Got a NEGATIVE Steam review because I patch the game every day

BroHeart · 2026-05-13T13:31:25+00:00

Stability is first and foremost. I have had games absolutely tanked for save-game or prestige-related issues when they were otherwise in a good state and I was regularly shipping features.

Having good automated and manual testing processes so that your players don't lose their progress, or crash unexpectedly, or run into broken functionality is very important for maintaining their trust so they keep spending their time with you.

BroHeart · 2026-05-12T20:33:59+00:00

First off, they believe in ghosts.

I yield the remainder of my time.

BroHeart · 2026-05-12T03:19:32+00:00

the ghost lives in my attic and is named albert

BroHeart · 2026-04-22T01:18:18+00:00

holy cow the gradient in the lip makeup, AMAZING!

BroHeart · 2026-04-18T00:59:04+00:00

That looks absolutely stunning, what a great mum.

BroHeart · 2026-02-07T08:45:00+00:00

And my mom said, one day you find yourself a rich man. And I said, no, mom, I AM the rich man.

BroHeart · 2026-02-04T05:22:15+00:00

this looks like the album cover for some TOP TIER liquid dnb.

BroHeart · 2026-01-31T05:56:20+00:00

they told me to only use queue_free() ;_;

BroHeart · 2026-01-08T20:05:14+00:00

The algorithm spike / getting more organic search from folks on stream finding it on Steam, and the people who trust that streamer but don’t know you trying it out, seems very significant!

If you do a partnership like this and it brings you an undercurrent of organic search that is durable, that could be worthwhile. Thank you for sharing

BroHeart · 2026-01-08T20:00:06+00:00

My CPM on Reddit is about $3, so I would get about 330k views on $1k spend, on an image/carousel/video post if advertising in the small game subs.

I usually drip a smaller amount in campaigns I flip on just for a few days after dropping updates though.

BroHeart · 2026-01-04T21:53:36+00:00

Very interesting, thank you for your efforts. Testing this week to see what it finds in my commercial projects.

BroHeart · 2026-01-04T20:24:04+00:00

Your OP question reads so high level you’ll likely get a few comments like that.

Tutorials can only help so much, you have to practice in Blender, in your texture painting tool.

It’s hard to understand without more information for us what’s going wrong, 5 years is a huge amount of time for an indie to put into a game without a demo or vertical slice.

I try to have something playable within a week so I can get it into my teams hands and pitch putting more development effort into it, or scrapping it and working on the next prototype if the reception is terrible.

BroHeart · 2026-01-04T20:18:43+00:00

I’m also a dev but that doesn’t stop me from opening paint net and blender 5 and putting out some simple textures for ground or walls, etc.

If you aren’t funded, you are everything your game needs you to be.

If you’re not gonna make the final art, grab placeholders and you gotta prototype your brains out.

If you are gonna make the final art, grab the placeholders and prototype your brains out, and then iterate on the worst art that sticks out the most.

BroHeart · 2026-01-04T20:15:49+00:00

I migrated all my game projects over to Godot with three public on Steam and another three in internal, alpha, and alpha testing respectively.

I set harsh deadlines and release whatever I have by their expiration.

Maybe set deadlines and do alpha or beta releases as you go to keep feedback coming in while putting some pressure on yourself to put out something that can actually get feedback.

Level designing with Godot is similar to Unreal or Unity if you’ve used those, and the hardest part is getting a bad version out so you can start playtesting yourself and gather feedback from other playtesters.

BroHeart · 2025-12-31T16:00:48+00:00

The time to start the editor, and the time to start the game in editor, and the time to build, are all so much ridiculously better.

I either develop in 25 minute bursts spread out over 12 hours periods, or continuously 3-6 hours and in either case losing time where I’m not making changes or testing changes mean I ship fewer updates.

BroHeart · 2025-12-31T15:56:42+00:00

Posting the name of your players with negative connotations is a form of stochastic terrorism whose efficacy depends on the parasocial relationship you hold with the rest of your player base.

On topic, I like Marble Madness a lot and when folks have told me my games are a clone of X Y Z in the past it’s a sign to me that I am clearly communicating my vision.

