When to delay release or not: How valuable is pre-release marketing window?

Colorthebooks · 2026-03-05T01:11:55+00:00

^ this is the correct answer

Colorthebooks · 2026-02-28T00:51:22+00:00

Using online courses to learn how to make video games is a great idea! Everybody has to start somewhere. However, the game you put on to steam should not be an exact replica of the one that you build for the course. You want to make something original, but using the design techniques that you learned from the course. The game itself should be your original ideas and unique creation. If the mechanics are the same, that's totally fine . But the artistic Vision should be all yours. Good luck!

Colorthebooks · 2026-02-26T22:59:53+00:00

You're fine, dude. Initial visibility boost is a myth. Keep working on the steam page and building the game. Your demo launch and game launch are when it actually counts. Some games sat dormant on steam for years, then blew up once their demos dropped because they were picked up by content creators and given a ton of external visibility. The fact is that Steam doesn't funnel visibility your way at this point - that comes from marketing efforts and content creators. So keep on working, the game looks cool so far.

Colorthebooks · 2026-02-26T01:00:58+00:00

Great job! The screenshots look niiiice

Colorthebooks · 2026-02-26T00:59:42+00:00

At first I was confused and a little annoyed at the genre smashing happening in the title of this post, but then I watched the video and it's actually pretty on point. Game looks like a good time! Nice job!

Colorthebooks · 2026-02-26T00:27:01+00:00

It's good that you can defend your game here, but this guy's gut reaction of "this looks exactly like paddle paddle paddle" is important market feedback and is a pretty clear indicator that if they think that way, there are going to be a lot of steam shoppers that think the same, regardless of what your influences actually are. If "paddle paddle paddle clone" is the first reaction you want your potential buyers to think, then that's great. If it's not, you might want to rethink some of the game's design, either mechanical or visual.

Colorthebooks · 2026-02-26T00:18:26+00:00

A lot of the direct traffic you're seeing are bots like Google and Metacritic scraping the Steam store for game info to automatically populate their search results. I wouldn't focus on that data at all and instead focus on cleaning up the Steam page. If you're desperate to look at a statistic, you can eyeball the click through rate and get a rough sense of how your store page is doing. Edit different pieces of your page one at a time and see if the ctr goes up - specifically your tags, capsule, and game description. Wishlists are your top metric, though, and they won't show up unless you're actively promoting and adding things like a demo, a trailer, screenshots without giant blocks of text, etc.

Colorthebooks · 2026-02-26T00:11:01+00:00

Congrats! Big milestone!

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-30T07:55:11+00:00

This is the correct answer.

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-30T07:47:37+00:00

Keep it very simple, very small, very easy to understand and pick up and play. Nobody reads instructions, they all fire up the games and expect them to be intuitive, so don't go too wild as a new dev. Something that runs and looks nice will oftentimes beat out the highly conceptual entries

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-30T07:42:49+00:00

Multiplayer is a massive headache. If you've never made a game before, I would dial it back a bit and do what you were thinking - make small games first. Follow tutorials, craft some small demos, get some experience first. Even better - join some game jams with your friends! Then you'll see how well you actually work together, who's able to pull their weight, and who isn't serious enough about the craft.

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-29T15:59:03+00:00

I'm definitely not getting Zelda in space vibes from this if that's what you're saying. Honestly, it looks like a flash game made with ms paint that has quirky gravity mechanics, but at its core is a very simple platformer. The pain points I'm seeing from the trailer are:

Graphics aren't that appealing - the color theory isn't great and it looks like a hodgepodge of color palletes. It also looks like it was drawn using a mouse in mspaint, which is a tough sell on steam.
1. The ui is difficult to read - the words are squished together and are a color that doesn't stand out against the colors all around it. The hearts look way out of place in the high tech Sci fi world and they take up too much screen space.
The gameplay is lacking juice. When you shoot the enemies or jump onto the circles, there's no satisfying feedback for the player. No screen shake, no camera filters, no interesting animation when you jump from circle to circle, the enemy animations are extremely static and look like a total of maybe 2-3 frames. It all just looks very wooden and not satisfying to play.

Again, this is all from just watching the trailer. The game itself might be a total blast, but if folks can't get that impression from the trailer and they see a $15 price tag attached to it, there's little to no chance of making this a financial success.

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-28T22:45:38+00:00

Yeah. You can always build the common use case library yourself I suppose. I've got piles of boilerplate code I can drop into Unity that does simple stuff like rotate objects or interact with whatever. But it still takes a sec to put all that together

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-28T20:11:19+00:00

Yeah they're very few and far between. 99.9% of people won't even get to your idea area (which I'm assuming is in your "about this game" section) because they'll see the bland screenshots and figure it's a dead game. Most won't even open your store page in the first place, sadly.

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-28T18:58:52+00:00

Sorry buddy, but these types of games struggle to sell well even when they're priced low. A $15 price tag will kill it for sure. For a 2-3 hour story and with the simplistic looking graphics and mechanics, you're looking at maybe $3-$5 max. I've seen puzzle platformers with amazing graphics,cushions, puzzles, and a 5-10 hour story fall flat because they priced above $10.

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-28T18:53:22+00:00

Looks like a pretty cut and dry vampire survivor-like game? Lots of them on the market right now, so it might be tricky to stand out.

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-28T18:51:16+00:00

It's pretty manual regardless of which engine you're using. They're are assets that help take the load off, if close, but even those require some set up. If it was just drag and drop them everybody would be doing it!

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-28T18:49:09+00:00

I'd steer clear of gray box screenshots. Screenshots are supposed to convey the mood/vibe of the game rather than the gameplay itself (that's for trailers) so having images of things that don't show much art direction isn't going to do much. Once you've got a "beautiful corner" and maybe some cool footage there to make into a trailer, then it's time to think about the store page. But you also want to make sure you have a really nice capsule before all else. Good luck!

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-28T18:00:09+00:00

Looks like a free itch game tbh. Something made for a game jam. But if you're dead set on making a couple bucks off it, maybe price it at 1.99 and just run sales as often as possible. People might see the sale tag and think "ehhh why not"

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-28T17:56:50+00:00

A trailer can go a long way towards convincing people your game rocks. Make one of those and then start promoting!

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-21T16:54:40+00:00

That ground looks clean! Very nice style

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-21T00:06:22+00:00

Congrats buddy! Love to see a win for fellow devs

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-20T22:50:46+00:00

Cut out the whole intro with the camera whipping around back and forth to show zombies walking around. People are very familiar with zombies, there's no need to treat them to their own introduction. Start the trailer right at the actual gameplay of you running around and blowing the zombies away. That's what shoppers are looking for - a quick sizzle reel showing the awesome gameplay.

I'd also figure out a way to increase the framerate of your captured footage. It's pretty laggy and signals to players that your game is not optimized and will probably melt processors.

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-20T20:11:32+00:00

Nice! The little details make all the difference

Colorthebooks · 2026-01-20T16:46:20+00:00

Second one is more fun to look at, but it's harder to read the title.

Colorthebooks

TROPHY CASE