Pressure is rising: What happened after INDUSTRIA's announcement in early 2020?

Fellow Industrians,

When I look at versions and builds of INDUSTRIA from late 2019 and early 2020, I see a different game. The idea and feeling was the same. But if you compare it quality wise with the current version, it's like night and day. What has happened since then? How did the game change? And most importantly, how did the public awareness suddenly change the game in itself?

Before the announcement by our publisher Headup in early 2020, we pretty much only had people in our, back then, tiny Discord server and on our Instagram account. The project has existed since 2015, sure, but we never had any press coverage or trailer out. There was not even a Steam Page. The only big thing we did before the announcement were some kind of closed Alphas of the game we hosted in itch.io.

Our Discord members got exclusive access to the early builds and we gathered feedback early. Our skill sets back then were very limited though. There was no sound designer, no extra 3d modeling help and the two of us were still learning a lot of fundamental things about modeling, level design and development.

When I look back at these old versions, I keep thinking "how the hell did we just keep going?". The project was always way too big for us, especially with the limited experience we had. It was the classic beginner error: choosing a way too big project for the first gig. But we did it, and pulled through the down times of frustration, realization of these facts, combined with almost canceling the game.

And then came early 2020. We finally managed to get signed by Headup. We did a lot of new content, I cut a trailer, we created a Steam Page and boom, may 28 2020 came about. Here is the announcement trailer we published back then:

For us, the announcement was the biggest thing yet. Thousands of views on the trailer, numerous news outlets writing about our little dream project. It was some wild days. People on Twitter compared us with Half-Life 2 and Bioshock, numerous AAA devs reached out to say how much they appreciate the project. It was beautiful.

All this obviously gave us a lot of motivation to push even further. The successful announcement, the Steam Wishlists and all the comments, all these things pushed us to bring the quality yet to another level. We reworked AI systems, all weapons, animations, levels, sound and so much more.

We continued to post on Social Media, especially on Twitter under the #ScreenshotSaturday hashtag. We got joined by our Sound Designer Clemens Ruh and by our First-Person Animator Gabriel aka AnimatorFox. The German gaming news magazine and YouTube channel GameStar interviewed us a number of times. We got to cooperate with Nvidia to implement Ray-Tracing.

This project really experienced a bump since the announcement both in terms of public awareness, but also gradually got better in every single aspect. In game development, and especially in our first project INDUSTRIA, it is always interesting to think, "How would the game be if this or that did not happen?".

Would the game be already out without the announcement? If so, undoubtedly in a very different state. Much smaller, much more buggy and much less complex and good looking. Not to speak about the wonderful human beings that joined us we would not have met or all the additional people that joined our little community on Discord, Socials and Steam that grew since then.

We are incredibly thankful for the journey we had so far, and we can't wait to see how far this will go. Next week we are going to look into how INDUSTRIA came to be 5 years ago. A true look into the past. See you then!

All the best and stay healthy! David & the Bleakmill Team

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1172650/INDUSTRIA/