while True: learn() Steam Early Access
Today is an important day for us that would not have taken place without our wonderful community. Damn, I did not want to begin by shouting “Thank you all!” to our players… I will have to collect all my will and hold out for at least a couple of paragraphs.
It has all began with our designer who asked something like: “will these neural networks use intuition after the bug is fixed?” and something just came into our heads. We understood that modern AI and machine learning are very mystified and we had to tell people how do they work in reality.
We had been developing the game for 6 months, and after that, for 4 more months, we made weekly updates available for free. We thought that everything will go soft and smooth, and there will be about 50–60 people who will like to try our game out, they will play it and say that there are a lot of bugs and we will be fixing them one by one and improving the game little by little. However, after we published Pre Alpha version we made available for everybody, we understood that our plans did not match the reality. There were more people, who were eager to play this, and there were a lot of them.
Well, since the plan was already ruined, we decided to play big. In order to decide which price is fair for our product, we decided to offer Pre Alpha players purchase the keys of the game in a Pay-What-You-Want model. Everyone could pay as much as they wanted for the game — starting with one cent and ending with 100 dollars.
You think the things went smoothly after that? Hell no. Keys we’ve prepared for 3 months ended up in a few weeks. We were also surprised that the average price for the game was high above our expectations. It meant a lot to us — people believed in us and we could not fail their expectations. This is how we became more confident and began taking a little less sleep.
We started our company, Luden.io, with a simple idea in mind — we wanted to make games that could teach people something new, explain things to them. When more than 3000 people played the Pre Alpha version of the game, we understood there are many people who share our ideas out there.
So here is what happened during Pre Alpha:
- We received more than 500 letters of feedback and ideas
- We introduced more than 100 improvements suggested by our players, including Color Blind more and Russian language localization
- Players spent about 155000$ per day on dressing in-game kitties
- Besides the tasks the game had already had in stock, we added an ability to get a job of a CTO in a startup
- We had finally made a tutorial we still have to work with
- For the first time in our lifetime, we saw how Youtube video watchers were discussing neural network architecture in the comments
- The release of the in-game newspaper about the real facts from the history of machine learning and AI, Depp News, had been adjusted
- @Mistergrow printed kitties on a 3D printer and added a bit of magic to them
In one of the schools, a teacher uses our game to make learning logic more interesting to children. We are very happy to hear such news, and we are ready to work at the full swing so that our game could be used in your school or at the school your children attend to. Just let us know if you want to do so.
So, today, on the 28th of March, we are releasing our game in Early Access in Steam. The Pre Alpha version of the game will remain free for everyone until the end of times. We are where we are now only with the help of our community and friends, who have stayed next to us since the beginning of development, always cheered us up and motivated us to move forward. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. You are the best community any developer can dream of. We will continue to deepen and expand the game; there is still a hell lot of work to be done. But we promise to keep developing the game with ❤️.
Join this process: I heard that there is a special secret cat giveaway running in the game now. I will go and register now, maybe I will be the lucky one to receive that unique kitty :)
- Our Friends Club (free Pre Alpha and unique kitty promo code are included)
- Steam
- Humble Store
- Discord
- Web
- Press Pack
