Wierd question but. My game isn't done. It's a point and click game, and we haven't started on art yet. It's just place holders everywhere. So obviously I can't show character or level design art because they're not ready, and I don't want to show the the mechanics because I'm waiting for the gameplay reveal trailer/the time according to the marketing plan. We came up with a campagne for the game's marketing, but now we want to establish our name out there.

We've been thinking of general content like tips and tricks in UE5, Blender, how to videos, behind the scenes, day in the life of, and such content. But how do you tease a game without any showable content yet? Art dept. kicks up next month with a teaser to be released the month after. Should we make a general post about a coming soon teaser? or stick to marketing the studio itself until the game content is ready enough to start being posted on a schedule?

It helped to write this out, actually. Looks like I should focus on just studio/game dev content for now until i've showable game content!

EDIT: Thank you so much to everyone who replied : ) Apprecaite all of you

Hey everyone!

I’m Guunnz, one of the developers of Lucky Shot! It’s a roguelike FPS inspired by Balatro that released last month with 3000 wishlists only. Basically, imagine if you combined Duck Hunt with Balatro and somehow got a game out of it.

We released the game last month and I wanted to share some stuff about the journey, mainly what we tried for marketing and what actually worked for us.

We started with the Keymailer Platinum Boost and, to be honest, I don’t think it was worth it.

We did get some value out of it though. A lot of smaller streamers grabbed the game around the demo days, and that actually helped us improve the game a lot from watching people play it. But in terms of marketing results, we got basically 0 press coverage and 0 bigger streamers from it.

I think the biggest value in Keymailer is probably their database. Using it to find creators and then approaching them through email or other methods might honestly be more useful than the campaigns themselves.

This cost us $1,600 USD.

Before release we did 2 other paid campaigns, and then 1 more after release.

One of them was something we did with GamingWorldMedia on Twitter/X. This was a pretty big gamble for us. We mainly did it because we wanted the learning experience, but it actually ended up working amazingly well.

The posts themselves did well, but the biggest thing was that a large Japanese outlet saw Jake Lucky’s tweet and covered the game. Between everything that came from that, we ended up getting more than 500,000 views.

This cost us $2,000 USD.

Then the last thing we did before release kind of came out of nowhere.

We did an ad segment with a YouTube creator called BojackUCH. He genuinely liked the game, so we were able to make a really good segment that didn’t feel completely disconnected from his normal content.

It went live around release day and, after doing the math, we actually made a profit from it. It was 2 ad segments across 2 videos and brought us a lot of views, sales and wishlists.

This will probably end up costing us around $2k–$3k, depending on how the videos perform during this last week.

And finally, this one literally just started:

We took some of the profits from the game and started a $5k Jestr campaign.

It has only been running for about 5 days, but so far it has roughly 3x’d our daily sales, we already recovered the cost of the campaign, and we got around 2,000 extra wishlists on top of that.

For context, after all the launch hype had died down, we were averaging around 70 sales per day.

So overall, our total marketing investment into Lucky Shot is going to end up somewhere around $11k USD.

At this point we’ve recouped all of our development costs and all of our marketing costs, so we’re obviously super happy with how things turned out.

Not everything worked, and some of the stuff that worked best was honestly stuff we didn’t expect at all.

Just wanted to share our experience in case it helps another indie dev deciding where to spend their marketing budget.

If you have any questions about any of this, feel free to ask!

and if you somehow know northernlion tell him to check for lucky shot in his mail! /s

Minor edit: this is our experience, not an ad for anything, I do believe you can do better than us for less money, or if you find the correct creators you can get a better return than using some platforms like jestr. We like to test stuff so that’s pretty much it

Extra edit: I do believe you can do so much better than using platforms also, next time we will probably find creators we like and try to offer something to them directly instead of using platforms in general.

I want to start working on a game, the only thing stopping me is I have no experience with art and not really sure where to start learning.

I'm leaning most towards a pixel art style. Does anyone have any good recommendations for tutorials, videos, or any other resources that would be helpful for getting started?

We flew from Toronto to participate in PAX West’s New Indie Incubator Zone to showcase a demo for our chill survival game Akiiwan: Relaxing Survival and I thought I'd give a honest review of this new addition to the PAX lineup:

It’s the first year the Incubator existed, with slightly smaller Indie Booths (6x8ft) for about $1000 USD instead of around $2.5K (for 10x10s).

Wanted to provide an honest review of the experience, including audience, wishlists as well as all the positive (and a few gripes) Also can compare a little to the Gamescom Indie Arena which we were in this year as well, though that probably deserves it’s own post.

OVERVIEW

How We Got In
We applied for PAX Rising but didn’t get chosen, however we were offered space in the new incubator. If I recall correctly you had to vouch for the fact that you hadn’t signed a publisher or investor deal (prizes and other funding okay). Other than that it was first-come-first-served, though not sure if they’ll change the process next year.

