Cryptid Farm Steam Release! (26.10.2024)

Happy release day everyone!

This post is to announce the release of Cryptid Farm on Steam! 

It's available now here for purchase:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1892140/Cryptid_Farm/

(A snippet of the Steam library atwork)

Notes on the release

I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for following along to this point. It's been a long journey and I've learnt so much about game development by working on this game. What started as a funny experiment into multiplayer games has quickly become one of my favourite games to work on and  one of my proudest achievements. Whilst the game may still be a little rough around the edges, I believe it's finally time to let Cryptid Farm enter the games industry as a released, commercial project (my first one in fact!). I've been blessed with such an incredible following from this game and it couldn't have been possible without the continued support of everyone involved.

The release development period was very high pressure, there were a lot of decisions to make before the final deadline! I've spent the last month or so just working on the ending sequence and the main menu, cutting out bits that weren't needed and including bits that I forgot to add. The Steam Next Fest demo helped me to narrow down what needed to be done for a standalone version of the game and garnered a lot of attention (which was amazing!). The new menu came out almost just the way I wanted it to which I'm very pleased about. That said, using a lot of my development time on the menus and ending meant I had less time to fully playtest or promote beforehand other than the Steam Next Fest demo. Please let me know if you encounter any issues and I'll fix them as soon as possible!

As for the itch.io version (or the "Pre-steam demo"), I was planning on leaving it up as an homage to the final product. People can be free to try out the old version, and if they like it they can purchase the full version on Steam. I feel as though the itch.io version is at a good stable point to let people try the game without giving too much away. That said, most future updates will likely be focused on the paid Steam version from now on. I hope that's understandable for everyone!

For the Steam Next Fest demo, this has been retired for now in place of the new released Steam version. Thank you to everyone who took the time to try it out! The response was so incredible and blew my expectations far out of the water, I felt bad deactivating it since I knew so many people enjoyed it! In the end I've currently only got one set of big servers that will accept one Steam app connecting to them at a time, maybe I could fix that in the future. I've also included a gamemode in the full game called "Compact" which replicates the demo's shorter gameplay cycle.

Conclusion

Once again, I'm so grateful for everything that's happened with this game and I hope everyone enjoys the new content in the released version! I'm going to keep an eye on the current version for now and make sure everything is working as intended, then maybe think about some future content later >:)

For now, so long and happy farming!

- FistFlame