Legend of Etad Chapter One has had a truly spectacular reception from the Playdate community! We're a week out from launch and I thought I'd write a few words about how the launch has gone, and what comes next. I'm also going to touch briefly on sales, because I believe that being transparent about that stuff is super important for indie devs - especially on a niche platform like Playdate.

Firstly though, I've just uploaded a new game version...

Patch 1.1

Amazingly, there was only one bug reported to me by a few folks - a crash when approaching a certain boss. This crash was 100% reproducible, but only happened if you played from the start to this certain point without backing out to the home screen. Essentially, it was an out-of-memory problem caused by Etad butting right up against RAM limits.

I've managed to cut back in some areas that shouldn't be noticeable and save almost a meg of RAM, which stops this crash occurring and leaves a fair amount of overhead too. That said, if you ever do hit an out of memory crash in the future, Etad has your back - autosaving at the start of each map means you never lose much progress and reloading the game will get you back on track without further crashes.

If you do hit this problem or any others, please leave a comment here or join the conversation in #sideload on the Playdate Squad Discord.

Patch 1.1 only solves this one error, so you don't need to update if you've finished the game or are playing Etad in small sessions between other Playdate games. Note that your save game is not affected by updating.

What people are saying

I was humbled that Etad received tweets from both the Playdate and Itch official accounts:

But more importantly, you all had some amazing things to say:

Playdating Legend of Etad by @GarethIW until dawn! One giant step in games for the lit'l yellow handheld. Amazing creation!
- @land_patricio, Twitter

ok this game is awesome
once you figure out what the icons mean, managing what you're holding in each hand is super intuitive
- @simjnd, on Discord

Yoooo this game is incredibly decent
- @Shademonger, Discord

love it! I got to the jungle pyramid level so far. this game is an amazing showcase game with what the playdate is capable of. puzzle solving is fun and that giant minotaur was a challenge to fight! can't wait to play more!
- jencastro7, Itch

Having so much fun, accidentally played for 2 hours when i booted it up last night in bed
- @james (he/him), Discord

It's insane how well this controls, and how fluid the game itself is, walking around and exploring feels illegal on the playdate. I was dreaming of a game like this for the console
- @BummerOfGeorge, Reddit

Legend of Etad is dope. Can’t wait to spend more time with it, but it’s got “Killer App” written all over it
- @ralphiscool, Discord

Thank you for making Legend of Etad!! I’m loving it! Big nostalgia! I haven’t played a game like this since I was a kid messing with MS-DOS games! It’s awesome!
- @JCP256, Twitter

My dad had fun watching over my shoulder. He’s been showing me games since Commodore 64 and enjoyed the style.
- @Chromeblast, Discord

Can’t wait to check this out over the weekend. CD-ROM vibes = you have my attention
- @Cabel (of Panic), Twitter

If you too had fun playing Etad, please leave the game a rating right here on Itch! Every rating helps :)

Stats, Sales and Targets

I'll go into much more detail on sales numbers in a month or so, which will provide much more useful data including what the long tail might look like.

For now, here's some quick stats!

• Just before launch, Etad had been added to 192 collections (like Steam wishlists) since the page launched on Itch in April
  
• Legend of Etad reached break-even* in less than 48 hours
• 200 copies were sold in the first 72 hours (pretty much on-the-dot!)
• 300 copies sold in the first week
• The game page received 2700 views in the first week
  
• The Playdate and Itch tweets provided a big bump in views and sales on Monday and Tuesday. Since Wednesday, the views and sales have dropped to just a fraction (average 10 sales/day), but that's not yet enough data to see if it's a long tail. 

Before launching, I had a pie-in-the-sky target of 100 sales in the first weekend, with a lifetime "this'll never happen but who knows" target of a 10% hardware attach rate. That is, for every ten Playdates out in the wild, I want one person to buy Etad. Over the life of the system.

It's an ambitious target, and unlikely to ever be hit, but we'll see how things go. I'll do another sales report after a month, and then again before I launch Chapter Two, so we can laugh at how naïve I was together!

* I should point out that I'm not counting my hours spent when I talk about breaking even. That's only counting the cost of assets and the Playdate I bought on eBay.  About £700 all-in.

It's bad to not count the hours I spent, but I can also justify it because Etad was developed as a hobby, outside of my VR software development day-job. I'd estimate that I've probably put about 250 evening-and-weekend hours into Chapter One, which would take the break-even point up to almost £8000 if I charged myself my cheapest contracting rate. I'm not sure Etad will ever hit that!

What's Next?

Chapter Two! And the work has already begun, despite me saying I'd give myself a week off :) Look out for progress updates here. I'll leave you with a few words that sum up what you'll get in the next Etad installment.

• Sprawling pyramid tomb!
• Swingy-choppy-things!
• Portals!
• Chasms!
• Timer puzzles!
• (un)Friendly villagers!
• The start of Chapter One... huh?!
• Freeze!