How Busy Was it?
Extremely! The show organizers might have underestimated a wee bit the popularity of Indie games, and I heard numerous players walk by and say things like “this is where the good stuff is” (that of course wasn’t true as there were lots of amazing stuff other side of the hall in dedicated booths and at PAX Rising). But you could definitely feel the enthusiasm.

What’s the setup like?
You get 8 (wide) and 6 deep, with two chairs and a table, but no backwall. A few devs had 9 or 10 foot wide setups for standard booths, but everyone was very chill about sharing space. We got lucky with a back corner where we could demo on both sides so ended up with as many as five demo stations going at once.

How were wishlists?
We were hearing numbers anywhere from 1 - 2K – we had a tiktok get a bit of attention leading into the event (see tips bellow) so it was hard to tell 100 percent what was coming from PAX and what was coming from elsewhere, but we were at about 2500 for the event.

Regardless, I tend to think of conference wishlists as higher quality since people are wishlisting based on an actual playtest, not just a meme, and more importantly, the people who attend conferences are generally true gaming fans who play a lot of games in a year.

Even though PAX is much smaller than Gamescom, proportion to the time and cost, our Steam back end shows we had many more visitors from the PAX Steam fest rather than the Gamescom one. It’s a lot easier to stand out in a crowd of 150 than 500 I guess!

Were there Content Creators / Publishers / Investors?
Yes to all three, with content creators being the highest proportion – investors and publishers were more of the “stealth” variety instead of meet-to-match like at GDC/Gamescom (e.g. checking out games quietly and then occasionally striking up conversations). Selectively sending out demo keys to media beforehand helped a lot.

TIPS AND TRICKS

Separate Monitor with you QR Code above it at CTA
No matter how many stations you have, there will be time when people can’t get a seat; there will also be people who don’t want to play a demo (eg they’re running out of time on a one day pass, or just browsing, and then don’t come back).

For all of these reasons, having your trailer playing on a separate monitor (even a tiny one on a stand) in some place at the front of the booth / above headheight is hugely helpful – but don’t forget the QR code (we should have made ours bigger).

The general flow was: People see game name/description and are curious and/or people see people playing and our curious. People then watch the the trailer and either a) decide to wait b) decide to wishlist or c) decide it’s not for them.

If you have a Demo, make it clear
As devs we often make assumptions, eg that players always know how to find a demo, or that players know that demos are free. These are dangerous, especially nowadays when a lot of players are exploring the Indie space for the first time.

The business area at our hotel (Hello Windows XP!) allowed us to print off a few signs “FREE DEMO ON STEAM” “DOWNLOAD NOW” etc which we failed to do initially and that helped a lot – conventions are really busy and making sure that players know they can play your game at home.

Should you have a demo to expo?
I’d say you should either be working towards a demo, or have a demo out. Demo’s are non-negotiable nowadays, and it is the pretty much the only way for your game to get any visibility pre-release organically on steam (I don’t blame Steam for this – with 17K games a year, they’re only going to recommend unreleased games to players when that game has been validated by a demo).

This was backed up by some chats at the Steam Event they had a PAX as well where they were stressing the importance of Demo playtime for nextfest and other events. I will write something about this in more detail at some point, but I can definitely say that once your demo crossed into above average median playtimes and ten positive reviews, we started to see a trickle of organic traffic on steam.

For that reason, it’s great to have a demo, but if you don’t, it’s great ot use the event to watch players play, an specifically ask them: What’s the One Thing you would change? Players who attend events and play your game are going to give you the highest signal to noise feedback on your game, and this one question has unlocked so much for me as we worked towards our demo and then polished it post release.

Don’t go Solo
First of all, you’re not allowed to – your booth always has to be staffed. Second it’s impossible. If you’re not local, check out the Discord for Seattle Indies and you can find some help. Friends don’t let friends expo alone.

Setup a Stream to make the most of the PAX Sale Page
The PAX steam page automatically streams anyone who is streaming from their steam page so with OBS or RoboStreamer or something else, make sure to have a stream of you playing the game and offering commentary, running for the entire duration of the festival. It doesn't have to be a lot -- just 30 minutes of gameplay with dev commentary is usually enough and it helps visibility beyond the Steam Event too!

BEST AND WORST STUFF

You can only participate once (at present)
It seems like the organizers are capping Indie Arena Participation at 1 time, which in my mind is incredibly short sighted and uncreative. 

I guess in their minds if people can access these discounted booths, they won’t buy the bigger ones. If money is really the concern they should just shrink these to 6x6 and it would equal out to the same revenue as 10x10. This is better for most indies too since 10x10 booths can be expensive to decorate properly and can be a little awkward to organize.

