Yahallo! ULTIMAHJONG has been approved for participation in the March 25th Deckbuilders Fest! The game itself will not be releasing for a while, but I'd like to get a demo into everyone's hands as soon as possible and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Note that the game is still in a really early state (easily less than 50% done), but I've seen an insane amount of interest in the game so far. I'm hoping to get feedback as early and often as I can manage, and it seems like time to start. I don't think I want to promise a discord server or anything like that, I'm not sure I have the time to keep that under control (full-time student), but I'm definitely at least gonna run a google form with some free response sections.

DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS

The full game will probably release sometime q4, although there's no set-in-stone date and given my relative inexperience I can't promise there won't be delays, but I'm really trying to be pretty conservative with my estimates. To speak broadly on how far along the development is, right now there's use-items, upgrades, a few new tiles, and various dora colors implemented in the game. I'd like to at least double the amount of items and upgrades, but what's present for those categories right now should be fairly representative of the type of stuff I'm looking to add. The main thing I'm hoping to add is a ton of new tile types (that often aren't even tiles) to play around with. None of these are gonna make into the demo due to time concerns, but here's some of the ideas I've been messing with:

D6

The d6 is a "tile" with a suit and a value 1~6. Once every time you draw a tile, you can reroll any d6 in your hand into another random value 1~6. This is fully implemented but not well-enough documented for me to feel comfortable putting in the demo.

DOMINO

Dominos, like d6s, are suited and valued. What makes them special is that they have two values at once, and you can toggle between them at any time. This is not implemented at all. This is all up for change, but I'd like for you to have to choose for one of the two values, not for it to be a sort of knee-capped joker. (Jokers in general will probably come in variated capacities at some point, but it's really easy to completely break a game with jokers that are too strong [see American Mah Jongg, I've got nothing against it but's it's really fundamentally different than Riichi and not what I'm looking to create.] I've seen a few people bring up the Vietnamese Jokers in suggestions to me, they're a good upper limit for how powerful I'm thinking. I really don't want the game to turn into "how many jokers can you add to your deck." I might speak about this at greater length later, now just seemed like a good time to bring it up.)

STEAM INFO

I'm gonna try to be as transparent about this kind of stuff as I'm allowed to (and have time for). ULTIMAHJONG has ~1200 wishlists at time of writing, just two weeks after the page launch. I think this is primarily due to some people with existing following shouting me out (I'm hesitant to @ anyone individual just in case they're not up for the attention, but I really appreciate it!), as well as the Japanese news outlet Game*Spark for their article on ULTIMAHJONG. That article actually hit Japanese audiences before I was even able to finish writing the Japanese store page, lol. The other big thing going well for me is Balatro's success, i think. The Game*Spark article puts in the tagline but yeah, I am basically just Balatro Mahjong. I'm really trying not to just be Balatro Mahjong, I want to bring something a little different to the table, but I mean cmon right the comparison is obvious and deserved. The launch hump seems to have resolved and it looks like I'm averaging 10~15 wishlists a day on down-time, which is pretty solid. I'm hoping for around 10k wishlists at launch which quick maths is: 9000 more wls / ~250 days to launch = 36 wls a day. That's a lot more than 10 but as the data has shown so far it's looking like I'm gonna be riding on events like launches, demos, and fests more than raw wls/day. I really can't make any promises but I'm hoping to release an updated demo every few months before launch, and I think that'll really help drive interest more than just statically existing. Chris Zukowski's excellent reference howtomarketagame.com/benchmarks places my game near the top end of the "silver" bracket of games with the data thus far, and while I'm hesitant to make any conclusions until I've seen a lot more data, I can at least say that ULTIMAHJONG has driven a lot more interest then I ever expected it to. I was wondering if I'd ever even recoup the steam $100 cover fee when I launched the page, lol. That's it for now, I think. Thanks for your support thus far and I'm looking forward to your feedback on the demo!

[ 2024-03-15 15:02:27 CET ] [ Original post ]