Just created my first steam game, with the demo coming out this week, Here's what I learnt
After a year and a half of development, I'm on the brink of launching my first game — a gravity-flipping precision platformer called Squavity — on Steam, here's what I learnt:
Marketing starts before launch, not after. I spent most of my time building and barely any time promoting. By the time I was ready to tell people, I had no audience. Build in public from day one.
Wishlists matter more than I thought. Steam's algorithm heavily favours games with wishlists built up before launch. I didn't realise this until it was too late to do much about it.
The game is the easy part. Store pages, trailers, screenshots, descriptions, tags — there's a whole second job just getting your game visible. Budget time for this.
People are genuinely kind. The indie dev community on Reddit has been overwhelmingly supportive. Don't be afraid to share your work.
Done is better than perfect. I could have kept polishing forever. Shipping it and getting real feedback is worth more than another month of tweaks.
If you want to check it out, Squavity is available to wishlist on Steam with the demo coming soon — would love any feedback or just to hear from other devs who've been through the same thing!