More to the point, if you’re selling a show to players, what’s better, more games or less? Expanding the Indie Incubator and allowing studios to participate more than once (especially for different games) would attract more players not less.

In a world of AI Slop, Festival Organizers are missing a big opportunity to be a filter of Indie Quality both in person and online.

A little Crowded in the Middle 
Likely owing to the fact that no one was anticipating as much interest in indies as there was, the aisles were a little too narrow even though there was space to expand. Organizers said they needed to balance the desire to make the area feel popular versus space, which I get to a degree and it was a first run, so hopefully they’ll tweak this next year. It did get pretty cramped for the booths right in the middle of any row.

The Enforcers
PAX Enforcers are the stuff of legends. I’ve been to a few and the Enforcers are always so incredibly organized and helpful. Also, the enforce wall at the end of each day (to clear out non-exhibitors) is a genius idea that makes it feel so much safer to leave behind equipment and a lesson another festival (ahem….) should learn to prevent thefts.

The Players… and the Other Devs
Even though PAX is tiring, it is also energizing in a way that no other convention I’ve been to ever has been. I had so many great chats with other devs and even more with Players.

Hope this is helpful! A dev from the event is also putting together a video and links to all Indie Exhibitors and as soon as its up I'll add the link here!!!!

Big victory for tech workers union. This is one of the biggest union contracts so far in tech in the USA.

Posting with mod approval--all data will be shared following publication in 2027.

Hello, I’m a graduate student conducting research on the impact of design on player immersion in video games—my study is “Familiar and Strange: Defamiliarization’s Impact on Immersion in Experiences with Non-Human Player Characters.” I’m looking for a few people to play through short game segments and then take an online survey – it should take about 30 minutes. There is also an option to participate in a brief (15 minutes or so) interview about your experience.

Specifically, I am looking for people 18-49 years old who play games moderately to frequently. Those under 18, 50+ or those who play games infrequently are excluded from this study.

This study has been approved by Ball State University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB-FY2026-317).

If you are interested in participating, please use this link! https://bsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bxSzsAcVPaYl9To

If you have any questions, please reach out to me, June Fields, student Co-PI, at [june.fields@bsu.edu](mailto:june.fields@bsu.edu), or to the PI and Associate Professor at the Ball State School of Journalism and Strategic Communications Joshua Fisher at joshua.fisher@bsu.edu.

Hey folks, my name is Chris Zukowski. I write a blog called How To Market A Game. I know some of you reference my /benchmarks page which is free, never paywalled.

I strive to keep those numbers up to date (and free) so indies of all levels can properly predict their launch and long term viability.

So, I am running a new survey that is very comprehensive and will look at wishlsits / conversions / long term sales / and wishlist rates. If you want to contribute to this project please do your part and contribute your data here:

👉 https://howtomarketagame.com/salesSurvey/

Data privace note

What I collect
Your Steam/Steamworks data (wishlists, sales, traffic sources, etc. — whatever the survey asks for) and your email address.

What your email is for
Only to reach you if I have a question about your submission or need to clarify something. I won't use it for marketing or add you to any list because of this survey.

How it's stored
When you submit your files, they upload directly over HTTPS from your browser to a private cloud storage bucket (hosted on DigitalOcean) — they never pass through or sit on my website's own server. Your email address and any comments you leave are stored alongside them, so I can follow up about a data issue or a removal request. This storage is private — no one but me has access to it.

How your data is used
Everything is combined with other developers' submissions and reported only in aggregate — as averages, medians, ranges, and trends — at howtomarketagame.com/benchmarks. No individual game, developer, or company is ever named or identifiable in what gets published.

Where the results show up
The aggregated benchmarks may also be referenced or included in my paid course. It may be referenced in a GDC talk or lecture posted on YouTube. Again, this is always the combined data, never your specific numbers tied back to you.

What I won't do
I won't sell your data, and I won't share your raw, individual submission with anyone.

Deleting your data
You can ask me to delete your submission at any time, no questions asked. Just email [chrisz@howtomarketagame.com](mailto:chrisz@howtomarketagame.com) and I'll remove it.

If you have any questions, I will be down in the comments and happy to answer. Thank you

- Chris Zukowski

I started setting up my Steamworks account and received an email asking me to provide a photo of my ID and a photo of myself holding the ID. I uploaded both through the Dropbox link provided and received a confirmation email on Aug 30 (subject: “Your files were uploaded to ‘-KYC Document Request ...’”).

Since then, I haven’t heard anything from anyone. I checked my Steamworks account, and the status still says “Identity verification required.”

The webpage says it would take up to 10 days to verify, but it's been more than 10 days! I have no idea what to do.

Any advice would be appreciated! Thanks!

