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[Spidi]

@ nathy grrrl:
Thanks, I hope it will be to your liking . If you do so, please feel free to share your opinion, suggestions & critique.

Thanks for all the support so far !

[Pixel Noise]

Congrats on the release!

[Spidi]

Hi Pixel Noise,

Thanks for the kind words !
+
I'm checking out your portfolio and saving your contact info right away (I hope it is okay with you ).

[Pixel Noise]

 

[Sundrop]

I'd love to pin this on my backpack haha! Congrats on the release!

[Spidi]

@Sundrop:

Thanks



Sounds awesome

If you happen to make a sticker or anything like that please please post a picture !

I ordered a t-shirt for myself as a little release present :

[Spidi]

Hi everyone!

It has been more than two months since I released I Am Overburdened and since I wrote a devlog entry. Please accept my apology for this, I was super busy with the release and support of the game. But now I'm back with an in-depth analysis how the overall production and final numbers turned out .





Summary

I want to do a fully detailed breakdown of the development and business results, but I don't want break it up into a typical postmortem format (good, bad, ugly). I've drawn my conclusions, I know what I have to improve for my upcoming projects, but I don't want to dissect the I Am Overburdened story this way, I want emphasize how much work goes into a game project and focus more on how a journey like this actually looks and feels like. If you really want know my takeaways, here it goes in a super short format: I consider the game a success from a development perspective (good), but I failed from a marketing and sales standpoint (bad and ugly).

Now I go into the details, but will focus more on the objective "what happened, how it went, what it took" parts.

Development

The game started out as a simple idea with a simple goal in mind. I partially abandoned my previous project, because it ballooned into a huge ball of feature creep, so I wanted to finish a more humble concept in a much shorter time period. The original plan was to create a fun game in 4 months. I really liked the more casual and puzzle-y take on the roguelike genre like the classic Tower of the sorcerer game, or the more recent Desktop dungeons and the Enchanted cave games so I set out to create my own take. I designed the whole game around one core idea: strip out every "unnecessary" RPG element/trope and keep only the items/loot, but try to make it just as deep as many other roguelikes regardless of its simplicity. From this approach the "differentiating factor" was born, a foolishly big inventory, which helped me to define and present what I Am Overburdened really is.

A silly roguelike full of crazy artifacts and a "hero" who has 20 inventory slots.

Most of the prototyping and alpha phases of the development (first two months) went smoothly, then I had to shift gears heavily...



Reality check

After 3 months of development, when all of the core systems were in place and when I deemed big parts of the content non-placeholder, the time came to show the game to others. I realized something at that point, forcing me to make a huge decision about the project. The game was not fun . The idea was solid, the presentation was kind-of ok, but overall it was simply mediocre and a month of polishing and extra content in no way could change that!



Back than I was super stressed out due to this and I thought about this as my hardest decision as a game maker, but looking back I think I made the right choice (now I feel like I actually only had this one). I decided to postpone release, explore the idea further even if it doubles!!! the originally planned development time (and it happened ) and most importantly I decided to not make or release a "shovelware", because the world really isn't interested in another one and I'm not interested in making/publishing one...

Final scope

So after 4 months of development, feeling a bit glum, but also feeling reinvigorated to really make the most out of I Am Overburdened I extended the scope of the design & content and I also planned to polish the hell out of the game . This took another 4 months and almost a dozen private beta showings, but it resulted in a game I'm so proud of, that I always speak of it as a worthy addition to the roguelike genre and as a game that proudly stands on its own!



Some numbers about the end result:

It takes "only" around 30 to 40 minutes to complete the game on normal mode in one sitting, but due to its nature (somewhat puzzle-y, randomized dungeons & monster/loot placements + lots of items, unlocks and multiple game modes), the full content cannot be experienced with one play-through. I suspect it takes around 6 to 12 full runs (depending on skill and luck) to see most of what the game has to offer so it lends quite a few hours of fun . There are 10 different dungeon sets and they are built from multiple dozens of hand authored templates, so that no level looks even similar to the other ones in one session. They are populated by 18 different monsters each having their own skill and archetype (not just the same enemy re-skinned multiple times). And the pinnacle, the artifacts. The game has more than 120 unique items, all of them having a unique sprite and almost all of them having unique bonuses, skills (not just +attributes, but reactive and passive spells) and sound effects. This makes each try feel really different and item pickup/buy choices feel important and determinative. The game was also localized to Hungarian before release, because that is my native language so I could do a good job with the translation relatively fast and this also made sure, that the game is prepared to be easily localized to multiple languages if demand turns out to be high.



