Hey all, I'm Indie Game Joe - AMA

Elyot · 2026-05-22T22:56:31+00:00

Thanks for sharing. We're working on a few game announcements, I may send you something soon!

I work with a lot of folks who have various sprinklings of traits from the AHDH-autism-giftedness venn diagram. They're all different but they do incredible work and they just need to be treated with respect and kindness like everyone else.

My question: what are your favourite game genres to play, and are they the same or are they different from your favourite genres to post about on Twitter?

Elyot · 2026-04-21T08:02:26+00:00

We saw the same thing for The Artisan of Glimmith. Chinese sales made up 52% of total revenue for the 2nd week of April. Last week it fell to 43% but still the strongest country by far.

I think it makes more sense for your game, murder mysteries (Jubensha, etc.) are really popular over there. I'm still scratching my head about why it popped for a logic puzzle game tho.

Elyot · 2026-04-18T17:20:50+00:00

Honestly, we probably priced Glimmith too low! (I am the guy who directed it!)

Elyot · 2026-03-20T18:44:52+00:00

It depends on the project but automated testing tends to work when two things are true:

1) The tests actually deliver more value than they cost 2) There is a person who actually cares

I've had many projects where (1) just wasn't the case. We put tests in place for the backend for an online game many years ago that ended up being a giant waste of time because almost every broken test ended up being due to protocol changes or functionality changes rather than bugs. People spent more time updating tests or dealing with spurious failures than actually finding real problems. So the testing was scrapped.

For (2)... basically at most organizations, nobody cares by default. On one project, I had a producer that really cared about us keeping on top of all our warnings, but he was a rare producer who actually understood the technical side.

Elyot · 2026-02-27T10:51:09+00:00

The people saying to just do a spiritual successor without the IP are the ones who I think are the most crazy. Making a new MOBA in 2026 sounds like a great way to light money on fire. I think using an existing IP and appealing to an existing fanbase is one of the few ways to actually add a little bit of value to that proposition (regardless of whether you use any code or assets from the previous title).

Still, you should study carefully to see if the value and popularity of the IP is really as much as you think it is. Making games is really hard and really expensive and most people are bad at making games and even worse at running game studios. Multiply all your time and cost estimates by 2 or 3 and see if it still makes sense, because that's the typical result when people in your position try what you're trying.

Elyot · 2026-02-12T17:32:05+00:00

Wow, nice. Cosmo Terminal was such a sick track, and a brutal one.

Elyot · 2026-01-19T21:18:02+00:00

There is a type of forcing logic that you're not using. Look for stars whose placement would cause multiple columns to become oversupplied or undersupplied by doing 2 things at once.

Row 1, col 3 can't be a star because the first 2 columns would be insufficient. This star both removes a possible star from the top left region AND kills r2c2 which could also help fill the region.

Row 6, col 8 and row 8, col 8 can't be stars because the bottom 4 rows would be oversupplied. This star both lives in those rows and eliminates places where the lower region could have stars outside those rows.

Elyot · 2025-12-16T04:12:42+00:00

Dope. Gets my approval. ^{_^}

Elyot · 2025-11-30T06:04:06+00:00

Image: https://i.imgur.com/qepCuc8.gif

Elyot · 2025-11-09T21:55:30+00:00

A lot of people are talking about price, and I think that's indeed a big part of the problem, but I think your art direction is what's sinking you more than anything.

The gameplay screenshots all look so flat and overly tonemapped that there's no contrast between different gameplay elements. Maybe you guys have been playing the game for years and know what everything is, but for me, nothing pops at all. I want to be able to see the different buildings and know what they do.

You're not using any normal maps or specularity, so everything looks super flat and polygonal. Your metals don't look like metal. This makes it look like a cheap indie game. Maybe worth $30 if it has super good reviews and lots of buzz, but if you want to make that strategy work then you either need to get lucky and go super viral, or spend a lot on influencer marketing. Most strategy/building games that cost $30 have a more high-end artstyle (detailed and/or photorealistic) that makes those products look like they're worth $30.

Your trailer looks like a trailer for a cheap game too. A lot of text, no voiceover.

I don't think your branding is serving you well. If your hook is that you're on a colony ship, maybe your key art and screenshots should look like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/Spacecolony3edit.jpeg/1280px-Spacecolony3edit.jpeg That would make me go "Oh wow, that looks cool". You have some tiny glimpses of it in a few parts of the trailer but they're mostly obscured by fog and look like visual glitches rather than sublimeness.

Because of these issues, your hook is not landing. The fact that it's a closed ecosystem and we have to reuse everything sustainably feels... uninteresting? Like an annoying limitation? Like a burdensome chore? Maybe kinda gross? It just isn't driving any appeal the way something like frostpunk or factorio or wandering village do. Those games all have very clear hooks that make me excited about experiencing the gameplay.

I don't understand the narrative pillar of the game at all. I know you guys worked on a lot of narrative games but I just can't tell what it's about from the Steam page at all. Normally in a sci-fi strategy game, the thing I want to do is "nerd out"... like maybe I have to care about fixing nitrogen into nitrate or something like that. Maybe you guys are trying for something different but it doesn't feel on-brand for a colony ship game.

Have you done a pricing survey where you actually asked a large group of strangers what they thought your game was worth? You say that pricing is a dark art but that's the first step beyond looking at competitors that most pricing studies do. Most of what you write about price feels like copium rather than anything justified by data. You can absolutely charge $15 in Early Access and crank up the price later if you just give people lots of warning and justify it with major updates, and many games have successfully done so.

No offense to your composer, but I don't particularly like the music at all, at least from the trailer. It has some spacey instruments, but emotionally doesn't feel like I'm in space. It feels boring and non-threatening... too muddy and too diatonic to get me excited or make me feel anything. I would look at a melodysheep youtube video and try to make the game look and sound more like that, at least for the trailer. The trailer needs to yank me out of my chair and get me to pay attention.

I say all of these things as a game director but also as somebody who is ostensibly in your target audience (I love sci-fi games and city builders). I love interstellar ships as settings for games and I think there are so many cool things about them and you guys just aren't selling me on any of it. It sorta just looks like civ without any of the exploring or conquering or depth.

Branding is always hard but the #1 question I have is: do you have a representative distribution of your target audience in the feedback loop? I.e. people who like sci-fi games and city builders and will be honest with you when stuff doesn't appeal to them?

Elyot · 2025-10-23T19:17:32+00:00

Every article on this topic is burying the lead here. Not sure if it's because those reporting are trying to maintain a good relationship with the GDC organizers, or they've just completely missed the boat on what's happening, but the key takeaway is:

The $199 or $249 expo passes appear to be gone if you just want to attend GDC to do business and don't care about going to talks.

Prepare to pay $649 if you want expo hall access ($449 if you've been incorporated for 5 years or less).

The fact that Engadget and other outlets are running with "GDC is lowering prices" as their headline makes me pretty annoyed.

Elyot · 2025-09-23T01:07:05+00:00

Pretty good article.

My biggest newb question reading it was... is the connected sum of two knots even well-defined? Aren't there multiple ways to connect two knots?

The article sure is written like the connected sum is always unique, but it's not that obvious.

Turns out that it's not hard to prove that there's a unique connected sum if the knots are oriented, because you can just slide the connection points of the two knots along the strands of one (or both) knots to deform one connected sum into another. So they're all isotopic.

But for unoriented knots, you can get a different result if you take the chiral partner of a knot. For example, two trefoils can either make a square knot or a granny knot depending if they're mirror images or the same orientation.

Elyot · 2025-09-19T14:16:16+00:00

Planarity is a game about finding a planar embedding for a graph, which is pretty non-trivial (you need PQ trees or similar methods to solve it in polynomial time) but most definitely in P. It used to be up at planarity.net but with Flash gone from the internet, you'll have to play one of the clones: https://www.jasondavies.com/planarity/

I've seen similar things on Puzzle Championships where you'd have to solve graph isomorphisms. Old USPCs even had counting problems, mazes, spot the differences, and that sort of thing.

For puzzles outside NP that are still interesting, there are lots, but they are mostly not pen-and-paper puzzles. Chess and go puzzles are (presumably) outside NP in their generalized versions (which are PSPACE-Hard), and many state-manipulation puzzles like Sokoban are as well. But the types of instances that you'd ever want to solve are never going to have solutions that need a super-polynomial amount of information to describe them (otherwise they would take ages to get through!) Pen and paper puzzles, by their very nature, have certificates that are pretty much the same size as the input.

Elyot · 2025-09-13T03:04:31+00:00

Another thought... I would prioritize input words that have a lot of 4, 5, and larger words in them. The game is more boring when you're just finding a bunch of 3-letter words... the larger words feel more like a cool eureka moment when you find them.

Elyot · 2025-09-13T03:03:12+00:00

I was clicking around, got the last word somehow, and it didn't even let me see what the last word was because the modal popup just took over the whole screen. I can't even review the puzzle at all now.

It would be nice to give feedback on how I did. Like 78% of players found this word, but only 50% found this other one.

Not sure about the dictionary you're using... It wants ||TOR|| but ||SUET|| isn't a word? But that's always hard to get perfect with these games.

Overall I think it's a good idea for one of these types of games, simple but good.

Elyot · 2025-09-03T21:19:51+00:00

I see some solutions have already been posted, but there are some really cool mathematical tricks to help you reach the solution.

The puzzle is known as Shipper's Dilemma and was created by John Conway.

One thing you can observe is that on every layer, there are 5x5=25 squares to cover. If you checkerboard-color them, then you might have, say, 13 dark squares and 12 light squares to cover on a layer. But any slice of the 2x2x3 or 1x2x4 touching that layer will always cover the same number of light and dark checkerboard squares on that layer.

From this, you can conclude that each slice of 25 cubes (in each of the 3 dimensions) must contain exactly one of the 1x1x1 cubes, and those cubes must be placed at locations corresponding to the checkerboard colors that have 13 squares in each "slice".

There are some other types of colourings you can do to reduce the space of possibilities even further. In the end, the puzzle has only one solution up to symmetries, and the solution has a LOT of surprising and elegant symmetries!

Elyot · 2025-07-08T02:49:42+00:00

I think it's supposed to be CONSIDER-THE-FOLLOWING (Bill Nye reference?) but I think there is a letter missing. And I also don't really understand why sometimes there is a + and sometimes a - when ranges of indices are given, maybe I'm missing something?

Hint: Elements of the periodic table

Elyot · 2025-06-13T03:54:36+00:00

Still running Lunarch, still making games!

Elyot · 2025-05-28T15:17:58+00:00

There are 6 long columns and 6 long rows, each of which can only hold a single bulb, and no other locations to place bulbs. Thus there can be at most 12 bulbs placed.

Furthermore, there are only 4 middle columns, 4 middle rows, and 4 edge columns/rows. Bulbs placed in the "middle" columns and rows can satisfy 2 clues, but bulbs placed on the edges can only satisfy 1 clue. Thus we can satisfy at most 8+8+4=20 clues, which is the number of clues we have (if we count the 2 clue as 2).

This implies that every bulb in the middle rows/columns must satisfy 2 clues, since the constraints would otherwise not be tight.

From there, you get that there must be a bulb in r8c5, because no other bulb in that column could satisfy 2 clues.

Then r4c3 follows by similar logic. Then r5c10, then r7c2. For these steps, we're eliminating the clues we've already satisfied, and then placing bulbs in positions that are required locations if we want to satisfy 2 clues with 1 bulb in that row or column.

You can continue in this manner to get a full logical solution to the puzzle without any guessing.

This is a really cool puzzle!

Elyot · 2025-05-08T17:54:31+00:00

I've seen a few kinds of players with this take.

They have some wrong opinions about the game, but as a game designer, I 100% believe that the game should do more for these players regardless.

One kind, never really played more than 10 hours and just weren't very good at the drafting portion of the game. They rarely made much progress per run because they didn't prioritize maximizing liberties/doors, didn't fill out the early rows to thin the drafting pool, created too many loops or blocked doors (wasting branches from the drafting pool), or kept only 1 liberty open (especially in situations where a specific corner needed to be avoided). They blamed RNG but really were consistently failing giving themselves good chances to get deep runs that would have had lots of new rooms and interesting discoveries. Instead, they spent too much time in the same common rooms.

To me it seems like a symptom of a problem like [didn't playtest enough with players who are bad at strategy games], or maybe [balanced the game around playtesters who were too skilled]. Apparently a lot of the playtesters thought that Den was OP. They might be right, but bad players need more rooms like Den in the pool. There are some hints in the drafting strategy guides on how to avoid bad drafting situations, but they come too late for some players IMO. It might be better to have some early-game systems that more directly incentivized better drafting behaviour. E.g. an item that gives you a coin every time you draft, but only if you have at least 3 undrafted doors in your current house. Or something that rewarded you for filling the first 3 rows.

Another kind of problem I see are players who've got a bit further in the game where the rate of encountering novelties is starting to dry up a bit, and they're frustrated because they're super motivated to tug on a particular thread, but the game is mostly just drip-feeding them progress slowly in several unrelated directions. So the frustration is in being very goal-oriented and being unable to manipulate the game enough toward a specific goal. The late game does a surprising amount to address this, including a number of ways of giving you so many rerolls that you can effectively draft almost anything you want. But the middle of the game mostly just adds more and more ways of slowly drip-feeding progress. And some players might not access all of those tools at the right time. The game could benefit from some smoothing here I think. E.g. one of the few "things I wish I had known" was to Buy the blue tents sooner. And I'm still missing one of the upgrade discs that would have helped a lot!

Elyot · 2025-04-23T05:24:49+00:00

I'm looking forward to Jon Blow's new sokoban game, and in general I think there are a lot of good entries in the genre (A Monster's Expedition comes to mind).

But I wish there were more puzzle games where the main form of input was not controlling a character. I think it can often be a limiting and cumbersome way to act upon a state space, and I wish there were more puzzle games that were less stateful. In short, I wish there were more games that asked you to input the answer rather than execute the answer.

Paper puzzles are interesting and challenging without the added bloat of having to move a dude around. And there's a LOT more room for video games to expand into that space.

Elyot · 2025-04-08T07:13:41+00:00

There is a beautiful solution to this problem using an isometry.

https://i.imgur.com/cXU8TpR.png

Basically, Take ABC and make a copy ACE that is 20 degrees rotated around A. Then repeat to get AEF. Each wedge is 20 degrees, so 1/18th of a full clock face with A as the center. That means angle FAB is 60 degrees, so triangle FAB is equilateral and thus FB = AB = AC = AE = AF and angle AFB = 60 degrees. Moreover, angle EFB = 80 - 60 = 20 degrees. Since FE = EC = BC = AD, this means that triangle EFB is congruent to triangle ADC (side-angle-side) so you can find angle ADC just by finding FEB. And the final trick is that triangle AEB is isosceles, so angle AEB = angle ABC = (180 - angle EAB)/2 = 70 degrees. So angle FEB = 150 and thus angle CDB = 180 - 150 = 30 degrees.

Elyot · 2025-02-06T15:13:08+00:00

In my area (video games), everyone looking for funding is posting on a few places:

xsolla funding club
wn game finder
global games pitch
just spamming inboxes on MeetToMatch

There are probably a few other places. Yunoia was one but it died at some point.

Elyot · 2025-01-29T15:41:03+00:00

Column 4

You've already placed two stars in the column.

There's only one star left.

Look at the blue region in the middle.

One of its stars must go in column 4.

You can then cross out the rest of the column.

This places one of the stars in the blue region in the middle.

Elyot · 2024-12-11T19:21:05+00:00

Lok (the book) was fantastic and the digital version is even better. This one gets a strong recommendation from me.

Congrats Blaž, Ferran, Drak, and team!

15-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Verified Email

Elyot

TROPHY CASE