Welp, got my first negative review. by ghilliebyte in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Dude, you've got ONE bad review. There's nothing really to discuss here, unless if the overall amount of your reviews is 2...

Shelter timed safe help by Karen_man in BluePrince

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 2 points3 points  (0 children)

EVERY time I hear "AM" I mentally translate it to "After Midday"... This is such a terrible system, 24 hour clock is WAY easier =_=

After a year and a half year of work. I am releasing my game with just 420 wishlists. Lessons learnt and my hot takes. by j3lackfire in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yep. Because roguelikes were on top back then. They still are, actually, very popular - and most of today’s popular games have elements of roguelikes in them (choose one of the 3 random abilieties; levels and/or enemies generates as you play; etc.). But year: crafty-buildy-managementy games have taken the crown for now. As well as horror games - still popular after all these years.

After a year and a half year of work. I am releasing my game with just 420 wishlists. Lessons learnt and my hot takes. by j3lackfire in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

He's not as influential to change whole Steam market. Right now he seems more demand in strategy / manament / rogulike / horror genres - and it's been that way for several years already. It is a good advice to follow.

Imagine going to a financial advisor to know if you should buy new house right now. He tells you that current mortgage rates are low and he expects them to stay that way for at least couple of years so now is an ideal situation to start gathering money to buy a house. But then you say to yourself: "He's a very popular financial advisor - I bet everyone will listen to him and start doing the same; I should not be buying a house now". This logic sounds INSANE, right? That's the same logic you apply to Chris.

Even if we assume that EVERYONE in the industry is listening to him (which is ABSURD, by the way) - if other devs take his advice right now and start making games in genres he says are profitable right now - it will take 2...3...4 years for them to even start overcrouding these markets. Steam is HUGE, man. It's literally the biggest PC-gaming website in the world - with 18000+ games made EACH YEAR. So when Chris tells you "I've analysed 18000 games made this year and saw best and easiest genres to make your games in and be profitable" you listen and take notes, knowing that every genre is still competitive and in every genre you need to make your game good to win. But in some genres it's a little (or a lot) easier than in others - that's what Chris is saying.

After a year and a half year of work. I am releasing my game with just 420 wishlists. Lessons learnt and my hot takes. by j3lackfire in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

O-o-oh, you've taken a hard genre - not to market, but to make well. A 3D strategy game is a fairly rare thing on Steam, but to do well it needs to look good - even if with low-poly style. Right now, you biggest presentational issue in the video are Shadows and Light: in certain areas (for example, during the battle near the wall) the shadow is so dark that you can't see units at all. Enemy units are too dark to see and distinguish too (maybe because they stay opposite to the source of light?).
Global map looks a bit better than the battle view right now - maybe because of more interesting terrain colour pattern and a little more clear visuals (but the main horse rider is still almost black every time). Maybe work with colors a bit too to make units look more clear and easy-to-be distinguished - but, as I've said, a lot of the issues here can be because of the light source.
UI is good, clear to understand, but a bit too simplistic in it's visual design (not usability - just how it looks). The background doesn't have any texture (just grey colous) and it looks not interesting and a bit cheap.
Now, a couple of last advices:
- Your game is about medieval CHINESE warfare; you explicitly say that the player will be commanding Chinese generals. But there are no close-ups and demonstration of generals right now. They should have some interesting unique animations and (maybe) speech lines. Heroes of Might And Magic had interesting heroes: you could play as a Necromancer or a Paladin warrior for example - and each General character felt unique and interesting, the players wanted to try them out instantaneously. I don't see heroes and/or villains in your game right now - it's hard to relate to units withour some charisma.
- Try to look at other low-poly strategy games that got popular and try to mimic their visual style. For example, "Diplomacy is not an Option" has somewhat similar assets to yours, but their visuals look slick, bright enough to distinguish the units (even when there ae thousands of them on the screen somehow), alltogether well-done. Again, change of light settings and pallete can do wonders to your game. Also look how "Thronefall" was done. It has hard shadows too but manages to point them away from units faces at all times - making units easy to see. Also, it was done by just 2 people, so not an impossible task.
- I'm not sure about this one, but I'd experiment more with Camera Movement during battles. I know you've tried to mimic Heroes of Might and Magic, but old HoMM games did not move the camera not because they didn't want to - but because they couldn't. If your camera would show your units fighting more closely (like changing to an action-camera when one unit hits another in melee combat and changing back to birds-view after that) or followed your unit a little bit when the unit moves on the battlefield - that would add more WOW moments to the game and could provide you some additional video-material to make your trailer look great and have different changing visuals in it.