Production numbers

How much code I had to write and content I had to produce all in all to make this game? It is hard to describe the volume/magnitude with exact numbers, because the following charts may mean a totally different thing for a different game or in case of using different underlaying technologies, but a summary of all the asset files and the code lines can still give a vague idea of the work involved.



Writing and localization may not sound like a big deal, but the game had close to 5000 words to translate ! I know it may be less than the tenth of the dialogue of a big adventure or RPG game, but it is still way larger than the text in any of my projects before...



I'll go into the detailed time requirements of the full project too after I painted the whole picture, because no game is complete without appropriate marketing work, a super stressful release period and post-release support with updates and community management work .

Marketing

If you try to do game development (or anything for that matter) as a business, you try to be smart about it, look up what needs to be done, how it has to be approached etc... I did my homework too and having published a game on Steam before I knew I had to invest a lot into marketing to succeed, otherwise simply no one will know about my game. As I said this is the "bad" part and I'll be honest. I think I could have done a much better job, not just based on the results, but based on the hours and effort I put in, but let's take it apart just like the development phase.

• Development blog/vlog
  I started writing entries about the progress of the game really early on. I hoped to gather a small following who are interested in the game. I read that the effectiveness of these blogs are minimal, so I tried to maximize the results by syncing the posts to at least a dozen online communities. I also decided to produce a video version because it is preferred over text these days + I could show game-play footage too every now and then. I really enjoyed writing my thoughts down and liked making the videos so I will continue to do so for future projects, but they never really reached many people despite my efforts to share them here and there...
  
  
  
• Social media
  I've tried to be active on Twitter during development, posting GIFs, screen-shots and progress reports multiple times a week. Later on I joined other big sites like Facebook and Reddit too to promote the game. In hindsight I should have been more active and should have joined Reddit way earlier. Reddit has a lot of rules and takes a lot more effort than Twitter or Facebook, but even with my small post count it drove 10 times more traffic to my store page, than any other social media site. Since the game features some comedy/satire and I produced a hell of a lot of GIFs, I tried less conventional routes too like 9gag, imgur, GIPHY and tumblr, but nothing really caught on.
  
  
  
• Wishlist campaign
  I prepared a bunch of pictures up-front featuring some items and their humorous texts from the game. I posted one of these images every day starting from when the game could be wishlisted on Steam. I got a lot of love and a lot of hate too , but overall the effectiveness was questionable. It only achieved a few hundred wishlists up until the release day.
  
  
  
• Youtube & Twitch
  For my previous Steam game I sent out keys on release day to a 100 or so Youtubers who played any kind-of co-op game before, resulting in nearly 0 coverage.
  This time I gathered the contact info of a lot of Youtubers and Twitch streamers upfront. Many were hand collected + I got help from scripts, developer friends and big marketing lists ! I categorized them based on the games they play and tried talking to a few of those who played roguelikes way before release to peak their interest. Finally I tried to make a funny press release mail, hoping that they will continue reading after the first glance.
  I sent out 300 keys the day before release and continued the following weeks, sending out 900 keys total.
  And the results?! Mixed, could be worse, but it could be much better too. 130 keys were activated and around 40 channels covered the game, many already on release day and I'm really thankful for these people as their work helped me to reach more players.
  Why is it mixed then? First, the videos did generate external traffic, but not a huge one. Second, I failed to capture the interest of big names. I also feel like I could have reached marginally better results by communicating lot a more and a lot earlier.
  
  
  
• Keymailer
  I payed for some extra features and for a small promotion on this service for the release month. It did result in a tiny extra Youtube coverage, but based on both the results and the service itself all in all it wasn't money well spent for me (even if it wasn't a big cost).
  
  
  
• Press
  This was a really successful marketing endeavor considering the efforts and the resulting coverage. I sent out 121 Steam keys with press release mails starting from the day before release. Both Rock Paper Shotgun and PC Gamer wrote a short review about it in their weekly unknown Steam gems series and the game got a lovely review from Indiegames.com. Also a lot of smaller sites covered it many praising it for being a well executed "chill" tongue-in-cheek roguelike . The traffic generated by these sites was moderate, but visible + I could read some comforting write-ups about the quality of the game.
  
