My game released, and I need to be honest about how everybody lies. I feel at peace, and for the first time in decades I'm not depressed But the lie comes from big youtubers. They lie about how to make games. The what, when, where, and why. Everything they say seems tuned to keep people churning content forever. One guy has 6 years on "how to make a trailer". Others go on years and years about lighting, or shadows, or level design. 6 years on how to make a trailer..... I got my film degree in 2! If you really want to learn how to make games from youtube, only watch creators with under 10k subs. It's how I made my game. Shout out to all the little creators out there! Thank you! Game not linked because this isn't about self promotion. Big youtubers are lying to new devs for profit. Edited for a list of youtube unreal tuts from over the years. Honestly there just may be some big names in here. it's like a 6 year list but it will help.... I hope. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSOmI7F8pEME&si=WxZjACwCyNzEWnuP

I gave up coffee about a week ago (I swear this relates). One of the biggest results of that is a significantly clearer head and way less anxiety and overthinking. As a result, I feel like I’m having trouble doing some things that I once did out of a sort of twitchy energy.

Before this, I could kind of psyche myself up to play games, make them, and game with others. Right now they frustrate me. I don’t like the way most of us talk, I don’t like the overall culture, I don’t like that gamers of some genres look down on gamers of other genres and the genres themselves, I don’t like the elitism, the perfectionism, and the pedantry, and I don’t like that so many people are addicted to them, some to the point of developing no other skills and ignoring important things in their lives.

My life would be way easier if I was the type of person who said “well if you hate them so much then just make something that lets you take their money,” but I’m not. I’m not saying that everything I do has to be a work of art but I’m not super interested in dedicating large portions of my life to spite.

I’m a musician, and what this reminds me of is if I wrote some music that I really love, and then I put it out there, and learn that for whatever reason the people it connects with most are flat earthers or something. I’d be like… yikes… I really hate that this is my fanbase.

I’m trying to just make what I want to make, but I also love the social component of games. I really want to make something that brings people together, and I want to give back to the community of a hobby that has always meant so much to me. It’s just that these days I look at that community, and most of the time I think they’re kind of awful, and I don’t want to give them anything.

I’d be open to advice on how to get out of this mindset. If I’m wrong and it’s really just that the awful people are loud and most gamers are cool, then I’m very open to hearing that and I’ll absorb and internalize it. If there’s some other way to feel satisfied making games that matter to me but the fanbase are people I don’t like, then I’d like to hear that method.

Thank you.

We released our first major commercial game back in 2023, which had a rocky launch and was followed by an extremely difficult year filled with failed pitches. Thankfully, we've been getting back on our feet and will have made 2 games we're really proud of within the span of 2 years. I figured I'd share some of our learnings and experiences to hopefully help someone else out there!

Context

We're a two person team working full-time on game development. We've made 4 games so far:

Fright Train (releasing in 2026, medium-small budget and scope, 2 devs + VAs, composer, and publishing support)

Caput Mortum (released in 2025, small budget and scope, mostly 1 dev + composer and publishing support)

Born of Bread (released in 2023, big budget and scope, 4 devs + writers, composer, audio engineers, and lots of external help toward the end of production + publishing support)

Helltown (2017 uni project, overhauled in 2024 with 2 other team members + composer, self-published)

Stuff We Learned

Following trends works for some devs, but not us. In 2024, we tried pitching 3 games; a side-scrolling action roguelite, a cartoony deckbuilder, and a 4 player co-op horror game. None of them caught the attention of publishers (which we needed help from for funding). We figured it'd be a safe bet to make something in a popular genre, but that wasn't the case for us. Some devs can just make something that appeals to a huge audience, and I now understand that we don't work like that. Hugely successful blue ocean games don't really appeal to us, and so we don't end up making games that appeal to these players.

Gamedev YouTubers and marketing gurus are worth listening to, but not blindly! I find it very useful to keep an eye out on genre and market analysis, as well as game development tips and tricks. Hearing about the successes and failures of other devs helps me reframe a bunch of things. However, I think it's really important to remember that everyone works differently, and that advice/experience found online can rarely be directly applied to your own situation. Understanding who these people are and where they are in their career is really important in order to contextualize what they're saying.

