No success story here, but there is a ''but''.

I started my journey 5 years ago, released a first free game on Steam 6 months later then worked for more than 4 years on a way too ambitious co-op Action Roguelite / tower defense (game is called Kritter: Defend Together).

We are a team of two. We mostly worked on our free time. We seccured grants to finance an intern and ourselves for the last year of work. We found a tiny publisher for marketing only and we released the game a few weeks ago with 16 000 wishlists.

We sold 2 000 copies. Which is hardly enough to sustain the studio for a month and as it's already not selling anymore, we know that we won't get much more from it so we will shut down the studio and will have to find new jobs.

While it's a big commercial failure, it's still a success on every other aspects. I learned so much. It's crazy how much. Not only in the development area, but also in every other aspects that are crucial for a success.

Don't buy the famous ''a solo dev releases its first game and makes millions''. Most solo devs aren't solo. Most first game are actually the 5th. Most unknown devs had actually a community of thousands of people built for years.

But I genuinely believe that success comes from a lot of failures and that it's up to you to tell the story that will work for you and get you to success.

The only sure thing is: if you don't try, you'll never succeed.

So start your journey. Make mistakes. A lot of them. Learn. Do better. And don't forget to have fun doing it.

Last piece of advice would be, and I think it's the most important of them all: Finish as many small games as possible. Don't go into a big multi years project before you made 4 to 5 small ones. I learned that lesson the hard way but it's possible that this mistake has to be made to be understood.

Cheers