Fabular: Once upon a Spacetime
Fabular: Once Upon a Spacetime at Tiny Teams 2022!
Tiny Teams is designed to shine a spotlight on indie games that have a solo or micro developer team! Did you know that Fabular: Once Upon a Spacetime is being created by a team of only 3?
You can try out the Prologue for the game over on our prologue page, here.
We hope you enjoy it!
Thank you so much to The Yogscast for letting us be part of the event and thank you to our community for all of your support!
We'll have more news coming your way soon.
Key demo stats and community feedback
Early Access is creeping ever closer and we’re still working hard to prepare Fabular: Once Upon a Spacetime for release. On that note, thank you so much for all of your feedback from the demo, it’s really helping us prioritise what needs to be updated or edited.
While we mentioned it briefly in the last update, we wanted to use this update to really discuss the feedback in more depth and let you know what you can expect in the future.
Buckle up; this spaceship is shooting into statistics territory! 🚀
Demo Stats
The Fabular demo was released on 06/06/2022 ahead of the Summer Steam Next Fest. As of today it’s had:
🌟 20,468 unique demo players
🌟 3,600 maximum daily active users
This milestone feels incredible and we never expected to reach it this quickly! Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to try out our demo.
But how much time does the average player spend playing it?
🚀 38 minutes
Given that there’s only Realm one and part of Realm two available, we’re very happy with this number.
Some other fun stats:
🗺️ Players from 127 different countries downloaded the demo
🎮 2,169 players played with a controller
💫 615 players spent over 200 minutes playing the demo. That’s over 3 hours!
Demo Feedback
Alongside the demo, we also created a feedback survey asking for your opinions on the game. We’ve received over 400 responses to the survey and we’ve gone through every single response. All of your criticisms and suggestions have been noted and we will be using them to chart a course for the future of Fabular.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common answers.
What do players like the most about the Fabular demo?
- The combat
- The first boss battle
- The art style/aesthetics
- The story
- The NPCs
Players highlighted so many different things that they enjoyed about Fabular, from the soundtrack, to the difficulty curve, to that moment when you kill the first boss with half a heart left and you feel triumphant.
Reading all of your responses to this question filled us with pride and excitement for what’s to come. The most important statistics for us is that:
💖 60% of survey respondents really liked the demo
❤️ 30% liked the demo.
We were also worried that the game might be too easy in its current state, but from the survey results it seems that most people find the game either just right or a little tricky. The perfect mix, in our opinion!
We also asked players what we could improve about the Fabular demo.
- Fuel scarcity and the penalty for not having any
- Star map generation
- Too much text in events
- Overall variety
We’re working to make tons of improvements ahead of Early Access launch. For example, we’re creating new events to release with Early Access, as well as editing some of our current events to reduce the text content.
Finally, players also had the opportunity to make suggestions for what they’d like to see in the full version of the game. Here were some of our favourites, some of them will likely make it into the game at some point!
- Unlock new songs for the jester based on choices made during the game
- Option in settings to change the Paladin’s shield from toggle to hold
- A flee mechanic
- Adding enemies that aren’t just ships, e.g. space monsters, space whales, space worms.
- Create a throne room upgrade that carries a % of gold and components from one run to another.
- Show where vendors are on the map
- Create a teleport point at the first node you enter the realm on.
There were so many fantastic suggestions in the survey and we’ve made notes of every one! If you have any other suggestions, please free free to drop them below or leave them in the suggestions channel in our Discord:
Thank you for all your support with the demo and prologue!
-Spiritus Games
Fabular: Prologue rockets onto Steam!
Steam is an incredible platform that offers us many opportunities to reach new players, but unfortunately it does have its limitations.
A demo is particularly limited as it may have its own app ID, but it's very difficult to discover organically. There's no way to publicly share screenshots of the demo, or to notify players that a demo has been updated. There's also no specific demo forum for discussion.
So, many independent developers and publishers are re-releasing their demos as ‘prologues’ to try to reach a wider audience, who may not find the game otherwise.
That’s why we’re going to be releasing a Prologue for Fabular: Once Upon a Spacetime, which is out right now! If you have time to wishlist, download and even play it for a little while, that would really help to boost the prologue and help it reach more players.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2060550/Fabular_Prologue/
Thank you so much to everyone for being so forthcoming with your feedback on the demo. We hope you’ll be excited to see some of the updates we will be implementing before the Early Access launch.
– Batowski out
The demo continues!
We want to ensure that anyone who wants to play the Fabular demo, but hasn’t had time this week, is still able to try it out. So we’re going to keep our demo up for another week after Steam Next Fest finishes later today.
You’ve all been providing incredible feedback on how you’ve found the demo, as well as notifying us if you encounter any bugs, and we’re so grateful. All the feedback you’re giving now is being taken into account to help us improve the game as much as we can before our Early Access release later this year! We’re also making notes of things we won’t have time to implement before Early Access, but that we hope to do during Early Access.
Some of the things we’re currently working on because of your feedback are:
- New weapons
- More items
- Range of playable ships
- Wider variety of enemies
- Endless mode
- Accessibility options
If you have played the demo and haven’t already filled out our demo feedback survey, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the game and any suggestions you may have.