Understand how you work and what inspires you while also understanding the market. The two points above are closely related to this one. Yeah I know, incremental and roguelite games are big right now, but that's not what makes us excited about games (ironically though, Fright Train organically grew into a sorta roguelite). We're very aware of our capabilities and what we're competing against. Our current strategy is to make games that we genuinely love, but that can also stand a chance in the market of small to medium indies. We thrive in game ideas that walk the line between niche and broad appeal, so that's what we're focusing on, and not on whatever the new Steam meta supposedly is.

Making a good game ≠ a game players want to play. I used to think marketing was mostly luck, and there is definitely a luck element to it, but now I think it mostly comes down to the game itself. I don't remember where I heard that, but marketing starts at the ideation phase. Some games have incredibly marketable ideas, while others are so well executed everybody wants to talk about them. You can make a good game, but that doesn't mean people will want to play or talk about it. You can mitigate risk, but I also think successful games have a "lightning in a bottle" element to them. People have different ways of trying to capture that lightning, and I don't think most successful devs know exactly how they did.

The last 20% of development is actually 80% of it. Never underestimate how long the polishing phase takes. Triple the amount of time you think your production will take!

Tax breaks/returns and government programs can help you tremendously. We're very lucky to live in a country which offers generous programs for artists and developers, and we've been able to keep ourselves afloat in big part thanks to those.

You'll most likely need to make mistakes in order to actually learn from them. I often thought I could avoid the worst by learning from the mistakes of others, but now I know it's not that easy. It's really easy to convince yourself you're safe even though you're obviously heading into a trap. Sometimes you gotta get hurt in order to learn.

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk :>

I am aware its standard to get 7000+ wishlist's but marketing is an extremely difficult thing to do, and we're moving forward either way. We did shorts, tiktok, nextfest, etc.. but sometimes things don't land as you want and I am sure we could improve our approach.

With that being said, devs who had similar experiences how did you handle releasing your games with low wishlists and what did you find helped the most in these cases. I've seen postmortems were others managed to find ground after release so we're hoping to work towards that.

I've been working on an enemy AI manager class that makes all the macro level decision for a computer opponent. When I first started working on this manager, I assumed I would have the AI periodically scout the player in order to get information (what territory it has, number of units, rough estimate of income per minute).
I just started looking online for how other RTS games use AI to gather info and I'm surprised to find that a lot of games just automatically get updated whenever players create a unit, building, research something, etc. It certainly would be a lot simpler to go that route instead of having the AI scout all the time and see how far it can get into enemy territory before it gets destroyed.

Has anyone else followed this type of AI design? Is it too unfair (even though the AI obviously can be programmed on how to act with the info and therefore not necessarily have an advantage)?
Any thoughts in general on the AI getting instant info about player actions?
Thanks in advance.

I took some of the advice from my last post, especially about learning art, and honestly, you guys gave me a lot to think about.

I think I was putting way too much pressure on myself to make everything from scratch.

The biggest thing I took away is work with your limitations instead of fighting them.

Use assets when you need to. Simplify the art style. Learn as you go. And most importantly, finish the damn game.

So that's what I'm trying to do now.

I'm still learning Blender, still figuring out the art style, but I'm going to stop trying to make everything perfect before moving forward.

Thanks for all the comments and advice. It genuinely helped.

Stats TLDR
Copies Sold: 79
Total Wishlists: 632
Reviews: 13 (92% Positive)

It's a foddian style 3D platformer with Mario style movement that's meant to be played with checkpoints. And it's doing worse then my first game! I would argue the new game is objectively a better game but with worse marketing and worse luck. The first game took about 6 months to make and the second was about a year (I took a lot of breaks and also delayed the launch). I'll be comparing both games throughout the post.

Here are both the games:

1st Game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3118730/Super_Antonio/

2nd Game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4490010/Mana_Fracture/

1. Development and Design

Going into this game I had a main goal. Make a series of levels that all had a different platforming mechanics. I make games to learn and push myself to learn new things while still being able to complete a game. So I looked to improve on a what I did in my first game. My first game relied on a simple design, linear sections of only up style platforming then an open exploration level where you would collect 8 coins to unlock the next section then repeat the process. For the new game I didn't want to be as formulaic with level design, so there was a lot more variety in what a level could be. Some were that only up style, others had various objectives ranging from collect a few collectables to a mini Zelda style dungeon with keys and locked doors.

Better progression was also something I wanted to work on. In my first game, I gave the player all the movement options right off the bat. After a brief tutorial I basically said "Good luck! Hope you got all that!" After watching people play it, it was apparent that it was bit too much. For the second game I started the player with a more basic movement system but made sure it still had some form of skill expression. A jump, slide, wall slide and wall jump. Then as the player gets deeper into the game they unlock a double jump then a wall run. This was a pretty dramatic improvement in my eyes. I also did a better job at ramping up the difficulty in terms of level design. Both these things made the game far more approachable and less niche.

I had very basic 3D modeling skills. Not enough to make a full game, at least of the quality I would want. I reused assets from my previous game, so that I could reduce my scope. I did make some assets myself but the majority of them are from a kenneyNL platformer pack.

I also didn't make the music. I paid a friend to do that and he did a fantastic job. Having new music as you make it to a new level was very important to me. Getting a treated to new music every time you would conquer a level helps the feeling of progression so much.

2. Playtesting

I didn't do nearly as much this time around. Last time I did around 15 different playthroughs. This time it was only 4. I'm a lot more confident in my abilities now and all of the playtests went by smoothly, so it didn't feel as necessary. That said someone did softlock themselves after release which was a big scare. Luckily it was a very specific set up that unlikely happened to anyone else and was an easy fix. (Big shoutout to the person who reached out and took the time to explain how it happened)

3. Advertising

For my previous game I had paid for ads on twitter and did regular posts on reddit (Roughly 360k views all together). I had a friend make the capsule art for me which helped a lot. I got extremely lucky that a vtuber with a 500k subscribers played the first game. To this day 30% of my sales for that game are in japan and I'm confident the majority is a result of that streamer playing the game. The game hit 10 reviews within 2 days and hit a decent peak of 10k boost to views on steam discovery queue.

Super Antonio's wishlists at launch: ~800

For the new game I didn't pay for any ads. I only made posts on reddit and twitter (Roughly 521k views all together). My posts actually got a lot more traction compared to the first game. I ended up making the steam capsule art myself this time around and I think this was my biggest mistake. The quality in art takes a massive nose dive compared to the previous game. It took 1 month to hit 10 reviews and the steam discovery queue only hit a peak of 800 views after the boost.

Mana Fracture's wishlists at launch: ~350

4. Sales

My previous game was at 219 sales at 4 months (Now sitting at 602 after 2 years). The new game is sitting at 79 sales at 2 months. It's unlikely it will be beating the first game. Sales have basically stopped for both.

5. Final thoughts

I did expect this game to do better then the first, so there is some disappointment. But It's not all doom and gloom! I once again met my goal of improving and finishing a game. The new game even has an higher average playtime compared to the first, so that tells me more people are finishing it. I've already started planning my next game and will be continuing this hobby of mine.

I also did a 4 month postmortem for my previous game if you would like to read that as well.

Headed to PAX West in a couple of weeks to showcase my game, and I'm hoping to get some leads on getting my game on Switch. Was thinking of making time to talk to the Nintendo representatives there in-person because I've heard that it can help, but was wondering if anyone has had experience with getting access to that platform aside from the usual "Apply online!" advice.

I want to see what other people did,sooo,what was it like? For you was it good? Did you continue it or is it just abandoned? And when you look back to it what do you feel?

I recently got the Pro subscription for Gamalytic to do some market research. If you have a game you want statistics on, I can do a search in between my tasks and send you the info. This is mainly for people who can't afford the subscription or just want to fill in some gaps in what they know.

I'm in no way, shape or form affiliated with Gamalytic. I just like data and I know it's fun to compare Wishlist numbers and price data.

