Hey there! We recently launched the demo for Adventure in Hender's Castle, a 3D action-adventure game where you cast magic spells, solve puzzles, and battle enemies. Inspired by the classic Zelda games, it’s been over 10 days since launch, and we’ve gathered some amazing feedback. Let’s dive into what players thought of the game and where we’re headed next.

4725 Impressions, 750 views and 117 downloads

Our banner click-through rate is 0.30%. There's a ton of room for improvement, and we’ll be updating the banner to boost visibility and downloads. Our target was 200 downloads for the demo’s lifetime, and we’re confident we can hit that by continuing to post and getting niche channels to take a look.

22 usd in revenue?

We didn’t expect any revenue, but to our surprise, three players have supported us by purchasing the demo. These are friends who wanted to show love, so huge thanks to you three!

10% responses on our feedback form

With 117 downloads, about 10% filled out the feedback form, and here's what we learned:

• Players mostly agree the game FEELS “Zelda like” —we’re nailing the genre.
• Players mostly think the character controller is "okay"—neither great nor terrible. Definitely room to make it feel more polished.
• Our telekinesis mechanic is divisive. Some players get it easily, while others find it frustrating. we thought TK was pretty good already but It’s clear we need to improve this.
• Players agree the combat needs more work, which we anticipated, and we’re actively improving it.
• Players agree they didn’t get stuck and mostly knew where to go. Our level design is working as intended, even with little hand-holding!

The top areas to improve? Combat, telekinesis, and making player movement feel smoother.

Everyone HATES the Camera

The feedback was unanimous: the camera needs serious work. It’s jittery, collides with world geometry, and takes control away from the player. Turns out we were immune to the issues after playing the game so much ourselves!

But now that people are pointing it out it is obvious how much of a problem the camera is for the whole experience. we got a very lengthy and helpful reddit comment on it.

So we're fixing it! We're overhauling the camera system, we are using unity’s cinemachine on the background with a cinemachine collider component so we should be able to get something way, way better by tweaking our configuration.

Art Direction is Our Strongest Point

Players loved the art style and aesthetics. It’s a massive focus for us, and we’re thrilled to see the hard work paying off. For such a small team with limited resources, we’re proud of how far we’ve come.

Something that players want to know more about is story and world-building. The demo itself does not have much history at all, NPC dialogues are mostly informative and we even had a BUG where you would lose the ability to talk to NPCs, so starting to add that history and narrative In the game is part of our next steps.

More Spells, Please!

Many players wanted more spells and variety. In the demo, you have just three spells: melee, telekinesis, and dash which comes right at the end and there is not a lot to do with it. For a game focused on unlocking spells and exploration, we definitely missed the mark here.

This is something I was surprised that we overlook, for a game that is suppose to be about unlocking new spells that allow you to explore new areas and find new spells (our core game-loop) the demo did not deliver on that promise, as this demo is also suppose to be the first hour of content of the game, I already have many ideas on how to include more spells earlier in the game and really nail our core gameplay-loop.

So What’s Next?

The demo was an awesome way to check the game’s vibe and see what players want. The verdict? Adventure in Hender's Castle has tons of potential but needs improvement.

Our next big goal is building enough content for a compelling Steam page and starting to collect wishlists. We’ve also got a clear list of things to improve, and we’re working hard to fix the biggest issues while continuing development.

The demo release was a very good exercise in getting a “vibe check” on the overall quality of what we are doing and in learning if players like and want this type of game, I think the result is that Adventure in Hender’s Castle, holds potential but needs to continue to improve

But we need your help! If you’ve enjoyed the demo or are excited about what’s coming, please tell your friends about the game. We’re making Adventure in Hender’s Castle for action-adventure fans, and we need your support to spread the word!

Let’s build something amazing together.

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