You can also chat directly with our team and our community members for tips and troubleshooting in the Fabular Discord:
Thank you again for all of your support and we hope that you enjoy the demo!
-Spiritus Games
Fabular: Once Upon a Spacetime demo rockets onto Steam!
The latest Steam Next Fest is starting today and we’re thrilled to announce that we are releasing a brand new demo for Fabular: Once Upon a Spacetime!
The latest demo version of the game lets you play through both the first and second realm.
In this new version of the demo you can try out a brand new spaceship (unlocked after defeating the first boss). The Manticore can equip daggers that have the highest attack speed and critical damage in the game, or glaives that are somewhat slower but cover a larger area in melee range.
Its special ability is Holo-decoy, which does a short range dash move, but when executed perfectly (just before an enemy hit reaches you), it leaves behind a holographic image of your ship that attracts enemies for a short duration. You can also swap your position with an active decoy, so it’s a quite versatile tool of survival and engagement.
We've completely overhauled the combat system to make the enemy's combat behaviour more realistic, as well as adding new items, new events and a number of quality of life updates too.
To celebrate the new demo, we’ve also released a new trailer for the game that explains all the mechanics that you’ll need to get started! Watch it below:
If you play the demo, we would really appreciate it if you could take the time to fill out our feedback survey, which is available in English, French, German, Russian, Spanish & Italian. We really want to make the game the best that it can be and any feedback you can provide would be really useful!
We also have dedicated feedback, bug and suggestion channels on our Discord if you want to talk to us directly:
You can also tune into our Steam broadcasts for our dev Q&A sessions and to watch the incredible sneakyteak playing the game! Our broadcasts are from 12PM PDT/8PM BST/9PM CEST on Tuesday 18th June and 10AM PDT/6PM BST/7PM CEST on Wednesday 19th June.
We hope you all enjoy the new content and we’re looking forward to your feedback! Thank you again for your continued support and have a fantastic Steam Next Fest!
Spiritus Games
Tune into our NextFest Q&A and demo playthrough!
If you can’t make it to the Q&A you can also join our Discord to ask our devs any questions you may have:
Tune into our NextFest Q&A and demo playthrough!
If you can’t make it to the Q&A you can also join our Discord to ask our devs any questions you may have:
Fabular Publisher Announcement!
Following our announcement a couple of months ago about our upcoming early access release, we’re excited to announce that Fabular: Once Upon A Spacetime has a publisher!
PRISMATIKA is a new publisher, who are going to provide official funding and support for Fabular’s development. This includes carrying out the console porting, marketing and advertising the game, PR and influencer outreach, and a lot more.
You can find out more about them here.
While they’re a brand new publisher, the team has a lot of experience and they have worked together for many years in the industry. In a way, they are quite similar to us as developers; Spiritus Games may be new, but we have a long history together and are quite experienced at making games.
The benefit of partnering with a publisher like PRISMATIKA is that they let us focus on making Fabular the best that it can be, and they also provide us with the resources to do so.
Together with PRISMATIKA, we can expand the reach of Fabular and get it into more hands than we would be able to ourselves. With the Early Access release rapidly approaching, it feels good to be in safe hands and it’s nice to not be ‘alone’ in it.
If you haven’t wishlisted the game yet, we’d appreciate your support! We will also be releasing a new and updated demo on Steam in the upcoming Steam Next Fest in a couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for that.
Wishlist here: http://steam.pm/app/645720
-- Batowski out
The Going Rogue Event and new art reveal
This quick update is to let you know that Fabular is participating in Steam’s Going Rogue event. While we don’t currently have a demo available to play, we're working hard on an updated demo and plan to release it at the upcoming Steam Next Fest.
But we couldn’t leave you with nothing! Did you know that all of our in-game illustrations are meticulously hand-drawn with pen and paper before the digital magic happens? Here’s a quick sneak peek of the before and after of an event that the team has been working on recently:
I wonder what secrets are corked in that bottle...
Do you have any ideas for medieval space events that you’d like to see? We'd love to hear your ideas in the comments. Also, if you like what you’ve seen of the game so far, we would be grateful if you could wishlist and follow it on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/645720
You can also join the Fabular Discord to keep up to date with current game development updates:
Fabular is coming to Steam Early Access in 2022!
Hey everyone, Batowski here with the latest news on Fabular: Once upon a Spacetime!
Announcement time!
We’re excited to announce that Fabular has a release window:
Coming to Steam Early Access in Q3, 2022!
If you haven’t wishlisted the game yet, we’d appreciate your support! If your friends and family haven't wishlisted yet, we'd be extremely grateful if they could! Any help we can get reaching like-minded players would really help us.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/645720
Showtime!!
We’re pleased to announce that Fabular is participating in The MIX 10th Anniversary Showcase @GDC, March 22-23! Our updated trailer (shown at the top) premiered there, showcasing new gameplay with the second ship class: the Manticore.
Feedback time!
In other news, we’re currently gathering feedback on the latest Fabular build, to incorporate into the game in the coming months ahead of our Early Access launch. Among the great people giving feedback is the talented team at Quick Save.
And remember, if you want to contact us directly, share feedback or interact with the Fabular community, please join our Discord:
We’re incredibly excited to finally be so close to launching on Steam and having the game in more hands! Thanks for your continued support! We hope you too will find it well worth the wait.
