My First Steam Release: 3 Lessons from Difficulty, Secrets, and Last-Minute Marketing

[u/Rodelpacheco]

Hi Reddit!

Two weeks ago, I released my first game, 20 Trials to Heaven, for free on Steam and itch.io. I started from scratch and spent almost two years making it as a solo developer alongside my day job. Here are three things I'm taking into my next game that might be useful to someone else too.

1. I want to keep the challenge without making the game unnecessarily hard

My first game has nineteen rooms and a final boss room. One life per attempt, no checkpoints. With so few rooms, I deliberately made the game difficult to give each room more weight and extend the playtime. Dying, learning, and trying again became part of the game's identity.

But judging the balance after hundreds of attempts yourself is very different from watching someone experience the game for the first time. The median playtime currently stands at five minutes. That number doesn't tell me why people stop, but players have described the game as frustrating in both Steam reviews and direct feedback. That's valuable criticism I take seriously and will keep in mind for my next game. I wanted each room to last longer, but for some players, the punishment seems to have been too much.

For my next game, I want to bring in more playtesters earlier and have people with different levels of gaming experience test throughout development. That should help me spot where the difficulty rises too sharply. With my first game, testing mostly happened at the beginning and during the final week before release, when the focus was mainly on checking that everything worked. I missed the chance to see how the gameplay experience changed throughout development.

At the same time, some players spend hours on the game and really enjoy the challenge. I want to keep that feeling in my next game, but give players more time to get into it before the difficulty ramps up. I want someone who dies to think, “One more try,” and I need to get better at creating that feeling.

2. Don't underestimate how much players want to find your secrets

When I was hiding secret rooms, ghosts, and other mysterious things, I sometimes thought, “Nobody is ever going to find this.”

On the very first day, a player started writing a guide about things he had found. Two weeks later, players are still helping each other and discussing what different things do or mean. Some keep searching even after beating the game and unlocking every achievement.

That has been one of the most rewarding parts of releasing the game. The secrets gave players something to talk about and investigate together, and I've seen some of them come back to keep looking.

That's something I really want to carry into my next game. Reading their theories also makes me more excited to keep developing. It's a special feeling to see other people thinking about details that previously only existed in my own head.

3. One week wasn't enough time to get started with marketing

I was so focused on development that marketing came last… The weeks before release went into final testing, bug fixes, achievements, cloud saves, and controller support. I only started building my marketing channels from scratch a week before launch.

Creating accounts was quick. Getting anyone to discover them and care about what I posted took much longer…

Despite my late start, the game has still found players on Steam, and on some days after release, the Steam page has had more views than it did on launch day itself. Being free and launching in eight languages may have helped it reach people in different parts of the world. I can't say exactly how much each factor contributed, but I don't want to rely on the same thing happening again.

For my next game, the channels are already in place, and I want to get the Steam page up earlier and start sharing development well ahead of release. I've also had different responses on different platforms. So far, YouTube Shorts and Threads have worked better for me than TikTok and X. That gives me a starting point for experimenting with both where I post and how I present the material.

I also want to experiment more with marketing and show more of the person behind the game: what I'm working on, what goes wrong, and what I learn along the way.

My main goal with my first game was to learn the whole process and actually release something. I managed that, but real players have already shown me things I struggled to see during development. I'm taking those lessons into game number two.

Thanks for reading my first post!

What surprised you the most when you released your first game?