  
  
• Ads
  I tried Facebook ads during and a bit after the release week + in the middle of the winter sale. Since their efficiency can not be tracked too well I can only give a big guesstimate based on the analytics, sales reports and the comparison of the ad performances. I think they payed back their price in additional sales, but did not have much more extra effect. I believe they could work in a bigger scale too with more preparation and with testing out various formats, but I only payed a few bucks and tried two variants, so I wouldn't say I have a good understanding of the topic yet.
  
  

Some lifetime traffic results:


So much effort and so many people reached! Why is it "bad", were the results such a mixed bag? Well, when it comes to development and design I'm really organized, but when it comes to marketing and pr I'm not at all. As I stated I never were really "active" on social media and I have a lot to learn about communication. Also the whole thing was not well prepared and the execution especially right at the release was a mess. The release itself was a mess . I think this greatly effected the efficiency! Just to be more specific I neglected and did not respond in time to a lot of mails and inquiries and the marketing tasks planned for the launch and for the week after took more than twice as much time to be completed as it should have. I think the things I did do were well thought out and creative, but my next releases and accompanying campaigns should be much more organized and better executed.

Time & effort

I don't think of myself as a super-fast super-productive human being. I know I'm a pretty confident and reliable programmer and also somewhat as a designer, but I'm a slowpoke when it comes art, audio and marketing/pr. For following my progress and for aiding estimations I always track my time down to the hour level. This also gives me confidence in my ability to deliver and allows me to post charts about the time it took to finish my projects .

Important thing to note before looking at the numbers: they are not 100% accurate and missing a portion of the work which were hard to track. To clarify, I collected the hours when I used my primary tools on my main PC (e.g.: Visual Studio, GIMP), but it was close to impossible to track all the tasks, like talking about the game on forums & social media, writing and replying-to my emails, browsing for solutions to specific problems and for collecting press contact information, you get the idea... All in all these charts still show a close enough summary.











288 days passed between writing down the first line in the design doc and releasing the game on Steam. I "logged" in 190 full-time days. Of course more days were spent working on the game, but these were the ones when I spent a whole day working and could track significant portion of it + note that in the first 4 months of the project I spent only 4 days each week working on I Am Overburdened (a day weekly were spent on other projects).

Release

So how the release went? It was bad, not just bad, "ugly". After I started my wishlist campaign, close to the originally planned date (2017. Oct. 23.) I had to postpone the release by a week due still having bugs in the build and not having time to fix them (went to a long ago planned and payed for vacation). I know this is amateurish, but the build was simply not "gold" two weeks prior to release . Even with the extra week I had to rush some fixes and of course there were technical issues on launch day. Fortunately I could fix every major problem in the first day after going live and there were no angry letters from the initial buyers, but having to fight fires (even though being a common thing in the software/game industry) was super tiring while I had to complete my marketing campaign and interact with the community at the same time. The game finally went live on Steam and itch.io on 2017. Nov. 2 ! I did not crunch at all during development, but I don't remember sleeping too much during the week before and after launching the game. Big lesson for sure .



I saw some pictures about the game making it to the new and trending list on Steam, but it most probably spent only a few hours there. I never saw it even though I checked Steam almost every hour. I did saw it on the front-page though, next to the new and trending section in the under 5$ list . It spent a day or two there if I remember correctly. On the other hand, itch.io featured it on their front page and it's been there for around a whole week !



With all the coverage and good reviews did it at least sale well, did it make back it's development costs, if not in the first weeks at least in the last two months?
Nope and it is not close to it yet...



... next part in the following post ...

[Spidi]

Sales

In the last two months a bit more than 650 copies of I Am Overburdened were sold. Just to give an overview, 200 copies in the first week and reached 400 by the end of November, the remaining during the winter sale. This is not a devastating result, it is actually way better than my first Steam game, but I would be happier and optimistic about my future as game developer with reaching around 3 to 4 times the copies by now. To continue as a business for another year in a stable manner around 7 to 8 times the copies total (with price discounts in mind) during 2018 would have to be reached. I'm not sure if the game will ever reach those numbers though . If you do the math, that is still not "big money", but it could still work for me because I live in eastern Europe (low living costs) + I'm not a big spender.



