💀 It's a Wunder-full Life! 💀

Belated Hello!

This is my third(?!) post of the year, the year I’m trying to be more consistent… Oh well, next years goal will also be consistency and at least that will be… consistent.

The first major update is that we launched Wunder: The Double-Sided Deckbuilder in Early Access on May 4th. It was during the Deckbuilders Festival and the thinking was that releasing a game during the festival (even with a very small amount of wishlists) would be a solid way for people to discover the game.

Overall, Wunder has unfortunately not made much of an impact.

A big part of the reason for that is how allergic to marketing I am. I also didn’t expect there to be 1000-ish games in the festival, this coupled with so many of them being filled with genAI made discoverability feel a fair bit worse during that festival than I’ve been lead to believe they usually are. I also don’t know any of this for a fact though!

Wunder might not be as good as I think it is.

I believe it is good of course, but it’s important to consider when making the decision to put another year into development.

There is a lot of room to be hopeful, the wishlists since launch have gone from around 400 to 1715 meaning people are interested in a game like this. So far the game has sold 316 copies and had 41 refunds (10 - 12% is the average for early so I’m not too worried about that).

It has 24 reviews that are all positive, with a few saying really kind things and remarking on the potential for the game. At least 2 people (that don’t know me) have played for about 30 hours and unlocked everything the game has to offer currently; I didn’t expect that to happen this early, but it makes me very happy!

The current live version of the game is v0.3.12. That’s not a random number, it’s where I believe the game is at, the next big update (v0.4) will genuinely be about 40% of what the final game is gonna be.

The major feedback I can take from people who refunded that I believe would like it at launch, is that the Player Fantasy isn’t solid enough yet. If you like the puzzle aspect of Balatro you’ll love the game, but if the aesthetics / vibes are the most enjoyable, or the story of Slay the Spire; Wunder just isn’t there yet. Even I think that!

v0.5 is when I’m going to try to address that in a big way, I’ll talk more about that in a later post!

The big hope is that eventually we can sell 200 - 400 copies a month, that’s when it will fund my outgoing bills and make life feel less anxious. If this doesn’t happen anytime soon, it’s not a super big deal; it just means I’ll slide a little more into debt haha. I’m in an incredibly privileged situation where I have a small safety net (my amazing partner who is the certified breadwinner tm), if I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to do any of this.

Wunder has been retitled to ‘Wunder: The Double-Sided Deckbuilder’! Whilst that might seem a bit odd or on the nose, I made the decision because as a 2 person team, we’re just not gonna get a lot of eyes on the game, so I wanna make sure the gap between “what’s that” and “oh it’s a deckbuilder” is as narrow as possible.

Weirdly, the motivator was the first Fallout game, which was marketed as ‘Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game’.

Seems silly to not know what it is now, but when it launched you really had to let people know what the game was as fast as possible.

The hope with this change is that it’s a multiplier. So if someone plays the game, their friends see “Wunder: The Double-Sided Deckbuilder” pop up and they’re like “oh, I like deckbuilders, what makes this one double-sided?”.

The biggest addition coming in the next update are Potions, but they also open up the possibility of all kinds of consumables (I have at least 3 planned atm). They’re a fun little game changer, giving the player a little bit extra to do during a turn.

There’s quite a bit planned for v0.4 (A new deck, new difficulty, shop rework, etc.), it’s taking a while cause I’ve refactored a bunch of stuff to clean up some tech debt and just make things feel nicer. I also made a big step towards controller support, hoping to get that in for v0.5.

I think some of the major updates will be monthly, but a few of them will be seasonal. It’s sad that it takes that long but it’s just me really working on it and I can only go so fast without burning out.

I climbed Ben Nevis finally completing the 3 peaks of the UK!

At the end of January I was at 7.17% complete for my 2024 goals, it was behind but only by a single percent!

I’m now around 32%, but we’re nearly halfway through the year… this is not good. What is good is that it reminded me to write this newsletter!

I’ve tried to adjust my habits to hopefully catch up and complete more goals, trying to cut out social media and just read books if I don’t wanna work. It’s a bit on the nose but my mantra lately is “Work or Rest, but Rest, don’t Rot”, it’s silly but it is working haha.

I never know how to sign off… goodbye!