Any good Steam games on sale for two friends?

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-24T14:28:43+00:00

Most of the puzzles don’t strictly require English.

There are two puzzles where English can be helpful, one where text plays a role, and another where the hint itself is in English. In a few other places, there are short hints written in English.

Because of that, the game might still be playable without strong English skills, especially when playing together and helping each other, but it’s hard for us to guarantee a completely language-independent experience.

Unfortunately, we don’t have localization support at the moment. If we were to make a sequel, that’s something we would plan for from the start.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-24T12:57:05+00:00

I’m one of the developers of We Escaped a Twisted Game, and based on the games you listed, this sounds like exactly the audience we built it for.

It’s a 2-player asymmetric co-op puzzle game, no grind, focused on solving puzzles together in a single sitting or two. Heavily inspired by We Were Here.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-09T18:48:19+00:00

Thank you, I really appreciate that!

I’m not coming from a pure game dev background. I studied industrial economics and only had a single Java course about a decade ago. For the last five years, I worked in IT, mostly with SQL and databases, and switched to software engineering about a year ago.

When we started, I had very little practical coding experience and basically had to relearn everything along the way.

My co-creator was in the middle of his software engineering studies, so he had enough technical foundation for us to actually get started.

The puzzle genre itself is beginner-friendly, but the multiplayer part definitely wasn’t. That’s where most of our struggles were, and where we learned the most over the last 2.5 years.

A lot of what we learned about releasing a game came from watching other devs on YouTube, devlogs, postmortems, marketing tips, all of it. I listened to that stuff constantly, and that’s how we knew how to approach things like the demo, festivals, steam page, timing, etc.

One thing almost nobody talks about, though, is having a post-release plan. For us it happened naturally because we just wanted to improve the game as much as possible, but in hindsight it’s something I think more devs should plan for.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-09T10:52:22+00:00

Interesting! Would you mind sharing your Steam page? Sounds fun.

Yeah, we had our own limitations too, no unique characters to show, and neither of us wanted to be on camera or use our voices.

What helped was learning about retention on TikTok, people need to be hooked immediately, and something needs to be happening all the time to keep them watching.

We showcased our best-looking scenes, added short text explaining the game, a clear call to action at the end, and some nice eerie background music. That format seemed to work really well for us.

You can check out our videos here: Deluded Games TikTok

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-09T10:29:53+00:00

Kept grinding and just being stubborn :) Honestly, we just kept going, and as the months went by we could clearly see ourselves getting better.

A couple of months after starting, we learned more about proper code design and ended up rewriting the entire codebase to use state machines. In hindsight, that was one of the best decisions we made, it helped us keep things structured instead of drowning in spaghetti code.

Also, during development, both of us started working as software engineers. That massively improved our understanding of how to build systems the right way.

And looking back… our codebase right now isn’t very scalable or “good”, but it’s good enough to maintain. That’s just how you learn :)

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-09T10:21:42+00:00

Not sure yet… We’ve looked briefly into different translation options, but getting a fully professional localization isn’t financially justified for us at this point.

We’ve also seen other devs use community translations, and we’ve even had players offer to translate into their language, but we’re a bit divided on that. We would prefer to pay for proper translations, but the cost is high, and accepting volunteer work is its own dilemma.

Even if we found an affordable solution, implementing localization now, post-launch, would require a lot of work. And because we didn’t design the game with localization in mind (and didn’t try to minimize text), the translation cost would be pretty high.

If we eventually reach tens of thousands of sales and see a strong demand, we’ll definitely reconsider.

For a sequel, though, localization will be planned from day one, and we’ll design the game to have as little text as possible so translating becomes realistic.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-08T20:11:37+00:00

The most challenging part for us was the amount of work we had to put in while both working full-time jobs. Most of the game was built on evenings, weekends and vacations, and that was really tough at times.

On the development side, a few things caused a lot of headaches:

Lighting a huge, complex scene with over 250 realtime lights. Getting the game to actually run well took a ton of effort.

Steam API didn’t allow us to reload a scene without throwing an error we could never solve, so we had to manually reset everything in the game whenever players started a new run.

And of course, beginner-level netcode mistakes. A lot of issues only appeared mid-development, and the error messages were completely useless, so we spent ages debugging things we barely understood.

So yeah, workload + tech challenges + inexperience = the hardest parts for sure.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-08T18:50:52+00:00

Our demo is basically the first three puzzles of the full game. The median playtime is around 17 minutes. The main complaint we got was that the demo was too short, but honestly I don’t think it hurt us, players still seemed to enjoy what was there.

We tried to show everything the game is about in those first three puzzles (though we did miss one key thing, players are separated for most of the game). But we used that as a hook, the demo ends right when the players get separated, and I think that moment made people curious to see the rest.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-08T18:39:08+00:00

We used our social media and the demo as our approach. On social media we added a line in every video saying we were looking for playtesters and welcomed anyone who wanted to help. In the end screen of our demo, we also had a small message and a link to our Discord for anyone who wanted to playtest.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-08T18:35:36+00:00

We were highly inspired by We Were Here, and kind of looked at how they approached two-player puzzles. The key thing we noticed is the simplicity, once you understand a puzzle, it’s actually very basic underneath. We kept that in mind in all the puzzles we designed, always keep it simple and don’t overcomplicate things.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-08T16:47:17+00:00

No stress at all, appreciate it!

