Thanks for all the love the other day. I've been encouraged to post more regularly about smaller updates with the games development. Bumper Bout is a solo project, pinball versus where players share a playfield. I'm launching it later this year so im pretty nervous but in a good way I think. The idea is fairly unique so I have to think outside the box a bit to accommodate that, but it's a fun ride. Plenty more to go between now and then - it's gonna be a busy year. Thanks again for your time and comments, they meant a lot.

There's still quite a lot of work ahead, but I hope you guys have as much fun playing it as my team and I do!

Showcasing the tier 3 vehicle in my game, Cargo, Please!, and the trailer system.

Strategy and results

A short section about my game here for context: I'm making a 2D top-down drift game called Drifters Don't Brake: Midnight. A sequel for "Drifters Don't Brake", a game that made ~400 copies.

Last month I wrote a post here about how many wishlists I got after accumulating 1M views on YouTube Shorts and TikTok together. I also talked a little about my project and first experience with the two video platforms. Here is a link if you wanna read that first: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1rnl1np/how_many_steam_wishlists_i_got_with_1m_tiktok/

At that time I had already been posting videos for 40 days. I only posted low effort videos. Pure gameplay with some background music. For some reason, one of my TikTok videos went viral accumulating almost 900k views alone. It didn’t generate too many wishlists tho. I reached 500 at the time of that post. Now, a month after that post, my game has 6k wishlists.

At the end of that previous post I mentioned that I was testing putting a little extra effort into the videos. I started adding narrations and subtitles on top of the gameplay to see if that would generate more views. And it did.

YouTube Shorts: Not too long after I start posting the narrated videos my average view count went from 400 to 1k, then 2k. Most shorts I post now get around 5k views. One of the shorts hit 2M views, and a couple others surpassed 50k views.

In the beginning I thought YouTube shorts was very unstable in terms of view count, but now it seems to be the most stable of the social media I’ve been posting.

TikTok: Before I started posting narrated videos, my average view count was around 300. The narrated shorts instantly did better, reaching 1k views. Currently, average view count there on flopped videos is around 1500 views, but many videos go over 50k views. No other video reached close to 1M views, but a couple videos went over 100k views. TikTok seems to be the most unstable in terms of views. I never know if my video is gonna get 2k, 10k, 50k, or 100k views.

Instagram: I decided to give instagram a chance. I’ve heard before that it is the social media that better converts views to wishlists. The only issue is that you can’t schedule videos from a computer. I even tried the Meta Business website. It seems to allow you to schedule some post, but after scheduling, the post disappears and is not posted. Shit is broken. You need to schedule through the phone app. I’ve just been manually posting the videos daily through the PC.

Instagram is more similar to TikTok in terms of view count. Flopped videos get around 4k views, a few videos get over 20k views. One of the videos got 2M views though, which was surprising.

All of that accumulated around 6M views in this last month. That was enough to bump my game from 500 to 6K wishlists. The videos that went viral on each platform are different, but it gives me an idea of what kind of video works and what doesn’t. At some point I had two different videos going viral at the same time on two different platforms (YouTube and Instagram) and that got me 1k wishlists a day for 2 days. Now I’ve been getting around 100 wishlists a day, which is surreal to me. I went to Next Fest with 200 wishlists and left it with around 350. Then I started posting my low effort videos that bumped me to 500 wishlists in 1.5 months, then getting 5500 more in a month with narrated shorts.

Instagram was in fact the one that converted the most, then YouTube, then TikTok. I couldn't find a way to add a hyperlink on TikTok, so people have to copy and paste the link I added there, or google the game. Instagram is a little behind on videos. I started posting narrated shorts there after I started on YouTube and TikTok, so Instagram is almost a week behind.

How did I get those views?

Honestly, I think my game fits in a nieche that isn't super explored, and hasn't had big titles released recently. There aren't many big 2D Top-down drift games out there. I didn't do any research beforehand, I was just making a game that I enjoyed playing. I did look into Steam to see if I could find games that were similar to mine, and the most similar one was Absolute Drift, an 11 years old game. Then, after start posting videos, people started mentioning that my game reminded them of a free mobile game called Data Wing. A 9 years old game. Data Wing is very often commented on my videos. Every 2D top-down car game looks similar, so I've heard my game looked similar to many other games. However, none of them has the same theme as mine, a futuristic neon pixel art style.

I guess my game scratched some nostalgia people had by reminding them of some other cool game they've played before, while still looking and feeling fresh.

What workflow works for me?

I really dislike video editing. But I found a workflow that is good to me. I record my voice and mix it first in a separate software, then I use an AI to generate the subtitles and another AI to polish the subtitles. The first AI that transcribes it isn't perfect. It adds one subtitle for "top-" an another for "down", separates "95" from "%", includes commas and periods... So I created a text file with some instructions on how to cleanup the SRT file and I send that and the SRT file to the second AI. It works pretty good. I record a bunch of audios first, then I start creating videos for each of them. Recording and mixing audios takes me ~15 min per audio.

