Conquest! Go-Live and Lessons Learned

After ~8 months of development and beta, Conquest! is officially live and has already completed 2 Ages! It has been a busy month since I last posted.
The Reddit AMA was a success and generated a huge uptick in users.  A big thanks to the Reddit community and Nicholas Laborde from Raconteur Games for helping me get it set up.

Since the go-live I have released an average of 1-2 builds/week. Some have been bug fixes but the majority include enhancements to the user experience. These have included "The Basics", an expanded tutorial-like system of help screens for new players, interactable journal entries, additional jump buttons to quickly navigate to other parts of the UI, updates to the tutorial, and several spelling errors corrected! Here is a shot of one of the new tutorial screens:

Since introducing the first "Basics" pop-up several releases ago, I have noticed a slight uptick in the number of new players completing the tutorial and that was the inspiration for creating eight additional ones.

Some new enhancements to the game include 8 new badges, 2 new artifacts, improved tracking of player statistics (jousts won/lost, naval victories/defeats, etc.), and an overview popup which shows a balance sheet style view of your kingdom:

The community has been growing slowly, with a mix of veterans from the original game returning and new players who have made it past the steep learning curve. The new alliance system, which allows up to 10 players to join together, has been a big help to old and new players alike. It's one of the enhancements to the game I'm most proud of.

In fact, this is probably the biggest lesson I've learned from launch: do not underestimate user experience, especially with a complex game. What seems intuitive or logical to one person (me) may be odd or downright confusing to another. I believe there is a mix of art and science here and I'm still learning it. Thanks to all the beta and current players who have helped make the game better by making suggestions.

Conquest! also has a new wiki page. It was created by a new player, AgedWizard, and has some very good information regarding strategy and tactics. It is located here. AgedWizard and RobinHood are also working on some gameplay videos, which will also help garner interest.

To celebrate the launch, I created a "Build the Realm" giveaway and the winners were announced on June 17th.  It was a successful campaign and I intend to create more of them in the future.

Sign up for the Conquest! mailing list here and follow the journey on Facebook or Twitter.  Until next time, I hope to see you in the game.