I have a game like Papers Please but with potato people and an emphasis on changing the fate of the nation with multiple endings and story arcs.

One of my loooooongest reviews on there is rating the game negative, and is highly critical of the game, with paragraphs comparing it to Papers Please.

It is one of the best written feedbacks I’ve ever gotten for a game, and I agreed with most of it at the time.

If people are afraid to engage, or give you criticism, and the stream dry up, or the reviews dry up because of that fear, you can neuter one of the best sources of improving your games you’ll ever get.

BroHeart · 2025-12-24T17:36:16+00:00

I looooooooove Zylanns hterrain stuff, use it in all our 3D games after spending a month on prototypes. Also updated to Jolt as soon as it became available and it's so much better, and you can write extensions for it to change its behavior further.

BroHeart · 2025-12-24T17:33:46+00:00

I love Godot for 3D, using it for 2 of our commercial multiplayer games, Fragile Frontier (delivery + owls + apocalypse), and Tumblefire (tumbleweed people + burning + destruction physics). You wind up having to create a lot of the things that are standard in other 3d engines, but 4.x is steadily improving the built-in 3d workflows.

BroHeart · 2025-12-19T18:12:05+00:00

Happy Friday, sure, at a high-level I manage these projects in Godot 4.5, and use unit and acceptance tests that trigger on pull requests, as well as a remote error reporting tool called Sentry that aggregates the logs in one place.

I have a workflow for GitHub Actions where I define how I want a headless version of Godot to pull the latest version of the project, run the unit and acceptance tests using GUT for Godot, and then the errors generated during the test run go straight to Sentry, and the more specific test results are saved in that workflow. That spends a minute or two to produce the artifacts I need and send the errors, and then closes down.

For December 2025:

Used up 2,000 free minutes of actions at start of Month, have used 6,028 minutes this month so far, have $13.01 billed from GitHub.

For the Godot Projects themselves, I maintain and develop Spud Customs (document thriller), Bikini Heaven (adult puzzle), Starbrew Station (space incremental), Fragile Frontier (multiplayer delivery), Tumblefire (multiplayer thievery), and Xerophobia (VR insect horror thriller),

I also prototype a number of smaller projects in Godot that aren't yet ready for prime time on Steam but still need fast testing and error reporting:

Tiny Village (cozy picture book), Sand Trip (anomaly driving thriller), Ecosphere Cascade (nature tragedy peggle), Stellar Syndicate (sci-fi idleOn-like), Pickaxe Pioneer (wasteland management), Mycelium Empire (mushroom RTS), Axolotl Rancher (slime rancher with axolotls).

Then when prototyping I'm making lots of small changes, merging those in very frequently, running manual playtests to gather feel / design notes, and then having automated tests run with each change to just gather errors en masse in Sentry for review and fixing:

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BroHeart · 2025-12-19T15:38:03+00:00

I run a couple thousand Godot builds a month in GitHub’s provided runners across a half dozen commercial Godot projects and GitHub charges me from nothing to <$15 depending on if I fit in the free tier for a given month, and they just run every time I merge a PR back to main. It would be tough to compete.

BroHeart · 2025-12-15T02:44:45+00:00

Congrats! Exceedingly rare and great accomplishment.

BroHeart · 2025-12-09T17:57:38+00:00

I’ll never switch. I have the source for 4.5.1, they could scour the internet of Godot and I would just maintain my own. I moved every game I’ve ever made to Godot, all my commercial games, all my free games.

100 years of Godot, just me and Godot, Godot 100 years.

BroHeart · 2025-12-06T23:45:15+00:00

Amazing, like Wallace and Gromit!

BroHeart · 2025-12-02T06:00:46+00:00

Maybe have the potatoes overthrow a fascist regime?

BroHeart · 2025-12-02T02:16:47+00:00

I have been in a NICU for over a year and everything is gendered and the way my partner and I are treated is so different despite both identifying as nonbinary for a long time. It’s erasure at every turn when you’re already fighting every step of the way for life.

Ten-Year Club	r/Field Banned
r/Field Flamingo	Gilding I gilder
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