We decided to release Salt as early access available from our website on August 22nd. We pretty much had zero expectations. Salt is our first game and we had been working hard on it for over a year. We knew that Salt was a fun game and we were really proud of it, but how would it be received? Early access is not necessarily looked at as a positive thing these days but we knew that was the best way to fund the development of Salt. 

So we pushed it out to the internet and went back to developing. The first month was as expected. Sales were fairly slow but we were thrilled to see anyone playing our game! We were lucky early on to have a few Twitch streamers play our game and have a positive response to it. For us, however, the major milestone came when Rock Paper Shotgun posted an article on our game. 

This was huge! Our little pirate sailing game had only been out for a few weeks and was only available on our website. When we saw the article on RPS, we were thrilled. It was wonderful and rewarding to see someone from a large website like RPS enjoying our game. 

Around the middle of September, we began to look into the process for getting our game on Steam. We submitted our game to Steam Greenlight and told a few people about it, hoping to get it on Steam. The Greenlight process was very interesting for us. It allowed us to see some of the initial reception to a game like Salt and get valuable player feedback. After about a month on Greenlight, Salt was Greenlit! 

Once Salt was Greenlit, we knew that we wanted to put it on Steam as an early access title as soon as possible. Shortly after the Greenlight campaign, we launched Salt on Steam. This was huge for us and we were really proud to be at this stage. Steam has proven to be a really successful outlet for Salt and has enabled us to grow and communicate with a player base we wouldn't have otherwise. We were also excited to see a lot of positive reviews of Salt and have enjoyed getting to communicate with players about updates and suggestions. 

One thing that became clear to us pretty quickly as Salt grew is that our player base was awesome. We love each and every one of you who choose to support us and play Salt. It's extremely rewarding to see players communicate with each other about the game, sharing their charts, adventures, and sharing their tales of the sea. Our player base has also been very supportive of our decisions and has been quick to test out dev builds and give us valuable feedback. We could not do this without our players and are thankful everyday for them. 

As fun a year as 2014 was, we are even more excited about 2015. We have some really fun updates planned for this year and can't wait to see Salt and it's sailors develop!

- Will Sterling (Sound Design and Marketing)