This has been a hectic weekend with activities completely unrelated to Galantrix… Events to go, chores to do. So, this is going to be a quick update.

This week, I finished Outsider “0.3.0”, a release candidate for the public Demo! Unfortunately, playtesters couldn’t yet play it because of an unexpected step in the Steam private playtesting process. I could have done it weeks ago, but didn’t know I could. If I can get the build approved quickly, we’ll have our first playtest done through the Steam client! This is really exciting and an important step towards validating Outsider for the public Demo. If all goes well, the Demo should be available on March 3rd!

Besides the finishing touches on the Demo build, which included the final reviews on chapters 1-4, volume normalization & mixing of all game audio and last minute polishing, I spent a considerable time trying to improve the wishlist rate of people going to the Outsider Steam page. Unfortunately, the metrics that would have enabled me to do a proper A/B testing weren’t working well. Wishlist reports weren’t in sync with wishlist actions, and I went 2 days without any reports at one point. Because of the system’s flakiness and the fairly spartan metrics, it’s hard to correlate store page changes to wishlist rates. My conclusion is that Steam doesn’t support this optimization workflow very well, and I’ll have to change my approach or be patient.

Oh, before I forget… Galantrix was accepted as a panelist at the Atlanta Sci-Fi and Fantasy Expo! I’ll be talking about my solo gamedev experience and, of course, show Outsider to the entire conference. The expo will happen on March 15-16, and I’ll let people know once I have a confirmed time slot. Exciting times!