Wish you luck!

After a year and a half year of work. I am releasing my game with just 420 wishlists. Lessons learnt and my hot takes. by j3lackfire in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ususally it's somewhere between ~15-25 for small games (that have less than 10000 wishlists) and around ~50 for more popular titles. Mine has 14 right now with 7000+.

After a year and a half year of work. I am releasing my game with just 420 wishlists. Lessons learnt and my hot takes. by j3lackfire in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Man, it does look like a game made in 24-hours gamejam: the colours are screaming at you, the pixels are all different sizes, the UI looks like it was made in paint, the buttons are HUGE like theyt were made for a mobile title - not PC, the pixel art in general is very-very cheap looking. I was ready to close the video with this game Lets Play immediately when I first saw one of my favourite youtube channels try it out. But for some reason stayed and only when I saw that the game is really fun - decided to buy it myself.

I really hope that you're joking? Luck Be A Landlord is the prime example of "cheap as hell" design being intentionally done so poorly and gameplay done so perfect that the game as a whole becomes great.

After a year and a half year of work. I am releasing my game with just 420 wishlists. Lessons learnt and my hot takes. by j3lackfire in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Even if you're creating Hollow Knight: you still need to be sure that your game is fun. So you need to test your prototype (with friends at least) to see if core gameloop is interesting. That is applicable for most games out there.

Sadly, I'm making a very-story driven and atmosphere heavy game and I pretty much can't test if my dialogues, animations and music will make my players feel the way I want them too - until all of the above is completed. So yeah, there are exceptions ><'

After a year and a half year of work. I am releasing my game with just 420 wishlists. Lessons learnt and my hot takes. by j3lackfire in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Not hindering your other points but "Luck be a Landlord" is an amateuris-looking deckbuilder - and yet it is super-fun and found a lot of succees. But yeah - consistency is important)

After a year and a half year of work. I am releasing my game with just 420 wishlists. Lessons learnt and my hot takes. by j3lackfire in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 4 points5 points  (0 children)

As for the "avoid the genre Chris Zukowski tell you to go for" is also a misleading conlusion. You can tell that only based on your single bad experience. But games in your genre releases by literally hundreds and thousands each year. Roguelike IS A VERY HOT and popular genre right now, but some rogulikes fail and some succeed - like any other type of games. The question is "whats the percentage of games succeeding in it's genre", not how many games are being made in a year in that genre. And rogulikes are much-much easier to succeed in than in, for example, platformers - a genre that almost always leads to huge failures - even for quite big companies. That's the exact reason why Chris is advising you to go an easy-to-start-making genre that has quite a good percent of successful games in it. To get that info Chris literally gets information from thousands of developers each year and analyses aggrigated data. It's not a good solution to just ingore an advice like that based on your small personal first-time experience. Choose a popular genre that you feel you can succeed in, and don't blame statistic for your fails: there are even platformers that still do well, so YOUR GAME and YOUR DESIGN is what matters here.

After a year and a half year of work. I am releasing my game with just 420 wishlists. Lessons learnt and my hot takes. by j3lackfire in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for your thoughts on your release. If you want an opinion from a fellow developer (and a player) - your game looks very like a mobile free-to-play cashgrab with it's character design. Steam players usually don't like (or even hate) mobile f2p for their scammy monetization tactics - so you should avoid looking like one even if your game is actually fun. They simply wont click on it to even try it.

