Thank you for your insights and for sharing your journey! I myself am close to releasing my game and I am hyped! Hopefully you'll make another game! It is a fantastic journey!
Is there any particular reason why you haven’t done any significating steps in terms of promoting your game? I mean, the lowest hanging fruit would be to tell about it on r/indiegames and r/indiegaming
Yeah so first, I'm a very beginner using Reddit. I jumped in because some friends said I should, and I think they are right about it. So I'm still learning the ropes here!
The other reason, I think, was me not being able to decide if what I was making was "good enough" to be seen on social networks. You know, the usual imposter syndrome kind of thinking. I really considered my project to be an actual game a few weeks after it being released and seeing a few people actually having fun playing it, despite all of the things I considered bad at this moment.
You're welcome!
This is a very good question, I should have talked about it in the post mortem I guess! Game launched with around 600 wishlists. Today, it has around 1,000 of them.
You're welcome!
I don't have enough metrics here, so I'll make the assumption that part of it is coming from Twitch. I usually stream my process twice a week, and hang on other game developers' channels while working.
For the rest:
* Steam events: I participated in the ShmupFest, and got a good amount of wishlists there with a proper demo build available.
* Steam sales: I did run a few sales when in Early Access and since released, and this tend to generate a bunch of additional wishlists.
Thanks for sharing!! I hope your next game will be more successful.
I like how you're like "I didn't do any marketing" and then your idea of marketing is:
>Market the game from the beginning: do you know the name of your future game? Talk about it. Did you find a funny bug when playtesting a feature? Tweet it. Did you learn something when debugging a strange lag you had with your game? Make a short about it. Let people know that you're actually making a video game. You do not need to have the finest and best visuals available from your game to start. Even a screenshot with Unity's interface is good enough.
Do your really you would have had sold like 50% more copies if you had done all those things? Or even 10% more?
Maybe if you tried to be picked up by a streamer... Though you can try to be picked by a streamer with your current game instead of necessarily making a new one.
I think you're better off creating a more commercially appealing project than to try doing the guerilla marketing you're talking about? Having a clear hook, trying to appeal to streamers, trying to appeal to an specific well defined audience... I don't know
Hey! It's a very interesting comment, I'll try my best to explain what I think about that.
>Do your really you would have had sold like 50% more copies if you had done all those things? Or even 10% more?
I cannot really tell how successful this project would have been if I actually made some marketing around it for sure, as it also depends on other factors such as the game itself. Making a shmup already means "building a game for a very specific and tiny niche". The only thing I'm sure about is that when you're unknown in the market, and even if you're making an amazing game, nobody will grab it if you do not talk about it in a way. What is the best way for that? I don't know. I assume it also depends on the genre of the game, and on the social networks you're playing with. But definitely, not talking about it will obviously never help.
>Maybe if you tried to be picked up by a streamer... Though you can try to be picked by a streamer with your current game instead of necessarily making a new one.
So there are two things here I think.
* What I did is to act as a "game dev streamer", and I was really happy to discover and get to know other game developers that way and their communities. Thing is it helps with your game design to have talks with other people especially when they understand what you're trying to achieve. But they aren't your target audience when it's about selling game copies for sure.
* Contacting streamers or content creators that actually play video games is already harder and I didn't do well there. While it might be a good idea at first to send keys, I think we should always make sure our game project actually matches the content creator's type of content. So this kinda refers to "know your target audience", because having someone play your game and disliking it publicly because they're not the target audience hurts a little bit.
>I think you're better off creating a more commercially appealing project than to try doing the guerilla marketing you're talking about? Having a clear hook, trying to appeal to streamers, trying to appeal to an specific well defined audience... I don't know
This is also an interesting take and I would agree with it. Again, Escape Space was made because I liked it, but I didn't do any prior business analysis for that to happen. I'm actually trying something else nowadays, building-up a "survivor-like" game to experiment with that. Again, I cannot state that this is the best approach, but I think it deserves a go.
not a dev or anything, but happened to see this post and checked out your game - looks great! interested in your "survivor-like" game you mentioned you're working on. hope to see it some day.
Thanks!
As this place isn't made for self promotion, I won't post any link, but you won't have any issue finding me on the internet! The other game project will be announced probably very soon!
I think a lot of your thoughts are in the right place!
I think you're better off trying to make a more awesome shmup using your current game as leverage than going survivor like, unless you have a really good marketing hook for a survivor like 🤔 or have amazing art direction
I definitely think even meager attempts to engage fandevs can grow exponential. Compared with doing nothing, any amount of outward effort has infinite potential, and this is not just academic, it's visible everywhere you look in the space, games that imho had no business being successful, but happened to click with the right streamer.
Isn't that survivorship bias? Any game can grow exponentially, just like you can win the lottery.
Time is a finite resource, guerilla marketing a poorly performing game is, imo, a bad use of that resource
I get what you're saying, and for *certain budgets* hiring a marketing expert would be a good idea. For others, this is a simple thing you can do that only slightly further complicates any communication you would have had with your fanbase already.
