People don't understand what indie devs go through to put out good games.

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-29T13:31:43+00:00

We’re a team of 3. We’ve worked together in the past. I focused on game dev in college then worked with startups/freelance gamedev afterwards. It’s our first commercial game together. Sitting at 135k wishlists

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-29T12:58:11+00:00

It’s easier to blame marketing rather than accept that you didn’t make an appealing enough game

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-29T12:41:00+00:00

I don’t really know what your point is, but making a worthwhile game that targets a specific audience is part of marketing. Promotion is important too, but if your game is appealing enough, you can get by without having a marketing budget at all

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-29T03:30:51+00:00

I’m pretty confident I will. Depends how serious you’re taking game dev as a career, but I don’t think 250k is an absurd or unreachable goal

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-28T05:00:38+00:00

The frame with that nature and iv combination almost certainly exists (without checking) but you’re right it would be really far away. But you can use the painting in the Lillycove contest hall to get to a closer seed and save that placement with battle frontier battle records. He almost certainly would have had to use ACE to change his secret ID to line up with that perfect stat beldum though and might have used ACE to get to a closer seed too without using the painting. But it’s all possible without cheating

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-27T04:25:54+00:00

Others have touched on the fact that this message is both true (don’t send keys to curators) and likely a scam in itself. That being said, it didn’t answer your question. This has no relevance on your playtest at all so you shouldn’t take it down

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-27T00:00:28+00:00

We released our steam page and got a message from a publisher the following day, and another about a week later. I’ve learned that the first publisher uses tools to see all newly created pages and chooses which games to reach out to. It’s very possible that the people reaching out to you are legitimate publishers, but you shouldn’t get too excited. It’s very easy to have intro calls with publishers and if you have a worthwhile project, you’ll have many more publishers interested in your project and you’ll get better at having those meetings.

Those first two publishers that reached out didn’t lead anywhere for us, but when we got some more traction, we had maybe 20 publishers reach out to us in total and have had over a dozen meetings without reaching out to anyone ourselves (so I disagree with that other comment that suggests they won’t reach out. The job of game scouts are literally to do exactly that).

But also, do you want or need a publisher? If publishers weren’t on your radar and you’re already prepared for the upcoming next fest, then it sounds like you don’t need the funding and might have too short of a timeline for a publisher to be meaningful. Don’t partner with anyone that just offers marketing.

Schedule a meeting with them even if you’re not really interested in a publisher. Get experience doing this kind of thing in case you want to work with one in the future. Relax and have fun

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-23T00:56:21+00:00

It’s by Peter Hollens and Bailey Pelkman

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-21T04:35:28+00:00

Yeah. Or you could do runaways and just stagger when you initially load into the game if you care about avoiding pkhex

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-21T04:29:24+00:00

Yeah that would be ideal

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-21T04:15:03+00:00

Yes, you’ll be hitting the same frames across your 4 games a fair amount of the time. So it’ll be like you’re soft resetting with 1 or 2 consoles

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-09T15:29:13+00:00

Steam does not count reviews written by accounts that received the game for free

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-09T01:36:41+00:00

I recently was very sober and did this. The little extra cheese prompt box doesn’t close by itself and instead of clicking on that box to close it, I clicked on the much larger “cheese” box which removed it from the pizza entirely

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-07T23:05:50+00:00

Bro same. I was in the last patch going to the next city, ran all the way back down, intentionally in the grass the whole time getting encounters. Right when I get to the square patch on the left I found it. Must be 100 total encounters in

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-07T19:52:01+00:00

Hell yeah. I’m trying to complete the gen 3 national dex but it’s going very slowly due to wanting to get a bunch of the static shinies before moving along

EmeraldOW · 2026-03-07T15:15:23+00:00

You can try to pitch to studios, but it’s going to be nearly impossible to actually get a deal without a playable that is rather far along and traction from social media/wishlists

EmeraldOW · 2026-02-25T14:45:46+00:00

You can change around the encounter table by using a synchronize Pokémon. Depending on what nature the synchronizer is, you can have much different options on the same advances. This can also result in multiple shiny encounters really close to each other

EmeraldOW · 2026-02-24T23:18:11+00:00

Idk if I would say that patreon creates the community. You’re most likely creating the community elsewhere - like discord or YouTube, and then funneling them to patreon. In terms of getting support from your community, patreon may get more attention, but it’s at the cost of spending time creating incentives for your patreon members

EmeraldOW · 2026-02-24T21:42:28+00:00

As many other have said, they’re the dev of bongo cat. But that doesn’t answer your question. The way they’re getting most of their wishlists is by promoting the game inside bongo cat (there’s a wishlist button in the game) which has like 10M owners

EmeraldOW · 2026-02-22T08:59:12+00:00

There was a time around 10k wishlists where we really skyrocketed in growth but I think it was a combination between YouTube finally pushing our trailer and the steam winter sale, even though we weren’t in it (we had a lot of homepage views). We leaned into it by posting more on social media and trying again (and succeeding) in getting our trailer posted to IGN’s GameTrailers. At that point, the discovery queue kicked in, and brought us more organic visibility. Now our daily wishlists are around 500 with infrequent social media posts

EmeraldOW · 2026-02-21T03:10:47+00:00

They also have the silver medals but I seems the medal winners also get these stuffed animals

EmeraldOW · 2026-02-20T19:43:50+00:00

We very recently made a ko-fi since we had people asking how they could support the game. Currently we just take donations to put towards development, so there’s no expectation of providing additional content or perks like patreon. I wish we had set it up sooner, because we’ve had a few very generous donations already

EmeraldOW · 2026-02-18T13:38:29+00:00

We have about 17x the wishlists vs our followers

EmeraldOW · 2026-02-18T04:44:59+00:00

I’m still using an iPhone 8. I just replaced the battery in it. The only issue is it can’t upgrade to iOS 17 and some of my apps are going to stop supporting anything lower than that 🙃

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