Assembly RTS can now be wishlisted on Steam! news

Hi everyone! A couple of days ago I finally published the Steam page for Assembly RTS.
"Why now?" you may ask... "Didn't you want to create a trailer first?"

Yes, but Perafilozof, the popular Youtuber was about to release a new video, this time featuring 30 strategy games, including Assembly RTS. You can watch it here.

I was expecting way more potential traffic than the the last time my game was featured in one of his videos, The previous video featured 100 strategy games which obviously dilutes potential attention, comparatively speaking.

Additionally, other RTS game developers urged me to release my Steam page as soon as possible.
Both of these factors combined led me to set up the Steam page earlier than I had originally planned.

I submitted my Steam page on the day Perafilozof's new video was released.
However, the page took a couple of days to be accepted by Steam staff.
Even though I missed the publication date of the YouTube video by a couple of days, the game has been gaining a decent amount of wishlists.
I don't regret letting Assembly RTS out into the wild one bit!

Most importantly, extra marketing efforts could now actually be worth it.
People can finally just hit the wishlist button and make a massive impact without any extra steps needed.

The first thing I did was to post a TikTok (since it's supposed to work very well for games).
I haven't yet checked if it did any good... That place scares me 😰
(I also wouldn't be surprised if I'm already shadow banned for using a VPN)
YouTube shorts are surely more 'comfortable' but I have no idea how effective they are in terms of marketing.

By the way, I already have a YouTube channel where I post devlogs (sometimes).
I'll be posting my shorts on a separate channel.

Either way, I'm eagerly working towards further improving the Steam page with updated screenshots and a trailer.

One of the key features I want to highlight in the future is the vehicle customization aspect of Assembly RTS. So far I don't have much to show off in this area and I think the Steam page would be much better off with some screenshots showing this important gameplay feature.

I wasn't entirely sure what the vehicle customization screen should look like, so I have been experimenting with different approaches over the last week.

My first approach was inspired by deck-building games:

I experimented with some different colors:

But in the end I wasn't particularly happy with the card-based approach.
Instead, I gave retro-futuristic visuals a shot, with a vehicle always at the center:

I still wasn't content with this solution. Next I experimented with a garage-based setting:

But what I ended up liking the most is an open-doors setting with 3D text used for the entire UI.
Check out this early preview:

Today I tried a few new things in my 3D asset pipeline and I got some great new ideas on what the second faction could look like. I'm not going to give away too much, but I'm really excited about how that could work out in the future...

That's it for this devlog, I hope you got something valuable out of it. Don't forget to wishlist Assembly RTS on Steam and tell your strategy game friends about it 👏