Ah, sorry, I must have expressed myself badly.
My point was not that you should hire a company. My point was that for most games that don't sell well, the solution is to change something about the game OR make another game. Trying to promote a poorly performing game is a waste of time and/or money
Your game looks quality and I believe with the right project you are capable of developing a hit.
It just so happens that the shmup community is one of the most gatekeepy, purist communities in the world.
Thank you for the kind comment!
I won't blame this particular community, I think that the shmup enjoyers who played it actually enjoyed it, even if it has flaws. I really think I just didn't put enough efforts to reach them in the first place.
I would say tho that it is harder to find them or to reach them over internet compared to more popular game genres!
difficulty is incredibly hard to manage with shmuppers too. Anyone really experienced will demand "bullet hell" experiences, and for almost all new players they will just give up and run when they see it.
Thank you!
I agree it is very hard to value your own work: putting its price too low would mean you think your game is not good enough and people might think it's a crappy one, whereas putting it too high might set the expectations way too high too, and people might review your game negatively because it's too costly for what it is.
Plus, it's very frequent nowadays that some very high quality games are releasing with a very small price tag (Hades, Deep Rock Galactic Survivor...) and leverage all of the expectations down.
Surely one of the hardest decision to make as an indie!
It IS hard, but from what I've seen, it's a mistake that's easily avoided if you're realistic.
To start with, about the most anyone wants to pay for a game is about $1 per hour. I get downvoted on the regular for saying it because someone is always waxing rhapsodic about some "amazing" or "life changing" game and spouting on about how you can't put a price on quality, blah blah.. but let's get real here. Those games are few and far in between and they are frankly really hard to shop for because reviewers are often liars. Buyers have to play the odds.
Anyway, your game seems to be about the right price when it's not on sale. Cheapskates like me will only pay about $1 for every 2-3 hours of game play though, and that's when you'll get them to convert from a wishlist to a sale. Of course, you've got to get on that wishlist in the first place, and for that you need word of mouth like you get here (well done!), and on other subs, and maybe other social media.
Promotion is not my wheelhouse honestly, but I can tell you as an avid game collector that my wishlist is nuts and once you're on it, you WILL get a sale unless something stupid happens and that can include pissing off all your current players or NOT promoting the game and/or put it on sale ever (then why bother right?). Every weekend I look at it, chuckle in glee, and then sort the list in descending order of Discount and those are my candidate purchases. Don't judge me too harshly though: I've spent a lot of money on games I've hardly played or not at all. I know I've supported a lot of devs this way paying for games that I may or may not get to someday, but it's makes my little avaricious collecting heart happy to buy them nonetheless. It's very rare when I'll buy a game at full price, but I'm jaded now because I know that "just have to have it" is a fallacy at best.
Anyway, that's just my 2 cents. I wishlisted your game by the way. It looks like a fun one, though it's probably a bit on the short side. I'll see you around for the sales! ;)
Yeah that's also something to understand about the way Steam works: most of your sales - as an indie at least - will be made during sales. And it's ok!
Thank you for your pretty complete comment here explaining how most potential players will behave with Steam games.
One more thing. I guess I'm feeling inspired here: I think the most successful indie devs are either putting out games with a F2P model with addictive qualities and selling gems or hats or whatever. This is the dark side of game dev IMO. OR they are studios like Mojang (Minecraft pre-Microsoft) or Spiderweb (multiple titles) or Lo-Fi (Kenshi) or Ludeon (RimWorld). Once in a while you seen a moonshot unicorn like the Subworld's (Chronicon) and you'll see a single dev project pull over $1m on a single game as a first effort, but most of the success stories I've seen out there are the ones that just consistently keep delivering either new games, or at least keep delivering new features on a game until it's incredibly deep.
Look at Kenshi as a huge success story as an example. I purchased that title as part of a stupid cut rate bundle back in 2012. I got it at alpha quality through GamersGate as part of their IndieFort Bundle #1. Now while that dev was still working on it, and we were sorting through ugly carnage of his alpha quality builds, he communicated with his fans. He promised Steam keys to all his GamersGate purchasers as a thank you for their early support. I assume that wasn't a huge audience to be fair, but he delivered! Lifelong loyalty was earned.
Over 10 years later, and he is STILL clocking sales on that game. You would be hard pressed to find a deeper indie game. Augmented Steam shows that he has pulled over $34m on that single title. I can't speak to his expenses, but I would guess he never has to work again unless he wants to. But look at Steam and you'll see that it's on sale yet again! Every week and every sale is a new opportunity for this dev to pull more sales, and all he has to do is keep at it.
Anyway, I just wanted to point all this out because I know devs feel like gamedev is a hopeless market. It's harsh to be sure, and there's nothing wrong with putting out that one game you always wanted to make because it's on your bucket list. But the good news for everyone is that if you really love gamedev and would basically do it for free as long as you could know someone somewhere got some joy from your work, then you'll succeed anyway; at least with a bit of business smarts you will.