Of course this is an outcome to be prepared for and to be expected when someone starts a high-risk business, so I'm not at all "shocked" by the results. I knew this (or even a worse one) had a high chance. No matter how much effort one puts into avoiding failure, most of the game projects don't reach monetary success. I'm just feeling a bit down, because I enjoyed every minute of making this game, a.k.a. "dream job" , maybe except for the release , but most probably I won't be able to continue my journey to make another "bigger" commercial game. I may try to build tiny ones, but certainly will not jump into a 6+ months long project again.

Closing words

It is a bit early to fully dismiss I Am Overburdened and my results. It turned out to be an awesome game. I love it and I'm super proud of it. I'm still looking for possibilities to make money with it (e.g.: ports) + over a longer time period with taking part in several discount events the income generated by it may cover at least a bigger portion of my investment. No one buys games for full price on PC these days, even AAA games are discounted by 50% a few months after release , so who knows...

If you have taken a liking to play the game based on the pictures/story you can buy it (or wishlist it ) at Steam or at itch.io for 4.99$ (may vary based on region).

   

As an extra for getting all the way here in the post, I recorded a "Gource" video of the I Am Overburdened repository right before Christmas. I usually check all the files into version control, even marketing materials, so you can watch all the output of almost a year of work condensed into 3 minutes. Enjoy !





Thank you very much for following my journey and thanks for reading.
Take care!

[rarelikeaunicorn]

This is a really solid analysis of the release and followup! Don't feel too discouraged about the results as you have sold copies and received a favorable response. If you feel like staying organized with the marketing side is more difficult for you then that's a skill set to grind out deliberately in anticipation of, or in parallel to, your next game's dev cycle.

[Pixel Noise]

Wow, great info and write-up! Really insightful. We also worked on a project that only ended up selling around a few hundred copies, so I completely understand the feeling. But I'm glad you are looking at it as a "lesson learned for next time", rather than just giving up game dev!

The marketing/social thing is a HUGE aspect, and it's the thing I find that many devs struggle with the most.

[Spidi]

@rarelikeaunicorn:
Thanks for the encouragement . Yes indeed, for the next game I'm putting some measures in place already, so that I can improve my marketing and pr skills. I will also try my best to track and organize it much better. I feel like this upcoming project will be an experiment somewhat from a business/marketing standpoint. I'm pretty excited already !

@Pixel Noise:
I'm glad you found it helpful/interesting. Yep, I really don't want to give it up just yet. I've come a really long way from my hobby dev days with my last projects and I feel like I'm actually improving and experiencing an overall "up-ward trend", even if this game was still unsuccessful financially. It would be a shame to let it slip away now . I have to try again and I have to do everything to improve . It's a shame though, that I don't have the capital & resources to pull of a game with a similar scope as I Am Overburdened was. With my last games I could successfully increase the size of the games and deliver them. On the other hand as I stated I'm not really in the mood to jump into a huge game project, so it is okay I guess...

Yes, marketing is hard. I think these are probably common mistakes/problems among game developers who are more early in their journey/business, especially when coming from a production (software/design/art/audio...) background and not from a business (management/marketing/sales...) one.

Thanks again for the kind words and encouragement !

[Josh Bossie]

Thanks a lot for the write up. You went into a lot of detail that most don't, and I appreciated hearing what worked and what didn't.

It's definitely encouraged me to look at more private one-on-one sessions for my own game.

[io3 creations]

Thanks for the detailed write-up.  Reminds me of John Oldblood's Masochisia devlogs.


Regarding the game and release, here are my two guesses regarding potential issues:

1) Visuals are of course subjective, but I don't think your game visuals had a "wow that looks good" kind of effect compared to other similar games so it may not have stood out.

2) Release day.  
-conventions
-AAA releases
-sales
While there aren't a lot of periods when something attention grabbing isn't happening, Fall and the Holiday season tend to be really busy and possibly players were already occupied.


Either way, "better" luck with your next endeavor!

[Spidi]

Hi io3!

Thanks for the tip. I have to dig deeper into the Masochisia devlog. It's been a while since I checked it ...

1) Yep, I know the audio & visual presentation of the game is not something, that makes heads turn , but at the same time I don't think, that is a huge factor. I'm not naive, I know it affects the end result "badly", but at the same time I highlighted marketing and release issues for a reason. I talked to some fellow devs about their results who released around late 2017 and I've been in contact with for a while. My conversion rate, so how many people bought the game from those who checked it's store-page, was actually big (at least when comparing to a few other games). It was even better than of a 3d game which had a stellar presentation and way bigger marketing spending than I Am Overburdened. The thing is all of the games, that had a better first month, had way more traffic (one even 10 times  ). I guess what I'm trying to say is, spending a month of work (or some money) on better graphics/audio probably would not result in significantly better results, but I'm pretty sure spending the same amount on reaching more people would have ?!

