Faerie Solitaire Harvest is one of the games we’ll be releasing on Steam this year and it’s made with Defold! You can see a gameplay trailer on the Steam page. We will release several Defold games on Steam this year although I can’t say how many exactly. Most of them are casual but not all of them are.
FSH has a release date of this Easter so 49 days from now. Still have some polishing to do so it will be a busy time until then…
Faerie Solitaire Harvest is our take on the match-2 solitaire type. I wanted to make the very best match-2 solitaire in the world and I think we have a good chance at that.
Wishlists are hard to get on Steam and kind of important for getting on the featured list on Steam. To be fair, casual card games like this don’t really have a competitive chance on Steam but I still want to get as many wishlists as possible before release so please give it one even if you have no intention of buying! Posting its store link anywhere you know there are people who like card games would also be helpful. I believe it is worth helping to build up the casual audience on Steam so everyone who makes these kinds of games can release there and not be so reliant on mobile stores.
After 3 days of having the page live on the coming soon FSH has gotten 244 wishlists with probably half of those organic from Steam and half me sharing with my Steam group. According to Valve, a game needs something like 40,000 wishlists by release to even be considered for featuring.
We’ll be publishing this game on mobile too of course but PC first!
After release I’ll be taking about a bunch of new things we built for this game and publishing them as community resources. After release I will also write a Defold promotion piece to share around the gamedev places detailing all of the great features of Defold that this game used and benefited from.
I’ll update this thread with more information about this game’s development and interesting stats over time!
Why do you plan your release this easter ? It’s impossible to get 40k or even 20k wishlists for such short period… Maybe wait … I don’t know… like 6 months?
I can see you have very successful Faerie Solitaire https://steamspy.com/app/38600
2010 is an another reality, but anyway - what kind of pr or marketing did you do to achieve such awesome results?
Why publisher?
Where did you get info about 40k wishlists for featuring? Have you tried to write Valve with request for featuring?
We don’t plan to wait for 40k… currently we’re aiming for 4k. It’s now at 280 wishlists total so might get that in time.
We were lucky to be one of the relatively first games on Steam (back in the day I was super persistent with contacting Valve until they added the game!! ). See the app ID is super low compared to how many games are on Steam now! Since then it’s been in lots of sales, giveaways, bundles, and even has a Team Fortress 2 item so the numbers add up.
Ultimately because it’s more fun to collaborate! We have other games in progress with Puppygames and when we release those later on the partnership will make more sense. I’ll be doing similar thing with other developers in the future too.
This would be more accurate to say is hearsay because you’re not going to get a direct answer from Valve officially about this. It’s probably more accurate these days to say the number is getting higher and higher. Valve giving it a feature just because is very unlikely. Honestly we will even be lucky if they even let us remarket to our own customers.
358 wishlists so far, 46 days until release. 8.9% toward reaching wishlists goal.
Testing Linux version it has two major issues. Custom cursor icon is not working, fullscreen on launch doesn’t work. But setting fullscreen in options menu does work so it’s something to do with not being able to set the game fullscreen until graphics are setup or something… tried to use timer.delay() to set fullscreen after 2 seconds delay on Linux but that didn’t work either.
According to my feelings it’s unreal to get 4k for such short period relying only on Steam traffic. More likely 2 - 2.5k
Do you plan any PR activities?
Yeah, with current trend it will likely get 2600 optimistically and 1200 if I did no more marketing and relied only on what comes organically.
For marketing, I’m planning to do some giveaways, make at least 2 more trailers one being the story trailer, write some articles, try to get some small youtubers / streamers to look at it, keep occasionally sending new stuff to my Steam groups, and the big thing I’m hoping Valve will let us do is send a notification to all owners of my previous games on Steam so they get prompted to wishlist FSH. If they let us do that it would probably dwarf everything else, but they’ve never given us a Steam popup even to our own customers before, and the only casual games I’ve seen them do Steam popups for were for PopCap games after EA bought them.
Some of these things can take a lot of time but most important thing right now is finish polish / redo what still needs redone, fix any crucial issues, and get anything extra that’s worth adding in before release date. Not in panic mode yet.
You can ask to send discount coupons to all players of your previous games, I’ve seen this many times on Steam.
Also, it’s better to have localized Steam page (it costs not that much using Fiverr).
And I strongly recommend to add Chinese localisation in the game.
"/home/desktop/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Faerie Solitaire Harvest/FaerieSolitaireHarvest.x86_64: relocation error:
/home/desktop/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Faerie Solitaire Harvest/FaerieSolitaireHarvest.x86_64:
symbol _ZTVNSt7__cxx1119basic_istringstreamIcSt11char_traitsIcESaIcEEE, version GLIBCXX_3.4.21
not defined in file libstdc++.so.6 with link time reference"
Made an issue, but it might be caused by an extension. I’m downloading SteamOS now (was testing only with Linux Mint before also NO other Linux testers out of almost 60+ reported this issue…)
We submitted the game for review yesterday so it only took about 1 day to get reviewed. I’ll report time to review after this issue is fixed too.
I’m going to reluctantly uncheck Linux + SteamOS support on the store page as I want to see if we can get an approval without it. If the issue can be figured out and fixed before release I’ll recheck it, but I’ll still also keep uploading builds for Linux. The computer I’m using atm has an older CPU and I can’t run a SteamOS VM. Trying to find a tester in the wild with it who would be willing to run a few builds with the possible problematic extensions enabled one in each build.
My money is on GA (although fmod and discord also have mystery binaries without full source to check) but I don’t want to submit a build without it just to test.
I am using std::string in defold-fmod, so it could be a culprit. I wish I had the time to rewrite those bindings without the template and macro soup that it currently is (maybe auto-generate them)…
I’ll have to grab a copy of SteamOS and test as well. Maybe I can rewrite the bindings to not depend on std::string. It’s not the first time they’re causing ABI issues.
I wanted to do it soon so there would be time to fix any issues.
