Deleted post
Hey there,
For me game development is more about learning, and earning experience. I like making games that push me out of my comfort zone, so I can be exposed to new areas of programming.
Not sure if this is a less regular point of view, as I work full time in the industry too, so the experience I earn building unusual indie games, helps massively with my full time job. This might also be why profit is not really a priority, as I enjoy the process.
As for marketing, I usually don’t reserve any budget. I like self-publishing, and mention the game on a few places myself. There are times when I’ll decide to invest a small amount into marketing, but it’s usually not planned.
I’m aware this might not what you were looking for, but that’s been my experience. It’s hard to tell for sure what’s the right balance between marketing and working on a game.
You mentioned “unusual indie games”: what are you experimenting with?
I mostly focus on game design. As someone that enjoys doing different types of puzzles in my free time, I enjoy coming up with new gameplay ideas and trying them out in games.
I wouldn’t say it always results into a success, I’ve definitely had projects I decided to abandon, but it’s always a fun and learning experience.
Is the user’s feeling of being “clever” rewarding enough?
In older games, that would be enough for many users, but modern games have more complex rewarding mechanisms. There’s visual rewards (a beautiful looking cutscene), story rewards (what happens next?), the satisfaction of beating a hard challenge or spoils that let you become stronger, and much more.
Different rewards work for different users, not everyone enjoys games for the same reasons.
How do I find the right difficulty for puzzles?
First pick your target audience. Is your game made for a 5 year old discovering puzzles? A 50 year old puzzle master? Or somewhere in between? Then make a game that starts easy, so the user can learn how to navigate it, and that it gets harder and harder, requiring the user to take advantage of most of what the game has to offer to beat it.
Are there any mechanics that don’t work at all (in your experience)?
Whatever you do, you have to offer to users something new and unexpected. Other than that, different users like different mechanics, so it’s difficult to say what works and what doesn’t easily.
Everything I mentioned here is my personal opinion, I’m still learning myself how to make fun new game concepts, so feel free to form your own opinions based on what I wrote :)
for me it's a hobby, I enjoy creating a game much more than playing it, so it's a game to do it, except that the goal is not in a virtual world but in the real world, if it makes sense. lol
if you mean money for marketing it is 0, for the time it is a little more but not much. I am not and I do not want to be a blogger or a youtuber, not even a spammer (in the good sense) or a social manager, so I do just the minimum even if I know it is a mistake ..
but speaking of money I read somewhere that converting a person from visitor to player costs about 1 $ of marketing, but we are talking about marketing done well, for us independent / soloists I don't know if it is a viable path because we compete against millions of dollars..
in my ideal world as "artists" I think our job is just to create things, and the rest should be done by the "fans" ..
I don't know, honestly the marketing thing just makes me sad. lol
I make games for both reasons. I love programming, and I love video games in general, and since they can bring in some income, might as well.
I spend mainly time on marketing, not too much money, just time link building and distributing.
Only on a few major sites would you want to spend money on marketing, or to just hire a dedicated marketer who has a good track record.
A web version of a game can be distributed on different places and linked to from everywhere online, it's a great marketing tool that can also bring in income itself.
My indie work is 100% just a hobby. You could say that I do both though–I use an industry job to put food on the table and fund the (extremely limited) budgetary needs of my indie projects.
Since I don’t do it for money (and given my line of work, it is much less legally complicated to keep my hobby work 100% free), I don’t spent a dime on marketing since there’s no return to be had.
I'm working towards making a living by doing game dev full time. Not there yet, I'm still too green. Still go a long way to go, but I'm enjoying the ride so far.
Right now I'm just releasing game prototypes for free and am happy if people just give them a try to be honest. I'm hoping more people will give them a go, maybe leave me some feedback so I can improve, then release better and better games as I claw my way up game dev mountain.
I do games as both a hobby and as a potential future income. Currently I've only a demo (soon to be full game) and game jam projects where I was a teammate, but me and my teammate are working to hopefully be able to be taken seriously as commercial game creators.
Honestly, I know it's really hard to get anywhere selling indie games, but I really want to do it despite it all, as games are something I loved since I was little, and making games for a living would be a dream come true. Until then however, we're just working hard to make the games we're making as known as possible, making the game look good, and doing game jams and work for other games.
I currently am not spending anything in marketing or other parts of game development, but that's because my teammate and me are doing everything ourselves, marketing, assets, so on.
I don't know, the only thing I can think is just checking out me and my teammate's game demo and such, but that's about it. It's just we currently have creation of the game, a visual novel, under control, and marketing is what it is, slow, but steady on different platforms. We're kind of hoping our next game will be a little easier to market, but we're still doing our best with this one.
Was marketing slow on your first game too?
Game covers are definitely important, which is why I plan to have a new title screen and cover created not too long from now, at least before the final game releases.
I know quantity of games won't make a difference, I just feel that our next idea, which will use more traditional art, at least more so than pixel art, might appeal more to visual novel players. Plus, we'll have more experience advertising. While we did get quite a few players and some followers by releasing the demo and advertising, dev logs also helped get some eyes on the game, so we definitely will continue doing that in later games.
What strategies do you think might help you, other than improving your game covers?
We plan to finish development of the game in early 2023, to give ourselves a good amount of time to finish without rushing, especially as both me and my teammate are involved in either other projects, work, or school. Thankfully, most of the sprites we need are finished, so development now is creating backgrounds, CGs, the rest of the writing, and then programming it all in.
Twitch would probably work better if you instead ask some smaller game streamers to play your games instead, they already have followers so you just would have to find some that play similar genres.
This is a super interesting thread and question -- I always struggled with this as a game producer, if you're going about this fully indie, it's pretty hardcore and rough. The chances of getting a run away success is quite slim.
However, there's lots of great fun ideas out there, which is why they shouldn't be thrown away but actually sold off, so I built a platform to help this happen -> indieacquire.com which basically lets indies sell their game / ip / idea etc and get some cash for the work that they have done which is pretty neat.
Just soft launched, so it would be good to get some feedback from anyone that's been trying to make some money from their games or haven't been able to and this might be a lifeline.
T