The Game and the Story by Dan MacDonald

Kingdom Elemental (part III) (April 04, 2007)

Like it often is with indie game development nothing ever seems to go exactly how you expect it and the launch of Kingdom Elemental was no exception. I talked with Chronic Logic's Josiah Pisciotta again about the release of the game on their site. Where most indie developers rely heavily on a demo to sell their game, Kingdom Elemental was listed for sale on the Chronic Logic site without any demo or free trial. “When Kingdom Elemental reached beta (content complete) we set up the ordering and order processing allowing people to pre-order Kingdom Elemental and actually play the beta version if they wished” explained Josiah. What they didn't expect was for the demo to take so long to complete. So while they awaited the release of the demo the pout out a trailer which garnished some interest in the game. He elaborated on what happened next. “When the demo was finally ready about three weeks after the release of the full version we had sold about 30 copies. I didn't really expect much with out a demo and the pre-demo sales were a nice bonus” he said.

I asked Josiah how he felt about KE's combined score of 7.3 on Game Tunnels top 10 monthly round up. He admitted to being a little disappointed with the score and mentioned from some of the comments that it was obvious that the judges were playing version 1.0 that was missing some fairly significant interface improvements. “I think we would have been ranked much higher if they had played the 1.2 version which we release about a week after 1.0” he said.

Despite getting an average score on the monthly round up Kingdom Elemental did quite well in Game Tunnels game of the year round up sneaking into the top 10 games of 2006 as well as placing 3rd in the strategy game awards. I enquired on the effect of those awards had had on the game thus far. “Almost all of our sales to date have been a direct result of the exposure we have received form the 2006 GOTY awards on Game Tunnel”, Josiah explained. “That said, Game Tunnel was also one of the only sites to have major coverage of Kingdom Elemental as it was released just before the GOTY awards and most other sites have not had time to do reviews of the game.”

In the first article in the Kingdom Elemental series Josiah said that he hoped KE would sell at least 100 copies a month in order to sustain its development. I asked him about how the game had done since release. “ So far we have received 71 sales which is about the minimum sales we are hoping for. Time will tell if these numbers will be sustainable and we still have a lot of promotion and marketing left to do.” Josiah explained since the demo release there has been 42 sales and around 1600 demo plays. This equates to a respectable 2.6% conversion rate for the demo” he said with characteristic indie optimism.

With KE now released and off to a reasonably good start I asked about future developments on Kingdome Elemental. “I have a list of new features that I would like to see in Kingdom Elemental” Josiah explained. “If Kingdom Elemental sells well enough those will be the first things to be added. After that we are hoping to be able to do a new version of Kingdom Elemental for Windows, OSX and Linux. We have a long list of features we would like to put in this new version including Multiplayer and a bunch of new units. Hopefully Kingdom Elemental will give us the opportunity to add some of the many features we could not put into the current version.”

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By: Dan McDonald
Posted: Wednesday April 04, 2007