I’ve been solo developing a game called Freerunners in my spare time for the last few years. Finding chunks of time to work on it in the evenings and weekends outside of my main job which is pretty time-consuming (also making video games, I’m a lead developer on Marauders).
Freerunners is a parkour game, based on my own experiences of doing parkour from a couple of years ago. I wanted to try and give the feeling I got of finding a flow and rhythm of moving through an environment. Vaulting, climbing, jumping, ducking, swinging, sliding, doing what it takes to complete a route as fast as possible.
PLAY THE FREE DEMO HERE
Let me know what you think and give the game a wishlist if you like it!
I’ve been making slow and steady progress over the years and am getting to a point where I feel more confident about being closer to launching the game. Now I am mainly refining the design of the levels, getting and acting on feedback from people as well as bug fixing, polishing and adding more juice. The core of the game is there, I have all the obstacles, the unlocks and all 50 levels are playable with art.
The next big milestone I had planned on the game’s journey was taking part in a Steam Next Fest. I had been holding off doing one before because you only get one Next Fest per game title. But now with the game being closer to launch I thought it would be a good chance to get some exposure, get more feedback on the game, and see if I could get wishlists (aka if people actually wanted to play the game). The only problem was I didn’t have a demo yet…
So last August (2023), I got to work on creating a demo. I tried taking an exciting section from the middle of the game, but it just didn’t work. The game is very much about learning and using the controls at the right time. Throwing people into the middle of the game just didn’t feel good or work. So I ended up giving people the first levels of the game, where you learn the controls and where it builds to more complex levels. With the last 2 levels being less tutorially and more representative of the games normal gameplay: Thinking about obstacles on the move and getting chased by the bad guys. The whole demo takes around 8-10 min to play and I think it gives a good feel of what the game is. I wrapped it up with some extra UI and blockers to tell people it was a demo and added a button to send players to the Steam page to wishlist the game.
I first uploaded the demo to Steam in September 2023. The plan was to get the demo up early and then keep refining it until the Next Fest, giving plenty of time to iron out bugs, get feedback and act on that feedback. For uploading a demo to Steam and linking it to my main store page this YouTube video was very helpful. Funnily enough, I missed the deadline for applying for the Feb 2024 Next Fest. However, I contacted Steam a few days after the deadline, letting them know I was interested and they let me join it still (thanks Steam). I think having my storepage and demo already up probably helped me out there. So then that was it, I was locked in!
I ended up being super busy in my day job over the months between Oct and the Feb Next Fest and marketing the game definitely suffered, but more on that later on. However, I managed to squeeze out 5 updates to the Demo in that time. These updates were a mix of general improvements that had come naturally while I continued developing the core game but also some things targeted specifically at improving the Demo. For example, I added localisation into 4 languages and the options to change keybindings and screen resolution. After receiving feedback (thanks r/parkour) I also decided to change the design/flow of some of the early levels to have a better rhythm to them. I’m glad I got these changes in as I think they created a more solid and accessible game.
Let’s get to the bit you probably came here to see, the cold hard numbers! I could do the marketing clickbait thing and tell you that I almost doubled my wishlists! But before you get too excited the truth is the numbers weren’t great ha. But it’s been a good learning experience and something I can work and build on, both for Freerunners and games I make in the future!
THE STATS HIGHLIGHTS
I had 154,724 impressions (people “seeing” my capsule art)
2,261 people visited my store page (or 2,430 not sure why the numbers are different)
Of the 2,261 store visits 564 were from external traffic (Roughly a 5th from external traffic the rest were from within Steam)
A click-through rate to view my store page of 1.5%
Wishlists went up from 420 to 755, an increase of 355
If 2,261 people visited my store and I got 355 wishlists, that means I had a wishlist rate to store visits of around 15.7%
Demo plays went up from 194 to 691, an increase of 497
If 2,261 people visited my store and I got 497 demo plays, that means I had a Demo play rate of around 21%
The median demo play time went down by 1 minute to 6 min. (The Demo itself takes about 8-10 min to play through fully)
In terms of countries visiting my store page it was: USA - 29% (714), Russia - 14% (344), Singapore - 11% (268), China - 5% (117), UK - 4% (102), then Hong Kong, Canada and Japan with 3% each, then Germany and France with 2% each
I got the most amount of visits and wishlists on the first day of the next fest, it then declined over the next 2 days and was kind of steady for the remaining days
My Followers increase from 26 to 40
Here are some screenshots of the actual data:
