Not super ground breaking, just uses standard formulas for wishlist and revenue estimates and embeds directly into steam. It's something I've wanted for a while and decided to make. Also includes links to sites that put more effort into correct estimates if you want to dig in more. Hope its useful!
In response to this post, I thought it would be good to start some conversation about fun autobattlers but with no self promo allowed. If you are a dev, surely its because you love playing autobattlers.
So, what is everyone playing or looking forward to playing?
I try to keep up with the genre as much as possible. The most interesting one I tried recently was the open playtest of Alchemortis.
It's single player and uses an inventory management mechanic similar to backpack battles. It offers a tree no navigate like slay the spire, and has a cool alchemy mechanic where you mix things together and they either improve or get cursed. I didn't get too deep into it but it definitely left an impression and left me wanting to learn and play more.
The one I've been keeping an eye on and want to try soon is batomon showdown. I was watching retromation play it a lot and its high on my list of things to try next.
How about you all?
That's pretty much it! We're making a fantasy auto-battler with RPG vibes called "Claw and Conjure." Currently on Godot 4.4.
I was playing/testing and capturing new screenshots for steam tonight and really felt like I was having fun with the game and was proud of how it's coming along, and wanted to share with someone!
I was feeling a bit more optimistic about the appeal of the game last night and took some screenshots. What do you all think? Is it appealing? These are the UI/town phase, still got a ton of work to do on the battle visuals and readability.
We got tons of feedback when announcing our game last week. Overall it was being interpreted as cheap/amateur and we really want it to seem polished and professional. Are we headed in the right direction here?
We're currently on Godot 4.4 BTW and the old lock icons were always placeholder. Overall we're adding texture, details, shadows, depth, etc as opposed to the old more vector style.
Any tips are welcome. Does the new screenshot look like something you'd expect to appeal more widely?
Wishlist here to keep with development
We're pretty new to producing marketing materials that make the game understandable. While we work on better videos and stuff, this description explains things a bit better:
>It has the core autobattler loop where you buy stuff from shops then watch it fight. But after each fight you decide what to build/upgrade in your town which is the engine that enables builds. You can lean into spells, units, items, economy, or hybrid buildings. Then in battle phase there's a map with 4 POIs that you fight for, and each one gives your army different buffs.
>So the archery range buffs physical DPS damage. So you could put together a party of 4 physical DPS with a trap build. For trap builds, you have units, items, and abilities that do a ton of burst, but only if they arrive first to the POI (so they need decent speed stats).
>And/or you could put a tank, healer, and two DPS with lifesteal on the tank and some sustain abilities on the healer, and send them to the castle. If you win that battle, your army gets a 5% all stats buff for next round.
>And that's pretty much it. There are lots of different builds and we're still figuring out how to balance the complexity and simplicity and stuff but its coming together nicely. For example, one of my favorite factions is raven's reach who are kinda rogue-ish. They have assassin and spy abilities, so if you want advance knowledge of the next enemy or if you want a chance to just assassinate enough units before battle begins to tip things in your favor, those are the specialties of raven's reach.
We're a two person team who's spent all of our freetime over the last year getting to today. We're finally able to officially announce our game!
Check out the steam page and wishlist if this seems like something you'd like to play. We'll also be looking for playtesters over the next couple months!
| Languages | Turnaround | Words | Subtotal | Service Fee | Tip | Tip Fee | Total | Cents Per Word |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 11 hours | 538 | $10.00 | $4.05 | $5.00 | $3.78 | $22.83 | 4.2 |
| Russian & German | 13 hours | 1076 | $35.00 | $5.43 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $40.43 | 3.8 |
| Japanese & Korean | 29 hours | 1076 | $55.00 | $6.53 | $8.25 | $3.95 | $73.73 | 6.9 |
| Brazilian Portuguese | 40 hours | 538 | $5.00 | $3.78 | $5.00 | $3.78 | $17.56 | 3.3 |
| TOTALS | 40 hours | 3228 | $105.00 | $19.79 | $18.25 | $11.51 | $154.55 | 4.8 |
Overview
In preparation for announcing our game and launching our Steam page, we used Fiverr to translate the text (short description & about this game) to zh-CN, ru, de, ja, ko, and pt-BR.
We made 4 orders for the 6 languages and had all of them back within 40 hours of the initial order. The advertised cost was $105.00 and we ended up paying $154.55. We averaged 4.8 cents per word which is a good value, I understand an agency would be more in the 10-20 cent range so this is very cheap.
Russian (and I assume German) were a bit suspicious and might just be AI. Evaluation of quality is tough.
The Good
The platform is easy to use. Interaction with the translators was very pleasant. Turnaround time and cost are tough to beat. Our Brazilian translator was really interested in the game and signed up for the mailing list which is nice, even if they are just hoping to get more business.
The Bad
Fiverr is such a scummy platform and I cannot recommend using them. For one, they trick you into spending a lot more than they advertise. Take our cheapest language, pt-BR. Five dollars is incredibly cheap. Then you see they're charging you almost $4 for a $5 transaction, but still 8.78 is a great price so you move forward. Once its done they basically bully you into tipping. The language is very strong saying that tipping is basically expected, not optional.
I am American and accustomed to tipping so I don't mind doing it, but the way they present it is very off-putting. Then, the minimum is 5.00. I also don't mind paying an extra $5 to the worker, they definitely deserve 10 bucks for the work IMO, but being bullied into a 100% tip feels bad. Then, to top it off they charge you 3.78 to send the worker a 5 dollar tip on work that was originally advertised at $5 total. At least drop the fee on the tip or charge something reasonable like 0.50 or 1.00
Then, if that weren't bad enough, they want you to leave two separate reviews. One is the public review where they encourage you to write good things, then they want you to submit a second private review? This ruins the whole point of the review system. Good workers should rise to the top by doing good work, and clients should see honest feedback from other clients.
Translation Quality
Evaluating the quality is so tough. I tried using AI, which said the translations were very good and definitely had a native speaker who knows the gaming space work on them, but then I had Chat GPT do a translation and had Gemini evaluate it and it said the same thing - definitely done by a human expert.
I have friends who speak Chinese and Russian and asked them to skim for anything that felt really unnatural. The Russian speaker said he thinks that one used AI (he pointed out "the fall of the king" translating to the king physically tripping) and I had suspicions about that translator already. Their communication felt very AI coded and they turned around two languages almost immediately.
Overall its really hard to judge quality. Either you ask for favors from friends which doesn't feel good, or you try to hire someone else to review, but then you need to trust them, so it doesn't solve the problem.
This is a big benefit of using an agency with a good reputation if you can afford it.
Should I use AI?
That is totally up to you. For us the reasons not to are:
Bonus Tip
One really annoying thing about steam I discovered is that if you translate into brazilian portuguese or latin american spanish, and you get a visitor from spain or portugal, or even someone from latin america who chose "spanish" instead of "latin american spanish" in their browser settings, Steam will show them the english version of your store page.
We discovered this during testing and then copied our translations to the parent language so that we can cover spain and portugal, even if the dialect is a bit off.
I'm currently trying to design my own autobattler and decided to play a round on TFT, then Hearthstone Battlegrounds, and then The Bazaar for inspiration. The Bazaar felt so much more engaging than the other two, but I couldn't pin down why.
All of them have nice particle effects, meaningful decisions, and interesting synergies. I do think the async nature is a big part of it. I hate running out of time when I could have done something way better with ten more seconds. Other than that I'm not sure, so I wanted to see what you all think makes it great?