Mostly-solo first-time indie post-mortem - 8k sales, $30k net, 2.5 months after release |
- Mostly-solo first-time indie post-mortem - 8k sales, $30k net, 2.5 months after release
- How do you deal with having nothing visual to show for your work?
- Remake of my Radial Progress Bar shader. Better approach, smooth edge transition and overall logic. Made in Unreal Engine.
- What's your opinion on publishing a demo-version on Steam before releasing the full version?
- How do you complete a project
- Community question
- Blender is common in both filmmaking and game development. Why After Effects is not?
- Can anyone help me find an old art tutorial?
- Need help with camera view. Isometric or not?
- How do you handle the edges/borders of your 3D levels?
- What's a good board/video game to code in order to practice my algorithms for interviews?
- If you are new to gamedev, here are 3 reasons why you SHOULD and SHOULD NOT do game-dev.
- Game Designer - Portofolio
- How to make in game events like what fortnite does ? Is it just coding
- do I need a high end computer to dev with apple?
- What do you guys think of WebGPU as game devs?
- [30 days, UAC £100] Chapter 1: Android Mobile Game Analytics Journey, Firebase + Unity STATS & more
- In game visual scripting
| Mostly-solo first-time indie post-mortem - 8k sales, $30k net, 2.5 months after release Posted: 08 Dec 2021 03:37 PM PST Yo, this is a direct followup to my earlier pre-mortem musings which I encourage you to read first: Mostly-solo first-time indie marketing pre-mortem - 10k wishlists, a few days from release Once again, let us skip the whole "haha thanks for asking" mating ritual: Pawnbarian is a chess-inspired puzzle roguelike, its Steam page is here What follows is mostly just raw numbers for all your raw number crunching needs, nothing about the actually interesting parts of gamedev. In a nutshell:
Where I live this translates to an ok salary (~15% above average), but certainly nothing special for a decent programmer, even in game development. However, all in all I consider these numbers an enormous success:
Wishlist & sales dynamics:
Post-release content creator and press interest was negligible - I really do appreciate all the folks who covered me, but ultimately this is a drop in the bucket by the time the Steam algo takes notice of you. Even big press doesn't convert well these days, and no big content creator cared. That being said, every bit counts because of the compouding and multiplicative nature of Steam, it just doesn't show up well in these raw numbers. Also, the little folks is often how you can reach the big folks, though that just didn't happen this time around. E: to be clear - I didn't just wait for stuff to happen, pre-launch I did send out a proper press release & keys. Including Keymailer, it went out to easily >500 separate people/websites who I actually looked into at least briefly and thought they might be interested, including people who I knew for a fact loved the demo and I thought were pretty certain to cover the full version. Didn't happen. Approximately no one cared. But yea, 99% of sales (and, more generally, post-release exposure) are from organic Steam traffic. Thank Mr. Gaben. You've likely heard this already, but just to drive the point home: gather enough wishlists to get into Popular Upcoming (~7k?) and Steam will do enormous work for you. Other than Aleksander on the music & sound side, I got huge help with art from my brother Piotr. He doesn't do anything game related, but check out his ig where he does after-hours modernist painting. Cheers, hope this helps someone! xoxo, Jan / @_j4nw [link] [comments] | ||
| How do you deal with having nothing visual to show for your work? Posted: 08 Dec 2021 01:37 PM PST The past month of development I refactored my code, learned how to do inputs properly, and I also made the inventory system able to keep track of items and save them. All while learning programming. Not bad for a months work, or so I thought. When I gave my game to family and friends to test, all of them remarked on how nothing has changed. This has to be common right? Often the things that are improved isn't visually obvious. While it is OK now, it has me worried. If the game was in Early access or I used a Crowdfunding people would have been mad at me. How do developers resolve this problem? [link] [comments] | ||
| Posted: 08 Dec 2021 10:49 PM PST
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| What's your opinion on publishing a demo-version on Steam before releasing the full version? Posted: 08 Dec 2021 10:34 PM PST In February there's another Steam Fest coming up and we have to decide whether to publish a demo of One More Island during the Fest. On the one hand it should bring some publicity and hopefully an increase in wishlists. On the other hand it could lead to people skipping the actual purchase later on because they've already seen the first hour. The game is a 2D top-down island colonization / city builder (some sort of mix between Prison Architect and Anno). For a demo I thought to limit it at 'researching civilization Tier 2', which is about 45-60 minutes in the game. What are your thoughts on publishing a demo in general, or for this genre in particular? [link] [comments] | ||