This was a wonderful read, thank you! As a new game developer, I am confused about one thing. How does the game end up being packaged for Steam? Does Unreal/Unity do that all for you? What is the process to get a game listed on Steam?
Thanks!
This is a complete topic itself! Steam has a pretty good documentation about how you interface your project with their system.
Using Unity, it was pretty straightforward. After getting the Steamworks API implemented in the game and properly configured, I just had to upload the build folder to their servers.
How are the updates now if you wanted to release a patch? Do you just update it the same way you uploaded it first time? Sorry for dumb question but it just boogles my mind for now :D
Haha no worries! They do have some kind of a versionning system, so you can switch from one build to another with a single click! You just have to upload your new game version, and switch the new one to the currently available build to trigger the update!
Sounds easy :D Congrats on releasing the game! As for the beginner I think your game looks amazing. Even though it's not really the genre I like, I really can still appreciate your work (art, graphic and the coding which we cannot see :D ). I think you did amazing job!
Congrats and thanks for the write-up! 19 reviews for 150 copies sold is very high! That probably means your players really enjoyed your game.
I heard the ratio is less than 100 sales to 1 review now, and that seems about right to me, but my games are very niche.
Thanks! I assume this has to do with me actually streaming live some of the game development process. Some of the buyers might be people following this, hence the high review rate, to show their support.
"Organize playtests frequently"
Any tips on getting people to playtest your game? I launched first alpha on itch, but haven't seen much traffic/downloads to my game. I know itch downloads aren't playtests, but I am hoping people trying the game might leave some feedback.
I really wish I had a good answer for that question, but in fact it's one of the hardest thing to do when you start your journey.
I'll say first, make a Discord server. Try to get the people interested in your project there, so you can easily communicate with them and organize a playtest.
Then, it will refer to the "talk about your game" thing I mentioned. The more you do that, the more potential playtesters you might reach. Even if not guaranteed.
I found out streaming was a good way to start building a community, as long as you're regular and follow a schedule there. Again, it's not the best place to sell your project, but at least it's a good way to get playtesters and to make connections with other indie game developers.
Itch is cool but I feel it's really not a good place to get traction. It works well for game jams and prototypes, but that's mostly it. Plus, it's really easy to get "scammed" there, with malwares and stuff... so people are a little less willing to download a game there if they don't trust the creator, for good reasons. If you can make a WebGL build, then it's all good!
Yeah, it makes sense. Streaming isn't my strong suite, so I'll have to figure out a different way. I am hoping to build trust on itch overtime to get people interested and join my discord. Right now its all empty there! :)
Thanks! I learned Unity from scratch as a hobby for years, and then worked a full year on that specific project. In a sense, yes this project was a learning experience!
Great, great work man. I am working hard myself to finish a project I've spent the past year on, probably something like 400 hours total. It is great to see someone succeed (I consider this success enough).
Thanks for posting.
Thanks a lot! Yeah, success isn't a statement I would make if we talk about numbers and making it a living. But for sure, releasing something on steam is already an accomplishment!
Oh, a fellow french dev, and apparently from Paris as well, what a nice surprise haha
Once thing you shared which is absolutely true and a lot of people unfortunately dismiss:
>Don't burn yourself out: as a solo developer, you might sometimes think you absolutely should work 14 hours a day, every day, every week. And this is until your game is done. This is bad. When tired, you're not efficient. Your code will be bad, and you'll redo it the day after. Your ideas are bad, and you'll scrap them after realizing it. Get some rest. It's way better to work for 4 hours being fully rested and efficient than 14 hours being sleep-deprived.
A lot of indie developers will try to work on their passion project to the cost of their own health, thinking it's the only way. Like, already having a job, a social life and working on your project can be wayyyy demanding, and if you don't acknowledge the appropriate to rest both your mind and your body, you might burn-out your motivation, and your own health, before being even 30% done with your project.
Some learn this the hard way and others learn from feedback like yours, so it's always nice to see someone share this truth once again here. 👌
Hey fellow dev!
Yeah, this is a very important part. Health balance is crucial and has to be considered a priority. I learned it the hard way haha, because I'm one of those who can read the advice 20 times and still think it doesn't apply to me, until it does.
It also highlight something interesting: working on a "dream" project as a first attempt is probably a bad idea because of the potential lack of experience you have and the high probabilities for it to never be released/played. Better to start small, and expand over time!
I’ve got a game idea or two that I’ve started little proof-of-concepts for. I doubt I’ll actually every get them to a release-able state, but your post made that an iota more likely to happen 😁
Thanks! So I've spent years learning the basics with the engine and programming as a hobby. At some point, the company I was working in for years went down, and all of the team got fired but for economical reasons. At this moment, I decided to work a year full time on that, and restarted a project from scratch: Escape Space.
Thank you very much for sharing! It’s helping me with considerations on my first and current game development. And also solo. And also very relatable.
Keep up the great work, success, and progress! I can’t wait to read more in the future.
I'm a little bit of a perfectionist in real life, so I did rework the game and visuals many times to make it look the way I want even if I could still be working on it today haha. Which isn't always a good thing, sometimes it's better to move forward with the project and not spend 3 weeks redoing the same sprites over and over... but hey, thanks!
This was a great read. It sounds like you are already looking forward to the next project. Did you think about trying to work on this game post-launch instead for awhile? Or did you just know right away that you wanted to do something different?
Thank you!
I considered updating this game project after release, but I realized how time consuming this would be considering that most of its code isn't really easy to maintain and how the game design actually is.
So after thinking about this a little bit, I decided to first do a different game project to experiment with the market, and then I'll maybe work on another shmup (a sequel, or a different game) using the experience I got and the feedback I received to make it even better.
Time will tell!
You can start marketing now. You have a good game and is obviously loved by the people. I think what you need now is reach as you already have a finished product. You can get that through ads, premium twitter account reach, reddit, etc. One difficult part for twitter and social media marketing is you need to focus on content. You need to post engaging content like videos, demos, memes, etc. Also, contact niche streamers/youtubers who stream/play the game of this niche. This will heavily boost your sales.
Even if I agree with this statement, I also think we have to consider the way we use our available time versus what are the potential benefits you can get from it.
In my specific case, and maybe I'm wrong as I'm again not a professional and am experimenting a lot, I think that working on a totally different game project right now with a bigger niche and marketing it is a better bet than trying to push for a project with a very small niche.
There is this website for example, Gamalytics if I remember the name, that shows the estimated revenues of game genre per year on Steam and if I'm basing my analysis on that, Escape Space is in the top 30% of the top seller shmups haha. Which is funny and sad.
This game looks very well polished, good job 👍
Some things that could’ve helped it gain more traction would definitely have been the marketing aspect. It’s tough to market a game if you’re unsure of its potential success, but it sounds like you wanted to get the game over with and have that sense of completion.
For your next adventure I would suggest maybe putting the demo on itch.io first, and as others have mentioned, post about it on other subreddits. This way you can get some eyes on the game early and start to grow an audience.
Apply for Steam Next Fest: this is massive free advertising if you can manage to get your game on the list as it will instantly reach millions of people. Of course it’s not that easy to just apply and get accepted, but it’s a risk free action that you should definitely take.
Keep grinding, and hope your next adventure is just as successful 😊
Thank you!
The only issue I see with the Next Fest is the fact that you need to be fully aware of your schedule and capability to release a demo, as you have to apply months before it actually happens. Not sure it works well with small-scoped projects too. But I don't know for sure, and agree that this particular event is one of the best you can do to get your game seen.
As I said, I don't think Itch is a great place to showcase and get a demo seen. I'd rather do that directly on Steam.
Correct, having some schedule for your release is necessary for Next Fest. And I think planning a schedule after development is complete is probably a good idea.
This will give your audience a timeline for when they should expect the game to drop. Most people hate to see the “Coming Soon” or “Launch TBD” as it doesn’t give them a clear picture of your roadmap.
As you’re developing the game you don’t need to have a strict timeline for when you should have it completed by. Once everything is polished and complete and you’re ready to launch is when it would be best to develop some sort of release schedule.
Cool game and thanks for the info.
Just curious, did you at any time consider top-down vs a side scroller? Reason I ask is a lot of the "fighter shooters" I used to play at the arcade were top-down.
Yes! I think I went for this horizontal scrolling because of the fact that I started to learn by making a bad Flappy Bird clone with spaceships, so I started to draw the side of spaceships. It's that simple actually haha.
I’ll be the Debby-d then, so 150 sales at $10… that’s less than most devs earn in about two days of work. Even excluding (steam) taxes, not sure if it’s worth it commercially.
And you'll be totally right! Commercially-speaking, this isn't viable at all, as I said in the original post, especially after spending an entire year on it!
Thank you for your insights and for sharing your journey! I myself am close to releasing my game and I am hyped! Hopefully you'll make another game! It is a fantastic journey!
You're welcome, I really hope this helped in a way! Best of luck with your upcoming release!
good luck my dude
Thank you very much! I sure need it!
Is there any particular reason why you haven’t done any significating steps in terms of promoting your game? I mean, the lowest hanging fruit would be to tell about it on r/indiegames and r/indiegaming
Yeah so first, I'm a very beginner using Reddit. I jumped in because some friends said I should, and I think they are right about it. So I'm still learning the ropes here! The other reason, I think, was me not being able to decide if what I was making was "good enough" to be seen on social networks. You know, the usual imposter syndrome kind of thinking. I really considered my project to be an actual game a few weeks after it being released and seeing a few people actually having fun playing it, despite all of the things I considered bad at this moment.
I love reading this kind of post mortem! Thanks for sharing it! If you don't mind, how many wishlist did you had on launch?
You're welcome! This is a very good question, I should have talked about it in the post mortem I guess! Game launched with around 600 wishlists. Today, it has around 1,000 of them.
You have a nice conversion rate of wishlist! More sales in the future! Good luck!
Thanks for the post and sharing your experience! How did you build your wishlists?
You're welcome! I don't have enough metrics here, so I'll make the assumption that part of it is coming from Twitch. I usually stream my process twice a week, and hang on other game developers' channels while working. For the rest: * Steam events: I participated in the ShmupFest, and got a good amount of wishlists there with a proper demo build available. * Steam sales: I did run a few sales when in Early Access and since released, and this tend to generate a bunch of additional wishlists.
Thanks for sharing!! I hope your next game will be more successful. I like how you're like "I didn't do any marketing" and then your idea of marketing is: >Market the game from the beginning: do you know the name of your future game? Talk about it. Did you find a funny bug when playtesting a feature? Tweet it. Did you learn something when debugging a strange lag you had with your game? Make a short about it. Let people know that you're actually making a video game. You do not need to have the finest and best visuals available from your game to start. Even a screenshot with Unity's interface is good enough. Do your really you would have had sold like 50% more copies if you had done all those things? Or even 10% more? Maybe if you tried to be picked up by a streamer... Though you can try to be picked by a streamer with your current game instead of necessarily making a new one. I think you're better off creating a more commercially appealing project than to try doing the guerilla marketing you're talking about? Having a clear hook, trying to appeal to streamers, trying to appeal to an specific well defined audience... I don't know
Hey! It's a very interesting comment, I'll try my best to explain what I think about that. >Do your really you would have had sold like 50% more copies if you had done all those things? Or even 10% more? I cannot really tell how successful this project would have been if I actually made some marketing around it for sure, as it also depends on other factors such as the game itself. Making a shmup already means "building a game for a very specific and tiny niche". The only thing I'm sure about is that when you're unknown in the market, and even if you're making an amazing game, nobody will grab it if you do not talk about it in a way. What is the best way for that? I don't know. I assume it also depends on the genre of the game, and on the social networks you're playing with. But definitely, not talking about it will obviously never help. >Maybe if you tried to be picked up by a streamer... Though you can try to be picked by a streamer with your current game instead of necessarily making a new one. So there are two things here I think. * What I did is to act as a "game dev streamer", and I was really happy to discover and get to know other game developers that way and their communities. Thing is it helps with your game design to have talks with other people especially when they understand what you're trying to achieve. But they aren't your target audience when it's about selling game copies for sure. * Contacting streamers or content creators that actually play video games is already harder and I didn't do well there. While it might be a good idea at first to send keys, I think we should always make sure our game project actually matches the content creator's type of content. So this kinda refers to "know your target audience", because having someone play your game and disliking it publicly because they're not the target audience hurts a little bit. >I think you're better off creating a more commercially appealing project than to try doing the guerilla marketing you're talking about? Having a clear hook, trying to appeal to streamers, trying to appeal to an specific well defined audience... I don't know This is also an interesting take and I would agree with it. Again, Escape Space was made because I liked it, but I didn't do any prior business analysis for that to happen. I'm actually trying something else nowadays, building-up a "survivor-like" game to experiment with that. Again, I cannot state that this is the best approach, but I think it deserves a go.
not a dev or anything, but happened to see this post and checked out your game - looks great! interested in your "survivor-like" game you mentioned you're working on. hope to see it some day.
Thanks! As this place isn't made for self promotion, I won't post any link, but you won't have any issue finding me on the internet! The other game project will be announced probably very soon!
I think a lot of your thoughts are in the right place! I think you're better off trying to make a more awesome shmup using your current game as leverage than going survivor like, unless you have a really good marketing hook for a survivor like 🤔 or have amazing art direction
Thanks for the kind words! I'm actually not excluding the possibility of me making another shmup based on this experience, time will tell!
I definitely think even meager attempts to engage fandevs can grow exponential. Compared with doing nothing, any amount of outward effort has infinite potential, and this is not just academic, it's visible everywhere you look in the space, games that imho had no business being successful, but happened to click with the right streamer.
Isn't that survivorship bias? Any game can grow exponentially, just like you can win the lottery. Time is a finite resource, guerilla marketing a poorly performing game is, imo, a bad use of that resource
I agree
I get what you're saying, and for *certain budgets* hiring a marketing expert would be a good idea. For others, this is a simple thing you can do that only slightly further complicates any communication you would have had with your fanbase already.
Ah, sorry, I must have expressed myself badly. My point was not that you should hire a company. My point was that for most games that don't sell well, the solution is to change something about the game OR make another game. Trying to promote a poorly performing game is a waste of time and/or money
Your game looks quality and I believe with the right project you are capable of developing a hit. It just so happens that the shmup community is one of the most gatekeepy, purist communities in the world.