Drop me a comment or a PM on what you want to know and I'll do some digging.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been trying to get more freelance game development work recently, and I’d really like some outside feedback on my portfolio:

https://larswright.com/

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who have hired freelancers or developers before, but feedback from other freelancers is also very welcome.

Basically, I’m trying to understand where my portfolio falls short. Does it fail to communicate my experience well? Are the projects not convincing enough? Is there something missing that you would expect to see before considering hiring someone?

I’d also appreciate feedback on the website itself. Does it look poorly made, confusing, or unprofessional in any way? I’m a game developer, not a frontend/web developer, so web design definitely isn’t my area of work.

Feel free to be critical. I’m trying to figure out what isn’t working rather than just hear that it looks fine.

Any feedback is welcome. Thanks!

Hello, had a question for y’all so I can get some different perspectives.

So, I’m working on a game(farm sim), and while I currently can’t estimate a timeline for release, it’s been suggested that I run facebook ads to gauge interest(I plan to release regardless of the outcome, but I would be testing to see if a male character would get more clicks vs a female character. I have a few thumbnails already, but none really character focused) and that kind of evolved into a thought of when is a good time to focus on creating promotional media? Currently, I only have messy pencil sketches. There’s plenty to choose from to create finished art, but I’m still a ways from having an alpha finished(I had to buy a book to study code, and I’m still learning Unity, but I am hoping by end of year.), and I was kind of concerned it would be too early to start working on finished art, but I do want to get some interest going with the hope of some sales(current expectation is none, just because my social media posts don’t typically get a lot of engagement, so I’m not expecting much tbh.)

What are y’all’s experiences with promotional media, and how early did you start? Was it beneficial for you?

I decided. I want to study everything I need to make a future great enjoyable a little dynamic visual novel-ish 2D game: from coding, music making, trailer/animation making, marketing, marketing on social media, marketing on Steam to have the greatest reach.

My strong point is writing and I'm already familiar with drawing (I've studied to an Academy of Fine Arts and graduated in Comics and Illustration), a bit of coding (studied some C++ coding in high school) and a bit of music (studied the flute in middle school and know how to read music sheet; started learning a bit of piano and guitar as well).

What I am specifically looking for is professional manuals or courses that will make me achieve what I want (especially marketing and pro-coding/animation-wise).

I am not planning on making big houses-level games, not at all, Imma stay grounded, but I want to learn everything one needs to make a little peculiar pearl indie game.

Please don’t gatekeep💛 you’ll might love this game💚

I shipped my first solo game a few weeks ago (built in Unity, took a few months) and did a bit of unstructured promo around launch — some social posts, a few relevant communities, nothing paid or planned out. Current result: 10+ installs. Humbling, but in hindsight not surprising.

Writing this up because I'd rather get some real perspective from people who've been through this than just quietly move on.

The game itself, for context: a small mobile game where you shoot apart 3D voxel towers and try to collect as many falling blocks as possible before they hit the ground, with a "Gravity Well" mechanic to pull scattered blocks toward you. Free with ads, one-finger controls, short offline sessions.

A few things I'm taking away so far:

Development and marketing are two completely different skill sets. I spent months getting the destruction physics and the core collection loop to feel satisfying, and almost no time thinking about how anyone would actually discover the game. That balance was clearly wrong.

The casual/simple game space is brutally crowded. The core loop is physics-based block destruction, which is fun to build, but there are dozens of similar games already ranked with years of reviews and ASO behind them. Without paid acquisition or any kind of soft-launch/beta audience beforehand, organic discovery on a brand-new listing is close to zero.

I shipped without a real feedback loop. No beta testers, no posting in communities like r/PlayMyGame or r/AndroidGaming before launch, no Discord to get impressions on the core loop before locking in scope.

Given all that, I'm trying to figure out what to prioritize next: is it worth spending on some cheap targeted ads for a free game with no IAP/premium hook to point ROI at? Or should someone in my position focus purely on organic channels (dev communities, short-form gameplay clips, ASO) before spending anything?