2) Yeah, I can't help but think, that I either should have released 2 to 4 weeks earlier or wait until early 2018. Due to both financials and the state of the game sadly both were out of the question (at least at the time when these questions came up in my head). Of course just as you said there is almost never a "non-busy" phase and there are always a million reasons to postpone a release , but I'll try to manage this better the next time...

Thanks for the kind wishes !

[Spidi]

Hello everyone!

It's been a while since my last I Am Overburdened update and I haven't posted anything online for more than a month now. In this post I'll showcase the changes in the latest version which went live today and I'll go into what happened to me.

Update

So I uploaded version 1.1.7. It does not contain many new features or new content, but has some nice additions.



The game has been localized to French ( ...), Danish ( ...) and Romanian ( ...)! These are the first bunch of official translations besides English and Hungarian. I'm hoping the game will reach more players with new languages added. Of course I would like to add even more in the near future and I already started talking to translators to make this happen.

Special thanks to the translators for their work:
Nicolas Fourcroy (French), Victor Fisker (Danish), Fazekas Sándor-Imre and Vezsenyi Ákos (Romanian)



Another addition is the "developer" tools for localization and QA. In the latest build of the game three debug screens can be accessed. Of course these were developed for internal use, primarily to test translations, but I thought they could help anyone who would like to localize the game.

So I cleaned them up and added an option to access them in the release builds too. I also created an official guide how these tools can be used and how new languages can be added to the game.

P.S.: I guess using them could be considered cheating (spoiler alert!), since you can see all the items and monsters the game has to offer even if you have not unlocked or seen them previously.

Sale







To promote the new languages and the game itself a bit, currently it is 40% off for two weeks, so you can get it for 2.99$ (may vary based on region).

You can buy it at Steam or at itch.io.

   

What is up?

So yeah, long time no see and this update isn't a huge one neither. What is going on with Magic Item Tech?!

Last month I stopped focusing on my projects and made the decision to find a full-time job. I already have a position secured at a studio. This does not mean goodbye, my contract allows me to keep my company and I'm not abandoning my games. Magic Item Tech and I Am Overburdened will not be forgotten, only they are becoming a secondary commitment.

Besides job hunting, organizing and integrating the translations, I also worked on new features from time to time. If you checked my Trello board recently you already know that the "save game" feature is getting close to completion. I'm planning to release ports and content updates too in the future. They will take more time due to working on them on the side, but I will try to make all the ideas I mentioned before a reality .

Thanks everyone for reading my blog and for all the support I got from you. I'm not sure when, but sooner or later more posts will follow.
Take care!

[Spidi]

Hi there!

Lately I had less free time to post updates about about my games, but I just released a tiny new update for I Am Overburdened and I have some news/plans to share so here comes a short entry

Update

Version 1.1.8 is online, featuring mostly fixes and fine-tunings, but lets see in detail what it has to offer!

Achievement bug fixed



Due to some timing and file-reading mistakes in rare cases some achievements were not unlocked. The boss, monsters and the four artifact unlocking related trophies may have been affected for some players.
Now the problem is solved and I added an extra step to the startup logic of the game so that achievements missed by previous versions will be unlocked automatically (e.g.: if you unlocked all the monsters, but the achievement is missing).

My apologies for each of you who run into this problem.

Item pickup and shop enhancements

Item pickups (especially buying one in the shop) bugged quite a few people, due to not knowing what kind of item one receives. I wanted to leave item collection as a "mystery" and unlocking artifacts being both a reward and a learning process, but I understand the inconvenience of this. To alleviate it a little I added a simple item slot notification when the player moves next to an artifact.



Another hopefully useful addition is the "same item speech" in the shop, which triggered before when you tried to pick up an item you already own, but now it triggers before buying items you have equipped too.



What's next?

Finally the Mac and Linux ports are getting closer to the finish line and the save-game feature is already functional ! It will still take a week or two to stabilize and complete them, but they are next in line and will be out later this month

Anything longer term?

I'm also working on a bigger update. I may have mentioned it before, but it is still too early to show anything in action, however it will see the light of day by the end of summer.

