We only have five members working full-time, and I am the only programmer who works on the Xbox One version on our team.Īs small as we are, it is difficult to balance development on both platforms, let alone supporting communities across both Steam and Xbox One. But after the reception on Steam, that became our main platform in terms of online competition and community support. I did not expect Rivals of Aether to blow up on Steam as much as it did when we launched on Early Access. How does differ from your experiences with Steam in terms of reactions from gamers? I think this frame of thinking is good for the program because indies really need to hit all the platforms they can to maximize their sales.Ĭonsole exclusivity is becoming a dying notion all around but especially for indie games that have niche audiences it becomes important to hit all the platforms that are feasible to you in order to survive. There have been other small improvements to make things closer to Steam for developers who want to bring their experiences over. But recently Microsoft released simple achievements so developers can simply trigger achievements like you can on Steam and not worry about circumventing the Xbox One stat system. So developers would just make achievement stats to make their lives easier where "0" was unachieved, and "1" was achieved. However, it made porting a game from Steam to Xbox One more tedious. For organizing a game, the Xbox One way is technically better, especially for grinding achievements. However, on Xbox One, you had to hook up every achievement to platform stats and have those stats trigger the achievement. When making a Steam game, you can just fire an achievement with a simple function call and be done with it. One of the big changes that launched recently was an addition to the achievement system that many developers have asked for. I think the biggest improvements have come from developers who want to launch on multiple platforms in a painless way. The program has grown over the time since we initially started talking to them in 2014. Rivals has been on Xbox One for quite a while now, has the program evolved and improved since you joined initially? After we launched Rivals of Aether on Game Preview, we have been making a lot of use of that certification team as we have pushed multiple updates since launching in July 2016. We also have access to account managers and an ID-specific certification team. After we were able to establish our game, we were able to get into some of those shows on our own, but the Event team helped for getting the word out. When we were still pretty new, we attended shows like PAX West, GDC, and E3 through the program at Microsoft booths. What kind of support do you get from Microsoft? And do you think they need to do has been a big help for Rivals of Aether and our development in general. A new program that was meant to scale from larger to smaller indies was exactly what we were looking for in console development. Originally our team was only two members, me and our composer, flashygoodness. A platform fighter is best played with a controller, and the ID program was well equipped to handle a game of our size.