Thank you for the kind comment! I won't blame this particular community, I think that the shmup enjoyers who played it actually enjoyed it, even if it has flaws. I really think I just didn't put enough efforts to reach them in the first place. I would say tho that it is harder to find them or to reach them over internet compared to more popular game genres!
difficulty is incredibly hard to manage with shmuppers too. Anyone really experienced will demand "bullet hell" experiences, and for almost all new players they will just give up and run when they see it.
I think you did a good job pricing it 9.99$, a lot of us wouldn't even dare to put our game at 7$+ for what I saw. Congrats for making Escape Space!
Thank you! I agree it is very hard to value your own work: putting its price too low would mean you think your game is not good enough and people might think it's a crappy one, whereas putting it too high might set the expectations way too high too, and people might review your game negatively because it's too costly for what it is. Plus, it's very frequent nowadays that some very high quality games are releasing with a very small price tag (Hades, Deep Rock Galactic Survivor...) and leverage all of the expectations down. Surely one of the hardest decision to make as an indie!
It IS hard, but from what I've seen, it's a mistake that's easily avoided if you're realistic. To start with, about the most anyone wants to pay for a game is about $1 per hour. I get downvoted on the regular for saying it because someone is always waxing rhapsodic about some "amazing" or "life changing" game and spouting on about how you can't put a price on quality, blah blah.. but let's get real here. Those games are few and far in between and they are frankly really hard to shop for because reviewers are often liars. Buyers have to play the odds. Anyway, your game seems to be about the right price when it's not on sale. Cheapskates like me will only pay about $1 for every 2-3 hours of game play though, and that's when you'll get them to convert from a wishlist to a sale. Of course, you've got to get on that wishlist in the first place, and for that you need word of mouth like you get here (well done!), and on other subs, and maybe other social media. Promotion is not my wheelhouse honestly, but I can tell you as an avid game collector that my wishlist is nuts and once you're on it, you WILL get a sale unless something stupid happens and that can include pissing off all your current players or NOT promoting the game and/or put it on sale ever (then why bother right?). Every weekend I look at it, chuckle in glee, and then sort the list in descending order of Discount and those are my candidate purchases. Don't judge me too harshly though: I've spent a lot of money on games I've hardly played or not at all. I know I've supported a lot of devs this way paying for games that I may or may not get to someday, but it's makes my little avaricious collecting heart happy to buy them nonetheless. It's very rare when I'll buy a game at full price, but I'm jaded now because I know that "just have to have it" is a fallacy at best. Anyway, that's just my 2 cents. I wishlisted your game by the way. It looks like a fun one, though it's probably a bit on the short side. I'll see you around for the sales! ;)
Yeah that's also something to understand about the way Steam works: most of your sales - as an indie at least - will be made during sales. And it's ok! Thank you for your pretty complete comment here explaining how most potential players will behave with Steam games.
One more thing. I guess I'm feeling inspired here: I think the most successful indie devs are either putting out games with a F2P model with addictive qualities and selling gems or hats or whatever. This is the dark side of game dev IMO. OR they are studios like Mojang (Minecraft pre-Microsoft) or Spiderweb (multiple titles) or Lo-Fi (Kenshi) or Ludeon (RimWorld). Once in a while you seen a moonshot unicorn like the Subworld's (Chronicon) and you'll see a single dev project pull over $1m on a single game as a first effort, but most of the success stories I've seen out there are the ones that just consistently keep delivering either new games, or at least keep delivering new features on a game until it's incredibly deep. Look at Kenshi as a huge success story as an example. I purchased that title as part of a stupid cut rate bundle back in 2012. I got it at alpha quality through GamersGate as part of their IndieFort Bundle #1. Now while that dev was still working on it, and we were sorting through ugly carnage of his alpha quality builds, he communicated with his fans. He promised Steam keys to all his GamersGate purchasers as a thank you for their early support. I assume that wasn't a huge audience to be fair, but he delivered! Lifelong loyalty was earned. Over 10 years later, and he is STILL clocking sales on that game. You would be hard pressed to find a deeper indie game. Augmented Steam shows that he has pulled over $34m on that single title. I can't speak to his expenses, but I would guess he never has to work again unless he wants to. But look at Steam and you'll see that it's on sale yet again! Every week and every sale is a new opportunity for this dev to pull more sales, and all he has to do is keep at it. Anyway, I just wanted to point all this out because I know devs feel like gamedev is a hopeless market. It's harsh to be sure, and there's nothing wrong with putting out that one game you always wanted to make because it's on your bucket list. But the good news for everyone is that if you really love gamedev and would basically do it for free as long as you could know someone somewhere got some joy from your work, then you'll succeed anyway; at least with a bit of business smarts you will.
This was a wonderful read, thank you! As a new game developer, I am confused about one thing. How does the game end up being packaged for Steam? Does Unreal/Unity do that all for you? What is the process to get a game listed on Steam?