My long term plans are a bit vague at the moment. I think I have clear goals in my mind, but no exact plans on how I could reach them. I want to deliver more updates for I Am Overburdened and I would love to port it to multiple platforms (console and mobile to be exact), but I don't really have the resources nor the contacts to really do it. Will see what the future holds...

As always if you have useful tips for me, any suggestions or critique, I'm all ears.
Drop me a comment or a mail!

Thanks for reading my post and for your continued support.
Take care!

[Spidi]

Hello everyone,

So much time has passed. I've been away from my online life and making games for months. Thanks to some new opportunities it looks like the time has come for me to return to active development again

And what better way to restart my venture than putting out new updates for my games
I will share some details about my short term plans soon, but I'm devoting this entry to a long-overdue I Am Overburdened update!

Update

Version 1.2.0 is live and the highlight of it is the save-game feature! Besides this one major addition, it is mostly a bug-fix and tweak build.

Save & Exit

Finally the game can be suspended in the dungeon and continued later. Since a full play-through is relatively short plus I Am Overburdened is primarily a rogue-like and save-scumming would undermine this core idea so only one save slot exists. Of course more could be added with slots only having a continue option if there are genuine requests for it, but I think the game works well this way.

This is more like a convenience feature to be able to stop playing at any point you wish and finish the run when you have the time to spare.



The pause menu had to be reorganized a bit, since it was already crammed. As you can see it's cleaner now and the last option saves and closes the game.

I would like to create a more technical post too about this specific feature. Kind of like a tutorial about aspects of save systems. Let me know if you are interested!

Immediate (Save &) Exit

The immediate exit hot-key was remapped from F10 to F9. Sorry about this change, it was a necessity (os/platform reasons), but as a bright side it also supports saving the game. So now if you hit F9 during play and the game could be continued (e.g.: the player is not dead ), the state will be saved just like when saving and exiting using the pause menu. This change is already reflected in the input guide.

Pesky bugs

I've been working on the game on and off in short bursts in the last months and alongside with the community I discovered some problems too. I fixed quite a few things so I'm simply going to list them:

• Few items and their related skills could cause a crash under super specific circumstances. It's not likely many of you run into these issues, but if your play was interrupted by a crash I'm sorry.
  
• Certain item skills with persisting effects (e.g.: Fear, Cripple) could get stuck or be triggered on freshly summoned/resurrected monsters in rare cases. These were not visible, but could affect how well you did, so my apologies for the occasional unfair (de-)buffs.
  
• The positioning of hallucinations from toxicity effects (e.g.: Toad monsters, poison in potion) were not correctly randomized. These hallucinated monsters were always placed in the upper-left quarter of the map, breaking the illusion. Now this is fixed.
  
• A while ago I added item-slot notifications to item pickups and chests when standing nearby. It did not occur to me though, that with this modification the treasury pickups and chests triggered unnecessary ones too. Oops, fixed!
  

In balance

With this update balance tweaks found their way into the game too. There were still some complaints regarding this aspect, so I made normal mode a tad bit harder and nightmare difficulty a tiny bit more forgiving. These are not substantial changes, only slightly affecting the pickup and chest spawn rates. Another extra is "near death" detection. Simply put if you end up in a really bad situation at some point, the game tries not to punish you even harder on the next dungeon level
These changes are subtle, so they keep the game challenging, but they were introduced to make it more fair at the same time.



Boss confusion

Some people found the boss level corpses confusing. I don't know if the new version will work out better (this is not the first time I change this :S ), but now the number of corpses (below the one serving as the story hint) are tied to the unlock progress of the boss entry in the monster book.



I know some other unlocks still need more and better hints too. I'm going to work on these problems in the near future...

Am I still alive?

Yes, pretty much. Due to personal and financial reasons I had to put full-time game development on hold for a long while, but I'm back now and I will be working on my projects in the upcoming months. Before I vanished from the face of the INTERNETZ I teased possible ports and a bigger content update for I Am Overburdened. These are not forgotten and progressing well In a week or two I will reveal more details about my plans.

Until then, have a fun-filled time.
Thanks for reading and take care!

[Spidi]

Hi there!

Maybe I should start with some rambling about why I've been dormant for so long, but I want to jump right into the details of the latest I Am Overburdened update I've just released. I'm leaving the boring bits to the end !