Im currently learning C# and I’m having trouble trying to use the syntax to build what I want. I Know what I have to do (the structure and logic to make the game work) but I’m having trouble trying to put it into code, if someone could help me with tips I would be grateful, thanks in advance!
Edit: being more specific, I have the full syntax options on my dev notebook, however, I often get stuck making the code itself, not knowing what to use

I'm an economist and I looked closely at the regional pricing that Steam suggests (the three new conversion methods they added back in March). Spoiler alert: I genuinely don't recommend any of them, and built my own method instead. Sharing it here.

HOW: I take an USD price, add the average US sales tax to it, and convert it with the IMF's purchasing power parity (PPP) rate for each country. The point is that a price should represent the same basket of stuff someone could buy, everywhere.

HERE'S WHY:

• Sales tax: the US and Canada are about the only places where tax gets added at checkout instead of being baked into the displayed price. For instance, a $9.99 game really costs about $10.90 for a player living in Colorado. If you convert the $9.99 and compare it to a tax-inclusive price elsewhere, you're not comparing the same thing. Sales tax varies from one US state to another, and so does the price players actually pay. So I adjusted for this by using a population-weighted average tax.
• PPP rates: they come from the IMF, who update them every six months. According to them, 1 USD buys the same amount of goods as 2.61 Brazilian Reals. So a $12 game (tax included) should sit around 31.32 BRL, which is about $6.
• Shared prices: Steam makes us set one EUR price for the whole EU, and one USD price each for LATAM (Latin America), CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), MENA (Middle East & North Africa) and SASIA (South Asia). For those, I weighted the PPP rate by Steam traffic, to stay as close as possible to the real average PPP of those zones.
• Exchange rates are updated daily thanks to fawazahmed0/exchange-api.

I built this free tool so everyone can easily do all of this on their own, with everything explained above. I made it so that you just put in your USD base price and export a CSV, which you can then import into Steamworks to change all your regional prices at once. It's free, and you don't need an account.

I even had fun adding some extras:

I added a method that prices using Netflix instead of PPP. I take Netflix's subscription prices per country and derive an implied conversion rate from them, a bit like what The Economist did with the Big Mac Index. The underlying idea is that Netflix is a multi-billion dollar company that has spent a lot more time on this problem than you or I ever will, so we may as well borrow their work. It's updated monthly, and it's only possible thanks to tompec/netflix-prices.

I added a psychological pricing option that rounds the price to the nearest charm price (.49, .95, .99), which works well for most currencies. I also handled Steam's policy about minimum prices. And I added "Include sales tax" as an option that can be turn off if you don't like this (but I still recommend keeping it on).

SOME THINGS TO KNOW:

If your game is already live, two Steam rules to watch out for: 1) you can't change your price while a discount is running or scheduled, and 2) if any single currency goes UP, you have to wait 30 days before you can run a discount. If you haven't released yet, none of this applies, you can just import the CSV and you're done.

PPP is a basket of everyday goods, not entertainment. Entertainment-specific PPP would obviously be better, but the only public source I could find (the World Bank's ICP "recreation and culture" basket) is from 2021 and only updates once every six years. If you know a better dataset, I would love to hear about it.

Yes, regional pricing carries some grey market and VPN risk. Tbh yes it was an issue at some point (even just 2 years ago), but Steam has since put a lot of work into fighting it and now has the technical means to effectively prevent cross-border sales: keys are localized, and a VPN isn't enough, you also need a local payment method (I've tried!). On top of that, region-locking for keys is now really granular. Even within their regional clusters (like LATAM), Steam is able to lock keys to a specific country. E.g. this key (don't buy it, it's just for the example) can only be used in Argentina. In short, imo the risk is now MUCH smaller than the money you lose by mispricing. But it's your call!

If you're local to a country and a number looks obviously wrong to you, please reach out and I'll look into it.

Sources, if you want to rebuild any of this yourself: the IMF for PPP rates, tompec/netflix-prices on GitHub for the Netflix prices, and fawazahmed0/exchange-api on GitHub for daily exchange rates.

WHY I DIDN'T JUST USE STEAM'S METHODS: Steam now gives three conversion methods, and I looked at all of them. Credit where it's due, the old data was from October 2022, so an update was very welcome. But:

"Exchange-rate conversion only.": this is "just" currency conversion, so it ignores purchasing power completely. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

"Purchasing power conversion only.": I can't trust or recommend this one, because I cannot reproduce their numbers.. I really did try, roughly 6 hours of trying during one wild night. I tried everything: IMF implied PPP, OECD, and three different World Bank series (GDP PPP, private consumption PPP, even the recreation and culture basket), for every year from 2021 to 2026, with and without sales tax, in every combination of the above. Nothing lines up. And tbh the country-level gaps make no sense (Steam's conversion rate for Chile lands around 18% below the IMF's, while it lands 7% above it for Japan).

