Hey everyone!
I’m Gabriel, developer from **Robi Studios** – a small game studio in Argentina, South America.
I wanted to share a bit on what goes behind launching an indie game such as [Blue Fire](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0wPny3_8nQ&t) and how we lived that experience, including what we expected, some of the things that went right and some that could have gone better. I’ll also mention what the [Void of Sorrows DLC](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uosHr8YOYtI) is about and what other plans we have in store for Blue Fire!
Feel free to ask any questions! Hopefully I’ll get to know how you guys see some of the things I talk about from your perspective as gamers 🙂
So we launched Blue Fire early this year and things went incredibly well ^(and pretty bad at the same time.)
We had been working on our first title for over a year and a half, at first just my brother and me working from my bedroom while doing outsourcing work. We would work the first half of the day on Blue Fire and then continue with our client work ^(-which paid the bills of course-). After a few months we felt we couldn’t keep it up and that our project would never really take off that way, so we decided to devote ourselves to our own game full time. We took a pretty big risk and went all in on the project that would eventually become **Blue Fire**. At that time we had no name for the game, a few raw prototyped enemies, a character that could jump and attack and some money saved up for a few months of development.
But apparently, we made the right call. About three months in we showcased Blue Fire for the very first time at a game convention and we had such a blast! *People loved the game*! We had a short prototype which was played all weekend, people would gather around our booth to watch others play and we were surprised at the crowd we had.
Soon after we got back home we were contacted by *Graffitti Games,* the publishing team which we partnered with for the launch of Blue Fire! This was awesome for us, and when we heard from them that Nintendo also liked our game and Blue Fire would be a timed console exclusive and part of a Indie World direct, we were hyped.
Fast forward a bit over a year and we were ready to launch Blue Fire on **Switch** and **PC**. We had been working furiously on it and in a way felt that it would serve as a pretty big validation regarding our ability as a studio to make fun experiences, to make good games. Because in the end, what drives us to plan new projects, wake up and code or make games all day is believing that we are making experiences worth picking up and enjoying, and we were about to see if we could really deliver on that.
So launch day came around. We were SO surprised with how many people played Blue Fire the first day. It was *incredible* seeing people stream the game, commenting, sharing and all sorts of crazy things. The reception the game had on launch was honestly way over our expectations. However it also brought along a big issue. We had tested the game a lot internally and with external partners but the testing we had done did not compare AT ALL with the thousands of people who played the first days.
We then realized we had so many small bugs, issues, crashes and similar problems that when stacked up, made the experience way below the quality we intended. The following weeks were very intense and we barely got any rest while we tackled everything we could. It would take a lot of time just to reproduce a single very small issue that could happen to one or two out of – say – a thousand players. After a few intense and crazy weeks we had a very stable build, which personally made me sleep a lot better knowing that people could really enjoy the game.
But it doesn’t end there. Being a small studio, we had to start planning what we were going to do next right away and our programmers – myself included – were super busy chopping away at bugs and issues and porting to another three platforms! After some debate and seeing how much people were enjoying the game we decided to develop a free content update.
By that time, we had patched the game pretty well and the experience was a lot more enjoyable, but we felt we still had much more room to improve. We decided to split the DLC content into several parts so that we could progressively update and enhance the game. We released a second really big update called **Sword of Steel** which introduced a lot of game enhancements, bug fixing, game balancing and polishing.
Today, we are happy to release the Void of Sorrows DLC! This is the first update that includes extra content and the best part of it is that we’re able to release it for free! We’ve *doubled* the amount of void challenges with a total of *16 new voids*, we’ve added a boss fight ^((the best one in the game imo)), 2 new areas and many other things and secrets.
Making the DLC and the new content with an existing community was much more rewarding in a way (and a lot more stressful!) and we were able to have a better feel about what players will think about the new content.
We’re also excited to share two upcoming updates for **Blue Fire**: the first, *a huge balancing and enhancement update that the game will be receiving next month*; and the second *another free DLC content expansion* which I won’t spoil too much about, but has to do with allowing players to create and use their imagination!
Looking forward, one of the biggest things we’ve learned is that being a small studio, it’s important for us to look at game development and publishing in a way in which we can interact a lot more with players. Games, gamers and game developers have changed a lot. It’s likely that long gone are the days where devs were isolated from players working on their next big thing for years to release something that people either liked or didn’t. We feel nowadays devs – either directly in a small studio like ours or through community managers and analysts in bigger AAA studios – have to take an approach where games and communities must grow together. When we talk about our future plans for both *Blue Fire* as well as other games, we’re now constantly thinking about how we can interact with the communities that hopefully form around the games and how those communities could have ways in which they can influence the development and growth of our next IPs.
We’re probably going to keep missing sometimes, and ^(hopefully) nailing it others, but we’re compromised with giving it our best and learning from our mistakes to keep improving, growing as a studio and as professionals and most importantly, delivering better products and creating incredible experiences 🙂