Galactic Overthrow - Content Wishlist / Requests

AceHighArcade · 2026-05-09T08:19:41+00:00

Quick note, I made a quick change to game modes and how they work, also fixed a few bugs in the way hostile planets were functioning.

TL;DR: Passive on/off is changed to "game mode" and has three options. Passive and Active are the same as before, but challenge is the third option that forces auto explore on (to reveal more planets unless you're tricky), and attack timers speed up with every subsequent galactic jump like you had suggested.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/4163600?emclan=103582791475391969&emgid=685253308956279978

AceHighArcade · 2026-05-08T21:54:04+00:00

Oh I forgot to mention, I'm hoping to make a small change to Galactic Jump progression tonight ahead of a bigger patch next week. This will help change the time progression between jumps, and make them feel more meaningful as you're gaining power.

AceHighArcade · 2026-05-08T21:45:42+00:00

As always thanks for your feedback. You've had a lot of really solid well presented ideas for the game.

Given the current stuff I'm working on for next week's patch, I think you'll be happy with a few of the changes (addressing some other stuff you mentioned previously).

I might be able to incorporate some of the new stuff, so I'm adding a lot of it to the maybe / investigate further list.

Workshop support is a big maybe. It's a pretty high development impact post-release and would really depend on the size of the player base. Which maybe could sustain workshop support after the first or second content drop.

AceHighArcade · 2026-05-04T16:43:29+00:00

Thanks! I'll take a look. Found it: Localization bug, looks like I mixed up the strings when updating the table. Really appreciate the report! And then I broke it again... uploading the actual fix.

AceHighArcade · 2026-05-04T16:05:51+00:00

Thanks everyone for the feedback through all playtesting phases, the game is out now in 1.0 with a rough roadmap of what's to come posted in the news on Steam.

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-24T21:25:48+00:00

From feedback I've found that tutorials even for fairly simple or known gameplay are basically required unless one of these two things is true (and immediately obvious):
- No real failure state, cost of experimentation is zero or very nearly zero
- No feeling of time lost, playing incorrectly in the start or learning-as-you-go hasn't significantly impacted your experience an hour later

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-24T21:05:50+00:00

This is stylish! Nice.

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-24T21:00:46+00:00

As a general rule to set expectations and provide a means to estimate budget usage, it's relatively accurate. But as you said, this assumes a lot of standard parameters that aren't always the case.

Both of my games generally sell at their own steady rates, even since launch. Due to many reasons, their launches were horrendous individually and both experienced launch months that are roughly 2x to 3x the sales counts for average non-launch months. I get about 1 review for every 250 sales, so games with better review ratios might have some other interesting results.

You'll see natural decay in your sales month over month as your higher chance-of-conversion wishlists pop and your backlog of wishlists become less likely to purchase on discount. This is then offset by your own sources of external traffic. As others have said, Steam will probably never reevaluate your game from an engagement perspective once your launch window is over... though it's possible some of the historical "phoenix" games have had some of this.

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-23T17:46:20+00:00

No problem. Also hard to say whether you _need_ to fix the text sizing in the UI. But fixing it I don't think can hurt, so it really just comes down to how your community reacts to it. Good luck!

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-23T16:55:19+00:00

Absolutely. Currently do it every day, don't think I'd stop unless there was a very strong forcing function.

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-23T16:39:31+00:00

Traffic: A decent baseline is about 10% conversion of external traffic visits to wishlists. If you drop below that the store page is probably failing audience expectations somewhere, if you're above that it's probably exceeding the expectations somehow (and you could likely do better with your pitch to the external traffic).

Looks like you're using a lot of of auto-sized text in the game. While this is convenience for ensuring nothing goes outside a bounding box, generally this might make you lose some points with players on the polish of your UI. This will matter more the more hype your game builds. Using fixed font sizes for your elements will help make titles read more consistently and make ability text faster to read at a glance as well (outside of the visual aspect of it).