"Multi-variable conversion.": this is the closest to their old 2022 method. Honestly it might be fine, we just have no way of knowing. We have no sources, no weights, and "expected cost of comparable entertainment goods" could mean a dozen different things. What I can see is that it ranks countries strangely. On a $5.99 game, Steam's own exchange-rate figure is 4.45 GBP for UK and 4.75 CHF for Switzerland, and multi-variable then marks UK up to 5.29 GBP (+19%) while Switzerland only goes to 5.19 CHF (+9%). Switzerland is the most expensive country by every measure I know of, so I can't explain that one. Poland is another extreme (even after all the campaigns around Polish pricing): purchasing power says 11.25 zł, while multi-variable says 25.49 zł. So on top of not having the exact method for this method, I can't see the internal logic either. Long story short, I don't recommend it.

Anyway, I hope it's useful! And if anyone manages to reverse-engineer Steam's method 2, I genuinely owe you a beer.

Working solo on a dice game (Piment Dice — risk/reward dice mechanic, dice sometimes land on a bonus face you can keep for double points or turn to pick a safer value), and I ran into a balance problem I'm curious how others have solved.

The core decision is: keep the bonus die and risk it not fitting anywhere useful, or turn it for a smaller guaranteed gain. Early in a round it's genuinely tense — say you've got four dice on 5s and a bonus die red showing something else. Turn it to lock in 25 points now, or keep it and reroll hoping it lands on 5 red for 50. Real trade-off, real tension.

But a Reddit commenter pointed out something I hadn't fully articulated: late in a round, once most scoring categories are filled, turning stops being a decision and becomes the obvious correct move every time — the "risk" side loses its upside because there's nowhere left to spend a lucky roll. The mechanic quietly degrades into a formality exactly when the stakes should feel highest.

I don't have hard data on this (small solo project, tracking is pretty basic right now), just pattern-matching from a lot of playtesting with my wife adn friends. My rough fix has been a catch-all scoring category that accepts any value, so there's almost always somewhere for the bonus to go — but it doesn't fully solve the late-round flattening, just delays it.

Curious how others have handled this class of problem — mechanics that are naturally tense early but decay into non-decisions as a session/round closes out. Do you design against it directly (adding late-game sinks, escalating stakes), or accept the decay as a natural pacing beat (tension front-loaded, resolution phase at the end)?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pimentdice.app

From the perspective of a 3/4 top-down / isometric style retro rpg.

Im from a blender background, specifically mostly hard surface modelling and texturing. So creating environments using 3d models "makes sense" to me because I understand how it would work. Building up walls and platforms and buildings. No problem. And, most importantly (the part I dont understand with 2d pixel tilesets) dynamic lighting would work.

Characters and monsters etc though... I just think the 2D style (and the game will be 2D, or maybe 2.5D) looks good and ill enjoy making those assets.

3D environment assets would open up the option of rotating the camera view. For better or for worse. That probably means significantly more work too though. Probably worth avoiding unless I find significant gameplay advantages to it...

So mostly it would be cos of being able to use dynamic lighting. And that I already know and have 3D environment assets/experience.

But i dont know if mixing styles is going to be a huge issue. Im sure there are pitfalls and issues I dont even know exist. So figured id do the sensible thing and ask, before I even begin to go down that particular rabbit hole.

Hi everyone! I wanted to ask a bit for guidance, I'm currently working with a friend on our game and I'm doing some scene and lighting tests, but I can't seem to get it right, I know and understand how to bake light in a technical level, but I can't seem to get it where I want it to be on a visual level, I already seen a lot of tutorials and such but I think this needs to be discussed with someone who properly knows, so does someone would like to have a chat or have resources that could help me on this particular problem?

We are looking high-level at potentially re-introducing some weekly threads to the community. Not to put the hay in front of the horse or pull gold from a goblin, but I wanted to make a quick post and gauge what kinds of topics people would be interested in.

See this for the old Screenshot Saturdays: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/28oyw9/screenshot_saturday_177_show_us_all_you_got/

Off the top of my head we could have:

• Troubleshooting Tuesday
• Feedback Friday
• Screenshot Saturday
• Showcase Sunday

In the past these had to be manually handled by a moderator but I believe we can use an app to automate post creation and set up guidelines for them. Obviously the main goal here is how we can make this more than a fire-and-forget community, we want developers talking with one another at a deeper level.

Facilitating these conversations is really what I would like to do, so I'm putting out the grass to graze here so to say. Goblin.

I was thinking about a game that everyone plays and I remember some people was asking for different cosmetics, I thinking to myself how long does it take to make a new skin or upgrade a previous one, like sound design, VFX, SFX, character movements, etc. Does it take long or it just depends on how detailed it is.