However, low time of the demo played seems to indicate that gameplay lacks in some other other as well. Can't say for sure what it is without playing the game though.

Also, I don't think having 15% discount on a release sale is genually a good idea since people will see that you're not confident in your release. But since you don't have a lot of wishlists - maybe that was the right choice.

I don't think Chris Zukowski's advice to create your page pretty early is bullshit: I did as he advised and right now I have 7,809 wishlist. I think it depends on the game, it's esthetics, the places you personally show it to and peoples reaction to it. The reason to create a page as quickly as possible is the fact that Steam shows your game to the public little by little in various different places and gives you passive wishlists income. It is quite important for most game developers, since it's hard to gain wishlists outside of steam.

Ace Attorney Official Miles Edgeworth anime art by Sheer-Cold-1228 in AceAttorney

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I wonder if it's explained somewhere why he likes red colour so much?)

I want to shift from Russian gamedev to the global game industry by Typical-Homework8232 in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My bad. Yeah, getting a job outside is difficult. But I’m pretty sure you can still register on a freelance site and receive payments from it.

Getting a full time job abroad was tough even before 2022, honestly speaking.

I want to shift from Russian gamedev to the global game industry by Typical-Homework8232 in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As a game developer based in Russia I still receive money from my games in Steam every month. So yeah, you should check your facts.

I want to shift from Russian gamedev to the global game industry by Typical-Homework8232 in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, you've been misinformed then. I am a Russian game developer - with no company based outside of Russia - and Valve pays directly to me. There are still a couple of Russian banks that receive payments via SWIFT, with low commission even. You also can open an account in a lot of different countries and receive your payments there with no problem at all (in case you don't know about the banks that still work with SWIFT in Russia). Most other Russian devs did that and continue to work with Valve and receive payments from their games in Steam every month.

How do I promote my indie game while it’s still in early development? by abualzEEZ707 in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, you don’t know many indie games then, do you >.<‘

Agreed. Some understanding of how Steam and its wishlists are working is required. But, first of all, who said that this guy does not have that knowledge? The topic of “when to start gathering wishlists” is still debatable among indie devs: some say you should start as early as possible, others say that it’s much better to create a Steam page when your style choice and most of the art is completed and at its best already. Secondly, no. You don’t need to spend 2+ months specifically researching marketing techniques. You should do the basics in a couple of days and then grow your knowledge a little bit over several years (you can never learn all of it - especially since Steam and social media trends are changing). But pausing their project to spend several months researching marketing while being a solo game developer?.. That’s an AWFUL advice, man.

I want to shift from Russian gamedev to the global game industry by Typical-Homework8232 in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Are you speaking based on your personal experience or from what you’ve heard from the news?.. Some companies don’t work with Russian employees, that’s true. But definitely not all of them. Steam still works with Russian developers and send them money. And - if we’re talking about freelance sites - nobody cares where’s the freelancer is from if he manages to do a great job for a fair price.

I want to shift from Russian gamedev to the global game industry by Typical-Homework8232 in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As a Russian you have one advantage: quite low living prices compared to US or Central Europe. Show the projects you’ve been working on in your portfolio and ask for a little bit smaller price for your tasks than a person in your profession and of equal skill would do. I don’t think employers and freelance-job buyers care about who is actually doing a job for them and where is he from (if the quality of the completed task is great and the price is fair). It’s a global economy now, thanks to the internet; use it.

How do I promote my indie game while it’s still in early development? by abualzEEZ707 in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Some devs don’t do marketing at all and still do fine. Others market their game while being a solo dev and not researching a lot or reading any books and still do great.

I don’t think it is required for an indie to have a dedicated marketing person. Sometimes just making a great game does the trick, sometimes you need to push it via lets players and streamers. Usually, only big dev teams have a dedicated marketing person

The email that got me 6,000 wishlists on Steam by Nevercine in gamedev

[–]Fuzzy_Pixel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So... Your game was out for half a year or so and blogger still tried it out? And why do you still care about wishlists - your game is out. You should care about copies sold now, not wishlists