[XboxOne][Steam] Déjà Vu - A Puzzle Game About Life, Death, and Clones

My girlfriend and I just released our first game on Xbox and Steam! Déjà Vu is a puzzle game where you create clones of your previous actions on a level to help solve puzzles. It was a passion project for us developed over the course of four years. It was published on Xbox One through their ID@Xbox program.

Xbox Store | Steam Store

Launch Trailer


First level where you unlock the cloning ability. The puzzles get a lot more difficult than this.


Danielle posing in front of the Xbox store after the launch of our game

 

Awesome achievement! congratulation, would be nice to have an inside view from you guys dev experience with dealing with xbox one and steam plateform.
Best for your release!

 

Thank you! I planned on doing a talk about that for a local Unity User Group, but here's the abridged version.

Steam was much easier than Xbox. We used Steamworks.NET and had achievements and cloud saves and all that up and running that evening. The biggest hassle for Steam was all the different art assets that I didn't realize we'd need. There's a dozen different images of different sizes for when the logo pops up in the search results, the little message at the bottom of the screen when a friend starts playing the game, the library "capsule" image, header images, etc. And they're all different size requirements than the ones for the Xbox store

Xbox was much more of a pain to get setup. We applied to the ID@Xbox program and got accepted so they sent us two free dev kits. However, I didn't realize there was a secret Xbox One Development forum here that I needed to request access to so I was pretty lost Googling stuff for awhile until someone in a FB Indie dev group told me to ask my questions in that forum to get better feedback. There's a lot of setup once you have access to that group. Installing the xbox sdk, unity build support for xbox (the UWP build is just for the xbox creator's program where you don't have achievements and stuff, not ID@Xbox), creating special folders for all the dlls and setting up weird path variables. It's not streamlined at all like it would be to switch between Android and PC builds in the Unity editor. Oh, and none of the examples work locally which had me confused for awhile. You have to build to your dev kit and log stuff out to the screen or look through debug errors on the console with a special tool. Once you have the game building successfully you need to setup all the special cases like what do you do when a controller turns off during gameplay or the user suspends the app, etc. Lots of little things. There's also other rules that I didn't realize I was breaking until I failed cert like my trailer didn't use the branded xbox start/end animation that you see in every other trailer (I thought they just automatically added that on the backend after I uploaded the trailer but nope). You also need to request special access to that site as well. You need to request access for lots of things, haha. Steam was very streamlined and simple cert just to make sure your store description matched the game and it was playable. Xbox was very hands on to make sure it fit the platform, worked well, and no game-breaking bugs.

All that said, our game saw like 100x the sales on Xbox than Steam since it was one of three games that came out that day on Xbox and one of several hundred on Steam. For indies, the extra visibility was so worth the extra work it took. Also, a whole bunch of xbox news sites reached out asking for promo codes and actually wrote articles about the game. For the steam release I spent forever sending out emails and trying to connect to game journalists just to get ignored by basically all. It's also much easier for me to port another game to Xbox now that I have my dev environment setup and can reuse my code for player management and saving data. Overall it's definitely worth the effort to get on xbox.

 

Congrats and thanks for the info!