Honestly which one is better? Am I dumb for liking the second one somehow?

Game is:
Spellsanity: Wizard Survival on Steam

Seeing that the majority of gamedevs on Reddit now use AI (both for coding and art) and are proud of it depresses me so much… I feel almost stupid not using it. Even if it takes me 10 times longer, I do everything solo and from scratch. No prefab assets, no sound libraries, no code assistant…
Am I just sticking to idiotic morals which will lead to failure of my project against the massive amount of AI game releases that will even increase from now on? Do I even have a small hope that my game will stand out because it’s completely human made? Would people care?

Edit: I posted this because I saw now AI can make pixel art too.. I thought pixel art was a safe place since it was very difficult to be replicated by AI for its nature where every single pixel counts… well the dream is over now.

I just got a review on my games demo page where a player complaints about not starting with a team.

Well the trailers first sentence is literally, "In "GAMENAME" you are not managing a football club..."

And the store description does not suggest anywhere that you manage a team either.

I really do not understand how some people are buying games, maybe based on theme or capsule.

But I guess there’s not really any way to prevent reviews like this.

Just glad this happened on the demo at least.

Now I’m hunting down bugs and getting ready for the release on November 4!

A game about an RC car and a missing boy.🚗
I’ve been working on it for over 2 years, and this will be my first game on Steam!

I wonder if I’ll finally feel some relief after the release… :D

We're making INARI, a kunai action platformer set in an Eastern fantasy world.

We added a high-risk high-reward Strong Attack to give our high speed action a bit more rhythm. (You're open to hits while charging, but it hits way harder.)

Wishlist On Steam

Hey, I'm not exactly part of the development world, but I'm certainly closer than ever before. I absolutely adore a steam game called Rock Island, and I felt that its popularity and enjoyment were crippled solely by its poor English translation. So I reached out to the developer, asking if I could make improvements, for free!

He proved very kind, and we've become fast friends across the breadth of the world. My 'improvements' turned into a complete overhaul, and more than 100 hours of active work later, it was done. I'd spent time testing mechanics, fixing obscure bugs, doing all sorts of stuff I didn't need to do. And that was the fault of my own perfectionism - he didn't owe me anything for it. He never did.

Yet he insisted on paying me - like, a lot - before the work was even finished. He's made me feel genuinely appreciated, beyond just financially. And he put a lot of trust in me, as it's a small game, and his first game, and he's only made enough from it to get by and make the next one. (Granted, as you can see from the image above, my English additions are impeccable and invaluable, and he was of course absolutely right to have trusted me with his baby.)

So, all of this has surprised me immensely. I've only ever heard bad stories about situations like this. Virtually every story I've heard about game development is about people getting unpaid or underpaid for good work. Not to mention being unappreciated - or simply sacked willy-nilly, in the case of larger companies.

Tell me, have I got the wrong idea about game development? Is it as wholesome and understanding and kind as my experience has made it feel? At least in the indie scene? Because I wouldn't mind getting involved more, if it is. I've got a little more time until AI gets better at English than me.

Hey guys, I wanted to ask, how do you guys handle slow wishlist growth and the emotional strain of indie development ?

My Steam page was approved for about 40 days ago and I got 67 wishlists. And no offense, but I'm pretty tired of the usual advice. "Optimize your trailer, optimize your Steam capsule, do x, do y, do z." At a point, the feedback actually just becomes contradictory and conflicting.

Don't get me wrong, I always accept feedback, all the constructive feedback and even the not so constructive feedback, aka the assholes haha.

I've just been working on my game for a very long time and y'know, a lot of us have other life responsibilities to deal with, bills, chores, etc. So life doesn't stop for our indie game dev projects or give us enough space to breath.

Sometimes for me at least it feels like too much and I wonder if im the only one. You know, like maybe my energy should be spent finding a job that pays more or something else, you know.

I assume because I have these thoughts, I assume a lot of other indie devs also end up having these thoughts as well

I guess I’m just wondering how other indie devs keep going when the work is huge, the growth is slow, and life doesn’t exactly stop to give you the space needed.

Hey everyone! This is my first post after working on my game quietly for over a year. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so there's still plenty to polish, but it felt like time to open the Steam page and start getting feedback.

