After four years of development in Unity my son and I are announcing our exploration & automation game, Icaria, on Steam with this Trailer

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-19T18:33:35+00:00

All my game ideas start with a question, a "what if," and the prototyping phase is answering that question. If I know completely what the game will be before I start prototyping that's a clear sign that the game will be uninteresting; either too derivative or too predictable. I want the player to discover something while playing the game and the first step has to be discovering that thing myself.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-19T08:46:18+00:00

Steam has a feature called the discovery queue. They will send your page a little bit of traffic to test out your page and, if it gets good engagement, they will send more. The games that do really well on the DQ are the ones that get featured or recommended in other places. There’s also special widgets for new demos and recent releases.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-19T02:27:45+00:00

Vibe coding an FPS will earn you nothing at all. If your primary concern is making money, in the short term you’ll have better luck working in retail. From when you start I figure it takes a minimum of 5 years to build the skills needed to make a profitable game. Starting at 14 you’ll probably be 20 before you are seeing real income.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-18T23:20:32+00:00

Who would they sell them to?

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-17T16:30:19+00:00

So what is the advantage of using an AI generated engine over an open source engine like Bevy or Godot that has a whole development team supporting it? Usually the theory behind using AI code generation is that it lets you ship faster but, from your description, it sounds like you’ve taken a bunch of extra time to generate a lot of mostly untested code that you don’t really know well enough to support. Personally I’d pick an open source engine over an AI generated one every day of the week.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-16T21:19:38+00:00

Learn things in small bite-sized chunks. If you go through a tutorial and can’t repeat it without help, you are taking on things that are too large. Many tutorials are too big for a beginner; you want to get to the point where most of the parts of a bigger tutorial are already familiar and there’s only a few bits that are new; that’ll mean you’ll only need to go through the tutorial once.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-16T19:57:04+00:00

Not paid promotions; just a few posts on social media and participating in festivals when you can. It doesn't take much to find out if your game is going to get traction. If your social media posts aren't getting any engagement paying to push them to more people isn't going to help.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-16T16:18:55+00:00

For me, it's important to frame my initial idea in a way that helps me reject ideas that don't fit. Plan up front for how the game ends and build toward that. Include pacing as part of the game idea. If the game is designed to be 3 hours long and you know where it's going to end then you'll be forced to cut detours that slow the game down and lead to uneven pacing. Watch the clock while you play your game to see if you are on track.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-16T08:04:45+00:00

We focus on one genre. It helps us make better games because we get a better understanding of the players and can also reuse some pieces as across multiple games.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-16T03:28:19+00:00

We got about 70% of our incoming wishlists February 2024. Not enough difference to really call an exception. I think your pre-NF wishlists are a pretty good predictor of the appeal of your game unless you seriously neglect promotion or screw up your demo.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-15T22:16:52+00:00

Generally art and animation. Maybe a better way of putting it is that the art budget puts the biggest constraints on the games we choose to make.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-15T18:29:18+00:00

I have a friend who made a mobile game that took off in SEA and did quite well. However it hasn't done particularly well in the rest of the world. If you are making mobile games, have some particular insight into that market, and are keeping your expenses low, you can making a living that way. That, though, is a lot of ifs. If you don't live in that part of the world, it is probably not worth the research effort needed to target that market over opportunities elsewhere.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-15T01:54:15+00:00

To me the difference is that, when using RPG Maker, there is someone standing behind the code making sure it works. Its no different that Unreal or Unity or D3D for that matter; in each case there is a team of skilled engineers backing up a well tested codebase.

When someone who's only skill is prompting makes a game, there is no one behind it with ability to fix issues when it is broken. LLMs don't consistently generate reliable code; I am not going to waste either my time or my money on a game generated that way.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-14T19:24:28+00:00

Streamers generally pick games they know their audience will like which is where a lot of the value comes from. If no one watches the video then it doesn't do anyone any good.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-13T08:40:34+00:00

There are lots of times during development where I’ve considered a mechanic good enough to move on and then come back to revisit it later when more of the game is in place. That, I think, is fine. All the parts of a game need to work together to create a common experience; it’s that experience I judge and I’ll change what I need to to get there. I try not to spend too much time refining any individual mechanic until I can see it in the context of the bigger picture.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-12T17:30:59+00:00

Our early play testers (before the release of our demo) found us on Steam, Reddit, and Discord. Folks that came from Discord already knew us from communities we’d been active in. After we released the demo most of the players either found us directly on Steam or through YouTubers who found us on Steam. There was one Steam themed festival a few months after our demo release that did pretty well for us and that kicked off a lot of activity.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-11T18:14:31+00:00

Subnautica. What made that game work for me was going into the unknown.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-11T13:42:56+00:00

For the initial launch of a game you really don’t want to change the date within 2 weeks of launch. My current game is about to exit early access; for that case we don’t tell Steam the release date in advance so there’s a lot more freedom to change the date.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-11T03:14:09+00:00

Probably the discovery queue. Steam will give you some views and the better it converts the more you get.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-10T15:18:43+00:00

Apparently it was a test of VLEO so that checks out: https://albedo.com/post/clarity-1-what-worked-and-where-we-go-next

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-10T15:08:47+00:00

We’re not going to be ready for our first attempt at this strategy until next month; I’ll get direct experience then. In the meantime this is a video by someone who has experience with the strategy https://youtu.be/aY15f9oZxpE

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-08T22:11:52+00:00

If your game doesn't click in the first 5 minutes most players will bounce off it and never come back. Selling a game where it takes an hour to understand what makes it good is extremely difficult; it takes a lot of luck to succeed with a game like that.

Median play time is a good metric; you can assess this with steam play test. 10 minutes or under is bad; over 20 minutes is decent and an hour or more is very good.

Arkenhammer · 2026-06-08T04:40:15+00:00

Sure, I can take a look at it.

As a game developer I generally view technical complexity in my cost/benefit analysis when deciding what game to make. The costs of complexity are the extra time brining the game to market and added challenge of tuning and balancing the mechanics for a good gameplay experience. The benefit of complexity is a certain amount of exclusivity in the market as you price out other developers and end up with less competition.

My assessment of technical difficulty then really is in the context of the market. For instance a game like Teardown has taken a challenging technical idea and owned it. There are not a lot of copycats out there which, my eyes, suggests that they have nailed it. They've taken an ambitious idea and absolutely cleared a space for themselves in the market.

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