Hello, a year ago I launched an idle clicker game, Beat Stickman: Beyond, on Steam. It was a very ambitious project of mine, and I put so much love into it, but unfortunately, it wasn’t a success. A typical indie dev story, I guess 😅

I acknowledged that it was I didn’t get it right, I tried to learn from it and actually moved on since then (in the sense that I did work on a couple of other projects, and currently working on another one of my own).

But recently, the thought that lots of stuff I worked very hard to put in the game will be forever undiscovered bothers me really bad. (I sold 368 units, with 60 units returned/refunded, but because of the game’s design, I doubt any of the players has unlocked the stuff at the end of the story). So, when I finally have time, I decided to do something with it, the goal is to make my work (hopefully) appreciated by some players out there.

So, here’s the things I’ve done:

  • Rebalanced the game and will ship it as a free DLC: I’ve made it much easier to fully unlock the main story, it should be under 5-10 hours now (it used to be almost 100 hours required, insane I know, and it was a hell of drag, so it’s bad).

  • Quality of life update: I added Dark mode so your eyes won’t get burned by some super bright (white) background. I added Windowed mode so you can let the game run in the background/second monitor while you’re doing other tasks and sometimes stare at it, giving it some click of love. I added the ability where you can use a button on your keyboard as your mouse’s left button so your finger won’t get hurt (it used to be a really bad situation since in the game, you already had to move the mouse frequently, combining it with clicking and sometimes holding is a real pain). And a few minor changes that aren’t worth mentioning but together they do make your experience smoother.

  • Deep discount to the base game: finally, all the changes don’t matter if you don’t feel like getting the game, so I’ll discount the base game to the deepest ever.

About the game

It’s an idle/clicker/incremental game (yeah, it has all of those) where you beat the Stickman with all different kinds of things. The loop is simple: you beat the Stickman, gain coins from doing so, and use coins to upgrade your things more powerful to beat more powerful Stickman. The game has a narrative and your key progress is narrative-driven. I designed it to have an immersive feeling, that you’re not simply interacting with a game but interacting with an imaginary sci-fi system. I leveraged many in-game actions to create progress mechanisms.

So, as I said, I acknowledged that I haven’t done a good job of getting all those things to work perfectly. But, I hope with all the changes I’ve recently made, you will find some specific things in the game that may love.

The DLC, update and discount launch will be on Monday, October 23 at 10 AM (PDT), the discount lasts 7 days.

You can wishlist the game and DLC now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1494280/Beat_Stickman_Beyond/

I overkilled some beats to make these trailers myself 🥲:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp6ar2zyYI4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8N7_O8RlV8

I hired a team for $2K to make this trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qiRMZh7uAA

Thanks for your time,

P.S.: I intended to make a short post announcing the upcoming content, update, and discount. Ended up remembering the time I developed the game and overshared.