One Week After Release
Deep Space Classic Patch Notes — September 6, 2018
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
(A personal post by the developer)
Hi, I just wanted to go over my personal experiences and what it was like to have my first game released on Steam.
I think for probably the first half hour it was the greatest moment of my life, and every moment after that has been the worst.
The next few days after release was complete sleep deprivation, I was drinking as much caffeine as I could and every few hours I was pumping out a bug fix or content update. I didn't stop until I had to go to work, where it stormed hard.
It's hard to place this into words, but it was that day 3 that really made things go downhill. I had tried my hardest to explain to the overall community that this game was early access and supposed to be for testing but many were still calling the game greedy due to a lack of content.
I had felt pretty shit at that point having gone 3 days without sleep and I ended up getting into a fight with my family. It rained on my way biking to work and I almost got hit by a swerving truck driver who yelled at me to "get off the road" when it was a highway and I was biking on the shoulder of the road since there was no sidewalk and a railway on my left. I remember getting to work and just feeling depressed and angry.
Depressed that my game wasn't doing well and that I was fighting with my family, but also angry that people couldn't understand. They kept calling me greedy and just being "in it for the money" for the game's lack of content. It pissed me off that they couldn't understand that the release was working exactly as it was meant, it was meant to be a large-scale test to find bugs before adding new content and it was free-to-play. I ended up finally going to sleep after work for only about 5 hours before getting up to work on the game more.
Going to work again the next day I faced another storm and similar thoughts. At this point, my game's views were dropping after several personal attacks on me brought the game's store down. Once again a fight with my family ensued when my mom came in and started a fight with me about how I need to stop taking the reviews "personally" because its "just business" and that she ran her own business and knows what its like, to which I responded with "You don't know you have no idea, if a few people who hated you from high school walked in to your store the plaza doesn't pick up your building and make it disappear like steam does to my game". In-between customers during dull periods I would work w/ pen and paper sketching out a new map for the game.
This work at home on the game took priority to me, after all it was the career I wanted in life but noticing my preoccupation with it my boss cut my hours, leaving me back to eating ramen noodles every day (which was what I was already doing but now I can't even throw a salad in to the mix). My friend had attacked one of the members of my community for which I scolded him and which caused him to also negative review my game out of a temper tantrum.
So here I am, having to push content updates for a game that wasn't yet ready for it, and which got blasted with negative reviews who either didn't understand it was for testing or who just wanted to attack me personally. having my hours cut, in debt $235 for the budget the game won't be making back, my family fighting me, my friend is gone, and the promise from others online that any game that I do publish will get negative reviews by them simply because they don't like me. And all I could wish is that they understood my vision of the game, what I saw it as and what I know it could be. I'm not very good at multiplayer coding but I thought if I tried hard enough it'd work. So now I accept the reality, this game was a bust, and maybe that'll change with these future updates, but for now, I have to accept the hand life dealt me. And so I will continue to work without sleep until the community is happy with what I've created.
Sincerely,
Blake Gillman