2022-12-29 - Allgemein

End of Year 2022

Welcome to another annual End of Year blog post. 2022 was a big release year for us where we finally released our latest game Card Crawl Adventure after almost 3 years of development. In addition to that we announced a new game and I participated in 2 game jams which both were quite successful.

My personal life was and is still impacted by Covid. Our whole family got it in April and we suffered quite a lot, but everyone could recover. Despite the good recovery we do feel the fallout from constantly being sick through out the year with smaller infections, the Flu and so on. Especially in the colder month we got sick way more often than in the recent years. This meant I had to focus even more on getting things done, because you could never know if you could work the next week or not.

GUNCHO for 7DRL
In March I once again participated in the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, this time I got the honor to collaborate with the legendary Terri Vellmann. Terri is a fantastic game developer (Heavy Bullets, Sluge Life, High Hell) but also a really good Illustrator. I especially enjoyed his work on Dust Biters. We both knew each other for quite some time and always wanted to work on something together. For this years 7DRL I decided to revisit the “spinning tiles” mechanic that I used in the Disc Room Jam game. But after a bit of back and forth we decided that it would be cooler if the the spinning part would actually take place outside of the game board and so we came up with the spinning revolver cylinder which the game then was designed around.

Terri made a bunch of really cool characters and animations and the jam game turned out quite fun.
You can play GUNCHO via Itch.io and test if you can defeat the Banditboss!

GUNCHO gameplay trailer.

🤠👉 https://t.co/qdk1j6OASz#7DRL pic.twitter.com/h4nHqiBcnd

— Arnold Rauers (@tinytouchtales) March 8, 2022

Later on Mikael Brassman even made a PICO-8 version of GUNCHO because he liked it so much:

Finally released the spaghetti western #roguelike for #pico8. Chase down some bandits for that bounty!https://t.co/2wfW2iDmJd

💥🔫🤠

Thanks to @tinytouchtales and @terrivellmann for the original 7DRL game jam entry. pic.twitter.com/dj39CUbFWX

— Mikael Brassman (@spoike) July 8, 2022

Card Crawl Adventure
On August 3rd we finally released Card Crawl Adventure after 3 years of development. Card Crawl Adventure is a mix of a bunch of ideas and games and was the first project I co-designed. Matthew Dunstan a pretty established board game designer contacted me in Aug 2019 and showed me his dungeon crawler prototype that takes places on a 3×3 grid.

Big shout out to @wisegoldfish who contacted me in Aug ’19 with his 3×3 dungeon crawler prototype, that he based on his card grid mechanic in Monumental. After many design meetings and a year of intense game design prototyping, the final design of #CardCrawlAdventure was born. 🍻 pic.twitter.com/YqpqvX169W

— Arnold Rauers (@tinytouchtales) August 1, 2022

Things kicked off from there and over the course of 1 year we developed the final design for Card Crawl Adventure which includes aspects of Card Thief, Card Crawl, Slay the Spire, Into the Breach and many more. Another 2 years were spent on the production of the game where most notably Max Fiedler poured his heart and soul into the art of the game.

On August 26th, 2019 I published the first playable prototype of #CardCrawlAdventure.

127 versions later we are going to release the game on August 3rd, 2022. #screenshotsaturday pic.twitter.com/PSASiEh79p

— Arnold Rauers (@tinytouchtales) July 30, 2022

Since the beginning of the open Beta we also have a super amazing CCA Discord community, which made developing the game way more fun. Through the constant feedback and help of all the amazing players we founds crazy bugs and exploits, made major balancing changes and UX improvements.
We also created a Desktop version for CCA that will release in March 2023 and hopefully will be able allow even more players to enjoy the game.

In addition to that we are also almost finished with the first major content update for CCA which will introduce a new character and a new game mode that will change up the usual 5 Tavern structure for a more open ended challenge that goes way beyond the regular gameplay.

10 Year anniversary
On August 17th I also celebrated my 10 year anniversary as Tinytouchtales, since on that day I released my first game Super Zombie Tennis on mobile. I already made a big blog post trying to recap the last 10 years as a game developer with its ups and downs. It’s well worth a read:

Today is the 10th anniversary of me as an independent game developer under the alias of Tinytouchtales.

You can now read my
“10 Years of Tinytouchtales” blog post.https://t.co/DJAeHqqz80 #GameDev #IndieGames #MobileGames pic.twitter.com/qRH2239lcI

— Arnold Rauers (@tinytouchtales) August 17, 2022

Card Crawl Deck Merchant Update
I also managed to make a small content update for the OG Card Crawl. For quite some time I was unhappy with the Deck Merchant, a mode where players can create their own Dungeon Decks to share and compete in. Most of the Decks were uninteresting and the good ones mostly got buried in a flood of bad ones. This obviously is a content moderation issue, but since I really don’t have the time to moderate this type of content I decided to retire the old Deck Merchant all at once.
Instead I added a mode similar to Maze Machinas and Gnomitaires Challenges, where 10 people can compete on a particular game and gain rank points to climb a rank leaderboard over a specific amount of time (1 Month) called season. Despite the simple premise this featured turned out quite good and people seems to engage with it quite well.

