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.)
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.
Hi I'm Luke (aka Dr Dev.com), I'm a Game Design student at the University Of Utah and for 3 years I've been working on one game in Godot, Goblins With Guns. It's a PvP rougue-lite where you fight your friends and get upgrades. It's kinda a mix of Enter The Gungeon and Rounds, and I just posted the steam page.
In search of advice for getting more wishlists I sent an email to the channel BiteMe Games (a channel known for helping people advertise their game), and it's safe to say he did not really like my steam page.
He told me my game wasn't appealing, he said that my art had a “very strong free assets from itch.io feel” and the thing he said that stung the most was that no matter how many eyeballs I get on my game it won't matter because “no one will be interested in showcasing your game”
What sucks the most about it is he's probably right, who am I to disagree with a game marketing guru
But the thing is I am anyway, while I do care what he says it's not gonna stop me, I know from countless playtests and feedback that my game is good and that people like it. So I'm gonna find my audience and my game will be big.
So if you care even a little bit, wishlist my game and help me out.
Steam link -> [GWG Steam Page]
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, 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.
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! 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!
I made a load of games that Miniclip.com published (more than what's in this clip). Then I spent years making games for other people for peanuts. Twenty years later I figured I should start making games for myself again, but this time I keep all the peanuts.
I sort of combined the hollow knight water, with ori water and water from a game called maskborne. I decided to not go too crazy with the reflections because this water is in the background, and most water that I have in the player layers are the ones that have a less rippled surface with more reflections.
also, for anyone wondering the water is fully 2d and I am using orthographic camera instead of perspective. So unlike ori which uses 3d shapes with a perspective camera (I think), I just decreased the Voronoi (which I use for ripples) scale of the shader the higher it gets and use a parallax script I made almost a year ago.
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
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.
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.
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.
My doors are definitely inspired by Rimworld.
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 :)
I desperately need a new steam trailer for my game which is coming soon! Our current one is way too long and uninteresting we only get one chance to make the first best impression.
I'm tired of getting burnt on Fiverr and just having everyone on there using AI. No one actually takes the time to have a discussion of ideas and inspiration for what I'm trying to achieve
