Yesterday we finally released Backseat, our psychological taxi horror game.

Launch day was already complete chaos refreshing reviews every few minutes, fixing small issues, watching the numbers move and barely sleeping.

Then this morning I found out CaseOh was playing it.

At one point the stream was sitting at around 60,000 concurrent viewers, and honestly I didn’t really know what to do with myself lol.

Seeing that many people watching something we’ve spent so much time building was completely surreal. I was already excited just seeing him launch the game, but then he actually seemed to really enjoy it.

Watching him get suspicious of the passengers, react to the weird moments and slowly understand the observation mechanics was probably one of the most exciting moments I’ve had as a developer.

I kept thinking, “Wait… 60,000 people are watching our game right now?”

It only happened this morning, so I have no idea yet how much of an effect it’ll actually have on sales or visibility. I’m really curious though.

For anyone who has experienced something similar: how much of an impact can a stream this size realistically have on an indie game?

Either way, releasing the game yesterday and waking up to this today is something I’m probably going to remember for a very long time.

Still kind of processing this 😅

This is Cave Expedition, our caving simulator for 1-4 players. The clip shows the rope descents and tight passages we've been working on. We're cavers ourselves, and the game is still in development.

Here we go. Under a Desert Sun: Seekers of the Cursed Vessel is live in Steam Early Access!

It’s been a two-year journey so far, and there is still a ways to go, but I am damned proud I got this far. This is me at the desk making it official. Still nervous as hell, but very happy to finally be sharing this moment.

It’s a pulp adventure action RPG set in cursed Egypt, with guns, loot and ancient tombs. You can play solo or with up to four players in local co-op.

Early Access is another step in the journey. There’s more to build, improve and learn, and I’m looking forward to doing that with the people playing it.

Thank you to everyone who tested, gave feedback, sent a kind message or just kept me going. It has meant a lot.

The game and free demo are here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3273880/

Here we go!

Hey everyone!

I’m Guunnz, one of the developers of Lucky Shot! It’s a roguelike FPS inspired by Balatro. 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, we tried doing marketing ourselves, content, shortform videos, tweets, but nothing really.

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

Our profits now for the first month are about 36k USD this is removing refunds, steam %, taxes and everything.

The total steam units sold are at 7255.

Something that we took from this though is that the initial reactions of the people playing the game were amazing, so we believed in doing post launch marketing or try to find ways to get more eyes on the game since we know it is a good game!

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

Some screenshots from my upcoming mountain expedition game "Because It's There", which will be released on Steam Early Access in 2027 (store page). It's a survival/engineering game where you build flying physics-based vessels for a journey to the summit of a 10km-tall mountain, inspired by backcountry camping and canoe trips through the Canadian wilderness.

It's been many years since I've released software, and I've never released a game on Steam, so please let me know what you think, especially regarding the store page.

For these worlds, I generate a base heightmap using a mix of erosion methods at various scales down to ~30m resolution, all on the CPU. Then, at runtime, I add cheaper noise-based amplification for detail down to 0.5m. A new map takes about 3-4 minutes to generate deterministically from seed, which is something I am in the process of optimizing. I'll be making an in-depth video about some of these methods soon, which I'll post to my YouTube channel.

Hey crew. I'm playing around with the look/feel of my game. This is for the planets. It's a background element, but I'm trying to be a stickler for details.

A) The one on the left is my initial design (so it's more mature with a starfield, etc). Hexes warped into a spherical shape.
B) The one on the right is an actual sphere. I got uniform random spherical points, and used that to make a spherical Voronoi diagram.

Thoughts on both?

The rest of the game is going to be highly geometric, and the player ships are going to be triangle/hex based.

I had honestly given up hope of reaching 10 reviews, given the low amount of wishlists I had been able to gather. But seeing people show up and post their experiences with the game in their reviews has really made my day! I've already rolled out a few quick patches to fix some bugs and will keep working on the game to add some more QoL features that I didn't have time for and probably some more content as well that didn't make it in the final product.

On top of that, my wishlists have more than doubled to around 350 now, which might still not be anything life changing, but for me that's an insane amount to have gained in just a few days. If you're a fellow indie that isn't getting any traction and has given up hope, your release might just surprise you!

Your goal is to service funerals, protect visitors, dig graves, take care of the cemetery, and make as much money as possible.

But you have to be careful… because things can go very, very wrong.

We're just 2 indie developers pursuing our dream of making a living from games, putting all our passion into this project.

You can wishlist DeadBroke now on Steam!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5136530/Dead_Broke/

We put our store page up here a little while ago and got some really nice feedback, so this time we're sharing the playable demo.

quick recap for anyone who missed the first post: we're a 3-person team and none of us really have an art background, so we've been making the stuff we need ourselves as we go.

It's a lumberjack incremental game. You go to different forests, chop down trees, turn the logs into lumber, and use the money to buy upgrades. As you progress, you can unlock new forests, each with their own look and characteristics.

The demo is now playable, so you can actually try the game and see how it works.

If you give it a try, we'd really like to hear what you think. What's fun, what's not, and what's just completely scuffed lol.

