Where do we go from here?

Greeting fellow gods,

Today I would like to take a moment to share my thoughts about where things will likely go from here. As some of you know, I left my job to focus on game development at the beginning of April, and I wanted to take a short break after the exhausting release week to think about the future of Soulash and beyond.

Before we look into the future, let's look at the present to understand the options available. Soulash was a decent success. I was ready for three different scenarios. The most pessimistic one would repeat the sales numbers of the 3 year long alpha on Itch during that first week on Steam - in that case, the income would not make enough of a difference, and I would likely have to stop developing games. The second one was a mediocre success, I would still need to stay at my job and continue working on games in my spare time, but considering how difficult it got at that point, I would still need to think if continuing would be worth the effort. The best scenario I hoped for was repeating Rift Wizard's success last year, and I'm happy to say I think we matched or even surpassed it slightly, at least in regards to the Steam release week sales numbers.

Before I decided to leave my job, I made some calculations, as the only way for me to do gamedev is the responsible way, where my kids don't starve. The good thing is that I can take a bit of a risk because I have pretty valuable skills in web development, so if things get too hot, I can always get back on the market, granted I don't take too many years to do so, since tech keeps changing rather rapidly.

Getting back to the calculations. As of right now, we have enough funds to work for about one and a half years. That's huge, but at the same time, considering it took 5 years (3.5 years if we recalculate my spare time as a full-time job) to create Soulash, it would be about half of the investment returned, without counting the cost of graphics. The good news is that Soulash may very well sell some more copies over that 1.5 years, so we'll end up with a little more time or funds to invest in the next step of our gamedev journey.

So what comes next? Most of you know about the Kickstarter stretch goals that I wanted for the game in 2021 - Procedural world, Factions, Servants, a new skill-based progression system, Building among other things. I still believe this is the right path to pursue, however, after taking some time to think about it, I believe attempting them in Soulash is no longer a viable option. Last year when the Kickstarter failed to bring us enough funds, we were still in the alpha, without gods, victory conditions, or an ending to the story, the game was flexible enough to go in that ambitious direction and even rebuild some of the big parts of it. After that failure, we had to finish the game or abandon the project, it took almost an extra year, and we had to close some potential paths of expansion to get to 1.0. I took some time recently to think about the potential paths to fit these things into Soulash, but nothing seemed viable.

There is, for example, a way to do it as a separate sandbox mode, and leave the current game as "story mode", but financially it doesn't make sense. Creating these extensive features, and getting them to work together well, will take at least 2 years, consuming more than the current income from Soulash in full. Paid DLC is some kind of option, but DLCs are limited to the players that have the full game, and the numbers are not high enough to have only a portion of them in 1 - 2 years and call it a success. We couldn't rerelease the already released game to get the necessary exposure to continue after that. We also don't have the predictable income from Patreon that some other established roguelike developers may have, so we can't afford to take that route either. It would be a dead end.

That's also why reading some of the reviews and expectations regarding Soulash is so depressing for me. I know the game can be so much more, but the only way to unlock that full potential is to have a lot of money to invest. This is clear to me, that this has to be a profitable business if I want to create an ambitious game, and I have to do what I can to make it such.

So that was the realistic take on the current situation. Now let's talk about more positive things. The release is a big win, and it buys us a lot of time to create the next big things. There will be more sales of Soulash, not as rapid as we had until recently, but I expect we will end up having two years to continue our development, and before that time runs out, we will have to run a Kickstarter or early access of a new game. Developing a new game is critical because 500 people tops would try Soulash without the Kickstarter and Steam release, so going for such massive tasks will have to open these options for us again. I don't see any good enough marketing opportunities with Soulash anymore, unfortunately, and I've spoken with a couple of publishers, but that path is not worthwhile as well. At least that's what my limited knowledge tells me, as this is my first game.

We've already started working on the big stuff, the first one being Procedural World and Procedural History generation, trying to figure out how to build the game with all of the stretch goals at the core of the gameplay and expanding on the story told in the first Soulash. I plan to share development news on Patreon every 1 - 2 weeks when I have something interesting to show. However, for the upcoming couple of months, everything will be in the experimental stage, where anything can be scraped or completely changed while I'll look for fun gameplay. This will also be a perfect opportunity for you guys to participate from a very early stage and tell me what you wish to see in the game. I remember about the rain shadow, Sinful. ;)

As for Soulash, I plan to invest limited amounts of time towards additional development, and we're going to continue our voting to add new stuff every month as long as you are interested. As the game is pretty stable now regarding bugs and crashes, I think we'll move to monthly releases following the Patreon voting content addition. I think it's also important to say that I don't see Soulash being abandoned any time soon. I still have some pretty cool ideas for races and professions that I would love to implement, and I plan to reuse the engine to create more games, so some new parts may be backported at some point. I plan to keep expanding on Soulash further as long as it won't put our financial stability at risk.

Feel free to comment, and share your thoughts, we can also talk about more details on Discord. These are my thoughts right now, however, it's not yet an official announcement about the future because there's still one more significant event coming soon - the Soulash GOG release, which may affect how much more development to Soulash I can dedicate in the near future. I don't expect it will be enough to make a big difference, but I've been positively surprised before.

Early next month I should have some more info about the state of the world generation and my ideas regarding that, so stay tuned,

Artur