Demo Reaction

We released the playable demo 2 weeks ago, and the reaction has been way huger than we ever expected. Comments, plays, wishlists (please wishlist on Steam), and even trending as 3rd most popular game on all of Itch.io! It's an amazing feeling to see people actually understand our inspirations and care about the mystery we are putting so much work into building. Thank you, thank you, thank you SO MUCH. You have no idea.

Your Questions Answered

We've been getting lots of questions (mostly about about the "full game") and I want to try my best to keep you all in the loop:

Release Date

By far the most frequent question is "when is the full game coming out?" The short answer is: not soon. The demo is really all we have so far, the rest of the game only exists on paper. And because we didn't expect a big reaction, our paper design was very minimal (maybe 1-hour long) And would have taken a few months to make. But the reaction HAS been big, so we've spent these 2 weeks going back to the drawing board and fleshing out the design to include a lot of things we thought we had to cut. We're still figuring out the exact scope. We're being responsible adults about it because we don't have infinite time and money, and there's only so much we can expect to earn back. But we are really narrowing down on some possibilities.

Ports

We're being asked if the game will be released for consoles and other languages. We'd love to! But the English PC version is definitely what we'll work on first. We'll worry about other releases when we are further along. Porting and localization is a LOT of work. Even if other people are helping us, it still takes some of our time. Since our team is only two people every little bit of time matters.

Difficulty

Another question we're getting: The Spotlight is too easy, will the full game be more challenging? "Challenge" is really tricky because the right balance can be different for each person. We made the call to keep The Spotlight pretty easy in the demo so people would actually finish it. In the full game we want him to be INTENSE and we are prepared to put a lot of work into getting it right.

PS1 Look

We're also getting questions about our PS1 look. A full breakdown is something we'd love to do for a future update. Our overall goal is to evoke the PS1 look without being SO strict about it. We're really picking and choosing what WE think looks good. Some people are saying that our filters are too intense. We'll be constantly tweaking the filters until we finish, so feedback is considered. The full game will also have an accessibility option to tone things down.

Content

And lastly we are getting lots of questions about what will be in the final game. More enemies? More gear? More locations? Etcetera. The simple answer is an excited "YES"! We have all of those things planned, but we won't know what will make it into the final game until we test and iterate and make sure it's fun. We're really not sure how much to share about specific content because it dips into spoiler territory. A big element of horror games is the mystery and the surprise of seeing things for the first time. So it might be shame to give things away so early. That's something we'll have to figure out as we continue to update you.

Thank You

We'll try to update you again when we have a better idea of scope and schedule. But now we really need to get back to work! Thank you so much for following us on this journey. Wish us luck! Bryan and Crista, Cozy Game Pals

[ 2022-05-04 00:36:09 CET ] [ Original post ]