Hey there! It's been a while since I made any updates to the page but I just wanted to say a few words about how things are going and what the future of this game is/could be! It's been almost 2 years since I first launched the game and had some small updates here and there to clean things up and stuff. By now a lot of people have played this game, though! There have been 10k+ downloads which is wild to me! Some of those people even like the game which is neat. 

I've wanted to do a postmortem for this game for a while. This isn't that. The game is still alive and stuff for now because I am still planning one last big update for it. I want this update to be huge and really make this game the best it can be so that won't happen for a while. Mostly because of personal reasons. Money is an issue. Mental health is an issue. Etc etc etc. If you've been reading my posts around, you know I've been considering a Kickstarter. I'd first and foremost want to keep this update free for everybody who already has the game which is why I'm considering a crowdfund campaign so that those who contribute can get their unique quirks added to the game and everybody else gets the update for free. That campaign won't happen for a while, though. I want people to have a chance to participate if they want and right now money is tight for basically all of us. It's also difficult to find a publisher or anything like that for this game because well. It is a silly grimy game about rats and tens of thousands of people already own it (because it was in the Racial Justice and Equality itch bundle a few months ago) so something like that probably won't happen. (But hey, if you happen to represent a publisher and like my work, my email box is open!)

Anyway, I won't get too deep into the things I want to add to the game, don't want to spoil things too much. I do want to say that the parts of this game you love will still be there obviously, and it'll be more than just "oh more rooms and dialogue and minigames" but some benefits to exploring and intricate ways things are randomized, like randomized sentences themselves for different "species" of rat npcs. Maybe some ai stuff? There will be more minigames and bosses and endings and reasons to explore around rooms though. Lots to think about!

Anyanyway. Lemme actually get into that pre-postmortem. 

Do I consider "Sewer Rave" a success? Well everybody defines success differently and for a while I thought success was just "oh did you make a profit" which, would have been nice but honestly that's a big ask for a first paid game with a very small audience at the time. I did not make much money on this. I didn't even charge that much because it's so experimental and really not even that big of a game. I didn't want somebody to be disappointed they didn't feel like they got their money's worth. Meanwhile somebody who really did get a lot out of it would feel great about their purchase, which seemed nice to me.

But success isn't all about money. It's about growth, and if people had fun. At least that's what I think. I definitely learned a lot and got more comfortable in Unity. Going back to the project I'm surprised by a few things, 1. how easy SOME things are to update, and 2. how difficult OTHER things are to update. There's a lot of scripts that don't do anything, and a lot of other scripts that are very specialized and only appear once or twice for certain cases. If I were to spend a lot of time, there's a lot of cleaning I'd have to do, including going back to each scene and making sure things get fixed. I'm not looking forward to that but it'll be a good lesson in making scripts more reusable and generalized. 

I don't remember how exactly I thought to include the Twitch chat integration. I think I was just thinking about how goofy and random a lot of the dialogue can be and thought that Twitch chats tend to be very similar to that, and games with integration like that were always really fascinating to me. Sewer Rave is already a really fun game to watch someone play and experience and be confused by, and including an audience that can influence that just adds to the fun! This was a great idea I think. While it didn't drive too many extra sales, most of my favorite streamers eventually played it and had fun with it which was extremely neat. It's just very special to have made something that a ton of people get to watch and have fun experiencing! 

So honestly just between of all the Unity skills I developed and getting to watch so many people play and enjoy and seeing audience reactions, it's a successful game. There's probably a lot of other things I'm forgetting. Oh yeah! It was also at Bit Bash Chicago in 2019 which was my first time going to a game's show. That was really neat. There's probably other things I'm forgetting too. But for now this is just what I think! I didn't expect to write so many words about silly rat game and I don't know how many people will read all of this! But thank you for reading and enjoying my games! It means the world to me!

I probably won't write up this much about this game until the real postmortem after the update, so until next time!

Autumn Rain!

P.S. Here's a radioactive elemental rat who will be a character in the update: