Any advice? Bunny Flags

Seriously, first time going, first Steam/PC ever dev and published by ourselves. We have made many mobile games and browser, but that was was back in the day. never PC.

Hi,

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5132030/Drain_the_Galaxy/

So this one's about being the captain of a galactic dwarf starship. You touch down on a planet, thousands of dwarves pour out of the cargo hold, and they just get to work tearing the rock apart on their own, you just sit back and watch your army and your bank account grow while chipping in from above.

- Thousands of dwarves split into 3 classes: Miners, Demolishers, and Snipers.

- A pickaxe with combos up to 8x, a laser cutter, and the "Dragonfly" missile launcher.

- Hidden ore veins and planet cores (gold, silver, diamond) for a big instant payout.

- Galactic exploration too, chase down rare planets, dig up ancient artifacts.

No clever tactics to learn, no progress to lose - just switch it on and strip-mine the galaxy at whatever pace feels right to you.

hey guys, I've been working on this project non-stop for about 5-6 months and honestly I'm kinda burned out, so I wanted to ask for some advice. Like I said I've been on this almost every day without a break for a long time and I'm just really tired right now. Actually my original goal wasn't even to get anywhere, I just wanted to make a game for myself that I would want to play. But I kept going, and believe me you can't get this far if you don't love developing game.

but at this point I'm exhausted because I haven't done any marketing or announced it to anyone yet. I only asked for some feedback on the visuals before and I have zero idea if people will actually find the game good. So I wanted to share a few in-game screenshots here. Is the idea good or would you play it? Because if you guys don't like it, I really don't want to spend more time on it.

as for the theme of the game, you're basically an interdimensional merchant. Think of it like Dealer's Life, but I can add as many universes as I want. I started it in a Medieval era first, maybe later I'll even put in a Harry Potter or Rick and Morty style universe, it totally depends on imagination. But right now I've already added and removed a ton of stuff, and I just need to see if people actually like this kind of concept. I want to continue based on that, otherwise it's just not gonna be a healthy situation for me anymore. Thanks everyone. By the way i am open the any kind of feedback too.

For anyone interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5069250/The_Rift_Trader/

So,
this is where we're currently at:

First off, Hi I'm kobi from Disco69,
nice to have a place to share this stuff.
If some things I write here are obvious to you, I get, but please don't dunk on me,
I learned these lessons through a lot of hardship.

Over the the last three months,
we started a pre-campaign with a publisher to see if our game is viable for signing with them.
In a lot of ways, the game benefited a lot from it.
we got some more visibility, we added mouse support after they insisted,
a lot of FTUI. overall good stuff, but we bombed. bad.

these are the lessons we learned, which we really hope the new Demo version addresses and solves the problems we found.

1. if you don't emphasize a mechanic to the player (and it's not "use WASD to move"),
2. you're shooting yourself in the foot.
3. for us, we made a Tower customization system that work with modules.
4. you get a new module, you put it on a tower slot and then you can purchase it.
5. it's a key feature, that if you don't use, you're gonna lose very early on.
6. about 30% of the players got it, the rest didn't. in turn, this made people quit the game early on,
7. we think because the game felt unfair.
8. Our solution was simple, just add it to the tutorial. force the player to see those options, give them a starter module, and see how it goes from there.
9. Errors and exceptions:
10. After doing some more research, we found that there was some video encoding bug at about 10% of the users, which meant that the game crashed for some platforms, and that shortened the median play time BY A LOT

our solution? for that one bug it was obvisouly to change the encoding,
but the bigger solution is to connect an error reporter like Sentry.
I can't stress enough how important something like that will be for your game's development.
most gamers, especially for a demo, will not give you a second chance.

1. Metrics.
   the first two lessons took us a lot of luck and research to figure out.
   we and you don't have to do this guess work.
   very early, get metrics about your game. it's very straight forward if you use AI tools and something like PostHog.
   We only just added it, and I wish we would have done this sooner.
   it will mean very much to us to see EXACTLY where players left, how many players kept going etc.
   steam doesnt give you too much in that regard.

2. Pacing
   that's a hard one for a team that is working a game for a very long time.
   you get very used to the game. personally, I was always looking for something new, and got really excited whenever we added a new feature,
   but for new players? we had to come to terms that most players will need an "easing" period before they really get into a game, and have enough context window to pay attention to all the new stuff.

for that, we:
A. Added another level to the demo (now 6 levels instead of 5, and also another boss / elite unit for kicks)
B. added a Codex and notification system, so that whenever a new unit in the game appears or an anomaly shows up, the user can stop the game and actually get some context.
C. LOWERED THE DIFFICULTY
that's really a hard one for us, and probably for a lot of devs, here's why:

Usually, an indie dev makes a game for themselves. kind of an idealistic way to put your art out there I think. from that position, you aim for the game to feel good TO YOU.
what will most likely happen before you release, is that you become a master of the game, and your objective strategies in it will be SUPER BIAS, which leads to...
a very unbalanced game, or more specifically, a balance that leans toward players that are super good in it or the genre. it's even worse if your'e trying out a game that has a lot of new mechanics.

in short, we made the initial difficulty much more accesible. on the way there we also found that the tower slots we put in the start of each level were too good, and that we were just too used to them, and that led to a very boring start.

D. unlokcing stuff.
Players need to know early that they would be able to test out different strategies and builds,
it really helps (we think) for the gameplay fantasy, to curiosity.
that part we haven't completed yet, but in about a week or two will. I hope some of you will play the demo then and let us know if we did it good.

Would love to hear your thoughts

Thanks,
Kobi

Hello. I've been writing up a game for the past year and finally got a team together to develop the software part of it. It's a tabletop war game, but you use an app to play the game. Is this the right community to talk to?

Hey folks!

Today I've got total madness for you. In the middle of our main development, we decided to dust off one of our old demos that never caught any publisher's attention, tweak a few little graphical things, and just ship it!

It absolutely had to have its trailer ready today, no exceptions. Otherwise our whole 60-day go-to-market strategy would fall apart, which is already crazy enough as it is!

So I sat down and spent 6 hours straight using DaVinci Resolve for the very first time (it's genuinely amazing) to put together this clip from our parody game. It's a metroidvania take on Jump King and Getting Over It, and a total tribute to the bald guys (I prefer to call them brothers 🫂)!!

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the trailer. If it caught your interest, here's the Steam page. You could read all the plot & gameplay there. And, most-important... you can go ahead and add it to your wishlist.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5115320/Jump_Bald/

I’ve been working alone on my game for more than 4 years now.

It started as a small project, but over time it became something much more ambitious. I’ve put a huge amount of time into it, and I’m slowly getting to the point where I really need to start thinking about marketing.

And honestly, that’s the part where I’m completely lost.

I’m really bad at marketing. I don’t really know what to post, where to post it, when I should start talking about the game, how to get the first people interested...

And with the amount of games being released nowadays, it feels like an absolute tsunami. There are so many indie games coming out every week that I honestly have no idea how a solo developer is supposed to stand out.

To be honest, I’m also a bit scared of finally starting to talk about my game and just having nobody care about it.

So I’d really like to hear from people who have already been through this.

For those of you who managed to get your game noticed:

How did you start promoting it?
How long before release did you start?
What actually worked for you?
What turned out to be a complete waste of time?
Did you already have a community before releasing the game?
Which platforms actually brought you players?

And if you had to start all over again today, what would you do differently?

I’m not really looking for advice like "just post consistently on social media". I’d much rather hear about actual experiences from solo developers or very small teams who managed to go from "nobody knows my game exists" to actually having people interested in it and talking about it.

After spending more than 4 years working on a game, the idea of finally releasing it and having absolutely nobody care about it is honestly a little scary.

So if you managed to get your indie game noticed, even on a small scale, I’d really love to hear how you did it.

PS: This was written by a real human ;) Just passed through a translator because I wanted to save some time instead of translating everything word by word from my language.

I've read about people using resource packs in their games and I'm looking for some. In my case I'm looking for sprites for units similar to those in Age of Empires. I would have thought that is a fairly typical set but I've not found any. I've looked on itch.io but no luck and my Google-Fu is failing me. Are there other places to look?

Hey ! I just announced Floraison, my cozy narrative game about the language of flowers.

I just hit 100 wishlist in the first day, is that a good start ?

What do you think about that ?

Here is the link if you want to check it out https://store.steampowered.com/app/4649990/Floraison/

Cancelling a game you actually care about sucks, but as an indie dev, knowing when to call it quits is easily one of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn.

I was working on Warband Survival a 3D action bullet hell survival game where you drive a truck around, rescue soldiers, equip them to shoot from the back of your rig, and wipe out enemy military bases while dodging enemy cars. I had physics based chaos, explosions, and custom character models working. Honestly, I really loved the core vibe of what I was building.

So why did I pull the plug after dropping over $1,000 out of pocket on concept art ($50/hr adds up fast) and Steam fees?

First off, 3D performance is a sneaky trap. Horde survival in 3D is a completely different monster than 2D. I learned this the hard way on my previous game (Northend Tower Defense) when trying to render huge waves of enemies. With Warband Survival, scaling up the gameplay meant running straight into optimization walls that could’ve easily swallowed 1 to 3 years of my life with no guarantee it’d run smooth.

On top of that, I couldn't lock down the core hook. Even though driving around causing explosions was fun in short bursts, I just couldn't pull together a tight, killer gameplay trailer. I had to face the scariest indie scenario: spending a year in the dark, only to launch and sell fewer than 1,000 copies.

And honestly, 1,000 wishlists wasn't cutting it. I managed to cross that milestone on Steam, but looking at my burn rate and dev timeline, it just wasn't enough momentum to justify paying contractors out of pocket for localization, UI, and audio.

If there's anything I'm taking away from this whole experience, it's the 2-3 Month Test. Build the core loop in just one level, put a rough build on itch.io or social media, and see if real people actually care before sinking a year into it. If people won't play your game when it's free, they definitely won't pay for it on Steam. You also can't defer technical debt never build huge systems assuming you'll magically fix performance down the line.

It hurts, plain and simple. I haven't deleted the Steam page, and if there's ever crazy community demand down the road, maybe I'll revisit it. But right now, stepping away is the only move that keeps me going.

How do you guys handle knowing when to pivot versus when to keep pushing through a rough dev cycle?

(I put together a breakdown video showing actual footage of the build and talking through why I stopped, if you want to check out what the game looked like, the link to my YouTube channel is in my Reddit profile!)

Hi! You can call me K.S. I've thinking of a cool 3D game story lately I just had in mind. It's based on one of my dreams.. but yeah. I js prefer to keep this idea written in my notebook. I dont wanna turn it into a real game. Im new to reddit so yeah. :)

I nothing forget...

I've made a few games before, but my latest one has performed surprisingly poorly.

I worked really hard on it and tried to make it as polished and engaging as possible, yet it has performed significantly worse than some of my previous games that I put much less effort into.

I'd really appreciate it if you could take a look at the store page and tell me your genuine first impression.

What did you think when you first saw it? What makes it feel uninteresting or unappealing? Is it the concept, the visuals, the trailer, the store page, or something else entirely?

Please don't worry about being harsh. I'm genuinely trying to understand what went wrong, and this kind of feedback will be extremely valuable when deciding what to make for my next games.

Relay Protocol on Steam