So, the day has finally come. Cue butterflies and sweaty hands.
Fallen Hero is out!
EDIT: Was a small update to take care of some minor bugs in the statscreen and text. Mostly language and connectivity related, as my last changes didn’t get included.
EDIT2: Okay. Fallen Hero has now been out for two days (depending on where you are in the world) and I am… overwhelmed. I never expected this.
Honestly, I don’t know what I expected. I know the story has had it’s fans, even back when it was a fanfiction project on Livejournal for an unpublished comic book that my partner is writing. It didn’t even have a name back then, just “a supervillain writing experiment”, where I was playing around with concepts and ideas. I think some of those fans are around still, even though it’s been… years and years. A decade? Maybe.
For the longest time it lay on my harddrive, half turned into a novel, then abandoned because I couldn’t figure out how to get at the core of the story I wanted to tell. I knew a lot of it was deeply problematic, but it was also the problematic bits that I wanted to get at.
I didn’t even think about making it into an interactive novel until Choice of Robots went viral on my tumblr dash and I realized that was the way I wanted to go.
But even then I never really thought that other people would connect to it the way some seem to do. Maybe it’s because it is so personal…
More rambling
A lot that goes into that book is things that have been going on in my own head in the past. I tried to put it all in there. The anger at the world. At myself. The hate/love for the people around me that understands but at the same time doesn’t since I never let them in.The destruction and the self destruction. Not feeling at home in your own body, but not knowing what to do instead. Depression. Gender queerness. Suicídal thoughts. The feeling of alienation from the rest of humanity. The sense of the inevitability of it all.
I’ve got some questions whether I’ve listened to a certain expert, or whether I’ve studied psychology. I haven’t. Not unless you count trying to figure out yourself. That I’ve done extensively. At 46, I’ve had a lot of time to make mistakes and try to fix them.
It remains to be seen what path the MC will take…
Another thing that I didn’t expect is that in just two days it would have this many good reviews, nice things said about it, or this many downloads. Two bloody days… I can only see the downloads on the playstore, (1000-5000 after two days), traditionally the app store is the biggest seller for choice of games but there’s no numbers (between #4 and #5 in the roleplaying section). Thes are downloads and not sales, but looking at the Steam achievement stats, it seems that around 70% have so far got through to Step 3, which is after the paywall, which I think is a pretty good ratio. The reviews are favorable, the things people point out they like less, are things I understand and agree with, but which are there for a reason.
In short, I am very happy, which is weird, because I do not trust my own happiness. I have a much easier time being disliked.
So… that being said.
It would be very much appreciated if you’d take the time to leave a review at your platform of choice telling why you liked/disliked the game. I’m not sure how one goes around getting a book up on Goodreads, but I think they have interactive novels as well?
Got no marketing budget, word of mouth is pretty much all I have.
Thank you so much everybody, you have no idea how much your support have meant to me. Thank you.
EDIT 3: A new thread for questions about achievements/gameplay.
