Ossuary Development Retrospective: a Post-mortem

Saturday, 20th February 2021

It's fair to say that the PC port of Ossuary hasn't been as successful in its early months as the Spectrum version was in 2013. The Spectrum version got a few videos in its first few months not solicited by me. So far one video has covered the PC version, but only after I made the content creator aware of the release.

I did make some promotion efforts. Contrary to my previous practice, I discussed development on twitter before the game was ready for release. After release, I posted regularly about my play-throughs, and wrote a series of blog posts for new players. These got some attention, but at the time of writing Ossuary is still what could be seen as a "slow burner".

There are some things that might bring the game to wider attention in the future. I'm continuing with DOS game development, so as I add more companion games to this web site, more people will become aware of Ossuary. I'm also considering streaming and creating video content in the future, and Ossuary will not be forgotten there. The game is suitable for straight play-throughs, as well as special challenges (e.g. collect all the blades, consume only apples).

There are no plans to extend the game or to develop an Ossuary II. So many compromises in the game were designed around the 16Kb ZX Spectrum, and for a PC platform with at least sixteen times as much memory it would make more sense to design a future dungeon crawler from scratch.

In the mean time, I've turned my attention to strategy games.