Post by DoctorDerek in How I Climbed Out of The Game Development Pit of Despair comments

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Awesome write-up. I'd mention one can and should also put the demo on Steam 6+ months before participating in a Next Fest.

The metrics stuff is really interesting. I was going to skip posting on Itch, but you've got me thinking the correct game dev flow is a series of Plan, Build, Playtest, Reflect loops:

- Minimum quality architecture (mini vertical slice/mini game demo)

- Full vertical slice ("gold master" game demo)

- Itch web and download builds

- Steam demo

- Steam Next Fest

- Steam Early Access

- Steam release ("v1.0")

Thanks again!

Ted Bendixson9 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Glad you found it useful :-). I definitely wanted to mention the Steam demo as the next obvious thing to do.

itch.io is great for gauging early traction, figuring out if your hook is landing and converting to players without the price of committing to a Steam page.

I just launched a Steam page for Cave Factory, and oh boy is it a serious effort. I spent the greater part of a weekend putting capsule art and screenshots together. Steam requires so much more capsule art than itch.io.

I don't create a Steam page until I'm a little worried a streamer might play my game, and I won't have a way to capture the traffic bump and convert it into wishlists. I decided to make a Steam page for Cave Factory because it was up in the top of the automation category on itch.io for a week, and it was too discoverable for streamers not to know about it and be playing it.

All good problems to have, but don't solve them until you have them.