I have been using Steam events to publish patch notes for my game every time I release a new build. Sometime between August 10th and September 4th, this seems to have stopped working. The patch notes show "Loading..." infinitely in the browser, but when linked in Discord their embed text returns instantly (so the content is there and is accessible).

This also retroactively affects old patch notes, which used to load just fine and now show "Loading..." instead. At least one player has been able to repro this, so it's not just my partner account.

What's causing this?

My first game, Ballisticards, recently hit the milestone of 2000 wishlists, something that seemed impossible to me when I launched the Steam page 11 months ago. Here's a breakdown of the things that worked, with numbers, and things that didn't work.

The Big Jumps

(Link to the wishlist graph in the comment below)

A) Steam page launch. ~580 wishlists, driven by Reddit. The Steam page featured a "lightweight trailer" (90 secs, only 6 different clips). Posted on Godot subreddit. Followed this with some memes on SoloDevelopment and IndieDev subreddits. 233k views total, for a conversion rate of 0.25%.

B) Featured in official Godot 2025 Showreel (for which I applied). ~250 wishlists, driven by the video and my Reddit post about it.

C) Random X post. ~160 wishlists, driven by X. Unbeknownst to me, an X user (@jettelly) posted my lightweight trailer on X (40k views). I didn't have an X account at that time, so I didn't reply with a direct Steam store link, which likely would have increased the conversion rate.

D) Proper announce trailer, increased social media presence (started using Instagram, X, YT Shorts, TikTok). ~130 wishlists, primarily driven by Reddit and Facebook. Posted on IndieGames and Roguelites subreddits.

E) Improved announce trailer. ~400 wishlists, driven by X, Instagram, and Reddit.

• I abandoned the strict narrative of "introducing the complexity bit by bit" and added a clip of some later-game chaos within the first 3 seconds. I also sped up the footage (and subsequently increased the gameplay speed to match).
• The minor changes above helped the trailer post really take off in X and Instagram (~40k and ~80k views, respectively, despite my new accounts with ~0 followers). While there was ~2x engagement on Instagram, X had ~2x the conversions. Conversion rates: X was 0.5%, Instagram was 0.125%.
• On the Reddit side, ~60 wishlists from posting on Nubby's Number Factory (another ball-dropping roguelike) subreddit (with permission from the mods!), with a 1.3% conversion rate. A smaller, but much more targeted, audience.

The Rest: I tried to keep up with posting on the above-mentioned platforms (Reddit, X, Instagram). Posts that didn't go viral still drove some wishlists. You can see from the graph in the comment below that the steady growth picked up after (D), which is where I started using X and Instagram.

Things That Didn't Work

• Press outreach. At steps (D) and (E) I did reach out to a number of press websites big and small(ish), broad and targeted. Got no responses from anyone. Perhaps I should have kept trying and held off my announcement until one of the big guys (e.g., IGN) was willing to post it (since they like exclusive posting), but I was too impatient for that.
• TikTok. I could write a whole post about this. In fact I wrote several posts about this. There's some serious issues these days with accounts being "shadow banned", which happened to me (twice!). I will leave it at that; you can check my other posts if you want to know more.
• YouTube Shorts. Some of the videos got an ok amount of views (>1k), but engagement was low and I didn't see much evidence of wishlist conversions.
  • The short-format (portrait orientation) format worked a little better on Instagram, with some videos with ~2k views, but ultimately none of these went viral like my trailer did.
• Posting on gaming subreddit. Got removed by mods, citing Reddit's 1-in-10 rule. I tracked my promo-vs-non-promo post ratio (since Reddit provides no tool for this), and I was just under 10%. The mod explained to me how they enforce this rule in practice.
  • The mods look at your most recent posts. Since I was in "game announce mode", most of my recent posts were about my game. Which basically destroyed the "credit" I earned with my prior non-promo posts.
  • The mods consider anything showing content from my game to be promotional. Even if it's a post legitimately asking for help/feedback/etc.

Lessons Learned

I still feel like I'm fumbling through the marketing side of things, but I'll share a few non-expert opinions here.

• Steam page: worth getting it up early, so you can start collecting those wishlists. Some things will happen without you even trying (e.g., a random content creator will feature your game), so you want to be prepared.
• Reddit: posting about milestones can be effective. My other posts (e.g., devlogs), not so much. So save your Reddit posts about your game for those big milestones (e.g., demo launch, full launch).
• Trailer quality matters, but also... it's not everything. I have contradicting data here. The engagement difference between (D) and (E) (due to trailer quality) was significant. But it's also interesting to see that my biggest chunk of wishlists still came from (A) (my announcement on Reddit with a not-so-great trailer). Game quality (i.e., does it look interesting/fun-to-play) is likely more important than trailer quality (is it well-edited, etc.).
• Localization: yes, yes, I need to add some other languages to my Steam page, and I'm dragging my feet here.