Update

Version 1.2.1. has a plethora of changes, but most of these are fixes, tunings and other tiny additions. All in all it is not THE huge content update I've been teasing, but it has a bunch of nice things I hope many will appreciate.



The game has been localized to German ( ...) and Spanish ( ...). With this second set of official translations the game now supports 7 languages ! Hopefully this way even more players will be able to enjoy the wacky descriptions and dialogues I would love to add even more in the future, but I can't make promises yet as these take time and money. Will try my best.

Special thanks to the translators for their work:
Nico Weiß (canemus): German, Juan Buleo (PsychoKurt): Spanish

Mouse and UI

When I Am Overburdened launched it lacked proper mouse support. I patched-in this feature shortly after and I tried upgrading it ever since, but there are still a few ideas left worth pursuing.

Book graphics and controls



The menu book graphics were improved with a simple trick and all the screens received separate "Back" and "Close" buttons. This way it is way easier to navigate them (some menu "stacks" were quite deep) + now it is possible to move around with only the left mouse button easily.

In-game UI



There is a new book icon under the health-bar for opening the menus. Again this allows left mouse button only navigation during play.

Inn renovation



The same way the user interface needed some changes to better support controlling the game with mouse only, the inn had to be updated a bit to accommodate. I added a journal next to the innkeeper which can be used to access the main menu.

Stash confusion



Many players claimed that they did not notice the "Stash" in the inn and had no idea about collecting starting items. Mea culpa, this was a big design error on my end. Now when it has items in it there is a smoke effect triggered when entering the inn similar to the ones accompanying other unlocks and play variants. Hope this helps in discovering the unlocked starter items.

Bug-fixes and tweaks

Besides adding new languages a lot of localization fixes found their way into the game. Layouts of the menus were changed a little to make translated content better fit them. I also increased the item pickups notification time for longer fluff texts as translators suggested.



A small balance change was applied too. The luck penalty on nightmare difficulty has been decreased to 3 from 5. It is not a heavy impact modification, but it does make nightmare an itsy-bitsy less luck based.

Path-finding



I made a mistake in the underlaying path-finding system which caused a rare but weird issue when controlling the player with the mouse. Fixed!

That is all for this update, but soon more will follow!

So what's up?

Sadly In the last six months I had to face a lot of difficulties (financial, personal and housing/moving related). Due to this I left the game hibernated and as a result its community dwindled

I really wish to do a 180 on this. I'm going to have free time for making updates in the upcoming months and I already re-organized my TODO list and plans. I'm also working on a somewhat "new" project pretty closely related to I Am Overburdened

To sum it up, I really had neither time, nor money or energy to work on the game. Thankfully it looks like now I'm on track to complete updates I've been dying to deliver for months now

Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
Stay tuned!

[Spidi]

Hello everyone!

New I Am Overburdened update, new entry
This time instead of launching new content or features I'm upgrading the graphics of the game a little.

Graphical facelift

As I hinted before on social media I've been working on multiple graphics related changes. This is the first update for I Am Overburdened focusing only on the visual aspect. If the response is good I may create another similar one
Let me know what you think!

Auto-Tiling

The biggest graphical improvement is the auto-tiling feature of the dungeon levels. In short, it is a technique to (dynamically) change tiles based on their neighbors to achieve a much less "blocky" look and to add depth to the scenes.



To me, the difference is night and day. It does make the grid structure of the levels less readable (functionally may be a bit of a downgrade), but it makes the dungeons feel much more claustrophobic so all in all, I feel like it is a big win

Some technical details:



The most flexible and well-established method is the "blob" or 8-way auto-tiling where you create special tile graphics with the required corners for all the relevant neighbor combinations (47 exist, the first part of the image). Each neighbor is represented by a bit (power of 2 value, the second part of the image) and by combining the flags of the ~important matching neighbors you get a unique value identifying the required tile.

Even though I coded a system like this long ago I decided to go with a different technique because of the amount of graphical work required...



So I switched to the "sub-tile" approach. It is super simple to implement and requires much less sprite work while still achieving a similar result. The idea here is to split tiles which require special corner graphics and check the relevant neighbors for each corner. To cover each situation 4 variants are required so 16 sub-tiles. Based on the horizontal, vertical and diagonal neighbors of a given corner the appropriate sub-tile graphic can be selected and voila. Auto-tiling.