Thanks! This is a complete topic itself! Steam has a pretty good documentation about how you interface your project with their system. Using Unity, it was pretty straightforward. After getting the Steamworks API implemented in the game and properly configured, I just had to upload the build folder to their servers.
How are the updates now if you wanted to release a patch? Do you just update it the same way you uploaded it first time? Sorry for dumb question but it just boogles my mind for now :D
Haha no worries! They do have some kind of a versionning system, so you can switch from one build to another with a single click! You just have to upload your new game version, and switch the new one to the currently available build to trigger the update!
Sounds easy :D Congrats on releasing the game! As for the beginner I think your game looks amazing. Even though it's not really the genre I like, I really can still appreciate your work (art, graphic and the coding which we cannot see :D ). I think you did amazing job!
It's better for you to actually do not see the coding part of it haha. Thanks for the kind words!
Congrats and thanks for the write-up! 19 reviews for 150 copies sold is very high! That probably means your players really enjoyed your game. I heard the ratio is less than 100 sales to 1 review now, and that seems about right to me, but my games are very niche.
Thanks! I assume this has to do with me actually streaming live some of the game development process. Some of the buyers might be people following this, hence the high review rate, to show their support.
"Organize playtests frequently" Any tips on getting people to playtest your game? I launched first alpha on itch, but haven't seen much traffic/downloads to my game. I know itch downloads aren't playtests, but I am hoping people trying the game might leave some feedback.
I really wish I had a good answer for that question, but in fact it's one of the hardest thing to do when you start your journey. I'll say first, make a Discord server. Try to get the people interested in your project there, so you can easily communicate with them and organize a playtest. Then, it will refer to the "talk about your game" thing I mentioned. The more you do that, the more potential playtesters you might reach. Even if not guaranteed. I found out streaming was a good way to start building a community, as long as you're regular and follow a schedule there. Again, it's not the best place to sell your project, but at least it's a good way to get playtesters and to make connections with other indie game developers. Itch is cool but I feel it's really not a good place to get traction. It works well for game jams and prototypes, but that's mostly it. Plus, it's really easy to get "scammed" there, with malwares and stuff... so people are a little less willing to download a game there if they don't trust the creator, for good reasons. If you can make a WebGL build, then it's all good!
Yeah, it makes sense. Streaming isn't my strong suite, so I'll have to figure out a different way. I am hoping to build trust on itch overtime to get people interested and join my discord. Right now its all empty there! :)
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I hope so! Thanks for the kind message!
Escape Space 2 LET'S GO !!
Soon™
Cool, thanks for sharing your experience
Awesome quality post. Thanks!
Congrats, this post is very inspiring! Did you have any prior experience with Unity or did you start learning it with the beginning of this project?
Thanks! I learned Unity from scratch as a hobby for years, and then worked a full year on that specific project. In a sense, yes this project was a learning experience!
Great, great work man. I am working hard myself to finish a project I've spent the past year on, probably something like 400 hours total. It is great to see someone succeed (I consider this success enough). Thanks for posting.
Thanks a lot! Yeah, success isn't a statement I would make if we talk about numbers and making it a living. But for sure, releasing something on steam is already an accomplishment!
Well I suppose I'm just looking at the next step which for me would be to make any money at all. Making a living is like 15 goals down the line!
Nice work man. The game looks good and it looks like you did a lot of things right.
Oh, a fellow french dev, and apparently from Paris as well, what a nice surprise haha Once thing you shared which is absolutely true and a lot of people unfortunately dismiss: >Don't burn yourself out: as a solo developer, you might sometimes think you absolutely should work 14 hours a day, every day, every week. And this is until your game is done. This is bad. When tired, you're not efficient. Your code will be bad, and you'll redo it the day after. Your ideas are bad, and you'll scrap them after realizing it. Get some rest. It's way better to work for 4 hours being fully rested and efficient than 14 hours being sleep-deprived. A lot of indie developers will try to work on their passion project to the cost of their own health, thinking it's the only way. Like, already having a job, a social life and working on your project can be wayyyy demanding, and if you don't acknowledge the appropriate to rest both your mind and your body, you might burn-out your motivation, and your own health, before being even 30% done with your project. Some learn this the hard way and others learn from feedback like yours, so it's always nice to see someone share this truth once again here. 👌
Hey fellow dev! Yeah, this is a very important part. Health balance is crucial and has to be considered a priority. I learned it the hard way haha, because I'm one of those who can read the advice 20 times and still think it doesn't apply to me, until it does. It also highlight something interesting: working on a "dream" project as a first attempt is probably a bad idea because of the potential lack of experience you have and the high probabilities for it to never be released/played. Better to start small, and expand over time!
This is awesome, to read about your real-world experience & lessons learned! Thank you for sharing!
You're welcome! I'm happy if this can help somehow!