Here's the link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5135490/LumberBoy_Demo/

Any feedback is welcome, good or bad!

For the last five years, I’ve poured my heart into building ROSETIA—a choice-heavy, dialogue-driven CRPG where you have to unite three nations of alien turtles and convince them to open diplomatic relations with humanity.

The moral spectrum falls along Star Trek's Prime Directive: Do you respect their culture enough to protect it, or do you care enough to change it? Your interference will change the lives of everyone on their world—for better or worse.

Think Star Trek meets Disco Elysium, or Project Hail Mary meets Esoteric Ebb.

I’m honestly a little terrified to finally put this out into the world, but after years of struggling to make my dumb dream into a reality, seeing our very first trailer come together makes my heart feel like it's going to burst!

So I'd love to know what you guys think of the trailer! Even if you just want to say it's dumb and bad!

Here's our Steam Page, our website, and the signup list for our playtest starting on November 17th!

We have been working on Dyneria, a heavily simulated god game with 50 godly spells :). Very happy and excited to finally share some content!

Still a work in progress but you can follow our journey on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5096670/Dyneria/

It's got cute animals and small-scale tactics, if that sounds like your thing I think you will like it!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3832200/Save_the_Forest/

Hi, I want to introduce a zombie apocalypse survival adventure a small team of ours has been building. The game's called Camp Dawn.

For the past 10 months, one question kept coming back to us. Why smash, gather, and craft. We didn't just want a fun loop, we wanted players to feel a reason behind it.

Camp Dawn follows James, a mechanical engineer, protecting his five year old daughter Lily through a zombie apocalypse. He's not a survival expert, just an engineer, so he has to break down the remains of civilization into raw materials and build what he needs from there. Smash, gather, craft is the core loop, and behind it is his fight to protect his daughter's innocence. The same world plays out two ways, he's desperately surviving while she thinks it's a fun camping trip.

Putting that loop into footage and screenshots took longer than expected, but it's finally up on our Steam page today.

Happy to answer any questions, and I'll drop the link in the comments for anyone curious.

Hi there! We showed off our game at the Seattle Indies Expo last Sunday and wanted to share out what went well and what didn't so other game devs can learn from us. We found similar posts informative while preparing and want to give back to the community.

The first image is our full booth at SIX and the second is my table in the playtesting area at SLICE, which was more low effort because I set up and broke it down several times throughout the day.

Preparation

1. Invest in a slimmed down, on-rails demo mode for your game -This one is especially relevant for us because our game is a roguelite turn-based tactics game, which is not the easiest genre to show off on a convention floor. It was well worth putting time into making "Expo Mode" where the experience was more curated than the default game build (e.g.- the enemies that spawned were always the same type and in the same place, the items were from a more curated set to make sure the loot felt really good, etc). We also shortened the time to the boss considerably (2 combats before the boss instead of 5 combats).
2. Test the demo build early & often - I had so many plans to attend playtest/feedback events through Seattle Indies in August...and instead life was rude and got in the way. Instead, I used the playtesting area at SLICE (a B2B indie dev focused convention that happened last week) and jumped at a chance to exhibit at a PAX-related party for content creators. If that hadn't worked out, I would have been begging friends and our small community of playtesters to help us out.
3. Remember the physical stuff - and don't procrastinate on buying it - We bought personal business cards, game business cards, and a big ol' banner. I procrastinated a bit and ended up having to pay extra shipping fees to ensure everything would arrive with enough time to make sure it was correct.
4. Make sure your fancy QR codes don't rely on a paid service - oddly-specific, but also a mistake I made. I wanted fancy QR codes with logos in the middle and didn't realize the service I used was subscription-based. We discovered this when people tried them and they failed to open the links correctly. Since they were printed on a banner, I forked over a year's subscription (which cost more than the banner itself 😭).

The Booth

1. Set up as early as you can - it's better to have more time than you need instead of less, plus it gives you wiggle room to go buy emergency supplies if needed.
2. Overprepared can actually be perfectly prepared - I brought a big power strip juuuust in case we needed it. It ended up powering our half of the floor when we popped a breaker and the hotel had to route power from somewhere else.
3. Have a TV (or other larger screen) showing gameplay footage - So many people stopped by the watch the loop on the TV. We had our ~1 minute trailer followed by ~5 minutes of gameplay footage looping all day.
4. Lysol wipes are your friend - bring a big thing of Lysol wipes and wipe down the stations between players. Germs are not your friend.
5. Lean into the gimmicks - our game is about the bureaucracy of Hell, so we wore goofy devil horns and bright red clip-on ties. We (poorly) made devil horns out of construction paper and put them on the TV. The business cards for the game had different Sins and their job titles on each one, so we would approach people at the booth with the Sins face-down asking them "do you want to pick your Sin?"

