TL;DR: Vargus has been selected by Valve for the upcoming Summer Edition of the Steam Game Festival.

The Summer Festival is an online event between June 9 and 14, during which Steam promotes demos on its main page. It's a huge opportunity for a small developer studio like us: we can show our game to a wider audience, not to mention the chance of it being covered by press and other content creators. So you can imagine that we are really excited to be part of this event. Now, let us see all the things that happened recently around the game in a little more detail. The First Month After Open-World It's hard to believe that we are the end of May already. The first month after revealing the Open-World campaign of Vagrus has been both amazing and exhausting beyond what we expected. We have received tons of feedback; some of you played the game for over a hundred hours. Based on that, we worked hard to patch out a large number of bugs and event script errors, as well as adding some quality of life improvements. Milestone Changes Most importantly and based on our players' insights, we re-prioritized our development milestones to ease the early game learning curve, which proved to be too steep for a lot of new players. Then, once we finished the combat AI improvements, we started working on Tasks. You can read about those two here (Combat AI) and here (Tasks). Demo on Steam Parallel to Tasks and developing content for the next large region to be added, we started to make preparations for our eventual Steam Early Access release and - as an important in-between step - for the release of our Demo on Steam. Turns our it was a good investment of our time as it was picked up by Valve for the festival! The three main reasons why we believe publishing a Demo is a good idea:

• We get a 'temperature check' on how the current level of polish sits with our future players
• We can refine the messaging (if needed)
• It generates hype
• And uhm... buy some time so we can finish implementing the Task system in the background

What do these mean in practical terms? After we release the Demo, players will have the chance to provide feedback on it - what they liked and what they hated; and a lot in between. What captured their imagination and what felt lacking. There is no game that ticks all the boxes for everyone, we know that. We also know that it is better to have a game that some people feel passionate about rather than one most players classify as 'okay'. Nevertheless, it is important to dig into those reviews to understand whether it was a genuine problem that we do want to address, or a mismatch in expectation with what a certain player had. In the case of the first, we have the chance to make changes in the game before we release it into Early Access, while for the second, we need to tweak our messaging to avoid, or at least minimize, such mismatches. Then there is of course the wish to generate hype. People playing the Demo will - fingers crossed - feel passionate about the game and sign up to be notified when it comes out, or even decide to support the development via our currently running crowdfunding campaign. So in conclusion, we hope you check out the Demo at the Summer Festival if you haven't already elsewhere, and let us know what you think!