itch.io

You too! Send me whatever builds you're working on. I playtest games every now and then

I think it's best to just do the right thing for the games I'm making. I already contract out some of the artwork and sound design. My games don't make enough money (yet) to pay someone a full-time salary, but if the project warrants it and I can reasonably forecast how much money the game is likely to make, I would definitely consider that option. So it's not like I would just decide to open a studio some day. It's more like there has to be a game that's getting enough traction to justify increased labor expense or some kind of outside funding situation where investors are asking me to give them a big return.

Steam is a different beast. It's basically just like itch.io, but much much bigger. Steam has its own algorithm and product placement tools that put your games in front of players. Just having an appealing Steam page helps so much.

Outside of that, you're looking at the same funnels that go to itch.io. You send the Steam page to streamers, post on some sub-Reddits, put your game into festivals, do Next Fest the quarter before you launch and once you've got at least 2,000 wishlists.

Functionally, it's not that different from itch.io. The scale is the difference. You'll get far more exposure to your games on Steam than you will on this site, so if you aren't getting a ton of views for your game on this site realize it's natural. itch.io is small and kind of niche compared to Steam. Use it to gauge early traction and don't get too disappointed if itch.io isn't throwing much traffic your way. Structurally, it can't.

Glad you found it useful.

Ok, for game jams I think I understand, but there's as much time for things as you make. There's no reason you couldn't pick up a game jam project after the jam, make a web build for it, and watch the analytics to see if you have an engaging product. You already went through all of that effort to do the jam. You might as well get something useful for your business out of it.

The game being too big isn't something I completely understand or relate to, but I'm guessing some engines naturally bloat the size of the game over the 1-2 GB Web Assembly limit. You're not going to like my answer for this. If the game project is important enough, you'll learn how to make the game from scratch so the limit isn't as important or you will figure out how to cut out content that isn't central to the experience to bring it down.

Either way, if you are persistent enough and you care, neither of these should be a concern. You might have other reasons you think the game won't work separate from analytics, but that's more of a gut decision and not a true barrier to getting accurate data on your game's marketability.

Glad you found it useful! I'll answer your questions as best as I can.

1.) I market everywhere I can that isn't a place I would consider "toxic social media." I have an email list, post on Reddit, post to various Discords, post the build here, and post a trailer to YouTube. 

I generally avoid Twitter/X/Bluesky because I find the 140 character format costs me more than it's worth. It's too easy to get sucked into pointless debates about the reflecting pool or whatever, and everyone is just talking past each other.

2.) My first players are usually the people from our local playtest group in Charlottesville. We meet roughly every month, and they get to play it before the build ever goes public. It's a good way to catch obvious problems before anyone in public has to know about them. 

Outside of that, you would be surprised with how far you can get by simply posting the build here and contacting some of your online game developer friends. This site is designed to promote games that get updated frequently, and there are people looking to play your game.

3.) Make a high quality game in a genre that is appropriate for the PC gamer market. That's 90% of it. I'm paraphrasing Chris Zukowski, but it's basically games that are buildy-crafy-simulation-y. Make one of those. Post it to this site. Fill out the relevant tags (automation regularly brings in organic traffic for me). That's it. If the game is good and speaks to the right audience, people will find it and play it.

4.) Reddit is genuinely annoying but too useful to ignore. Most of the bigger more generic communities like Indie Games have these nauseating rules about flair and screenshots, and when you post I guarantee some moderator will nitpick it to death and remove it on the first try. So I avoid those. Not worth it.

That said, smaller more genre-specific sub-Reddits are great! I posted Cave Factory in the AutomationGames sub-Reddit, and the audience was highly receptive. A few of the people on that sub-Reddit played my game and wrote some long highly detailed feedback posts that will certainly make the game better.

I also post to r/DestroyMyGame because it's a good way to get the most negative feedback possible, and that's useful for finding chinks in your armor. Take it with a grain of salt. Some people in there are kinda masochistic and enjoy the takedown (self-included), so realize a few are being negative just to be negative.

With Discord, it's a mixed bag and kind of depends on the specific communities you're a part of. I was in Thinky Puzzle Games for a spell, and they welcome new puzzle game builds. I'm also in some local game developer Discords and post there too. 

Again, the smaller communities tend to be better and more focused. If you're posting in some big indie game developer Discord, your game is just going to get mixed in with all of the other self-promotion so with those it's basically pointless to post because nobody is playing those builds anyway.

I'm in another Discord that's purely focused on falling sand simulation games, and I have to imagine the people in that group will definitely want to play builds of my game when I put them out because we have similar interests.

