Oxventure open alpha launch postmortem

Hello, I'm Nate Johnson a.k.a. Hooligan Labs. I wanted to share how we formed a team, made a game and launched "Showdown of the Dungeon"!

Looking back, here is what I learned...

• What worked:
  • Being part of a supportive community
  • Supporting single and cooperative play
  • Test with a group who want to contribute to the game
  • Using tester feedback as priority for game development

• What did not work (or took very long): Making features which broke the core gameplay

This game is inspired by the "Oxventures" series by Outside Xbox, Outside Xtra and Eurogamer. Especially the art by Emilie Bendix Bengmann.  

In the last three months, this game was made from scratch by fans with no budget. And now our game has reached hundreds of players,  is #1 on the charts Web Co-Op, HTML5 Co-Op, HTML5 Dungeon Crawler, and #4 for Web Multiplayer!

I write this not as the best game dev ever. The people who inspired this game talk a lot about how they work, and I want to show the same level of professionalism and transparency.

Here is how it happened...

I had made a few little video games before, and wanted to make something like the great tabletop dice game Dungeon Roll. As much as possible, I wanted it to feature and be inviting to people of all ages and genders.

What inspired me to action was fan art by Brad Rich.  Let me paste a sample here...

Could this be combined into a game that people would want to play? I thought there was a good chance. The "oxfam" are an especially productive group. In my opinion, this is because of the positive feedback loop created by Outside Xbox and Outside Xtra where they share the best video comments and best fan artwork every week. Brad's art is among the featured art.

My idea also passed the confidence test proposed by Tynan Sylvester in his book "Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences". I'm summarizing this  a lot, but he makes a great argument that something that I feel 80% confident about is actually only 30% possible. So Tynan proposes making games by focusing on necessary features that you have the very highest confidence in first. I felt confident I could create a good dungeon run game from a few relatively simple gameplay loops, spiced up with the computer equivalent of dice rolls.

The importance of a "minimum viable product", like a game that is fun and works at its core, is also well explained by Extra Credits!

But first, a test! What would this game look like? I wrote a little code in Unity, added some dungeon-themed props from the Asset Store (especially flickering torches) and shared a video of it:

Yes, the characters are basically on roller skates, but the events are being actually driven by my mouse input. It is like a visual novel at this point.

Did the experiment work? Yes! This video was featured in its full length by Outside Xtra in their weekly video. As a result, Brad and I started working together in earnest. The secret sauce to the gameplay turned out to be a suggestion from my wife. Originally doors would just open and produce random monsters. She suggested the "peek" mechanic where monsters could be briefly seen for each door, which added a much needed memory and skill mechanic.

A month later we actually had something like a playable game!

A good game cannot be made in a vacuum. Experts (like those I mentioned above) stress the importance of getting people involved and playing your game as soon as possible. Furthermore, there are a lot of great dev blogs and postmortems on this topic by Kitfox Games which I highly recommend to other aspiring game makers. They write in detail about the ways, means and results of creating communities around their games. What I found very helpful was their description of their game testing groups. New games are always broken in a thousand ways, and most of those problems just can't be seen by the devs who made the game. It is crucial to have a good sized team who take pride in making a game better through constructive feedback.

I can also thank Kitfox for introducing me to itch.io in one of their tweets! I am glad to have found this place where we can host a browser game and reach as many people as possible on one platform.

Thus I turned to the fan community lead by Ellie a.k.a. Outsidefanstra. Ze responded right away, and with zer help we quickly formed a hand-picked team of alpha testers. Again, we had zero budget and no real timeline. We kept each other motivated. In the words of the highly supportive Caitlin, we did this all for "good content"!

I want to highlight how much tester feedback was crucial to improving the game in a short time. There is a long list of things I would want to do. The "shapeshifting" animation in my original video didn't make it into the final game! However, I really found it valuable to put priority on the things which testers saw as wrong. That fixed problems that really mattered, especially for new players.

One of the first things our team discovered is that everyone wanted a single-player mode. The game was only two-player at first! This lead to a long month where I focused on adding this new gameplay mode. Brad provided new art assets regularly. This may have been the hardest part of development because it required weeks of fundamental, game-breaking code changes before we could actually have fun with the game again. It was worth it. I feel that 90% of games are now played in this mode. It also let us top the Co-Op chart as mentioned above!

With single-player (also co-op) mode in we did a second round of alpha tester invites. I think this was key. Especially because the game was so small, bringing in new players gave us fresh perspectives. They saw the weird or broken things that we had taken for granted. Their feedback did a lot to make this game far more accessible.

As we shared the game progress, many requests came in from the fan community for live-streamed gameplay. We were very fortunate that one of the test team was HeyCee. He volunteered to do the stream with other testers as players.

While we got prepared, Brad made this excellent "box art" for the game...

It took weeks to organize the stream. I found it very stressful! But we did it. Ellie made an announcement to the greater fan community, and Cee did the show.

It was more fun than I could have imagined. We laughed so much! Every aspect of gameplay was explored between friends in a 2 hour stream.

You can watch the original stream at HeyCee's Twitch channel or here:

At the end we made the game open for everyone to play. We were happy with the results. It is considered normal for half as many people to get a game as the day before. Interestingly, I saw a similar trend with this game...

However, things were REALLY kicked off when OutsideXbox retweeted a link to our game launch, saying "these heroes look familiar... 😮 #oxventure". This was like a whole new launch for us, and the effect was huge! In the graph below, our launch day is on the left and you can tell when Oxbox retweeted us on the right.

Where will this go now? I don't know, but I'm excited! I get requests and ideas from people all the time of what they would like to see. I hope more people will come and support us in growing this game.