August Development Report 2019

Screenshot by AppleBaerry (Filtered with Reshade) SUMMARY We're a bit late on our monthly development report, however now that the game is out we've been really busy. However, it is a good kind of busy because so many people have bought the game despite our pitiful marketing campaign at launch. We've hit 1000 members on our Discord, thousands of players have bought the game, our Steam reviews have been mostly positive everything is going extremely well! The few negative reviews we've received are all symptoms of us being in early access and are going to be easily addressed in the near future. SUCCESS AND SPECIAL THANKS! I want to give a special shout out to Gronkh to who we owe most of our game sales to.

When they started making let's play videos of Pumpkin Days they gave us a huge flood of new players. 80% of our game sales are from Germany and 90% are from Europe. Can you believe that?! All those players have given us the budget to guarantee development for the next year. It may even carry us to the final version of the game, which I estimate will be around Summer or Fall 2020. Taking royalties into account, by the end of September if daily game sales continue to be steady we should make back the money spent on development over the past 5 years. Then Pumpkin Days would be officially a financial success.

I also want to thank all the let's players out there who have been making videos of our game. You guys have helped us out so much and we super appreciate it. Please share your let's play videos on the Pumpkin Videos channel on our Discord. Sadly we do not speak German so we've missed out on the German let's plays, but we've been trying to keep up with all of the English let's plays. Much love to you guys for playing smaller indie games like us.

The pumpkin journey is not finished yet. We are still in early access with so many fun new things we need to add to Pumpkin Days. The big ones are, pets, animal breeding, bug catching, fossil hunting, and of course marriage and children which will be implemented last because we need to spend a lot of time on the writing. We do want to assure everyone that even with our financial success we will not allow scope-creep to cripple the project because it's very easy to get carried away. We have specific features planned for the final version of the game and anything else will not be considered until all the main features are in and more importantly all the bugs are squashed.

COMMUNITY NEWS

We're doing well financially, but if you still want to contribute to the development of the game we have a Patreon and you can donate via Twitch livestreams. If you donate via those means you can redeem your donation for a custom item in the game, like a t-shirt design, recipe, painting, etc with credit given to you in the item description. This only through Patreon or during a Livestream if you are interested.

I also want to give a special thanks to everyone who has been reporting bugs. It has been such a huge help and we've been squashing those bugs as quickly as possible and the game keeps getting better and better with each pumpkin patch so thank you so much.

FUTURE PLANS

If you want to keep up with the latest patches, status of bugs and other news, check our Steam page for announcements. We're hoping to implement controller support soon. It's going to require more work than we anticipated, but that's the next big feature we are working on. Also, since most of our player base is from Germany we have ideas about how to tackle translations. We're a tiny 3 person studio, we do not have the budget to hire a studio for translations (We have possibly over 300k words and counting to translate because we are a text heavy game), So we're going to have to get creative for that. We will do our best to see if we can make something happen before the end of the year.

Otherwise, once funding from game sales are available to us at the end of the month we're going to pump the gas on development and we'll get things done faster which will be exciting.

Thank you, everyone, who has made Pumpkin Days possible since our humble beginnings back in 2014. We will continue to do our best. I added a "contact us" live chat on the website. I can't guarantee I will be available 24/7 but you can leave me (Momo) a message any time and I'll try to get back to you as soon as possible. We're also on Discord so you can reach out to us there, we're friendly I promise.