itch.io

Hello  Commanders,

More news, we hit new milestones.

We managed to finish all maps for Defcon 4 and now we started implementing them. The first one was added yesterday and here is the reveal:

Yeap, it is a library.. Because the game content will be short we are focusing on delivering high-quality in our environments and player experience. What does this mean? Well, it means that each scenario will have a special mechanic/gimmick. For example, this Librabry map has storm weather effects that will prevent the player from doing hit & run so on this map you must first survive until the storm ends.

Oh, we also added some hot interactive cutscenes within the scenario itself and many easter eggs.

Talking about the storm,  here are the new storm visual effects rain + thunder.

And today we added the Subway map.

The Subway unique twist is that you can use the alternative way out with some penalties but if you wait for the train to arrive a new exit path will be unlocked and you can leave without penalties but others a catch. When the train arrives it will have unwanted passengers.

In conclusion, each environment is tailored to provide a certain experience. 

OK time to go back to work, we need to finish Defcon 4 this month. If this week we manage to implement all scenarios then next week we will start adding custom random encounters for this Defcon as well + a special scenario and full-screen cutscenes.

If you want to support us you can join our Discord and share some gifs with 90thies action heroes, "GET TO THE CHOOOOOOPAAAA!"

Discord invite: https://discord.gg/ak5zXQxR7D

best regards,
Cristi P. - 16 BIT NIGHTS

Just released "Welcome Back, Commander" on itch!

https://16bitnights.itch.io/welcome-back-commander

Thank you!

Thank you for the constructive criticism!

Its not the main menu, its the main gameplay screen, player has 3 choices per day to make, it also has parallax and other features.

And yes I can see now what you mean by very cluttered - il try to do something about it.

We released the demo on steam and now we work for the itch io version

I try to make a Diegetic UI design somewhere between Xcom and Papers please for my upcoming game "Welcome Back, Commander"

Tips and suggestions are appreciated

Gameplay Reveal Trailer is now LIVE

Hello wonderful developers,

My name is Cristi and I am part of the 16 BIT NIGHTS dev team.
Ready for another post-mortem from the industry of indie games?
I’ll start by saying that among other mistakes my most critical mistake for this title was: “I wanted to make a good game” – I will explain later what I mean by this.

The game I will be talking about in my post-mortem today is TAURONOS, as a pitch line “the game is sort of pac-man mixed with horror elements” and it was released back on 4 August 2017, I think it got through on final days of Steam Greenlit and I am writing this 7 years after its release.



Game Link on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/676240/TAURONOS/

Development
I made 20 flash games, 5 games released on Steam with a Publisher, 1 game released on consoles, and 4 games self-published on Steam and I will say that on TAURONOS I had the BEST development experience ever, and this was because of my partner at that time: Cavalie.ro, I am now referring to both the work pipeline and the social environment.
Development took us 6 months. I had a day job back then so I worked on the game part-time as soon as I got home up to obsession, and Cavalie.ro was full-time.
We decided together the game concept, My partner was focused on programming + the story(he placed a lot of focus on having the story as accurate as possible to the Greek myth) and I was focused on game design, art, and marketing.
At that point in my career, I was still learning marketing but as far as game development was concerned I wanted to make A good game, A very polished game with a solid gameplay loop because at that point I already had a couple of games released but I always kept skipping the polish step.



Considering that this was my first time working with Cavalie.ro I aimed for a simpler game design scope in order not to risk unrealistic objectives but as far as polish goes I did not want to make any compromises.
The only downside to the development part was that at some times we had different visions on game design considering that Cavalie.ro vision was more story-based and my vision was more gameplay-based.
Good-times.
Ah, also we made and released the game with basically 0 funding except for the voice acting and music. BTW I try to be as biased as possible but the Voice Actor we had is Godlike. Alexey Ryan did an amazing job.

Release & Results

On Itch.io the game had 0 sales. :(  https://16bitnights.itch.io/tauronos

At the time of release, we had around 800 WIshlists.
Not many content creators played our game and the ones that played it were very small, this may be because my email marketing back then was just with cold emails, and no networking whatsoever, not to mention my email template and email lists were very beginner level, instead of making my own custom lists and research I was just downloading random YouTuber lists and sending emails.
We released with 20% discount and the first month of release we sold around 200 units.
After the first year since release, we sold a total of 1500 units.
I had no regret but I was disappointed, this “failure” was also the cherry on top of losing the relationship I had back then with one of my exes.
And overall it was ok, I quit the day job I had and went back to my country(Romania) and the money was enough to make some renovations and find a new day job.

Now, in 2020, I met an indie publisher that managed to port TAURONOS on Xbox and Nintendo Switch. The sales were decent, a good source of passive income, double as much as I made on Steam the first year.
A couple more years passed, I think it was 2021 and our console indie publisher “Restless Corp” had some personal problems so we decided that all sales the game generated on the console market would be from this point donated to him so we renounced console royalties, he is a cool guy he deserves it.