That's why it's so important to pick a genre and niche down. It not only makes your game more discoverable to tag-based algorithms, it means you can post in specific sub-Reddits like r/AutomationGames and find people who want to play your game. If you have no clear genre, you have no clear audience, and you therefore have no communities you can join to find new players.

The more clear you are on what your game is (genre) and who it's for (audience), the easier it is to find people to playtest your game.

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. 

It should be. Are you not able to play the game via web browser? If not, let me know which operating system, computer, and web browser you're using. I'll see what I can do.

If you're already playing a native Windows or MacOS build, I'd just stick with that since it's a better experience anyway. You can get slightly better performance with a native build.

Glad you're enjoying it! I did take a lot of ideas from Sandustry. I really like Sandustry because it fully commits to the physics-based design space.

You can also keep watching this page for updates. I'll let you know when new builds come out 

We have a Discord for the game company (Send It! Apps). https://discord.gg/yjR3ZXhw

I'd love it if you could help playtest new builds of the game before we make them public. You'll be granted a free copy of the full game once it launches on Steam, among other opportunities.

I love these screenshots! Thanks for posting them. I think I may have some more information to help solve the ghost dirt block bug. Really appreciate this :-).

I just fixed your bug. If you can back up your save before playing, you'll get a better chance of recovering it. The first time you run the game and load the save, it should just delete the duplicates and let you keep playing.

First, thanks for the bug report! Glad you're enjoying the game.

It looks like you're on the latest version. 

If you don't mind, could you post a bigger screen capture so I can get a feel for the kind of factory you're building? There might be some edge case I hadn't considered.

You could also send me a copy of your save file, and I can diagnose some possible causes of the bug from there.

You can email me at: tedbendixson@me.com

If you're on Windows, go into <User>\AppData\Roaming\CaveFactory and you should see named save slot binary files. For example, the first save slot will be called save_slot_1.bin and so on.

It's a little more challenging if you're playing on Web or MacOS, but I should be able to walk you through it.

I redesigned the game's core systems to make that bug much less common for the version you're currently playing, but I clearly haven't hit all of the cases. I might be able to clean up your save file if you'd like.

I've got Claude fixing your bug right now. It's saying we should be able to recover your save. I will let you know when I post the new version. At that point in time, you should be able to pick up where you left off. Apologies for the inconvenience, and thanks for playing. 

Oh man. I'm sorry you lost your save. I can try to recover it for you if you'd like.

You can email me at: tedbendixson@me.com

I greatly appreciate the bug report and will get a fix out as soon as I can.

Try out the latest game build. The world is much larger now. No more falling down into the void (unless you dig really, really far). You're free to do that if you want.

Just wanted to let you know the game now supports saves, with up to three save slots. Saves work on all three platforms.

You can drop stalactites onto stone deposits. This will yield a stone or a coal. Repeat the process and you will get coal. You can also put stone patches into the dirt sifter to get more stone.

Here's a short preview of what I've been working on.

That build doesn't support it yet, but I'm preparing a big update with support for save files, more content, a big systems change. It's coming out in roughly a month so keep watching this space 

Thanks for the bug report and glad you found it funny :-). I'm trying out a few different design angles, one of them being giving players more options to place down things like stairs and get stuck less.

haha, love it! I'm planning to do another iteration on the game soon after I finish the current game prototype (Rogue Deck Builder).

After just one week, I've made some pretty good progress. I would estimate I'll have the game playable via Web GL within a few weeks.

As I understand it, Proton is how my first game, Mooselutions, can be played on the Steam Deck without any extra work on my part. If you ship a game on Steam for Windows, it's just automatically available on the Steam Deck via Proton. You have to make some adjustments to your Windows build so it plays well and looks good, but otherwise it's totally viable. Mooselutions got Steam Deck approved without any need to do a straight Linux port. Gaben delivers.

Will do. You never know when it could come back. I just wasn't able to use it for that game, but I might design a different game where I could fit it in somehow.

Nope. That's from a really old prototype. I wasn't sure where to take that gameplay so I started working on a different game concept.

hahaha enjoy. I need to do a few more passes on Rogue Deck Builder. It's still an early prototype. The resource harvesting is too repetitive, and I want to add in some automation ramps so it's more strategic and you aren't spending the whole time chopping down trees.

If you want a more refined experience, check out my full game Mooselutions on Steam.

Glad you like it! Next up is a Web Assembly / WebGPU port. I've realized I need to make all of my games available on the web. A friend of mine said he was running the game via Proton. That might be worth looking into. He didn't run into any performance issues doing that.

"Personal preference" in large numbers determines whether a game will do well. It's just a lot of people with "personal preference." So if the majority of people prefer the dice gimmick, great, keep it. If they don't, then I guess the game won't become all that popular. Do you want it to do well or cater to a small group of peoples' "personal preference." ?