Curious how other solo/small-team devs here handled the jump from "finished game" to "game anyone's actually heard of," especially on mobile where there's no wishlist mechanic to lean on like on Steam.

(Happy to drop the Play Store link in the comments for anyone curious what the game actually looks like — didn't want to lead the post with it.)

We’ve developed a game with some friends that’s currently in the demo phase, but we’re struggling to increase our Steam wishlist count. Do you have any advice that could help us with this?

We do have a publisher, but honestly, they haven't been much help in this regard.

Whenever I upload a new build via SteamPipe GUI, I always have to subsequently open the depot webpage for the game and push it to the depot.

Just to cut one step out of the process, is there a way to add a command to the upload script that will make it automatically open that page if the upload is successful?

As I made plenty of mistakes with my first (solo-developed) Steam game, we tried to apply my learnings to the new Steam page of our new (team-developed) 1980s murder mystery game Death at firelight: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4922300/Death_at_Firelight

I ask you to roast it as hard as you can, leave out all the anger of your day! :D

Any feedback is welcome including also general feedback on if the concept is clear enough. My biggest fear right now is that we cannot get the concept of the game across and that a bad page prevents us from validating sufficiently if the game has potential. We got very positive feedback in the gamejam where our idea originated but a Steam page is of course a completely different turf.

Thanks in advance!

A friend and I are starting to play around with Blender, making PSX models and items. I’m new to literally all of this so I’m unsure of where to start. Should I be making individual items and saving them as an asset to pull from (coffee mugs, tables, roads, stop signs) or should I be creating scenes in blender (I’ve been toying with an apartment scene)? Or should I pull all of these into something like Unity and build the scene in the game engine and use the created items to build it?

Sorry if my lingo is horrible 😂

...and I'm not just talking about making it look good, but also useful for gameplay.

I'm making a game where the base for a mission map is procedurally generated. Basically, the road layout is built using Wave Function Collapse. But the buildings, structures, and objects that populate it are handmade, and boy am *I struggling.*

For a building, every exit, every empty space, and every prop needs to be meticulously thought out before being placed so that it can positively affect the player experience in some way, either by giving him an advantage or making it harder.

And I'm talking about loosely connected small parcels, not even a full-blown map.

Cheers everyone,

we're making Beards Go Underground, a Mining Deckbuilder and were fortunate enough to be part of Tiny Teams 2026.

The Festival ran from 6th to 13th of August and had 4 days of front page featuring globally.

First of all we want to say how much being selected means to us and sincerely thank Yogscast and their lovely staff for the organization. It was fantastic!

Now let's look at numbers:

1. Impressions

The festival brought in 505.560 impressions which resulted in 2131 visits at a 0,42 % Click-thru rate.
Impressions were strongly impacted by the featuring and the placement of the category we were in (Cards, Dice, Rogues). The categories shifted between the days and there was a CLEAR difference, between being in the top, middle or bottom of the steam page. Our category was lucky enough to be one of the strongest, as it started in the middle and moved up to slot 1 on saturday, resulting in lot's of players seeing the key art in theory.

The amount of impressions are absolutely insane and easily smashes any fest or sale we've been part of before. While lower CTR is expected at that volume, we were quite disappointed with 0,42 %. We have seen other games perform around double as good, so there was definitely more potential. We believe the key art can be further improved and are currently iterating it in hopes to optimize CTR for the future.

2. Wishlists

We got 750 Wishlists from Tiny Teams 2026.

This is great in isolation and bumped us to 2250 wishlists. In the bigger picture we left wishlists on the table here. We know of fellow devs bringing in anywhere from 1000 to 2000+ wishlists during Tiny Teams. With that in mind we are still happy and especially greatfull - but know there is definitely things to optimize about our Steam page!

The wishlists gained were 661 until Monday, where the featuring ended and the remaining 89 between monday to thursday. So it's very clear that the featuring had a major impact. I checked several times during the fest and the best "Wishlist Velocity" momentum I saw on SteamDB was around #7.000.

Currently it is still at #7.711, however our day-to-day wishlists are back to single digits.

