The head of Ukrainian studio Hologryph, Maksym Khrapai, said that over 300,000 users played the SAND demo during the Steam Next Fest event. According to him, the developers wanted to see if the project would interest a wide audience.
The head of Ukrainian studio Hologryph, Maksym Khrapai, said that over 300,000 users played the SAND demo during the Steam Next Fest event. According to him, the developers wanted to see if the project would interest a wide audience.
«We sent out 80,000 invitations for the October SAND playtest, which took place before Next Fest. And we still couldn’t invite everyone, because even then we found out that there were problems with scaling server capacity», — Khrapai told the GameDev DOU website.
He said the playtest was a success, but only those who specifically signed up to participate. Steam Next Fest was a chance for the developers to step outside that bubble and see if SAND would appeal to a wider audience.
«We knew that the game had bugs, and at a certain stage we had to make a choice — either not to show SAND at Next Fest, or lose our best opportunity to draw attention to the project. We decided to go to the people despite the bugs and try to eliminate the most critical ones along the way, so to speak», — noted the head of the Hologryph studio.
He added that the developers had to make a number of restrictions in order to show players a working build. In particular, they had to abandon PvE components and even remove backpacks because the studio didn’t have time to fix the bugs associated with them.
Maksym Khrapai also spoke about the problem with Azure servers during the Steam Next Fest. According to him, the problems started as soon as many people started downloading the SAND demo.
«When we tried to increase the number of servers in the regions, it turned out that each Azure region operates almost like a separate company with its own teams, with different documentation requirements according to local laws, and also with different response speeds. Our goal of „instant scaling“ went to waste. But that was half the trouble. On the night from Friday to Saturday, we learned that our Azure account had been blocked, and the demo stopped working», — said Khrapai.
He added that the team was already exhausted from preparing for Steam Next Fest, but had to search for solutions on the forums and correspond with the hoster’s slow technical support until the block was lifted.
«Next Fest is a great opportunity to reach a wider audience and showcase your project. It’s the most useful free marketing tool currently available in the industry», — says the head of Hologryph.
In his opinion, the event went well, despite the server issues, and most reviews indicate that SAND is an interesting game, but currently full of bugs.
«This is not the end of the road, but it made us understand that we are moving in the right direction. When 300 thousand players play your game for the first time, it is an incredible feeling», — noted Maksym Khrapai.