Other successful games have systems like your dice rolling system, but they usually give you a choice. Voidigo has a powerup option that basically rolls a dice to see if you'll get a very powerful weapon, but I think they have a better design because you don't have to choose to roll for that upgrade. You can just pick the standard upgrades too.

It doesn't really mean anything to "save up" for another upgrade if all upgrades are gated behind RNG. I don't know if I'll get lucky this upgrade cycle or the next. They're the same. You think it's giving players a choice, but it's taking away choice.

It plays a lot like Vampire Survivors. The core interactions are good. Enemy behavior is what you would expect for a game done in three days (basic chasing, no interesting movement patterns, not much enemy differentiation).

I found the upgrade menu confusing. I know you're supposed to roll the dice to determine how many upgrade points you get, and I did that. I got some points, and I think I spent them on upgrades, but it didn't feel like it was clearly communicated to me. Sometimes the dice lands partially between sides instead of cleanly on one side, and that adds to the confusion.

I had to click on the "skip" button to get the upgrade menu to go away, even after I chose one of the upgrades. I didn't know of any other way to dismiss that screen, so I just kept clicking skip. It felt like I wasn't playing the game "correctly."

Just to test the limits of this thing, I walked as far as I could to the right. I walked right off the map. The enemies followed me for a bit, but then they disappeared and it was just me in the void.

Overall it seemed like it needed to be more challenging and less confusing. Enemies need to form big swarms like they do in Vampire Survivors, and they need to encircle you, making it hard to escape. Then you have to balance that with the upgrades.

But more importantly, I would just ask, why create this? How is it all that different from Vampire Survivors, outside of the gimmicky dice throwing upgrade system? Why is it better to put upgrades behind RNG, and why is it better to expose that RNG to the player? Isn't it much simpler to just let people pick their upgrades? What does it add? Why would I want that?

You don't have to take my word for any of this. Make two separate versions of the game, one with the dice gimmick, another without it. Give both versions to ten different play testers. See what they say.

For the record, I think you can take out all of the dice stuff, pare it back, and just work on executing the basics flawlessly, then consider how you can add a twist.

There's too much going on. It's a mess. I think you need to simplify and take out a bunch of the extra stuff.

Why does my gun automatically rotate? Why are there clowns in addition to the ghosts? What are those skulls? You're thowing all of that stuff at me right away at the beginning of the game, and I haven't even gotten a chance to get familiar with the game's controls. I don't know what I'm doing and all of this stuff is happening to me. Not fun.

When you add in the dice rolling trap mechanic, it's just more stuff on top of stuff. Sure that's the theme I guess, but there's just no reason for it. Why do I want to roll a dice to determine the number of ghosts I can trap? Why is that more satisfying than the alternative?

Simplify. Simplify. Simplify. Strip it all the way down to the gun, the ghosts, and trapping them. Try to make just *one* satisfying interaction, and then build the rest of the game from that.

Ah yes, Mervert Sloane, the prank name my dad and his friend would put into the wedding registry when they were younger.

Minesweeper already has procedural generation to make the levels. The dice doesn't really add anything to the design. You could have easily made the number of mines be procedurally generated without showing the dice, and that would have been the better design choice. 

Exposing procedural generation, which is typically hidden from the player in most games, just puts extra clutter on the user interface and makes it a little harder for the player to grasp all of what's going on in the game. That's likely not a problem with this game, since it's Minesweeper and many people already know how to play, but you could easily see it becoming a much bigger distraction in a different kind of game where the player doesn't start with a certain level of familiarity.

Take it out. Fix the bugs. Start with a clean implementation of classic Minesweeper, and then experiment with some different twists. A great example to follow is Dragonsweeper.

Ok now I think *this* one is the best I've encountered thus far. It's like one of those Sokpop games. Stacklands comes to mind as a potential inspiration. 

The game makes use of the dice theme without just slapping it onto the game superficially. There is a risk/reward tradeoff you have to make every day. Random events mix it up and make you think strategically on your feet.

Although there are many trinkets and options for crafting, I felt like I was barely able to get through each day. I played the game pretty safely, usually picking health/food/water and very rarely trying to craft anything. 

I think that's mainly because the UI doesn't clearly communicate the costs per turn. I vaguely know that if I make a campfire, I'm probably going to lose less health that night, or possibly gain health? I don't know. Do the values on the dice prevent more damage with the fire, or is it kind of like a real bonfire in the sense that you usually toss the lowest quality dead wood onto it (in this case 1s,2s, etc.)?

Bosses and events are mostly communicated clearly, but I wasn't totally sure about what happens if I leave a dice on a boss/event at the end of a turn and don't destroy the boss/event. Do the dice stay on the boss/event through to the next turn? I just assumed they don't because they don't stay if you partially make a campfire, and I figured the rule also applies to the bosses for consistency, but I was too "afraid" to check.