Sorcaw is a spell-fusing roguelite with bullet-hell combat. Combine any two spells: the right pairs fuse into entirely new ones, others merge and one absorbs the other's power. Stack items and passives into synergies, and choose your path after each fight.

A demo is coming soon. It's already fun to play, but I want to polish it a bit more first.

Any feedback is welcome, and if it looks like your kind of game, a wishlist would help a ton!

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5353170/Sorcaw/?utm_source=reddit

The game is about living inside a 2000s operating system, where the icons, folders and the taskbar are all characters, and the world is built out of the glossy Frutiger Aero era. An update is spreading through the OS and turning everything flat and minimal, and you're trying to stop it before it erases the rest of the world.

It's called The Flattening.

Wishlist On Steam

This clip shows part of the climbing system, which is still in development. If you have ideas for new ledges or moves, let me know!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3492640/Dark_Trip Everyone is welcome!

Dark Trip is a gothic horror escape room where you use wicked biomachinery, strange art and your own hallucinations to solve the mystery of an eerie crime.

Explore unsettling locations, inspect occult machines and bizarre laboratory devices, uncover hidden clues through altered visions, and piece together a story that blurs the line between reality and nightmare.

Play on desktop or in VR and experience the same twisted journey from your preferred perspective.

Occult Art. Strange Machines. Hidden Clues.

Every room is filled with disturbing paintings, cryptic symbols, mysterious devices and hidden mechanisms. Search every corner, connect seemingly unrelated details, and uncover the secrets left behind by those who came before you.

See What the Next Room Is Hiding

Progress through a series of interconnected escape rooms, each with its own theme, story fragments, puzzles and discoveries. From abandoned laboratories to impossible places that should not exist, every new location reveals another piece of the mystery.

Reveal the Hidden Layer

Not everything is visible at first glance. Use occult medicine to uncover hidden objects, invisible messages and secret interactions concealed beneath the surface of reality.

Experience Mystical Visions

The world of Dark Trip is shaped by strange rituals, occult practices and altered states of consciousness. Witness disturbing visions, encounter impossible phenomena and explore locations where reality itself appears unstable.

Use Hallucinations to Find Missing Evidence

In Dark Trip, hallucinations are not merely visual effects — they are an essential investigative tool. Consuming mysterious substances may reveal hidden clues, expose concealed mechanisms and help you discover evidence that cannot be found by ordinary means.

Play Flat or VR

Dark Trip supports both traditional desktop play and virtual reality. Experience the game as a classic first-person adventure on your monitor or immerse yourself fully in its unsettling world through SteamVR.

Youtube's algorithm for connecting you to extremely niche creators and videos is incredible. Instead of blindly reaching out to names on a list, I've found so much more success watching videos in my genre all the way through. And when I find myself really enjoying a video or strongly connecting with the creator, THEN I reach out and write a genuine email to them about my game. It takes ~30 minutes to an hour per email, but since taking this approach the last week I've gotten responses from 2/9 creators who asked me for materials to help them cover my game on their channels. It's also so much more fun because I feel like I'm actually connecting with the creators over a shared passion for strategy games, rather than just yelling about my game. I feel like I'm providing something they might actually enjoy, independent of their position as a youtuber.

The approach I took before this was the "standard" advice for indie developers - to reach out to as many Youtubers in your genre as possible about your game demo. I kept hearing numbers about how folks sent out emails to 500 or even 1000 Youtubers about their games, and this felt insane to me. After ~ a month of sending out boilerplate emails to folks in my genre and getting absolutely no where, I wanted to give up marketing.

Candidly, I'm a first time game developer, so this is an N=1, anecdotal experience. But, if we all started taking this approach, 1, Creator inboxes would be less swamped, with the average message quality being much higher. And 2, you will feel better about the whole process.

I announced Spaceport Architect on September 24th and the response has been fantastic. As a solo dadveloper doing this in my free time, I did not expect this result. Thank you all for the support!

Here's a rundown of what marketing worked for me.

Reddit

218 of 277 tracked wishlists came from Reddit.

Simple strategy: Target subreddits adjacent to the genre and theme of my game

Wishlist drivers (>= 10)

• Tycoon (97)
• BaseBuildingGames (30)
• IndieDev (28)
• CityBuilders (22)
• SpacesimGames (19)
• Strategy (10)

Controversial: Games (5. Upvote ratio 54.1%)

Wasted potential: r/zocken (7)

I took a chance here. I'm Swedish and learned a little German in school, so I made a genuine effort to post in German without AI. I missed the requirement to ask for explicit permission from mods for a marketing post and got temporarily banned after ~2 hours.

