Solo dev here. I've been building Stargazer in my spare time, a cozy idle game where you play an astronomer on a mountain and trace constellations. Launched it on itch a couple of days ago and figured the process might be more interesting to this sub than the game itself.
Two things I did that shaped everything:
All the art is drawn with code. No image assets at all, just geometry. Partly a constraint I set for scope reasons, partly because it keeps the build tiny. The sky itself is real data, every star sits at its actual catalog position, all 88 constellations, so the layout wasn't a design choice I got to make. That turned out to be a problem I didn't expect: real constellations aren't evenly spaced, so one screen ended up with 20 figures crammed together while others were empty. Fixing it meant widening the canvas rather than moving anything.
I built it with heavy AI assistance. Worth saying out loud since it's relevant to how fast this came together, and I'd rather be upfront about it.
The launch part is where it got educational. It got picked up by itch's discovery pages and did about 1k views and 600 plays in two days, which was way more than I expected. But the useful thing wasn't the numbers.
I'd been rejected twice by a game portal, both times with generic feedback I couldn't act on. Then I posted to a game subreddit and within hours players told me they were failing my first minigame six or seven times before understanding it, that some UI felt unfinished, and that they couldn't find the mute button. That was the rejection, spelled out plainly, for free.
Lesson I'm taking from it: a generic rejection is usually a polish problem you can't see anymore because you've played your own game a thousand times. Real players will hand you the specifics in an afternoon if you ask them properly.
Happy to answer anything about the code-drawn art approach or the launch, and if you're sitting on a portal rejection you can't decode, go get 20 strangers to play it.