Crystal clear

The looks of the last episode in the game received some valid criticism. My original goal was to make the "Crystalline Cavern" a bit confusing. Almost like a place full of mirrors. I think I went a little overboard and visual clarity suffered a lot.



I've redrawn parts of the tile-set, recolored the rest and a new walking effect was introduced to preserve the reflecting and mirror-like feeling.

Rain

The ambient sounds in the inn just weren't doing it justice. I added some splash effects outside of the building to set a more convincing mood.



Bugs & Performance

The fixes and optimizations are graphics related too. The biggest enhancement is the introduction of multiple (rendering) layers within the effect system and overall improved effect handling performance.

Effect layers

This problem probably did not bother many players, but some environment effects looked funny before the introduction of multi-layer spell effects.
Fixed!



Mouse control sprites

There was a tiny sprite state related bug which could only occur when controlling the game with the mouse. Not anymore.



Spell performance

Although the game could always run on a "toaster" hitches and frame-spikes during spell heavy moments weren't uncommon. This is now a thing of the past.



Next stop?

Work continues on I Am Overburdened. The planned content expansion pack is shaping up nicely. So far, I deliberately kept concrete info about it to the minimum since I'm still really bad at estimating the work left and I would like it to be a surprising and bigger release. This means the upcoming few updates will be similar to this and the last one (just a bunch of tiny changes), but I'm going to start teasing the new features in the following weeks

Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
Take care!

[Spidi]

Hi there!

So it came to pass, that only a tiny update gets completed within two weeks while working on another way bigger project
Hopefully, the user interface enhancements in I Am Overburdened version 1.2.3. will be appreciated still.

The book of monsters

The biggest (albeit functionally neglectable) change is the new "Book of Monsters" layout. Now the unlocked monsters can be explored using a scrollable grid just like in the case of the "Tome of Artifacts". It looks much less crammed + this was a necessary change for the future



Yep, this also means new monsters will join the party with the upcoming bigger content update (currently it looks like 4 to be more exact) and for this to happen the presentation had to be changed beforehand to accommodate.

Scroll madness

All the scroll-bars (not just the new monsters book one) were updated to handle up/down clicks too + screens where scrolling grids reacted to mouse movement (Stash, Treasury), were fixed since they could produce horrible noises with the quickly changing focused artifacts.



Nearby beasts

How could I forget about this feature?! The same thing was implemented for the "Tome of Artifacts" with nearby items long ago, but somehow I missed this one. Opening the "Book of Monsters" next to an enemy now selects it immediately.



Tome hot-keys

I also added hot-keys for accessing the tomes (Left Ctrl + A for the "Tome of Artifacts", Left Ctrl + M for the "Book of Monsters") with only one press as they may be opened semi-frequently during play. The input guide was updated to reflect these changes.



In-game inventory on steroids!

A real nemesis of mine. I could not find a good way to notify the player about nearby items so far. I tried multiple things in the past (some even made it into the game), but I was never satisfied.
I think I got it now? I really like the current version. Let me know what you think!



Little development history

One thing I tried long ago was changing the color palette of the slots which may be affected by a neighbor item pickup. Empty slots became lighter and used slots became red. I scrapped this approach because I could not find good enough color variants and it generally did not look that useful.



To give at least some help to the players I decided to add in-world slot notifications. I liked them quite a lot so I released this feature a while ago, but I admit that functionally it was not best (e.g.: with a full inventory the slot icons don't help too much )...



Then it hit me! Don't change the slots I have to focus on, change the ones I don't have to focus on. May sound counter-intuitive, but it worked way better than my first color based attempt



It wasn't a ~perfect solution though. I just could not pinpoint the best time when to fade in and out unrelated slots. It looked a bit chaotic. With some iteration, I worked it out though. If there is a rapid change just forget the whole thing (disable the feature) so it doesn't bother the player and only fade out the unneeded slots if the player stays still a little nearby an item (or items).

Summer Sale

In the meantime I Am Overburdened also joined the Summer Sale!



You can buy it at Steam or at itch.io for dirt cheap (50% Off - 2.49$, may vary based on region).

   

What's next?

This is the first "teaser" update where changes related to the expansion pack crawled into the official build of the game and I shared tiny but concrete info about what is to come. Expect a few more updates like this in the upcoming weeks, but soon (hopefully really soon) I will unleash a bigger and better I Am Overburdened upon the world

Thank you very much for following my progress and for all your support.
Stay tuned!