Greetings, Android fans of Where Shadows Slumber!
I realize many of you were dismayed that our original Sept. 20th launch was only on the App Store, but we have good news. We’re knee-deep in Android testing as we speak, which means you have the opportunity to play Where Shadows Slumber on your Android device before the game launches on Google Play later this year!
Read on for details…
What To Expect
Where Shadows Slumber is now available on Google Play through their BETA program. This free download allows you to play the first seven Levels of our game. We haven’t updated this thing since March, so if you played it back then you’ll definitely want to give the BETA another shot!
Remember that the purpose of this test is to help us with our upcoming Android launch. If you were hoping for more than seven Levels, we’re sorry! The team is more focused on solving hardware problems than providing a fun experience. (You’ll have to buy the full game for that…) There are 2,500 Android devices in current use, across six different functioning operating system versions. A ton of people still use Android 5.0, but Google is already up to version 9.0! There are so many combinations to test, we can’t possibly handle this on our own.
The BETA will allow you to see if the game runs on your old phone, see how well it performs, get a sense of the game’s controls and puzzles, and experience a tiny snippet of the game’s story. That’s all you need right now!
When you complete the BETA (which should only take 10 minutes) be sure to fill out the survey in the app description. For your convenience, here’s the link:
Happy testing, everyone!
What’s The Plan?
Currently, we have 3,275 people enrolled in the Google BETA, which is awesome! There’s just one problem: Google doesn’t let you let people download your BETA for free if your game costs money. Our game will be $4.99 on Google Play, just like it is on the App Store. So the way we handled this issue was by splitting our game across two store pages. It’s not ideal, but it means that when the full game launches on Android, the BETA will still be hanging out and it will still be free. I guess it will serve as a kind of extra demo until we take it down? This is in addition to our current Demo, which has been on the store since 2016. How confusing!
Our hope is that having three different entries on the Google Play store directing people toward the full game will be better than having just one. It’s a shame we can’t bring all the BETA people directly over to the final game later, but we assume that those who care will follow our prompt when the game launches. We’re thinking of updating the BETA one last time with something that says “ok, the game is out, go buy it!” Whether it will still be playable at that point is still up in the air.
Stay tuned for more news about our upcoming Google Play release. I can’t promise a concrete date just yet, but we are certainly striving to get the game on Android before 2018 ends. That’s all I can say right now!
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Where Shadows Slumber is now available on the App Store! bit.ly/WSS-iOS
Find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, ask us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, and feel free to email us directly at contact@GameRevenant.com.
Frank DiCola is the founder of Game Revenant and the artist for Where Shadows Slumber.
Game Revenant 