The night of launch, we just didn’t sleep. Some advice, indie developers? Release at 10am. Someone would be like, “Oh, I set my monitor in a very specific way, so the game doesn’t run properly.” We fixed all those immediately - pushed like 35 fixes in the first day of launch between midnight and 6am. You just can’t catch compatibility issues unless you have a whole team of hardware QA team. “We have to get this in, this guy has to be wearing this hat!” In hindsight, they were pretty minor. Our priorities started getting pretty weird with the lack of sleep. (laughs) We definitely had some crunch at the end.
What were some of the best and worst parts about launching a game? Did you run into any crunching, last minute fires? How that final “ship it” moment feel?
We used a service called Keymailer, which basically cold-calls streamers, and sent out 2000 or so keys, and had 250-300 accepted. We looked at a few other games that looked pretty polished, and they’re also having bad luck right now.Įven with that, the launch has been going pretty good all things considered - we’ve especially had a lot of success with streamers - we’ve had a lot of people come into games from watching streams. The timing with Steam holiday sales was unfortunate because people are looking for deals. One of our biggest mistakes would probably have been the release date. Sales have been slowly going up, which is good, but it’s unfortunate that Steam has created this kind of ecosystem where if you don’t get that initial boost, you don’t get much visibility, especially if you’re not in the top seller’s list. It’s a slower start than we had hoped for, although reception is positive beyond our imagination.
One thing is that when we released, EA had their big fiasco about Battlefront II, so that was kind of unfortunate (laughs). We didn’t get any big news on the big sites - we tried to do the whole self-starting the press thing with sending out emails, but didn’t get any bites. Reception-wise everyone’s been really liking it. In terms of reviews and reception, it’s been really positive – right now we have a 96% positive rating on Steam. With Slay the Spire newly released – how is the game doing in terms of success, if you don’t mind sharing? Then I left my job, and started working on Slay the Spire full-time as well. The prototype seemed to be hitting the right notes, so we scrapped it and started working on the actual build. We created a prototype, tested it out, and it was great. So Casey left Amazon and we started working on Slay the Spire in 2015. Then Casey and I reconnected and was like, “Hey, we should make games again.”Īnd then Anthony was like “hey, I have this game design document”, for what is now Slay the Spire. I managed that for three years on the side during college, then worked in QA as well at Cequint for about three years. I started managing a board & card game store, Ernie’s Games in Woodinville. I really liked it there - I made a lot of friends, invented the concept of a 3pm toast break - but I started getting bored and wanted to make games. I worked for Amazon as a QA, and was there for four years or so. It didn’t work out, so when we graduated with CS degrees we both just got jobs in the industry in Seattle. We learned a lot of lessons - we weren’t super successful, we were pretty naïve back in the day. We knew each other from going to college in UW Bothell, where we made Flash and mobile games together, just kind of for fun. We actually have a pretty long history, Anthony and I. So, tell us a little bit about yourselves! Today we spoke to their head honchos, Anthony Giovannetti and Casey Yano, about their recent release, their incredible playtesting workflow and data-driven game analytics, and their upcoming plans. Mega Crit Games is a local indie studio with a brand new Steam Early Access launch under their belt called Slay the Spire, a card deckbuilding roguelike.