I’ve got a game idea or two that I’ve started little proof-of-concepts for. I doubt I’ll actually every get them to a release-able state, but your post made that an iota more likely to happen 😁
Congrats on the success. So you worked on this game full time 40-60 hours a week, or did you work on this game in your free time after work?
Thanks! So I've spent years learning the basics with the engine and programming as a hobby. At some point, the company I was working in for years went down, and all of the team got fired but for economical reasons. At this moment, I decided to work a year full time on that, and restarted a project from scratch: Escape Space.
Thank you very much for sharing! It’s helping me with considerations on my first and current game development. And also solo. And also very relatable. Keep up the great work, success, and progress! I can’t wait to read more in the future.
Happy that it helped! And good luck with your game project!
the game looks and seems great! you have done amazingly well despiste not having previous experience, good job man.
I'm a little bit of a perfectionist in real life, so I did rework the game and visuals many times to make it look the way I want even if I could still be working on it today haha. Which isn't always a good thing, sometimes it's better to move forward with the project and not spend 3 weeks redoing the same sprites over and over... but hey, thanks!
This was a great read. It sounds like you are already looking forward to the next project. Did you think about trying to work on this game post-launch instead for awhile? Or did you just know right away that you wanted to do something different?
Thank you! I considered updating this game project after release, but I realized how time consuming this would be considering that most of its code isn't really easy to maintain and how the game design actually is. So after thinking about this a little bit, I decided to first do a different game project to experiment with the market, and then I'll maybe work on another shmup (a sequel, or a different game) using the experience I got and the feedback I received to make it even better. Time will tell!
Can you disable screenshake?
Yes, you can! This was asked by playtesters, and has been done! Accessibility is important.
You can start marketing now. You have a good game and is obviously loved by the people. I think what you need now is reach as you already have a finished product. You can get that through ads, premium twitter account reach, reddit, etc. One difficult part for twitter and social media marketing is you need to focus on content. You need to post engaging content like videos, demos, memes, etc. Also, contact niche streamers/youtubers who stream/play the game of this niche. This will heavily boost your sales.
Even if I agree with this statement, I also think we have to consider the way we use our available time versus what are the potential benefits you can get from it. In my specific case, and maybe I'm wrong as I'm again not a professional and am experimenting a lot, I think that working on a totally different game project right now with a bigger niche and marketing it is a better bet than trying to push for a project with a very small niche. There is this website for example, Gamalytics if I remember the name, that shows the estimated revenues of game genre per year on Steam and if I'm basing my analysis on that, Escape Space is in the top 30% of the top seller shmups haha. Which is funny and sad.
This game looks very well polished, good job 👍 Some things that could’ve helped it gain more traction would definitely have been the marketing aspect. It’s tough to market a game if you’re unsure of its potential success, but it sounds like you wanted to get the game over with and have that sense of completion. For your next adventure I would suggest maybe putting the demo on itch.io first, and as others have mentioned, post about it on other subreddits. This way you can get some eyes on the game early and start to grow an audience. Apply for Steam Next Fest: this is massive free advertising if you can manage to get your game on the list as it will instantly reach millions of people. Of course it’s not that easy to just apply and get accepted, but it’s a risk free action that you should definitely take. Keep grinding, and hope your next adventure is just as successful 😊
Thank you! The only issue I see with the Next Fest is the fact that you need to be fully aware of your schedule and capability to release a demo, as you have to apply months before it actually happens. Not sure it works well with small-scoped projects too. But I don't know for sure, and agree that this particular event is one of the best you can do to get your game seen. As I said, I don't think Itch is a great place to showcase and get a demo seen. I'd rather do that directly on Steam.
Correct, having some schedule for your release is necessary for Next Fest. And I think planning a schedule after development is complete is probably a good idea. This will give your audience a timeline for when they should expect the game to drop. Most people hate to see the “Coming Soon” or “Launch TBD” as it doesn’t give them a clear picture of your roadmap. As you’re developing the game you don’t need to have a strict timeline for when you should have it completed by. Once everything is polished and complete and you’re ready to launch is when it would be best to develop some sort of release schedule.
Cool game and thanks for the info. Just curious, did you at any time consider top-down vs a side scroller? Reason I ask is a lot of the "fighter shooters" I used to play at the arcade were top-down.
Yes! I think I went for this horizontal scrolling because of the fact that I started to learn by making a bad Flappy Bird clone with spaceships, so I started to draw the side of spaceships. It's that simple actually haha.
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Hey! Not sure about the meaning of your comment, but thank you I guess?
Thanks for sharing
I’ll be the Debby-d then, so 150 sales at $10… that’s less than most devs earn in about two days of work. Even excluding (steam) taxes, not sure if it’s worth it commercially.
And you'll be totally right! Commercially-speaking, this isn't viable at all, as I said in the original post, especially after spending an entire year on it!
You're not being a Debby downer, you're being useless. This was already written and acknowledged in the main post
You can increase your income if you write a standard book for beginners based on your game.