Now, one more year has passed, 2022 and I just released a new game with my Default programmer SadOff, the new game was called “Chromosome Evil” and had such good results that I was finally able to go full-time dev.
In 2022 I also made an agreement with Cavalie.ro and I paid an upfront sum for TAURONOS and he renounced his royalties so now 100% of TAURONOS goes to 16 BIT NIGHTS.

Present day
The game still sells a constant of 10-20 units per month + some small spike in sales each time I release a new game.
Having the game in the company bundle on Steam also helped a lot.
Currently, in 2024, TAURONOS sold a total of around 6000 units on Steam.

2017 First month of Steam release – 200 units
2018 First year of Steam release – 1500 units
2020 Released on Xbox and Nintendo Switch – around 2000 units from consoles until 2021 when I donated all future royalties to “Restless Corp”
2022 16 BIT NIGHTS bought the full royalties rights for TAURONOS from Cavalie.ro
2024 present day(7 years after Steam release) – 6000 units

Graph with sale(image)


Graph with wishlist(image)


Wishlist conversion (image)


Conclusion
The Game Design was not the type of game that I liked playing as a player but I wanted to make a Good game and I thought I knew what the audience wanted, I was naive, or maybe I was just bad at marketing at that time.
Since then I really focused on learning marketing and I now only decide to make games that have the “Yes” answer to the question “Would I actually pay money for this?” after checking my own Steam library because surely I cannot be so narcissist to think I am unique, so surely there are more people like me and best way to designate the target audience is on my own person.
In the end, TAURONOS was not amazing but proved to be a nice source of passive income in the long term and an awesome journey to create it.






Thank you for the read!




Cristi P. – 16 BIT NIGHTS

This will be a fast update since we are really low on time, lots of things do fix, and lots of things to adjust for the upcoming Demo.


So, firstly we are going to say that this game will also have rough-like elements through the achievement-reward system but because of the deadline I am not sure we will be able to implement them in the demo.

We also made serious polish to the command room visuals with some extra shadings and added new mechanics.
We will probably update the screenshots from the store page a bit later because you know TIMEEEE





"Welcome Back, Commander" logo has also been updated.
For this new key art, we got a lot of help from the Strain Tactics developer.





We are also working on a new trailer that is heavily focused on showing the gameplay.





OK time to go back to work

Hello Commanders,


I am dropping some news from behind the curtain and as the title says: we are preparing a Demo for Steam and Itch.io (and maybe Gamejolt too but I am not sure considering the low visibility).

The first part of the demo will include the intro cinematics, the tutorial, the interactive start of new game choices + the main gameplay of both the management command room and Defcon 5 RTS scenarios.

The start new game screen.

We combined the start of new game choices with interactivity and story elements in a unique mix that we hope will be enjoyable for you.
The main goal here is the MAXIMUM atmospheric value.

So each new game you will have a variety of choices in order to better customize your playthrough and make it as unique as possible each time.
- Enter your name(will affect some dialogues)
- Choose the game difficulty (we currently have 5 stages of difficulty planned but for the purpose of the demo we will only have 2). This difficulty setting affects the number of days you have and some enemy stats.
- Choose Commando strike team units, your starting units. This pool will also become larger as you unlock more units based on achievement(we invest very much this time on the re-pliability factor)
- Starting resources
- Choose Start bonus items (these will affect some special stats and special game mechanics)
For example, if you pick a scanner you will have this scanner mechanic during boss fights:






We also plan to have one boss fight included in the demo.

Here is a hint: it will happen in the new sewers environment that we just created:

Timeline: This coming week we will make the demo available for everyone with lvl 3 and above on our Discord community for a private beta test session and next month the demo will be publicly available during the Steam Next Fest.





OK time to go back to work.

Want to support us? Join our Discord.

We managed to implement the first 5 scenarios for the Defcon 5 stage.


Some new additions:

We added a Blood sample mechanic inspired by the movie "The Thing"



How it works?
One of the civilians that you must rescue is infected and if you try to save him with a soldier or engineer he will transform into a monster and attack you but if you try to save him with a medic you will immediately identify the infected and you will not trigger him.

Another new mechanic is the infected stash devouring flesh.
They will ignore the player units while eating but if you attack any of them they will all rush toward your strike team.



Also, we added tons of easter eggs and fan service.
For example one of the early possible scenarios will be an easter egg from Resident Evil aka Kendo Gun Shop.

And much more, we added custom scenes during exploration such as helicopters passing by, civilians running and trying to escape, car crashes, and much, much more.



OK time to go back to work.

Welcome Back, Commander just appeared in the upcoming strategy indie games video from perafilozof

https://youtu.be/X7ja9rNqKZk?si=S00f3m9OGT4IYUV7&t=1149

New Boss animation:

https://v-2.gjcdn.net/public-data/transcoded-media/554/178/34657928/900x900-uhev... 

Good news!

We just received a Steam Deck via the Steam hardware request developer program.

Now I just need to make sure this beauty reaches my partner who deals with the programming.

We also remade the game`s capsule

I made a case study in regard to the trailer results : https://itch.io/t/3846788/game-trailer-case-study-16-bit-nights#post-10222552

we don't have in-game transactions.

For everything else, steam provides all the data needed

I only make art, for perfect pixel alignment and other implementation features I'm afraid you will need to deal with yourself. 

