Silicon Dreams: A Micro-Postmortem

Salutations, cyberpunks! 

Danny and Jamie here to tell you what this Clockwork Bird’s been up to since we released Silicon Dreams. The short version is: critics loved it, it sold ok but not great, and we’re planning a free update with new content in the next few weeks! (More info on that to come in just a few days!)

For now, let’s look back at the past few months and share what’s been happening.

Part I: Development

Originally SD was supposed to be a six-month project. That estimate had tripled by the time the game was released. Why?

It was the first time either of us had worked on a commercial project with a team: Jamie had only worked solo, and Danny’s only experience was with small student projects and “The Embers of the Stars”, which was an in-your-spare-time kinda thing. (play it here!)

Commercial game development is a crazy incomprehensible beast with so many moving parts.. So that was a part of the problem, but also:

• We thought (foolishly!) that we could scrape by on bad visuals if the story was really good (this is not true at all :/ )
• The pandemic threw everything for a loop
• Through dumb luck, we kept getting more funding. At each point, it made most sense to push the game further rather than cut our losses and start something new

Part II: Release

Press coverage and steam user reviews were pretty outstanding! We want to give ourselves a pat on the back and share some of our favorites with you:

PC Gamer said it’s “An extremely intelligent sci-fi interrogation sim that’s unpredictable for all the right reasons. … the writing is incredible.”.

John Walker (writing on his personal blog Buried Treasure, then later on Kotaku) said “a STUNNING android interrogation simulation, the Blade Runner game you’ve always wanted to exist. … The credits rolled, and damn, it was perfect. … This one’s a must.”.

DreadXP said “The writing is phenomenal … a multi-layered masterpiece.”

And yet, we’re still only approaching the 2.6k sales mark with almost 15k wishlists. These numbers are not terrible for a tiny indie game, but they do not equate with financial success. (We need to sell about 7k units just to break even.)

Why are sales so low?

But, experimental means fewer people are going to click “Buy” on Steam. We think a lot of people came to the store page, realised it was kind of weird and weren’t sure that they’d enjoy it, and clicked away again. That’s ok – I’ve been that person too! But it had an impact on our sales, obviously.

We struggled to show off why the game is great

We’re not marketing people, and over the course of development we learned a lot about how to, and how not to, communicate the core of a game to potential players. 

We made a game that’s rich, complex and subtle, but requires attention. You’ve got to sit down and get to know the characters over the course of half an hour to see what’s special about it.. There’s barely any movement, no flashy action sequences, no breathtaking landscapes.

The mood is a key part of the game’s appeal, then – and visual presentation could have better sold that mood. We didn’t lock in the final visuals until 2 months before release, because we thought they were fine. They were not fine. A player should be able to look at your game and in a few seconds know what kind of thing they’re looking at. Our visuals just didn’t convey “cyberpunk android interrogation sim” until the eleventh hour. A compelling story won’t carry your visuals if the player never reaches the story because the visuals didn’t communicate what the story had to offer.

Part III: The Future

We always hoped the game would sell enough to justify all of the other stories we had planned to include as DLC or post-launch updates. We had new characters and storylines planned, including entirely different campaigns where you’d play as a different interrogator. We even hoped to add modding tool support to allow players to add their own stories. 

But the sad fact is, without a huge increase in sales, it’s just not possible to justify the expense. Given the sales numbers, it’s very unlikely that we’d ever break even if we spent our time adding that DLC to the game. (Though, as a fun side note: most of the character files are just stored as .json files inside the game folder ready for mod support that’ll never come. So you can just edit those files and it’ll basically mod the game. You could theoretically add 99% of a new character this way, although it would be pretty cumbersome to write.)

So what’s next? We’ve taken a lot of time to analyze what went right and wrong during SD dev so we can start the next project on the right foot. We have lots of ideas and are super eager to get to the next game, but before that, we have one final update in store for Silicon Dreams! Keep your eyes peeled for the next blog post discussing this new update sometime next week!

Closing Thoughts

To those of you who already own it, thank you so much for your support! If you haven’t already, a Steam review offering your thoughts on the game would be really helpful for us. To those of you still waiting, there’s a free demo! Give it a chance, we’re pretty sure you like what you see ^^