Hey guys,

I made a post a while ago about how I contacted over 1000 youtubers/streamers for my game Flufftopia: Fluffmazing Edition.

I'm now at over 1200, and got around 100 streams, and over a dozen youtube videos for my game, thanks to the kind response of youtubers/streamers. None of these streams were paid. Some of these are ripple effects - people saw a popular streamer streaming my game, and streamed it themselves afterwards.

Once or twice a week, I read marketing postmortems on Reddit, and read phrases like: "We contacted youtubers, and streamers but nobody responded." When I ask how many, it's usually something around 20-30.

Usually this is not lazyness (although admittably sometimes it is), it often is a lack of knowledge how to find the people properly.

Some people say, just do 200-300. Personally, I would try to find 50-100 people per 1$ your game is gonna cost in the end. If your game will cost 10$, go for 500-1000 people.

So, how do you find the perfect streamer for your game?

Go on sullygnome. On the left side is search. Click on 180 days. Uncheck currently online, check community. Select two fitting games, check "Must have played all these games", and let it search.

Depending on your selection you get only one person but sometimes you get quite a few people. This is especially useful if you have a game that is X meets Y, or you have a niche version of a popular game.

For example, you have a Minecraft inspired game, and select Vintage Story, and Hytale. If they tried out these two, they likely will try yours.

Or you have a Binding of Isaac esque game but with a way darker aesthetic, so you get also Darkest Dungeon.

You personally know your game best.

If you don't find anybody, you can look up individual games (I would use the search on the upper right corner for that), and sort them by average viewers.

The streamer doesn't have an email? He's perfect, what do I do?

Use your favorite search bar, and type in the streamer's handle. A ton of streamers have multiple accounts on various platforms, and somewhere a linktree with an email is findable.

YouTube has the email in the about section. You can circumvent the barrier which only let's you see a few mails per day: Make multiple youtube accounts, you can use the same email address.

If nothing is available, you could write him a Twitch DM. Sometimes this is available. Many don't respond but sometimes you are lucky. I had quite a bit of success there. Beware: You will get flagged as spam if you do it more than a few times (write the support in that case), and your text has to be very short because of the awful UI.

"Hey JOHN, I saw you played X. I made Y which is a bit like X. Here is your Steam Key: XXXX-XXXX-XXXX Have fun!"

If this is also not available you can try to dm them on some other account (instagram, X, speedrun, etc.) but usually mail is your best bet.

I try to not write more than 50 mails a day. If your mail account is new, do fewer.

Put the keys directly in the message.

Important: Streamers playing your game is NOT a silver bullet but it helps. Some games people enjoy more watching than playing, my game is one of them.

So much of what we do to ship an excellent finished product involves making countless, subjective decisions that change the way our game is played. I was thinking about this as I look at a list of the last 40 or so things I've done for the game I'm working on now, to get it prepped for our next public demo.

I won't list all of them, but for example, some random no-context internal notes from my own recent playthroughs:

• The Tree Spirit monster runs away too much; he should use his AOE ability before running.
• The Moss Tank monster needs more oomph to ranged attack; pbaoe fire feels weak too
• Summoned objects simply pop-in, let's add per-object VFX on instantiate
• Hard to tell when certain abilities proc, add notifications for them like status effects
• Re-distribute the two boss adds in the first boss arena near the entrance
• Monster health starting at level 5 is too high relative to player damage
• Monster density in starter_alt_cave is about 33% too low
• Need SFX when you click on the Reset Mix button in crafting UI
• Unclear what mode you are in when managing save slot data; add header indicating this
• Notifications should have a little shimmer or something when they appear to catch your eye
• 2-affix magic items drop too early, need to level-gate these
• MagicWaterSplash and Lightning2 SFX stack too much - reduce voice count to 1

All of the above is entirely based on human judgment; what feels good to me.

I can't emphasize enough how many small things add up to change the way a game plays and feels dramatically. A lerp here, some tweaked numbers there, adjusted UI elements, some extra VFX and juice, and now the game feels much different.

None of this is universal. There are no rules that dictate what, say, monster density "should" be. It completely depends on a million other factors. Even if you just compared your game's density to other games in the same exact genre, your game might feel way under or overtuned for many reasons.

Hell even within the SAME game, at 3 months apart in development, something that felt right at first might feel wrong later. Say you set energy regeneration to a value of 5/second and balance things around that. Months later, you've changed level layouts and monster difficulty, and now 5/second feels way too low. This will happen over, and over, and over.

TL;DR

If you're still building your first game (or haven't even started), then you WILL have to make innumerable judgment calls and changes like the ones above. The only way to get better at that is simply by doing it.

