CultGame 2024 - A Year in Review

Hi CultGame fam,

Today I’d like to take some time to give you an overview of the progress we’ve made on CultGame and what the road to release looks like.

This year, we’ve accomplished the following:

-Created a custom text-based game engine just for CultGame

-Wrote several open source C++ libraries that we’ve used to work on CultGame

-Produced a complete, 40 minute soundtrack for CultGame in collaboration with Evan Stevens

-Produced 12 ASCII art pieces in collaboration with littlebitspace

-Released 12 YouTube videos

-Prepared a 20 minute alpha demo of CultGame

-Showed CultGame at the 2024 TORG Gaming Expo

We’re proud of this progress, and we see room to improve and do more for this upcoming year. The decisions we make are going to be focused on goals that put the alpha demo in your hands faster, ensure that the full game is a high-quality experience, and marketing so that CultGame is a financially viable way for me (Jeff) to continue working on the project full-time.

With this in mind, here are our upcoming goals with order of priority:

1. Complete the first drafts of several of the game’s core mechanics (Preaching, Crusading, Sacrificing). This is to have some interesting screenshots for our upcoming Steam store page.

2. Release the CultGame Steam store page. With this release will come a large wave of marketing attention, so this will be a big opportunity!

3. Port CultGame to Windows. We’ve been developing on Linux this whole time, so a bit of work needs to be done here to get things working for the largest share of our players.

4. Prepare for the release of the public and free alpha demo. Our goal is to have this available to you ASAP once I feel that the playable bit of the game that exists gives you a good idea of the direction we are heading in.

5. Continue developing features guided by player feedback and iterate on the alpha demo. At this point, we will further develop the roadmap ahead.

Can we expect the release of the full game this upcoming year? I don’t believe so, but you will get to play early releases of the game for free.

This upcoming year will not be without challenges, however. The challenge of putting the game in your hands as fast as possible relies upon getting a very basic version of the game that I don’t feature creep to Timbuktu! I believe we can do this within Q1 of 2025, but this is not a hard date.

The challenge of delivering quality is very doable on our end, as I am very confident in the art and music of CultGame, and the feedback on the gameplay demo has been promising so far. We just need to continue to put our competent skills to use and keep listening to your feedback.

Lastly, as a solo full-time game developer, funding is my main challenge. For CultGame to be a financially viable full-time job for myself, we will need to sell around 3,000 copies of the game. I believe this is a goal that we can achieve! Warsim: The Realm of Aslona, another commandline strategy game that we are friends with, has recently passed their 100,000 sales milestone. A huge congratulations to them for pioneering the modern text-based game genre and proving that these are the kind of games players want. We’re in an era of corporatized AAA slop in the game industry, and it’s games like Warsim and CultGame that will deliver on the experiences that players have been waiting for.

Other stuff to expect from us in 2025:

-Still going to be releasing one devlog per month and one other gamedev/CultGame related YouTube video each month. We’re trying to meet the watch time threshold to get monetized, and we’re on our way there!

-More social media marketing. We’re going to try to be targeting fans of established games similar to CultGame like Dwarf Fortress.

-We’ll be hanging out on the CultGame discord! We’d love to have you join us.

-We’ll be attending meetings of the Central Ohio GameDev Groug regularly for feedback and gamedev networking.

-We’ll be showing at game conventions in the Midwestern United States. We’re considering Final Boss Con, The Cleveland Gaming Classic, GDEX, and TORG!

Thanks so much for being fans of CultGame! Y’all are so awesome and supportive <3. Until 2025, we are going to be taking a bit of a break for the holidays. What I’ll leave you with until then is a video of the current CultGame alpha gameplay demo.

Happy holidays and much love,

Jeff / Bucephalus Studios