What next?

[Karsten75]

OK, Virgil, are you planning to upgrade/refine CW more or is there a CW2 in the works?

I got hooked on TD games by playing GemCraft and then GemCraft Chapter Zero. If there was a GemCraft 3, I might not have been here.

Right now I've played all the games, conquests and challenges in normal mode and are slugging through Double Down mode.  (Wish there was a little star or something to show which ones I've conquered in Double Down mode - hint!)

I've played some custom maps and mostly find them not as attractive as the regular in-game maps. No offense to the creators, but it takes a lot of proactice to build a well-balanced map. Simply removing some of the units does not to me make it an appealing option to play the map.

In general, I think that CW (and no offense here) suffers a little from that once one understands the dynamics, the same basic strategy will conquer any/all maps.

[knucracker]

No offense taken...

In generate Creeper World will have a finite lifetime for each player.  There is no way for me (just little ole me) to maintain a game in flux and keep it entertaining for and extended period of time.   I try my best and hardest to make sure it is worth every penny of 10 bucks and then some... but like any favorite toy it will eventually be put down.

I think that Total Annihilation is probably the best game I have every played, but I've not played it in years.  I have fond memories, but it just isn't a toy I play with anymore.

Creeper World will probably get achievements and will get facebook integration.  I'll make some small updates to the overall game based on feedback as well.  After that there could be a CW2 or more likely a CW 1.5.  It might be an official and canonical extension of the Creeper World story and introduce some new units and some new game modes.  Like and expansion pack basically. 

The decisions will all be based on mundane things like total sales and how the popularity curve for Creeper World looks a month from now vs the resource investment and expected return on effort.  Sounds like real fun doesn't it? :)

But, I'm pretty pumped about achievements and FB integration..... and oh yeah....
I _might_ decide to release a game update that will create repeatably random mission levels.  But nobody hold me to it :)

[Karsten75]

The decisions will all be based on mundane things like total sales and how the popularity curve for Creeper World looks a month from now vs the resource investment and expected return on effort.  Sounds like real fun doesn't it? :)

Well, I hope you enjoy it!

I would be really interested to see how CW is faring out in the wild. Would you care to share with us on a monthly basis some statistics for sales. downloads, map downloads and so on?

Oh and BTW, yea it was worth the $10. Perhaps even $15.. ;)

[knucracker]

I can share some sales stats.... but only after about another month.  I don't want to draw any conclusions till after then.  The game was actually released on July 27, 2009.  I tried different market techniques in the months following the release.  Releasing the free training sim game was the biggest marketing effort.  Most of you reading this message are here because of that.  That is all still in progress so the results will mostly be based on that effort.  I can say currently that sales are pretty good for a low budget indie title with no marketing budget. :)

I like to think this is because the game itself is compelling enough that the demo to purchase ratio is unusually high for an indie desktop game.  I'm very pleased to say that when people give CW a shot, they for the most part like it.  Now like any PC game, pirates are my number one user... but I can't do anything about that other than make the game affordable, fun, and a good value. 

Web stat wise, I can say that over the last week there have been an average of about 8000 unique visitors per day to knucklecracker.com (the peak was 12,500 on one day) creating about 24,000 hits per day.  A good portion of them play the training sim.... so I served up about 350G of traffic last month.

Map downloads have taken off recently... I've not even totaled them all up... so lets see 'select sum(do...':
looks like a total of 13,913 total map downloads so far.  This is across the 132 maps that are posted so far (and I'm behind like 10-15 that people have been posting all day and I've been getting email about :)

[betadata]

stop playing in the forums and get to uploading those maps  ;)

[knucracker]

I hear ya :)
I'm just about to get onto that.... 2 more maps came in while I was typing the last reply.

[thomaswarner]

...Releasing the free training sim game was the biggest marketing effort.  Most of you reading this message are here because of that... 

Well, I am one of them. That was a good idea. Maybe you could put it on more sites. I have a thread about it in random discussion because I didn't have a list yet, but the thread is making a list. If you want me to move it I will.

[Cube]

I'm just throwing this out there (not sure if someone already thought of this) But i think that it would be interesting if something similar
to creeper spores form in deep creeper except that their land and can be destroyed by blaster and the other weapons. This is just an idea.  :)

[UpperKEES]

Creeper World will probably get achievements and will get facebook integration.  I'll make some small updates to the overall game based on feedback as well.  After that there could be a CW2 or more likely a CW 1.5.  It might be an official and canonical extension of the Creeper World story and introduce some new units and some new game modes.  Like and expansion pack basically.

I can imagine you first concentrate on the facebook integration as this will introduce CW to many more people and we will all benefit from that. Will the integration be implemented in the near future or do you rather not say anything about this yet?

I also have a question about the expansion pack. Will it allow maps of the current version to be played? If so, would you be able to use the new units, or would it detect the version of the map and only enable the currently existing units? The same goes for the new game modes. I can imagine you stick to the existing units for old maps, but do allow them to be played in the new modes, even when they've not been designed for it (the new modes would have different high score table anyway I presume). This way old maps will still have their value when the expansion pack comes out. I plan to start designing some custom maps myself soon, that's why I'm interested....