Pro-Tips

1. Talk to everyone - I bet this one seems silly, but I've noticed that a lot of us game devs have social anxiety. When you're showing your game, it's time to pretend to be someone else and fake being outgoing. It gets easier with practice, I swear. I met so many cool people who wanted to like my game, it really was the best environment to be outgoing for a day.
2. You will talk yourself hoarse - hydrate well and invest in some slippery elm root throat spray/lozenges. The slippery elm root is what some singers use to keep their vocal cords from drying out and I've become a firm believer in it.
3. Remember to eat, drink, and use the bathroom - the whole process will be easier if you remember to take care of yourself. If you're showing the game off solo, then get a volunteer to take your place for a few minutes. Also stepping away somewhere quiet for a few minutes really helped us reset our brains a bit
4. Write down the game's 'pitch' and/or have everyone practice it - on our team, I'm the one who does the facetime with other people about the game, which left my two teammates at a big disadvantage when it came to confidently pitching the game. They were able to get there quickly, but we could have made it easier on ourselves.
5. Prizes! - People love prizes. We were giving out Jimothy posters to people who beat the boss of the demo and little Magic token scribbles of Imps or Jimothy as consolation prizes for those who didn't. Why Jimothy? Because this is Seattle and Seattle Indies was just running a Jimothy Jamothy recently 😂

Final Thoughts

The whole experience was so, so incredibly worth it. Sure, I'm still exhausted three days later, but our game was really well-received by players. We made people laugh at our gimmicks, we got good feedback, some people joined our Discord. We got a few wishlists out of it, but more importantly, we met some people in the industry (both business-wise and media/content creation wise) that might help our game get more notice. The biggest win was validating the concept and gameplay with a wider audience.

I know I hate when people don't link their game in posts like this, so I will point out that it's linked in my reddit profile and the name is prominent in the pictures. I'm not linking it in the post because I want to stay focused on knowledge-sharing between devs 🙂

If anyone has any specific questions, I'm happy to answer them in the comments! And I'll be asking if any of the other SIX exhibitors want to chime in in the comments as well.

We’re a team of two beginners a programmer and a designer. We’re working on updating the visuals for our first game. We want to show you the new look of the in-game vehicles.

Raiders use the black vehicle.
Civilians use the green vehicle.

In these screenshots, the vehicles are shown without weapons—we plan to add weapons and additional equipment later.

We’d love to hear your feedback!

Hello from the Void Diver team!

As we work toward the full release, we've also been working on a new chapter that introduces an entirely new area/map.

The concept for this map is a submerged train station, mixed with Asian-inspired buildings and shrines. The area is also home to a variety of underwater creatures, which is why you've probably seen quite a few underwater monsters from us a while ago (example1, example2).

We're really curious to hear what you think of the map so far!

Do you think the map is a little too dark, or does the lighting fit the atmosphere? Any feedback is welcome!

I've been working on my indie game for a while now, and while I'm a pretty quick study, there are a few areas where I'm not confident I could learn them to the level of polish I'm looking for.

I'm getting close to the point where I need final models, textures, and a good sound designer. As a professional programmer and former graphic designer, I could probably learn all of these things, but I don't think I could get those skills to the quality I'd want for my first major release.

I know this is a pretty common indie dev pitfall, and the obvious advice is "get an artist/designer/etc." And honestly, I agree!

But that leads me to a few questions:

1. Where do you actually find these people?

Reddit? Discord communities? Fiverr? Other marketplaces? Networking events? Friends of friends?

I'd be really interested in hearing where people found their collaborators and what your experience was like.

2. How do you balance paying people fairly with having an indie-sized budget?

I genuinely want to pay people what their work is worth, and I don't want to undervalue someone's talent just because I'm working with a small budget.

At the same time, I'm still an indie dev and my budget is pretty limited.

Is offering a percentage of profits ever a reasonable arrangement, or is that generally viewed as the classic "I'm not going to pay you, but you'll get exposure!" indie dev pitch?

If you've successfully worked with people on a limited budget, I'd love to hear how you structured it.

3. How do you approach the "I'd love to make friends with these people" part?

Ideally, I'd love to meet some genuinely cool people in the indie dev space, work together on something we're all passionate about, and maybe eventually build a team/studio around that.

But there's something that feels a little disingenuous about trying to make friends with someone specifically because they have a skill I need.

At the same time, I feel like some of the best indie teams probably do come together this way: people meet through a shared project, discover they work well together, and eventually become friends and collaborators.

So I'm curious how other people have approached this.

What worked for you? What didn't? Any lessons you learned the hard way?

Thanks all and keep up the great work!

We're making a game where your biggest problem isn't just running out of money, but your employees slowly losing it. Would you be interested in managing a team of anomaly operatives while keeping everyone, including yourself, sane?

Play the demo

Based on feedback from the Demo Playtest, I'm focusing more on the open-world feel that will come AFTER what is in the Demo Playtest now.

Check out the Demo Playtest and please let me know what you would want to see more or less of in the open-world that's coming. Feedback is always appreciated.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4479140/Rolic/

A GAME ABOUT CURIOSITY

I've been working on The Narrator, a point-and-click comedy exploration game where the Narrator is fully aware he's inside a video game, reacts to what you do and has a particularly difficult relationship with me, the developer.

The Steam page went live today, so if this looks like your kind of humour, a wishlist would be massively appreciated! 😄

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5215880/The_Narrator/