Our Steam Games Festival Recap (Week 19 Update)

Overview

This week, I review how the Steam Games Festival went! We ran various livestream events and if you didn't catch them when they happened, we have the streams recorded to watch later. I took the last week off to rest up for our next steps forward with the project.

Goals

Showcase the game

Important Dates:

• Steam Games Festival (Demo Deadline: May 15th, 2020, Event: June 16th to June 22nd)
  • The Steam Games Festival wrapped up two weeks ago! It was big event and we are happy to have been apart of it. You can wishlist the game on Steam.

Playtesting

We were doing weekly playtests leading up to the Steam Games Festival and we will consider continuing to do that, balancing playtests with getting in enough fixes for issues that users have in time.

Support User Generated Content

We are running our second ever Story Jam in Discord the next couple of weeks. The theme is "A Party at Ravenheart". I'll be adding new scripting features to allow creators to play around with story telling more.

• What makes this game different from Trauma Center or LifeSigns?
  • We want to expand the game to have more romantic and visual-novel like gameplay. We don't want the game to feel linear and to reward players for engaging with our characters. Supporting user-generated content has also been something that JT and I have been interested with games and we've already seen how one generation of games with modding support can enable the next generation of game developers. We love fandoms and fan-fictions and saw the opportunity to support such content directly within the game.
• Are you planning on introducing a pathogen along the lines of Guilt / Stigma / etc?
  • We don't want to reveal too much information about this, since it can affect the story of the game, but we do have an idea of a kind of pathogen that could exist in the world, codenamed "Strages"
• What's the most high stakes operation we have planned?
  • We are of two minds for this. On the one hand, we have a plan for a more traditional high stakes operation, where you have to quickly perform surgery on an airplane pilot while repairing mechanical malfunctions with the plane. The other train of thought is a quirkier take on "high-steaks" operations, where you assist Big Tex at a large BBQ cookout, grilling steaks and making sure nothing gets charred.

Future Plans

Planning Week

I took last week off to get some rest since the beginning of starting RavenHeart Games. This week, JT and I will talk about what the next milestones for RavenHeart Hospital. We will review more details about how the Steam Games Festival went and how other devs we know found it. We have been talking about more procedures and character episodes to develop. This is a time to reflect on the project and how we push it forward.

The End

I hope you enjoyed this week's edition of our studio's status update. Each week, we try to bring new and interesting updates about how our studio and game are developing that we think people will like and learn from.

If you have any questions, comments, feedback for me, you can email me, Zappy, at zappy@ravenheartgames.com.

If you like this post, you can see more in the Devlog section or check out last week's post.

If you've been a part of our playtests and would like to chat with other players or us directly, join our Discord server below.

If you are interested in playing our latest demo, you can click the button below!