Working on a long due #CardCrawl Desktop update. 🤓 pic.twitter.com/H8jtUqpOfq

— Arnold Rauers (@tinytouchtales) August 30, 2022

New game Announcement: Geo Gods
Another favorite of mine this year was that I officially announced a new game with another amazing collaborator: Alba Ballesta Gonzalez!
I’ve been following Albas work for quite some time now and after deciding that my “Creatures” prototype would be worth a full game, I decided to contact her for a collaboration.

Try my new game prototype “Creatures”.

🔥💧🌲🪨🌞❄️

Draft cards and strategically place and combine creatures tiles to increase their score.

Playable in the Browser on @itchio https://t.co/F4FyKN0Qjl

Any feedback welcome!#GameDev #Itchio pic.twitter.com/IAdqkOxps6

— Arnold Rauers (@tinytouchtales) August 23, 2021

Alba has an amazingly unique art style and she has made an amazing mockup for how the game will look like.
We also opened an early play test via Geo-Gods.com if you are interesting in playing the game in an early stage. If all goes well we will try to release the game in the first half of 2023.

With the fabulous @albabbgg we’re working on a new mobile game called

🌈 Geo Gods 🌈

In Geo Gods you grow a godly garden by drafting cards and playing their gods, who control 6 elemental power crystals.

🔥💧🌲🪨🌞❄️

Join our closed alpha test viahttps://t.co/fj8yaTpuI2

🤳 pic.twitter.com/iDFuYUVLmS

— Arnold Rauers (@tinytouchtales) September 13, 2022

3-Lane Card Game Jam 2022
The second game jam I participated in this year was the 3-Lane Card Game Jam initiated by Keith Burgun and his community as a reaction to the popularity of Marvel Snap, a new game by the original Hearthstone design team formed around Ben Brode.

Today starts the @keithburgun 3-Lane Card Game Jam on https://t.co/n2iNyhK2bd! I’m trying to make something for it as well. #GameDev #GameJamhttps://t.co/CYFLtuxkPJ pic.twitter.com/g6fn1Yuq3y

— Arnold Rauers (@tinytouchtales) November 4, 2022

The jam was quite fun and revolved around designing a game to utilize the win 2 of 3 lanes structure that many recent games use. My first idea was to create a tower defense like that would take place on 3 different lanes, but after some brainstorming I came up with the 3 lane Poker idea, where the player would play 3 simultaneous hands of Texas hold em against the dealer. Revealing more cards in each lane increases the pot of that lane but also raises the risk of losing against the dealer. Another push your luck element I’ve added imitates a Marvel Snap like location mechanic that can change the rules of a lane and can work for or against the player. The game turned out quite fun even though I didn’t put a lot of time into balance or rules polish. Like most of my jam games you can play Texas Lane Em Poker on my Itch.io page.

Texas Lane’em Poker for the 3 Lane Card Game Jam ’22.

🃏 Play Texas Hold’em Poker on 3 lanes.
💰Win chips to survive the next rounds buy in.
🎰 Reveal each lanes action to win big or go home!

Play in your Browser:https://t.co/BjvJDQNUDX

♣️♠️♥️♦️ pic.twitter.com/TNWX3kU5uP

— Arnold Rauers (@tinytouchtales) November 10, 2022

Revenue 2022
The overall revenue of my games for this year was quite stable and nothing too surprising happened. With a total of around $104000 from iOS and Android my revenue improved by about 5% from last year. My best selling game is still Card Crawl with about $42000 in sales which makes up about 40% of the total revenue. The next best selling game was Miracle Merchant with $30000 and Card Thief with $18000.

The revenue split between iOS and Android is about 52% iOS and 48% from Google play. I suspect a slight skew towards Google Play since I made quite a lot of revenue coming from Google Play Pass as well, which I’m still not allowed to disclose publicly.

While Card Crawl Adventure pushed Card Crawl sales I have the slight suspicion that the reverse is rarely happening. While I have a good cross promo in place it does not seem that many CC players actually checked out CCA. We also could improve the revenue of CCA a bit after we’ve added a $4.99 unlock for the full game, which many players requested. While the overall revenue of CCA is not quite on par with my older games, I still believe that we should continue to improve the game and hopefully the release of the Desktop version will add to its overall revenue in the future.

(click for bigger version)

Conclusion
2022 was a big year for Card Crawl Adventure and I’m super happy that we finally released the game. I personally think it’s my best game yet and I’m super motivated to work on it further, improving it and adding new content. I’m still in awe with the world we created in Card Crawl and it’s super fun to expand it even further.

My prototypes were promising and especially GUNCHO is high on my list to be worked on more in the next year. I’m very happy to have Alba on board for Geo Gods, which is another really good game I believe and with her help it’s going to look fantastic as well! I’m looking forward to the release of CCA Desktop in March and hope to work on a few unannounced ideas as well.

Thanks to everyone who supported me, my games and our general efforts this year. I hope to see you all next year. All the best to you and your families!