And results:

As soon as we released the trailer on YouTube we started getting traffic and the traffic immediately went high.

After 6 days we reached these stats:

- 9000 views

- 500 likes

- 60 comments

- + 60 new subscribers to my channel

- + 300 Wishlists so far

32% of the people watch the video until the end.

87% of the video visibility came from organic YouTube recommendations

10% Impressions click-through rate 

And the stats still keep growing

For me, these results are fantastic considering that we are a small 1+1 game development team.

Source: 

What I think caused it:

- Community boost: after the trailer got released we posted about it on our Discord community

- Thumbnail colors/design: I think using bright colors in the YouTube Thumbnail helped a lot and the yellow/orange combo was often used in movie poster design for a reason

- voice acting: I am not sure but I suspect the YouTube algorithm detected multiple voices in the video which automatically boosted the quality perception

- video length: I read somewhere that videos longer than 3 minutes tend to also boost the YouTube algorithm

Kind regards,

Cristi P. - 16 BIT NIGHTS

Hi folks,

I am writing a case study regarding our trailer debut in hopes that it will help some of you in your game development endeavors and cast another positive light on my branding.

Our first goal was to have a high production value and at the same time to mix multiple elements during the development of the trailer such as:

- Trailer content(actually its more of a teaser)

- Game startup menu(where the player chooses new game bonuses)

- Intro cinematic

- Credit screen

Bassically our debut teaser should cover the exact first minutes of the game.

Now, everyone to whom I talked said the trailer should not be longer than 1 minute, and I agree I had the same opinion but this time I wanted to experiment outside the box and take a leap of faith.

So the trailer ended up having 4 minutes, and I must say right now: I have no regrets about this decision.

Considering that the trailer is more cinematic and shows very little gameplay this was because we aimed it more for our already existing fan base, "Welcome Back, Commander" is the last game from our "Chromosome Evil" franchise.

As to the funding, we had 0 funding.

Now you are going to ask how can we make a high-value production with 0 funding.

Well, it's simple, I did the design, coordination, and artwork, my partner did the core animation and programming and then we searched for volunteers for voice acting, we received much support from the Mud&Blood community, Newgrounds, and some content creators friends.

For music, we found free-use music from the internet.

Work on the trailer took 2 weeks of full-time.

Now on to some bad news, we synchronized the trailer release with the release of the coming soon page from Steam, the problem is we did so at the same time Steam Next Fest started.

Just made an itch.io page for this and I uploaded the alpha version

https://16bitnights.itch.io/welcome-back-commander

I finally got a trailer:

5 minutes long :)))))

and ofc we decided on the title : Welcome Back, Commander

Helicopter interior 

Transport helicopter sprites for the intro cutscene and tutorial stage. 

Thank you for the kind words!

I now work on adding music, voice acting and SFX, will be probably released as a teaser trailer after its don't in one week

I am working on an intro game cinematics and I thought about sharing this with you.

I made full art in WIndows Paint 98 + I added some effects after.

The main goal was: Maximum atmospheric value with MINIMAL colors and MINIMAL details.

I hope you enjoy

Started work on animating some of these panels,  we still need to make some polish but it's almost there.

And as far as progression goes this will have a solid combo, included here it will be: the intro cinematics, The teaser trailer content, the tutorial, the interactive start new game choices.

I finally managed to finish all the intro cinematic panels.

Now it's time to add animate them.

The goal is the same: MAXIMUM Atmospheric value with MINIMAL colors and MINIMAL details

New scene progression

Timelapse of cutscene artwork

And final with full interface

More encounters

Context (mockup) 

Animation I made for camp screen

Working now on the camp choices and visuals

UPDATE

I am trying to also integrate the inventory menu within the War room interface.

Each slot will provide the player with a minimum of 2 choices and a maximum of 3 choices for upgrade equipment.
There will be no perfect build and the goal here is to create a unique build on each playthrough providing freedom to the player and more ways to play.

Please bare with me, the main target here is to have low gameplay time, around 3-max5 hours of gameplay but HUGE replaibility value

I reduced the speeds and added some adjustments.

Also my partner started adding the rollovers and tooltips I made + a mechanical arm for unit selection.

just added more polish and also additional visuals for different screen ratios

And the first iteration of the parallax effect

Made some more progress

Some more progress.

I will try to keep all details minimal on the environment and go high-detail on interactive components.

In the meantime, I start to decide on the color palette and final polish adjustments on the game design.

This is a critical part of the game because here the player will spend half the gameplay time so I try to polish it as much as possible.

Hi,

I started development on a new game from the Chromosome Evil Franchise.

It won't be a direct sequel but rather a small prequel of sorts with different mechanics mixed with the RTS combat part.
I am going for a Diegetic UI design combined with easy 3 choices per day type of gameplay but all choices must have a big impact.
This will probably also be the final entry from this franchise.



First concept:




Team
Popa Cristian Manuel - artwork, game design, marketing, balance, team management, testing, level design
Sergey Dovganovsky - programming, animation, testing, balance
Developed under 16 BIT NIGHTS studio






Gentlemen