In any case, that's the sort of design problem that's going to be crucial for your team to solve. How do you visually communicate when a dice you place persists through to the next turn? Maybe you simply don't allow it. Maybe you explain that with a tooltip. But at the very least, I think the rule needs to be applied consistently no matter what you do.

I also think it would be valuable for you to explore alternative representations of the dice. Even though "roll the dice" is the theme of the jam, I don't think standard dice fit the theme of this game. I like the idea of some kind of thing with multiple states representing tokens you can use to pay for stuff. I just think it needs a different visual representation that fits the outdoors survival atmosphere a little better.

Really solid entry. This is exactly what a jam game should be.

Controls well, graphics are impressive. The sounds are the major highlight. I did run into some performance issues and dropped frames throughout the experience, mostly at the start when scenes load. It's a jam game. Performance is kind of a high bar to set, but something to be aware of.

As for the dice rolling powerup design, I just wasn't feeling it. For me, it takes agency out of powerup use. The fun with powerups is the ability to make risk/reward decision once you have them. If you put the powerups behind a random number generator, I can no longer choose which ones to use, so it just feels like I've gotta deal with whatever gun I'm dealt.

It also makes getting the powerups pretty same-y. It doesn't make any difference if I shoot this blue crate or that one. They're both going to give me a randomly generated powerup, so I guess I'll just shoot them all. Shoot the same blue crates. Wait for my random reward. Fire whatever that happens to be. Repeat. It's just not that much variety. 

It's also annoying that my ability to use a powerup is gated behind the RNG. It's like I have it but don't really have it. I've gotta wait my turn. Kinda takes the fun out of having a cool toy.

The dice don't add to the variety. The RNG powerup mechanic takes away from it. The game would be a better design without it, just doing something more standard where you have the powerups out in the open, you can see them, choose which one you want, grab it, and use it right away. I just want to play with the cool guns! You did such a good job with those. Don't tempt me with powerups I can't really use.

This is my favorite game of the jam thus far, and for a few reasons.

1. It uses the theme in a non-superficial way. You have to consider what's on the dice faces as a part of the overall risk/reward tradeoff, which is at the core of the game's design.

2. Simple discrete choices that have the potential to be much more interesting if developed further.

3. It's the ideal vertical slice for a game jam. Just enough gameplay to show the potential for something longer with more depth, but not so much gameplay that it gets mired in complexity and becomes impossible to complete in three days.

Of all the games, I found myself playing this one the longest. I was intrigued by the potential strategies one could employ in picking the dice, passing, choosing which dice to roll and in what order. Although I doubt any game made in three days can have much deep strategy to it, I was presented with something that can certainly be developed into a game with a much richer set of strategic decisions.

This is a solid base to iterate on. If you can add some more states between players, roguelike elements between the rounds, more ways of deckbuilding with the dice themselves, you could have something here.

One of my higher rated games in the jam. Execution is clean, and the design is focused on one thing. The theme is actually integrated into the gameplay, not just slapped onto it.

As a game design, I think this struggles with the marrying of continuous and discrete design spaces. If I were to compare this game to Tetris, the obvious difference is that in Tetris every move happens one tile at a time, and the scoring is also one tile at time.

In this game, pieces can occupy the space between tiles, and they can rotate a full 360 degrees (so much freedom!). Movement depends on physical interactions. The game is still scored using the discrete per tile "Tetris" system, but because you can move everything so continuously, more of the gameplay becomes this finicky struggle to get the pieces to do what you want them to do.

In Tetris, I look down and see a hole where I want to place my piece. Then I place it. The discrete movement system makes my choices much simpler, and that's why that design works.

In this game, I look down and see a hole where I want to place my piece. Then I furiously click and drag the crap that keeps falling into the hole up and out of the hole, trying to open a space for my piece to fall into. Eventually through a long laborious process of trial and error, my piece goes in, and then I've got to do it all over again.

It just doesn't feel satisfying. I dunno, maybe if you make that intentional like a Bennet Foddy game, you might find an audience for it. But I usually want to feel good when I play games.

This is the video that got me interested in game design:

I designed all of my puzzles in my first game, Mooselutions, this way. I think it also applies to other game genres. You have to play your games a lot to understand what's really happening in them.

I would say just rip out the dice roll part. I know that's the theme of the jam, but you could have a pretty fun auto-runner without the need to toy with the controls

Good feedback. Thanks for playing.

Really great points about precedence being a problem that interferes with the player's strategy. I wanted to do what Balatro does and only score the "hand" with the highest points. It didn't really occur to me that players might want to intentionally score a lower hand as a setup for something bigger.