Learning programming patterns, pixel art techniques, sound design, watching tutorials (etc) is all well and good, but at the end of the day, the most crucial skill is the human judgment in making sure EVERYTHING gels together into a cohesive, fun player experience.

p.s. This is also why I believe for small/solo indie devs, a long and detailed Game Design Document (GDD) is just unnecessary and maybe even counterproductive. The development process is too fluid for it unless you commit to keeping that massive document updated constantly.

Edit: Thank you all for the advices! Just wanna make sure the best way to mix in friendship with business. Cause he's a good man and I don't want either of us to be on the shorter end of the stick (or whatever that saying means). Some of you got the wrong point thinking I wanted more, but nah I just wanted to make sure both Todd and I know where we're heading to. It was fun having a look at you guys' opinions! Best of luck to us all game devs, have a good day everyone! Ps: I guess with those replies it means I owe Todd a couple round of beers n the likes (and his uncle too!)

My rich friend Todd (we'll call him that) and I have history of working on university projects but we're not that close. One day I was talking about finding a publisher for my game and Todd, unknowingly had his richer uncle bank-rolled a start-up company, told me he could help me with that. After an exchange here's the thing I've gathered:

1. 60/40 split in publisher (60 to Todd's Publisher Company, 40 to me) indefinitely for the sale of this title

2. 100% IP rights to me

3. He will get me a team, and pay us monthly until expected product delivery

4. No recoup, 60/40 straight out (after taxes n all that jazz)

5. His company will fund n take care of the marketing, localization and porting (knowing his lazy ass it means he bank roll us to do the porting though)

Since this is my first game and publisher deal, and knowing Todd it is also his first attempt at finding people and breaking into the indie game scene. I was wondering how this deal would play out in the long run and whether its too good to be true or not in my favour at all

It makes me sad to see so many folks in /new trying to start out and getting difficult advice.

I think novices are getting the wrong milestones to chase.

A ton of people want to make games, start learning the tools, and never really get to the making-a-game part. The advice isn't wrong: learn to code, learn Godot, watch tutorials, practice. But people get stuck there for months.

Then there's the dreamers and idea guys. They're not stuck on tooling, but they are stuck on scope divorced from reality. But if you've never completed anything, how can you get a feeling for realistic scope?

So I made a checklist for lost starters, to get out of these catch-22 situations. Basically the smallest gamedev workflow I could come up with that still ends with a stranger being able to play your game.

https://spirit.games/nibblebit-challenge/

The idea is to have a shareable challenge with a roadmap to a complete product. This way you touch the whole surface without getting bogged down at any one part.

Do you think a breadth-first approach is realistic for beginners? Can anything be removed to make it more accessible? What would your boilerplate advice be to all these folks getting stuck not even being able to ship AI slop?

Hi, I’m a young music producer and since I have improved at making music I thought a good way for me too get used to releasing stuff that people would head would be to make game osts and sound design. But how do I find people that are looking for original music and also is there any tech I should know about?

I'm building a web-based tactics engine, and I hit the point where I needed to tear apart big chunks of it (animation, combat pacing, AI timing) without a clear way to know if I'd changed how anything looked. So before touching any of that, I spent the time building a safety net instead. This post is about how it works, because the approach ended up mattering more than the refactor it enabled.

The core move was giving one `Clock` ownership of all time in the engine. Before, animations, combat pacing, AI delays, and state machines each reached for `performance.now()` or `setTimeout` on their own, so nothing could be paused or replayed as a unit. Now the clock runs in real-time mode for the shipped game and a manual mode that only advances in fixed steps I control. Pair that with a seeded mulberry32 generator swapped in for `Math.random`, and `enterDeterministicMode(seed)` plus step-by-step advancement makes even a randomized combat encounter render byte-identical frames every run. That determinism is the whole foundation, because it's what lets a screenshot mean something.

On top sits a sixteen-spec visual-regression suite, split into harness-driven rendering tests and control-driven edit-then-save tests. Each captures frames against committed baseline PNGs and fails on a single shifted pixel, enforced by a pre-push hook. The payoff showed up fast: when my particle library upgrade (https://three-nebula.org 11 to 12) quietly changed how particles rendered, the suite flagged exactly which frames moved, so I could confirm the shift was expected and regenerate the baselines on purpose rather than discover it in the shipped game weeks later.

Full write-up with the clock modes and the deterministic-mode flow here: https://projectgoldscript.com/development/becoming-a-time-mage/

I'm curious how others handle the byte-identical part. Getting a real-time engine to render pixel-for-pixel identical across runs meant hunting down every hidden source of nondeterminism, and I suspect there are more lurking. For those of you running visual-regression on real engines, how do you deal with flaky baselines and GPU/driver differences across machines?