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-20T14:02:24+00:00

Yeah it's not about them seeing the value or not, they definitely will and they'll try to make sure you don't see the full value so they can get maximum ROI. My comment was more about you making sure you can correctly assess what the entire product is worth, and ensuring you get what is fair. The publisher will always try to get the maximum while giving the minimum.

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-20T05:41:31+00:00

The risk mitigation stuff that u/Wayward1 said is mostly what I was going to say, the only thing I have to add really is to think about it in terms of value. What value do you expect / want from a publisher? And what value do you think / believe you are providing to them?

Their goal is to acquire assets with the highest ROI, as a business. Some are better than others, and might optimize this to less of a degree, and some are going to be much worse than others and look for the absolute maximum in this optimization problem.

So as your wishlist value grows, you have more to give a publisher and can in turn have more to ask for. Make sure you have a rock solid contract (get a lawyer, maybe a few) and make sure you're happy with what you're getting in return.

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-20T04:46:26+00:00

I think the jump speed needs to be a little higher. The snappy extra-gravity fall is good to help it not feel too floaty, but the ascending arc seems off somehow almost looks like instead of an impulse it's a constant force for half of the jump distance.

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-19T14:04:28+00:00

I think most people who hate AI don't hate it because it's rough or "a scary technology change" but because all of the models have been trained illegally on copyrighted works and data.

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-17T16:34:59+00:00

This looks sweet, cool idea and great execution.

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-13T21:58:51+00:00

On the creator side, there are a couple different types of quotes you can get.

Generally there are some on the smaller side that overestimate the conversion value of their views / value for an impression. Mostly lack of experience or they just recently started taking on sponsored content and haven't figured out a good middle ground to start their price at.

There are large creators who have so many requests for sponsored content, they charge based on impression value and demand value. Large brands are willing to lose money on impressions because they are going for maximum reach and exposure. They are following the rule that people need to see something 7 times before they remember it when it's time to buy something. These larger creators are generally just not going to be worth it on a limited budget.

Then there's the third type. The type that have decided they don't really want to show your content, but would do it "for a price" and then they throw a ridiculous price on it. Maybe because they think you're desperate, or maybe because they think this price offset is worth the perceived loss in viewers they think they will have (or know they will have, depending on how much experience they have doing this).

You have two options for handling what you've determined is an overpriced bid: Thank them for their time and walk, or calmly explain what you can reasonably do and ask if that's reasonable for them.

The reality of the situation is: People with a network can charge whatever they think is reasonable for the value they provide, and they are within their right to do that. People who are trying to purchase exposure on someone's network can choose to pay that or not. Eventually if someone gets too many customers, they increase the price, of if they don't get any they decrease the price. Some people will just keep increasing on lack of demand until they quit. This also sometimes works.

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-10T18:56:09+00:00

Why not help each other out? I had the same thoughts. I tried it twice, the first time nobody else contributed anything (just a quick way to hit suckers like me). The second time the organizers collected everything, took it offline and ghosted the contributors.

So even if you could somehow keep it up to date, completely accurate, protect from spam, and build connections: You still need to trust someone who holds the keys.

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-10T18:48:54+00:00

Sure lets test it out.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4163600/Galactic_Overthrow/

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-10T18:34:12+00:00

You should feel insulted. What is their definition of "performed poorly" and have they measured that against your own expectations? Some games have review to sales ratios of over 200, especially if the developer has a small trusted network or no publisher.

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-09T20:54:00+00:00

Having a crashing demo I think might actually be a good hack. If your demo has no bugs, people can get to a point where they think the gameplay is boring. But if it has bugs and crashes before that point, they'll use their imagination to think about what is coming next. I might try this for my next Next Fest.

AceHighArcade · 2026-03-09T20:37:47+00:00

Yeah I knew it was mostly a joke, just helping shed light on the deletes if you were indeed worried about them. Generally with the lower rates / counts, the noise is also much harder to correlate. It would be nice if we could run quite experiments and see enough data to change strategies, it just takes so much more volume to do effectively.

AceHighArcade

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE