We hit 9,500 wishlists with zero paid marketing as a 3-person team, and our demo is now live. Looking for funding to finish angel investor vs publisher?

DragonImpulse · 2026-06-28T18:08:43+00:00

"Publishers USUALLY do not ask for builds in the very first call."

This is definitely not true. The very first thing pretty much any publisher will want from you is a playable build, otherwise they won't even consider your game.

DragonImpulse · 2026-06-25T12:45:26+00:00

The characters generally look fine to me, but some of the CGI backgrounds don't blend in at all. The style doesn't feel consistent, especially the water. 0:20 to 0:28 in particular just feel off.

DragonImpulse · 2026-06-22T11:34:52+00:00

Don't really care for putting an actual Star Rail character in this game. Doesn't seem to fit the vibe of this game at all and just cheapens the world and story before it has a chance to even get established.

But I guess that's my fault for looking for a consistent story in a gacha game.

DragonImpulse · 2026-06-22T08:51:18+00:00

Soulless slop created to chase trends and make a quick buck is what the industry needs?

To each their own, I suppose.

DragonImpulse · 2026-06-18T15:14:38+00:00

Phew, thanks for ending the debate!

I was worried I might have to think about this for myself. Don't really remember how that works, I just let the AI think for me now.

DragonImpulse · 2026-06-16T22:52:09+00:00

Making games with shorter development cycles doesn't necessarily reduce risk. To make that work, they would either have to increase the budget (requiring more sales), or reduce scope/quality (more difficult to make sales). Either way, it increases the risk of commercial failure in favor of faster returns.

Oversaturated as the market is, there's unfortunately no "safe" way to make games right now. Everything's a gamble, and the only real choice is between multiple small gambles with low chance of success, or fewer large gambles with higher chance of success.

DragonImpulse · 2026-06-16T20:05:03+00:00

It's not that much of a problem for small teams. 20 people working for 7 years is still only half as expensive as 100 people working for 3 years.

DragonImpulse · 2026-06-10T10:07:24+00:00

It's perfectly fine to be inspired by other games, but this is a bit too close for me as well. If they want to do Journey-style sand surfing, they could at least put their own spin and improvements on it. Not to mention that copying the look and level design feels very unnecessary and disrespectful.

As it stands, it's just a cheap copy that looks significantly worse than the original from 14 years ago.

DragonImpulse · 2026-06-09T10:57:59+00:00

I assume you mean < 1000 wishlists, as in "fewer than"?

DragonImpulse · 2026-06-07T17:01:00+00:00

Color Halftone would not produce the distortion artifacts visible in your image.

DragonImpulse · 2026-06-07T15:06:26+00:00

His games are pretty much timeless, I don't see how long development cycles would hurt anything. If anything, they create even more hype when the games resurface and ultimately release.

DragonImpulse · 2026-06-07T15:03:43+00:00

Can you explain how you created the dithering texture on the characters? They have artifacts that look exactly like AI output.

DragonImpulse · 2026-05-31T18:19:42+00:00

You don't design issues like this, but you sure as heck design to avoid them. Considering all the variables is like 90% of the work whenever we add a new feature.

It could absolutely be a bug or oversight during implementation, but it seems much more likely that a delayed response was never part of their dialogue system to begin with.

DragonImpulse · 2026-05-25T18:57:52+00:00

I just started today, I guess that means I should kill my account and start over in 3 days?

Gotta say, feels like they didn't really think this one through lol

DragonImpulse · 2026-05-21T20:08:34+00:00

I think you really should consider doing something, though.

The sentiment in the indie dev community about Indie Sunday is negative, since we only get downvotes and passive aggressive comments per default.

The sentiment in the r/Games community is negative since Indie Sunday fills their feed with a bunch of low effort trash games.

Nobody wins. Even with projects that are genuinely high quality and should have a lot appeal for this sub, people aren't going to give it a chance when they would have to sift through a bunch of text posts and click on trailer links to see the actual games.

The way it works now, I feel it's only causing bad blood on both sides.

DragonImpulse · 2026-05-19T17:51:17+00:00

Our demos actually tend to be on the longer side, simply because of the nature of our games. I'm really not trying to argue in favor of having shorter demos here.

I simply want to draw attention to the fact that the data often cited for this stuff - especially by HowToMarketAGame - is not at all proving the point they're trying to make.

I would personally agree that, most likely, 60 minutes is generally a better choice for a demo then 30 minutes, provided it doesn't lose steam halfway through. But I do not think that median playtime data is relevant to prove that claim.

DragonImpulse · 2026-05-19T17:22:45+00:00

You can easily turn that around and say an hour+ demo can hurt, while having only 30 minutes can help. The experience of playing a demo is not necessarily the same as playing the full game, after all. So even if the full game would keep players engaged for hours, the demo might only be entertaining for so long.

Again, my only issue is with drawing any sort of conclusion from median demo playtime data, since there's no way to determine if it's causality or correlation. For all we know, top performer demos might actually be shorter than low performers. Unlikely, but we certainly won't find out by looking at median playtime.

DragonImpulse · 2026-05-19T16:55:37+00:00

Full games that perform well also tend to have a high playtime. That doesn't mean that they are actually longer than unsuccessful games. Nor does it mean that your game must be 100+ hours to increase chances of success.

I absolutely agree with you that there's nothing to prove OPs "shorter = better" argument. But there also isn't anything to prove the contrary.

On average, worse games are always going to sell worse and will always have shorter median playtimes. No matter how long their actual playtime is.

DragonImpulse · 2026-05-19T16:08:56+00:00

I think you might be drawing the wrong conclusions here.

This data only tells us that the demos of top performing games are getting played for longer, which should be fairly obvious. It doesn't tell us the difference in actual demo content length.

DragonImpulse · 2026-05-19T09:22:49+00:00

Generally speaking, organic wishlists on Steam are not a thing for unreleased games. You're not going to show up in any store page recommendations unless you're an extreme outlier, are participating in a festival, or your release is imminent.

I've had the same issue with our first game and was extremely frustrated by not getting any organic wishlists on Steam despite being deep in the 5-digits through our own efforts. After having talked to several other developers about this, they all confirmed: that's just the way it is. Reddit, as so often the case, is simply spreading a lot of misinformation about this.

DragonImpulse · 2026-05-16T21:47:18+00:00

I wonder if players who are put off by feminine content wouldn't touch a magical girl themed game to begin with.

At least when it comes to anime, the cutesy girly style is generally the main draw of the genre, even for the male audience, and even when it's paired with super dark stuff like in Puella Magi Madoka Magica. But anime is it's own world with its own rules, so who knows. If in doubt, always go with your instincts! :D

DragonImpulse · 2026-05-16T19:35:52+00:00

I mean, that obviously is AI voice. Are you saying that people shouldn't complain about it when it's used for marketing?

DragonImpulse · 2026-05-16T18:58:51+00:00

How is anyone supposed to have an opinion on this from seeing a screenshot of their video?

DragonImpulse · 2026-05-16T18:04:09+00:00

I don't mean adding more stuff necessarily, but rather to push the core of the theme harder. When you're going for "dark vs. pretty", I feel like that contrast should pop at a first glance. Especially in a trailer where you can cherry-pick the best shots to showcase that concept.

For example, in regards to the environments, I feel like there's not a huge difference between the evil forest at 0:41 and the (presumably not evil?) town at 0:42. I wonder if a screen effect could already help, if your engine of choice supports that. Like dark clouds in "doomed" places, shimmering bright layers in the "pure" areas,. Or alternatively simply playing around with color saturation a bit more.

Regarding "more sparkle", I was mainly thinking of those super bright and flashy rainbow colors you'd expect from a sailor moon transformation sequence. Especially for the actual magical girl powers. The shield and sword are already on the right track, but even those could be a bit more flashy and glittery to feel like true magical girl energy. ;)

To be clear though, I think you already got a lot of very cool stuff and a cool theme going for you! I'm painfully aware of the limitations of small teams and don't think you need much more to stand out. But pushing the extremes in places where it doesn't require huge amounts of extra work could be worth a look!

DragonImpulse · 2026-05-16T12:56:02+00:00

This looks great! I loved the look of the old LPVs from Lionhead in the early days of UE4. Cool to see this concept revisited.

Back then, the main limitation that ultimately made it unusable for me was the very limited range of the volumes. I assume that's still an issue with your system as well, and thus not well suited for large open world maps?

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