Then I start creating the video on a video editor software. I already leave a bunch of gameplays pre-recorded, so I just need to add my voice and the subtitles, pick a couple gameplay moments that fits the subject, edit it a little bit to make the video more dynamic, pick one of the tracks of the game to add as background music, and done. Each video takes ~20 min to make.

For subjects, I talk about anything in my game. Literally. My game is very simple, and there isn't much to talk about, but I always end up finding something. It's also OK to repeat subjects after a couple of weeks. 95% of my viewers are seeing my content for the first time, so they won't know the video's topic has already had a video before. Of course it's a different video, with a different script, just subject is the same (do not reupload videos).

I don't really write scripts. I write what I want to talk about, then I turn on recording and start improvising, recording sentences separatedly. And since I can separate the audio recording from the video making, I can work on videos while I think on ideas to record later, then record a bunch of audios at once and repeat. I'm not always doing the same thing, which helps.

I think that's too much writing already. I hope this helps and inspires someone to start doing some sort of marketing for their game :)

Hey everyone,

I posted Urban Ascend here recently and got a lot of useful feedback around onboarding and clarity. I focused heavily on that going into release, and the game is now out on Steam.

Urban Ascend is a city builder built around incremental-style progression. You start small and scale into a fully interconnected city where everything feeds into everything else, with the goal of pushing toward 100% optimization.

Here’s what changed since the last post:

• Interactive tutorial that teaches by playing
• Systems are now more visible (traffic, deliveries, flow of resources)
• Cleaner UI and smoother interactions
• Day/night cycle with more ambient city activity
• Stability improvements across the board

The focus was making the systems easier to understand without reducing the depth.

It’s out now for $5.99 with the launch discount: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4205730/Urban_Ascend/

After a few years of very clumsy development time, I finally released my first ever Steam game, Toyful Wonderworld! And I gotta say, pushing that flippin' "Release Game" button was HARD!! The uncertainty of it all. The stress of what might happen or what issues may be found by your players. It's enough to drive an already crazy person like myself even more insane! But, it is done. All I can do now is wait and see what happens next. To all the game developers out there, I don't know how y'all do it with actual professional releases! The stress must be ASTRONIMICAL!

Anyways, here's to my first release, and let me know what you think about this weird world I crafted!

After four years of development, we’re proud (and totally stressed out) to present Crushed In Time, a spin-off of There Is No Game featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson from Chapter 2.

The game will be a point-and-click adventure with an elastic twist and is set to release this year on PC.

To put it simply, imagine a point-and-click game where everything you touch is elastic and reacts accordingly.

Your goal, then, is not only to solve the puzzles but also to figure out how to make objects and characters interact. For example: there’s a key on the ground and you want to unlock the door, so you pull the key to fling it toward the lock. This is, of course, a basic interaction; the game will offer you other ways to interact.

If you have any questions or feedback, we're here!

You have to juggle everything when you are a solo dev: molding, coding, UI and marketing. These are just a few.

My friend and I thought that it would take us 6 months to do a Physics based platformer ... It took us 2.5 years in the end !

It took weeks of trial and error, several goose neck related mental breakdowns, and divorcing my wife, but I have added goose physics to my game

Experience this once in a lifetime experience soon in Gun Goose.

Demo coming this month: store.steampowered.com/app/4192320/Gun_Goose/

Slay the Spire 2 reached nearly 21k negative reviews at its peak and is now down to 17k.

But it made me think, 20k reviews is a lot, no matter where they come from.
The usual indie dev is scratching at 100 reviews in total over a game's lifetime.

What would you choose?

Say that you put sweat and tears into your game (no intentional scam!) and after release:

A) You get 20k negative reviews with only 10-20% positive on top. Technical and game balancing issues that are unfixable, there is no way to turn this around anymore. Or you simply hit the wrong nerve, politically etc.

B) You get just about 100 reviews but at 98% positive and players love your game.

*This may be unrealistic because a game that came close to those ratios was The Day Before and it got removed by Steam. But even if refund ratios are like 70% then you still sold way more than 100k units.

This is not about envy, just hypothetical thinking and seeing peoples intend.

Why are you developing games in the first place?
Some here may be happy with even one positive review and ship the best they can. On the other hand, of your first game was a failure, but somehow financially successful, you can still try to make it better the next time and you have the financial backing to do so.

I added some quick camera cuts to our Super Robot Survivors game to really emphasise key moments like destroying a major boss or activating a robot arm. It feels nice and doesn't intrude on the game flow.

We spent years on TetherGeist, so it feels amazing to have all those years of effort recognized! Even if we don't win the award, it's still an awesome accomplishment.