| Posted: 08 Dec 2021 10:34 PM PST How do you convince yourself to complete a project, instead of starting another right when it starts to get good and unique because I tend to just push new project instead of continuing my almost finished project (by almost I mean, yeah I think you get it) [link] [comments] | ||
| Posted: 08 Dec 2021 09:25 PM PST Would anyone be interested in watching a YouTube channel specifically about using your game dev skills to start a business that makes you money per project rather than possibly getting paid after years of development? Looking for thoughts and engagement levels of fellow devs. [link] [comments] | ||
| Blender is common in both filmmaking and game development. Why After Effects is not? Posted: 09 Dec 2021 12:34 AM PST Blender is common in both filmmaking and game development. Why After Effects is not? [link] [comments] | ||
| Can anyone help me find an old art tutorial? Posted: 09 Dec 2021 12:11 AM PST Hey! Awhile ago I saw a post on Reddit that someone made showing a time lapse of how long it took to hand draw a pixel art running animation vs using a program(either blender or unity or something) to show the program made it easier and faster. I can't find the post anywhere and I'm not sure even what subreddit it was on, does anyone happen to have the post saved or anything? [link] [comments] | ||
| Need help with camera view. Isometric or not? Posted: 08 Dec 2021 11:48 PM PST I'm making a fun tank game - half arcade, half old-school, and all about destruction and fast-pacing gunplay. And I need your advice about cameras. Initially I made a pseudo-isometric camera... but that made my game kinda uninspiring and usual. There are tons of games like this in Steam. Then I've made two really quick experiments - made "third-person" and "first-person" cameras. Isometric view had some polishing, and other ones were made in 15 minutes - so they could look really ugly. Using tons of placeholders and quick sketches, I've made three videos with different cameras, and asked some of my friends about it. And they've said that the best one is still isometric! There are videos in YouTube:
So, I'm at the brink of despair cause I can't understand WHY this uninspiring isometric view is still the best... Would you help me with this three questions? A) Are first-person and third-person views bad "by idea"? Or just needs lots of polishing? B) Is isometric view more adequate or comfortable? And why? C) Which view feels more interesting? Thanks and best regards! [link] [comments] | ||
| How do you handle the edges/borders of your 3D levels? Posted: 08 Dec 2021 11:45 PM PST I'm working on a semi open world game similar to Diablo, where the world is divided into zones. However, I haven't figured out the best way to handle the edges of each level, whilst still making it feel like its one big world. For now I'm just making mountains around each zone lol. How do you all handle this? [link] [comments] | ||
| What's a good board/video game to code in order to practice my algorithms for interviews? Posted: 08 Dec 2021 04:35 PM PST Hi there! I've done a few interviews for game engineer positions and have been struggling to answer some algorithm questions because I haven't implemented them a ton. I was wondering if you knew of a video or board game that would touch a lot of places that could give me some muscle memory on these? The algorithms I was thinking of are tree/graph traversal ones like Depth/Breadth-first search or others that involve recursion. I want to get comfortable with any that you think an engineer would need to know to properly handle an interview. I'm currently working on Ticket To Ride since that's a simple game and has some traversal logic in there to calculates and compare consecutive routes in a finite graph structure. Thank you for your time and I'm open to any suggestions to level up as an engineer! P.S. Some context, I am a self-taught programmer so there are some holes in my knowledge. [link] [comments] | ||
| If you are new to gamedev, here are 3 reasons why you SHOULD and SHOULD NOT do game-dev. Posted: 08 Dec 2021 10:33 PM PST Reasons to not do GAME-DEV
Reasons to do game-dev
[link] [comments] | ||
| Posted: 08 Dec 2021 10:31 PM PST I'm trying to create a portfolio for game designers I think the first thing I should make is GDD? is there anything else to add? [link] [comments] | ||
| How to make in game events like what fortnite does ? Is it just coding Posted: 08 Dec 2021 08:47 PM PST | ||
| do I need a high end computer to dev with apple? Posted: 08 Dec 2021 02:45 PM PST I have two questions.