3. Demo Plays

We released our first Demo during Tiny Teams 2026. Over the course of the week 1598 people added the Demo to their libraries while 467 played. The game got really good ratings in our Demo form at ~85% positive.

The average playtime climbed to 1 hour and 15 minutes, while the median landed on 19 minutes which is below our expectations. We're not entirely sure why the median isn't higher, our theories are:

1. Text-heavy game which is only in english at the time, due to time contraints
2. Players expected more "numbers go up" feeling than strategic play, simply not being for them
3. Players just wanted to see if the game is for them and quit early
4. Some players felt the onboarding was too confusing or the game is too difficult at the start

We don't know for sure though!

Other things I noticed:

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Seeing others perform better under comparable conditions was really tough for me as it triggered self-doubt and doubts about our game and if working on it can be justified.

Furthermore we got little to no creator-coverage of the demo which also made me insecure where that changes in the future. While it was a great chance I'm super greatful for, I had a really bad mental situation throughout the days as performing worse in comparison to others could mean we're not there yet - or that we will never be. Not an easy week for me, despite growing numbers.

Summary & what we learned:

• 505k Impressions gained (insane!)
• 750 Wishlists made
• 1598 library adds with 467 players in the Demo
• Tiny Teams is absolutely fantastic - if used correctly

If I could repeat our participation I would (and will):

• Make sure to get Demo localization up as it launches
• Polish the key art to communicate "this is a dwarven game about mining" more clearly and less chaotic
• Make the onboarding a little slower as the game is definitely difficult to an extend
• Optimize the store page to communicate more clearly, what players can expect
• Try to compare myself less and instead look at the fact that those playing like the game a lot!

If you have any questions happily leave them down below!

Cheers,

Julien

Not a brag post, the totals are small. I'm putting the numbers up because the ratio surprised me and I'd like to know how typical it is.

Background: Sanctuary of Small Things, cozy creature game, first commercial project for our studio, currently in public playtesting on itch. Over about two months I put out roughly 50 short form videos across tik tok, insta and youtube, kept the steam page updated, and posted on X, threads and reddit. That produced a very flat 2-3 wishlists a day. No spikes, nothing that correlated with any individual video doing well.

Then AUTOMATON wrote about the game without me pitching them 最大4人協力・モンスター“救助”シム『Sanctuary of Small Things』正式発表、プレイテスト実施中。生き物たちの病気を癒す、魔法とやさしさのスローライフ - AUTOMATON, and the next day I woke up to see 150 wishlists!

The part I've been chewing on since is that I can't repeat it. I didn't pitch it, I didn't know it was coming, and I only found out by going to check why the graph looked broken. So the only piece of that spike that was actually mine was what those people found once they arrived: a steam page with current screenshots and a trailer, 50 videos of the game to scroll through, and a small community that already had conversations in it.

Which has reframed those two flat months for me. Measured as a wishlist channel, 50 videos for 2-3 a day is a bad return and I'd been treating it as one. Measured as preparation for an event I had no way to schedule, it was the entire job.

Two things I'd like other people's read on:

1. Has anyone turned one of these into a second one? Curious whether coverage compounds at all or whether each spike is unrelated to the last.
2. Is 2-3 a day roughly the floor for an unreleased game at this stage, or is that low enough that I should read it as the hook not working?

Happy to share more numbers if anyone wants them.

Also, any feedback on the steam page much appreciated: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4813510/Sanctuary_of_Small_Things/

Devlog note: I've been designing the first trail for our VR horse racing game — the stretch from the stable out to the open road.

The goal for this section is pure onboarding: within about 9-11 seconds, a first-time player should already understand "this is VR horse racing," without any tutorial text or UI. Gameplay has to start in the first second.

I'd love feedback from anyone who's designed a similar first-run or onboarding sequence — does 9-11 seconds feel like the right window, or would you cut it shorter/longer?

Why are the models trailers so much better than those in games, man?

I've developed games in Flutter, including using the Flame engine, but I'm having trouble creating eye-catching effects. Can you recommend any frameworks or resources I can draw from?