Soul Reaper: Unreap Commander Out Now On Steam

Power Level Studios have released their strategy RPG Soul Reaper: Unreap Commander on Steam Early Access. The game is featuring about 1/5th of the planned content, with obviously lots more on the way. The studio posted on their Steam page why they went with the Early Access route.

It's mostly about content creation. You see, we're aiming to have 100+ monsters and 400+ loot, and drawing and animating all that takes time. Now, having 100+ monsters sounds arbitrary, doesn't it?

I assure you it isn't! We want every monster to be unique. And by that, I don't just mean visually and stats-wise, but I mean that it's useful in some situations, but may be less optimal in others. Plus, with 100+ monsters, there are many unique ways to work out synergies between other monsters and leads to more interesting team builds.

The full releasse is planned for Q4 of this year, and by going with early access you can shape the future of the game:

“Price will not change when we leave early access. But! By taking part of our development journey, you'll have your say on how you want the game to shape up. It's like being an assistant-designer. Just without getting paid. Mwahaha!”

Now LIVE on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/775920/Soul_Reaper_Unreap_Commander/ Soul Reaper: Unreap Commander is an asynchronous multiplayer version of Soul Reaper, focusing on monster team building as well as Soul Reaper's signature fast turn-based combat, and loot and souls systems. Assemble teams of Unreaps and train them against pre-defined challenges, or compete online against other players' teams and earn epic loot and souls!

Check out the game on Steam and follow the gang on Twitter.

Drum roll please.... #SoulReaper: #UnreapCommander is FINALLY OUT AND LIVE! Catch it while it's hot and steaming (sorry) on #Steam! And, feel free to let us know what you think about this little guy and his team of #unreaps! https://t.co/OaF6spq7vA#indiedev #gamedev #indiegame pic.twitter.com/rz6eWkmmhf

— Power Level Studios (@PowerLvlStudios) April 24, 2018

Guest Post - How our first game project accidentally reached 3 million players

The following guest post is copied from Medium with the author's permission. Danny Forest is the creator of Soul Reaper from Power Level Studios and wrote about his experience with his game reaching 3 million players in an unconventional way. Make sure to follow his studio on Twitter.

How our first game project accidentally reached 3 million players

During a recent interview with Gaming Reinvented (https://gamingreinvented.com/), I opened up on the “success” of our “first” title: Rogue Sharks Arcade, which has been played by over 3 millions players around the world.

I thought this may be an interesting story for other developers, so I’m sharing it here.

Here’s the question and the answer as a preview:

Rogue Sharks Arcade seemed to be your first game, and it was pretty damn successful. Did you imagine it’d have 3 million+ players?

Rogue Sharks Trailer

Haha, this one’s a good story I think. Rogue Sharks Arcade was some kind of “accident”, both the game itself and its “success”.

I started working on Soul Reaper back in September 2013 and came to the realization that the game was way too ambitious for a first game. I would need money to hire artists and more, but didn’t have the money. So I thought making a simple mobile game, similar to the classic gravity-based helicopter web game, would be my way out. For some reason, Sharks was the first theme that came to mind. I thought Rogue Sharks would take one month to build. I had limited Unity experience back then, but that’s not why it took much longer. It took about a year to build. The game just wasn’t fun enough by my standards, so I re-did it a few times with different mechanics. I released Rogue Sharks Arcade two months in, since the game had enough content to be a full-game loop.

Classic gravity-based helicopter game.

I released it on the web on Kongregate and was hoping to get feedback so I could improve it for mobile after. Money was not the target here. About 200 people played it on Kongregate and had a score of 3/5, confirming my assumptions: it’s not a very good game.

But here’s the interesting part: how did I get from 200 players to 3M+? The short answer: it was stolen and put on MANY other websites around the world. You see, I was too dumb to protect it, and I didn’t even put my company logo or the game title in the game, so people just rebranded it and claimed it as their own. It got featured on lots of Chinese, Turkish and Russian websites. There was no English text in the whole game. Everything was icon-based, so it was accessible in any language

BUT, because of that incident, I got exactly what I wanted: feedback. With 200 players, I got close to no feedback, with 3M+, there were plenty of players to give feedback. I had to track websites down and translate feedback back to English, but still, there was lots of feedback. But that’s not all, I was tracking everything in the game using Game Analytics. I knew exactly how people were playing, so I knew how to improve the game for mobile.

But then at that point I was travelling around the world with my wife for about a year, so I didn’t have much time to make the mobile version. But I did it anyway. I stopped Chiang Mai, Thailand, to work on it for one full month and finished it. So Rogue Sharks for mobile exists, and is a much better game than Rogue Sharks Arcade on the web. I never released it though, because it’s still bad in my opinion. We were in 2016 then and there’s millions of games in the App Stores. A lot of them are great and have a much bigger budget than we had at the time. Unless I found a good partner to release the game, I figured there was no point releasing a game no one would discover and play. Plus, we’re Power Level Studios, we want to make great RPGs, not game genres we know nothing about.

So yeah, the game was “successful” for what we tried to achieve, but definitely no commercial success. And yeah 3M+ was definitely not expected!

Conclusion

Getting your game stolen is not necessarily all bad. We got the feedback we needed to make a better version of the game for mobile, which would not have been possible otherwise.

Is it a valid marketing strategy? Well maybe. If you’re a little smarter than I was and add ways to track actual players’ contact info, it may be one of the best ways to get discovered.