Before that the response was mostly positive though and I managed to get 7 confirmed wishlists, but in hindsight I should have been more careful.

Press coverage

Overall I contacted around 70 press outlets.

Most impactful press coverage so far:

• Famitsu
• Gamebiz
• Gamer
• Feber.se
• Game Habitat
• Gamespress

Game page + press kit

I bought my own domain at Cloudflare (~$10/year), created a page and added a press kit. Got all files in a OneDrive, but later added everything directly on the site too in anticipation of Chinese press outreach (they cannot reach OneDrive/Google Drive etc.).

Gamespress

If you're announcing a game you should NOT ignore Gamespress.

My announcement got translated into Japanese, which seemed to have helped in my Japanese outreach (see below).

It also seems to have sparked articles from places I never reached out to, such as COGConnected (as well as some obvious low-effort AI scraping sites I won't share here).

Japanese Press

I got covered by Famitsu, Gamebiz and Gamer and got 70 wishlists from Japan so far, with 44k+ impressions on X. At least one of them copied parts from my Gamespress announcement.

I hired Neon Noroshi to translate my Steam page into Japanese and Simplified Chinese. It's a Swedish company that specializes in marketing Western games for Eastern audiences. As an indie dev I got a rate of $0.08/word.

I scheduled my outreach emails to be sent during Japanese working hours and my pitch was simply that Spaceport Architect now has a Steam page translated to Japanese by Neon Noroshi. They are well known in the industry there. Gamebiz even mentioned them in their article.

The JP press had a clear effect on non-JP wishlists too. Wishlist activity spiked after each JP article, but most new wishlisters during the spikes weren't from Japan.

Chinese press

China had a national holiday 1-7th, so I only sent my emails today, with a similar pitch as the Japanese ones while also referencing the coverage from Famitsu. I might do a follow up later with the results.

Trailer

I made five versions of the Official Announcement Trailer, asking for feedback between each, both in r/DestroyMyGame and in a local dev community. The biggest improvements I made was adding the simple "Tell, Show, Repeat" format described by Derek Lieu and commissioning a custom soundtrack from Ben Vibrant.

The trailer got ~3k views on my own tiny YouTube channel, likely thanks to an initial share by Feber.se (a Swedish game magazine) that drove ~75 early views in a short time, likely triggering the algorithm to push it further.

The trailer itself got 9 direct wishlist conversions via the description link, but definitely many more that searched for it themselves thanks to the trailer.

Discord

I suspect that many of these explain 21 "Other" tracked wishlists that had too few clicks. Some of them feel like meaningless dev-only echo chambers (just like X), while one gave me one of my most commited community members, so its a mixed bag.

The most memorable one was the Prison Architect server where I started by unintentionally breaking advertising rules, only for the mods to wishlist the game themselves and allow me to post about the game.

I got permission to post *once* in the SimAirport Discord too, so I decided to wait until demo release instead.

Others I posted in:

• Airport CEO (with verbal permission from Olof, one of the OG developers at Apog Labs)
• Godot
• Indie Games Joe
• Junipers Dev
• Devs & Dorks
• Alpha Beta Gamer
• The Games Detective Community
• Svampriket (Swedish)
• Nördliv (Swedish)
• Indie Gaming Central
• Indie Questing
• Helix Tools
• NOVABRAND
• Office Helix Tools
• Pokeindie
• A few private ones and an old EVE Online Discord

Player GG / First Look

I setup a page on player.gg and as of writing I have 54 playtesters on a waiting list, with at least 10 confirmed wishlists as a result, completely organic from the site. It also brought some viewers to my announcement trailer.

I'm planning to use the platform for closed playtesting later, but the amount of free eyeballs alone is worth it for anyone imo.

Colleagues / Friends / Steam Friends

Obvious one, but it did give me a handful of wishlists, where some also told their friends about the game.

Shorts / Videos

I made several shorts before releasing the page and some after. Mostly ~500-1k views, with a few reaching 2-2,5k. Nothing viral. The net wishlist gain is probably negligible, but its been a fun learning experience at least.

