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Back in 2014, we were a bit lost at Pixelnest. Matthieu (my former business partner at the time) and I tried many direction, without fully committing to any of them.
The initial plan was to “work together” and we had a great idea of a cooking app. But when we realized we only had a year of cash ahead of us, it was time to wake up.
We took (very) little contracts, and we got one with a cool local video game festival, the Stunfest. Our mission was to create a little shoot’em up game where backers from a crowdfunding platform would create a player or an enemy ship in pixelart, based on their pledge.
The Shmupfest was born! I did most of the game, especially the bullet engine based on BulletML but in Unity. Matthieu did the ship editor, and we ended with a quite funny game:
After that we thought… why not replace those absolutely copyrighted stuff with our own sprites and sell the game?
That’s 3 months of work and voilà. Steredenn SUPERMASSIVE was born.
We asked our friend Simon Coroller (Plus) to draw some cool ships for us. He did that, and we were SO. HYPED.
On the dev-side, things went wrong. Of course we could not just “replace the sprites”, we wanted to add cool new features: content, dialogs, challenges…
But worse: we lost the original juicy feeling. I still don’t know why, it’s a weird mix of sprites sizes, speeds and settings….
It took us 6 months to get back an okay-ish version of the game! That’s the one we had with us at some events like EGX Rezzed 2015.
The game was stupidly difficult back then: 3 hits and you were dead, no matter what the source was. We quickly realized we’d better change to a 10HP bar and 1-2-3-4 damages sources if we wanted some players to go further than the first boss!
We’ve recorded some of those old and lost prototypes, you can watch a retrospective here (sorry, 720p only):
Then one day, we received a very serious letter from a very well established studio forcing us to change the name, or face legal consequences.
It was very difficult to find a new one. At some point, we thought at “RATATATATA” because it was the sound of the starting weapon! (Turns out it’s now the title of one of the best song on earth). We finally chose “Steredenn,” which means “the stars” in Breton, and I still think it's a very cool name.
We exhausted our unemployment benefits and decided to release the game in Early Access in May 2015.
The months that followed were difficult, chaotic, exhausting: no money, a game to finish, lots of feedback from players... Some weeks of work ended on Sunday at 8 p.m. and started again on Monday at 9 a.m.
We knew we were in the final stages, that this was our only way out. I’ll never forget how hard that was and how I never want to live that again.
Still, Early access has been a blessing for us. We had a good player base that gave us great feedback. The Upgrade system, for example, came from a player. It has really benefited the game.
And fortunately, the launch in October 2015 was successful! We contacted nearly 500 YouTubers and press people for the occasion, as we knew we couldn’t miss our shot. And it worked! Indeed it was easier back then.
I wish we had the 1/3 of this cover for the release of CTHULOOT!
Thanks to Olivier Penot (now Seaven Studio), we gained access to the console world. We ported the game on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, which was not common at the time for small indie teams. And it was quite a technical challenge!
We also did an iPhone/iPad port that, you’ll see later, sold really well.
When the Nintendo Switch was released, it took us some time to get access to a kit and the SDK. To convince our publisher and Nintendo, we designed the giant Binary Stars DLC: coop mode, new playable ships, new content, new systems.
Binary Stars has, simply put, nearly all the stuff that couldn’t fit in the game at he first place. The 8 months of work on this DLC were awesome!
If you played the game, you’ll probably agree that it is a much better game now.
And yes, that’s the only thing you want, here they are!
We can’t share all the details, but of course sometimes we had some deals that doesn’t reflect on units count. Like an Xbox Gamepass or a Humble Monthly.
Total units sold: ~100k
Total revenue : ~450k€
Total players estimated: 250k
Breakdown:
And I’m sure you also want charts:
Lifetime:
Looking at those numbers you may think we got rich!
But keep in mind that:
it’s on a 10 years period
taxes are around 50% of your salary in France for an executive (2000€ income means + ~1000€ of taxes)
Etienne Marque (Sound Design) and Simon (2D art) have a revenue share
But I’m not complaining, we had some great years, of course.
We could have done another game just after Steredenn, but in fact we never had more than 6 months of cash ahead of us.
And we were so broken by the crunch of the release. We mostly did contract and education before doing the great Binary Stars update.
While the team has changed in 10 years, we decided to get back on a new game in space!
STEREDENN 2?!
Nope! Not yet. Maybe never, we don’t know. The good ol’ shoot’em up market seems pretty dead on Steam. Everything is a Bullet Heaven / Survivor now.
Our next game will be called “Cosmo Cargo” !
Curious?
(Oh, and Zander is cooking a surprise too for the anniversary 🤫)
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