I have a cheap laptop and so far I'm using unity and it seems okay. But I plan on developing a few games to the apple app store, and I remember before finding out that you must have an apple computer to upload to the app store. is this still true? And I was looking at buying a computer at best buy and the store clerk said that I needed the more expensive computer if I was going to develop games and specifically graphics. is this true? [link] [comments] | ||
| What do you guys think of WebGPU as game devs? Posted: 08 Dec 2021 08:41 PM PST WebGPU seems compelling. I am curious to hear what your thoughts are on it! Are any of you planning to optimize your games for it? Do you think there could be AAA or mobile quality games on the web now because of WebGPU? I would enjoy hearing from all of you! Thank you for all the possible responses! :) [link] [comments] | ||
| [30 days, UAC £100] Chapter 1: Android Mobile Game Analytics Journey, Firebase + Unity STATS & more Posted: 08 Dec 2021 04:39 PM PST I've been working on a unity mobile game for almost a year while working 9-6 at a full time software job. I don't have super high expectations, I just enjoy making it and would like to make games while travelling after I quit my job in about a year. I'll run out of savings and then I can come back and continue working again probably. Sounds fine to me. This post is for someone like myself, interested in the results of UAC (Universal App Campaign) on initial launch. I spent a lot of time googling for posts like this, so I thought I would actually make one. I've so far spent almost £100 getting downloads and I'll share both the results of that campaign as well as Firebase + Unity ads + IAP results. My game is an RPG meant to be played over several weeks/months, it's in early access and I try to let players know this is still very much a work in progress. UAC: How did I advertise this? First off, I targeted India because of the low cost per install, but I seemed to have a bug during these initial days where I forgot to public my OAuth consent form, so I got very little engagement. The OAuth form is the one that players need to sign for Google Play Services to work and not having it caused a bug! I wasted about £22 on this, and got almost zero engagement, I THINK because of the bug. India Campaign - https://imgur.com/a/Nc5L0dc Once I fixed the bug I started targeting Brazil with a £0.32 cost per install (CPI) and a £16 daily budget. I started this on the 20th November, it took me a fair while to realize the issue with India so that's why the delay here. NOW, let me make something clear, although my daily budget is £16 per day, one thing I've found is overall my campaigns have very rarely been hitting even close to their budgets. Brazil Campaign - https://imgur.com/a/cKeu1Sp The thing is though , the number of installs here was not super high. I wanted to spend more and the campaign was not hitting what I expected. I read about campaigns taking time to learn, but this was not picking up speed. NOTE: I'd been using APP install volume as my campaign target, but I used an advanced campaign that also used whether the player had finished the tutorial as the target action. The Brazil campaign might not be bringing me lots of installs, but the players were genuine and I was getting actual people playing. Now for the Philippines & Nigeria, two countries I added campaigns for to run alongside my Brazil campaign to try and reach closer to my MAX budget of £15 daily. I started targeting the Philippines because it has a large English speaking population and because the CPI is low. I also targeted Nigeria, although this was more to make my mum happy who has this thing with Nigeria being up and coming in the world... *shrug* I ran them both with low CPI targets of £0.18 in the Philippines and £0.20 in Nigeria. The daily budgets are both X50 the CPI. The results were really good, the Philippines brought in a ton of genuine downloads and Nigeria although slow is maybe starting to show light at the end of the tunnel with the last few days giving a couple of cheap downloads. Overall UAC Results - https://imgur.com/a/kpExW16 --- Now, some might ask what is the point of getting downloads without a return on investment. I agree for some this is pointless. But for me I love the game I make and I really want people to play and follow the journey. There's more to making games that you plan to update and care for than revenue alone. So although these metrics might be to some disappointing, to me they are pretty awesome and I'm willing to spend £1000s to get this game in the hands of people around the world. Ad Revenue Metrics - https://imgur.com/a/DeNTzbO Ad revenue is based on rewarded videos players watch to recharge their lifeforce. When playing the RPG you use lifeforce, once you run out you must wait to continue playing. I'm very happy with my growth here, but I do believe at some point the number of players I lose will be equal to my players gained via ads and I will reach a point of equilibrium. Lets see. IAP - https://imgur.com/a/23xC8Tp IAP is interesting, besides one failed purchase from someone in Brazil, everyone else is from outside where I was targeting. That means these were organic downloads. The app has been downloaded I think around 60-80 times organically so far, which is a rough estimate so take it with a pinch of salt. Not really much made overall here, but it's nice to see people willing to pay. Cheating IAP - https://imgur.com/a/2Pyp2Sg As you can see via the Unity dashboard, it looks like I'm making LOADS of money.. yeah, I got excited too, but it's fake, someone is cheating and Unity is fooled but let me tell you.. Google defintilty is not paying me for these! >.< Firebase Metrics - https://imgur.com/a/tto6TEP I added these so people can see how people engaged with the app during my campaign. Pretty decent, I'm happy with it enough although the churn is pretty bad and I think the day 1 retention could be much much better. --- Finally, this game is still a WIP, I'm willing to work and improve it. I started a Discord community for the game about 3 days ago and linked it in the game, I've had 11 people join so far and some nice feedback. I think if I can create a community + make a game I love and spread that around then I will be satisfied. My journey may be different to some, I'm not looking to make my money back here, I want to create a successful product that people enjoy and that meets my own personal expectations. If people would be interested in follow up posts then let me know. I'm planning to spend upto £400 a month on my ad campaign for the next 9 months. Don't worry, even If I made 0% of that back I would still do it if my engagement returns continue as they are now. Thankyou for reading ^_^ [link] [comments] | ||
| Posted: 08 Dec 2021 04:15 PM PST Anyone know a resource to add in game scripting with something like scratch or a node based scripting interface? [link] [comments] |
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