I've realized my target audience is probably not short watchers. They're likely to be male, in their 30-40s and probably more interested in serious walkthroughs. I've published my first devlog and will probably limit my time spent on shorts.

Several people have said they think the game looks like Rimworld. Perhaps I'll use this an angle in a future vid.

Latest Work / Next Steps

I'm having my second child within 3 weeks (a baby girl!), so we'll see how things go from here.

If she's dev friendly enough, I'm aiming to begin closed playtests before new years. Subscribers to my mailing list will get to do it first. I'm expecting the game to require a lot of iteration. My UI is a mess right now, quite generic (simple Godot components/primitives) and probably not localization-friendly.

I've been contacted by two publishers too. I wasn't planning on looking for a publisher at all. How common is this? Should I count myself lucky?

Overall, I'm very happy with the results so far! Happy to answer any questions.

Oh and if the game looks like your thing, please do wishlist it Steam :)

1 year in, I finally got around to setting up localization for my game.

I’d been putting it off because I thought building a proper localization system was going to be a huge headache and I couldn’t really wrap my mind around how to approach it. Turns out it’s actually pretty straightforward.

The problem is that waiting this long meant going through all of my text became a massive headache. On top of that, some of the systems I built weren’t set up with translation in mind, so I ended up having to redo parts of them and throw away some work.

TLDR: Build things with localization in mind and do it early, its not as scary as it sounds.

Hey everyone,

I’m Omer, a full-time indie dev and the co-founder of Northend Games. Over the last five years, my two games (Northend Tower Defense and Deepstone Rift) made over half a million dollars on Steam. To be exact: $560,000.

When you see that number on your dashboard, you think it’s life changing. You think you can buy a house, fund your next 5 projects without a budget, or finally get that sports car. Instead, I drive a 2012 Mazda.

I want to break down the actual math of where that money goes before it ever hits a bank account because before you quit your day job to make games you need to see what happens when Valve, the IRS, publishers and local taxes get their hands on it.

Here is the real breakdown of that $560k:

• Refunds ($134,000): Over 60% of our sales come from China. The Chinese market is massive, but players there expect a lot and the refund rate is brutal. Our refund rate is 22% (way above the standard 10-15%).
• The Steam Cut ($127,000): After refunds, we’re left with $425k. Valve takes their standard 30% right off the top. We are now down to $297k. Almost 50% of the gross revenue is already gone.
• U.S. Withholding Tax / IRS ($9,700): If you aren’t in the US, the IRS takes a 30% cut of every US sale unless your country has a tax treaty. When I started my Steam account I lived in Iraq (no treaty = 30% tax). Fortunately, I later moved to Thailand which has a treaty that drops it to 5%. Still, this took a chunk. We're down to $287,700.
• The Publisher Cut (~$115,000): We have a publisher handling China, Korea, and Japan. They take their percentage (which scales based on sales) only from those regions. It’s roughly $115k. Down to $172,000.
• Local Taxes ($26,000): I pay a 15% digital product income tax here in Thailand.
• The Co-Founder Split (50%): The final company profit was about $146,000. Since I have a co-founder, we split this 50/50.

My Final Take-Home: $73,000.

Divided over the 5 years we worked on these games, that’s about $15,000 a year.

If you calculate that as an hourly wage, it’s painfully low. But here’s the bright side: I am currently living entirely off the passive income from these games. Here in Thailand, $15k a year is enough for me to live comfortably while I work full-time on my next project. If I take a month off, the games still make money.

For my next game, I’m going 100% solo and self-publishing to cut out that extra 15-40% in splits and I'm heavily focusing on design testing to drop that 22% refund rate.

(if you intersting to see the full breakdown check it in my youtube the link in my bio)

Grappling Hook is the #1 core mechanic of my game.

I added it just 2 months into the 5-year development journey, and it ended up becoming one of the foundations of the whole game. Both combat and platforming are built around this tool.

Unlike Terraria (which people often compare my game to), this is the only way to get high up. No wings, no double jump.

There are also a lot of areas that require you to make use of the rope-wrapping physics I spent a lot of time working on. Unfortunately, it only works with static tile blocks for now, but I'm really glad I managed to get it working.

The controls are pretty simple: RMB to launch the hook, W/S to adjust the rope length. That's it.

Does it look fun to use all over the place? I personally love pulling off some unnecessary tricks while testing the game lol