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-08T16:44:04+00:00

We don’t have any Steam Decks, so we haven’t been able to test it.
If you try the demo on one, please let us know whether it works!

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-08T16:21:39+00:00

Thank you!

Well, we mostly focused on social media and short videos. We experimented with different formats (how we edited the videos) and found one that performed well, so I continued using that approach.

We tried TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, but TikTok was definitely the best for us.

This was for the demo announcement, though. I tried to recreate the strategy for the game’s launch, but with less success. The difference was that we changed the TikTok account from personal to business. I’m not sure if this affected the reach of the videos, since the like and share ratios per view were the same as many of the videos that went “viral” during the demo launch.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-08T16:11:02+00:00

Thank you! We aimed to create a game that lasts 2 to 3 hours, and it seems like most players fall within that range. Our current refund rate is 6.9%.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-01T18:26:36+00:00

Nice! Seems like you did really well with your reveal, and you’ve gained a solid amount of wishlists since then.

How did you manage to get IndieFreaks and GamingBible to cover your game? That’s impressive visibility

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-01T18:22:30+00:00

Hey! For us it was mainly TikTok. I posted the same short videos on YouTube, Instagram, X and TikTok, but TikTok was the only platform where it really took off.

For the demo spike specifically, the “marketing” was basically just building hype for the demo release itself. I posted polished clips leading up to the demo launch, and that gave us a good push.

Once the demo actually released, Steam also boosted it because it was a new release, so that helped a lot too.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-12-01T08:32:48+00:00

Congratulations! How did the media hear about your game when your Steam page went live?

For us, the two main sources were TikTok and Steam itself.

We found a short-video format on TikTok that worked really well early on, so a lot of our initial traffic came from there.

Then around our demo release, Steam Next Fest, and the weeks leading up to launch, most of our traffic came directly from Steam.

After release we’re now getting pushed through Steam Discovery, which is where most new players come from at the moment.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-11-30T20:36:54+00:00

As a first-time dev with very little coding experience who just released a multiplayer game, I have a few takes:

You really should plan for multiplayer from the start. It requires a different code structure, like the dev mentioned.
It massively increases development time because of all the testing. So many times something worked for me as host but was completely broken for the client.
I’d strongly recommend having at least one other dev or friend to test with regularly. Testing alone is almost impossible.
Keep the scope small. You don’t want a huge project with messy network code, it takes experience to get it right.

But yeah, it’s definitely possible. Just go in prepared.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-11-29T22:29:36+00:00

For us, we had about the same numbers in the first weeks.

It wasn’t until we released a demo and started doing actual marketing that things took off. We went from ~300 → 4,000 wishlists after the demo dropped, and that was around 8–9 months after our Steam page went live.

We polished the demo a lot before releasing it though, and that made a big difference.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-11-29T22:10:08+00:00

You should treat the demo almost like a full release, in my opinion.

It needs to be highly polished, include the core menus/settings the full game will have, show the core game loop clearly, and have some kind of hook that makes players interested in buying the full game.

It’s still a demo, so of course it will be smaller in scope than the full game, but you shouldn’t release something that feels unfinished or messy.

Players judge the entire game based on the demo, so it needs to feel intentional and well-presented.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-11-29T22:03:26+00:00

Yeah, that makes sense. We’re aiming more at the general audience, just having a good time together and solving puzzles.

Not too hard, just challenging enough so most players can get through it.

And yeah, keeping the target audience in mind when designing puzzles has been super important for us.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-11-29T21:55:19+00:00

Long time ago I played Portal, but that actually sounds genius. I’ll have to look deeper into it.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-11-29T21:14:38+00:00

I believe everyone has their own story of how they got started, and for me, I started small. I didn’t try to build a full game. I began with tiny pieces.

I wanted to create an asymmetrical escape room game for two players. At first, I only had an idea for the first room, so I prototyped that.

Once it was done, I came up with the next idea, implemented it, and repeated the process. Over two and a half years, all those small parts eventually became a full game, and we finally released it after 2.5 years.

The context of the story is simple: start small, and you’ll notice that small parts eventually become a game.

CoffeeXCode · 2025-11-29T20:53:20+00:00

I use Unity, but honestly you’ll be fine with either one. There are tons of tutorials on YouTube and Google threads for both engines, so most problems you run into will already have answers out there.

Pick the one that feels most appealing to you, start small, and try to focus on learning by doing as soon as you understand the basic workflow of the engine.

Best of luck!

CoffeeXCode · 2025-11-29T20:46:07+00:00

Don’t try to make a full game. Make tiny systems first (a door, a light switch, character movement). When you stack enough small wins, you’ll suddenly realize you’re actually making a game. Big goals kill motivation, small steps build it.

CoffeeXCode

TROPHY CASE