that a longer album duration necessitates a higher price point... ~5 hours of music places more of a burden on the consumer than a shorter release, and some may even find it less appealing. 100+ tracks is a little daunting for a casual fan, even if a lot of it is 'bonus' material that might be seen as optional. Oh, I also noticed the soundtrack is still on sale on Bandcamp despite the sale period being over!

[melos]

Even the Ocean's on sale right now if anyone's interested.

>>> http://store.steampowered.com/app/265470

Updates other than that:

Sales are still a slow trickle, but we do sell ~100 copies when we put it on sale for a week on Steam. More during the Summer sales! I anticipate once I go below 33% off (< $10) more people will see the game on steam.

Also I started a new devlog for another game! https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=62098.0

Joni and I also have a new game planned.

[melos]

Now here's something that might interest you all... Joni, our artist, has just started a series going 'behind the scenes' of the art.

For the interested, you can read right here.

Morever, Joni also started a newsletter if you'd like to hear about future installments of these posts!

[melos]

Don't know who reads this, but I've considered writing a series of essays/tutorials on Even the Ocean's soundtrack and music stuff. If you have any questions you'd like me to address, feel free to post here.

[xix]

I don't have any specific questions, but that sounds really interesting.

[melos]

Hey all!



it's the first anniversary of ETO! (Well, the 16th was.) I guess I could write a reflections post sometime, and I've been thinking of livestreaming a playthrough. Hard to find the time, nowadays, though.

If you haven't yet ,be sure to read the devlog for my new game: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=62098.0


Some ETO updates:

• Porting (To all contemporary consoles) is making progress - I've spent some time implementing Russian/German.
• I have an essay on the music of ETO coming out soon... ish. Looking for a website to publish it.
• Joni has since completed more essays about the art: https://medium.com/@even_kei
• That's about it!