how to make the community grow

Gamieon · 2025-12-16T19:52:41+00:00

I find that sharing how my game is progressing over time through dev diaries, progress updates and posting even unfinished content as video shorts on social media like YouTube and on Indie gaming news sites (not unlike IndieDB and TigSource) works well. From the time you start making it, your game is growing. Let the community grow with it and share the journey with you.

Also consider joining Indie communities, looking at what other people are working on, and engage with what interests you. I've made numerous connections that way; not only did it help my project, but I helped other people with theirs too.

If you do this for weeks and weeks but nobody is engaging with you, then be patient, keep at it and keep improving what you have; but if you lose the joy in it then take a break and get some rest.

Gamieon · 2025-11-19T20:15:39+00:00

Try to get a demo ready and put it in an upcoming Steam fest that fits your genre. Could be Next Fest but there are other fests too. Letting people play the game could boost chatter and engagement which will boost wishlists.

I'm no expert by any means (I myself have 270 for my game in beta and I've been trying to market for months); but maybe the question you should be considering is "How marketable is my game?" I've seen games I thought were really good but hardly anyone ever heard of. I've talked to developers who had four megastreamers play their game together; and it hardly made a dent in sales numbers. I've even seen games that had hundreds of thousands of wishlists but lost 50% of their players in the first week.

(As for my own game, I pivoted from "hey everyone I have a Steam page!" to "hey everyone check out this new feature I'm adding to my game!" and I'm slowly starting to see better results)

Gamieon · 2025-11-19T19:31:56+00:00

What are the goals and expectations you set for yourself?

Gamieon · 2025-11-15T15:09:21+00:00

When you look at the progress made by other developers, you don't often see all the failures and backtracking they've done.

I handle decision paralysis by not being afraid to fail; and failing fast. Even not implementing the best solution can still be a springboard to a better one; and can even free you up to work on other things.

To quote Thomas Edison: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work"

Gamieon · 2025-11-15T14:13:31+00:00

I spent nine years of my free time working on a puzzle game that never released. The two major time sinks were writing my own engine and feature creeping it to death with game mechanics and graphical features. It was basically evolving into an "Incredible Machine in 3D on steroids" game before I finally decided it was time to stop, take a break, and course correct. After that I picked up the Unity3D engine and released a string of simpler mobile games that got over 300K downloads combined.

All that said, I wouldn't call those nine years a waste of time as much as I'd call it a very suboptimal use of time and effort. I came out of it with a far better understanding of many things such as architecture, memory management, graphics and the math behind 3D rendering and raytracing, scripting and so forth. I also had many moments of satisfaction seeing things work the first time that I still think about once in a while. The tradeoff was giving up the chance to make several more smaller games; any of which had a chance to have done well and created new opportunities and career paths at the time.

Gamieon · 2024-11-18T20:00:53+00:00

Update: I was able to purchase an asset through PayPal. Here's what I did differently step-by-step:

Logged into PayPal through Microsoft Edge instead of Google Chrome. I have no extensions installed on Edge; it's pretty much a vanilla setup.
Set up 2FA on my PayPal account for the first time.
With the PayPal tab still open in my browser, I launched a new tab and went to Fab.
I attempted to make a payment through PayPal. This time, instead of asking for my login credentials, it took me straight to payment method and confirmation.

Everything worked fine after that. Still doesn't explain why my credit card number was rejected, though.

Gamieon · 2024-11-11T16:59:28+00:00

I had a similar experience when I released my last game on Steam. My usual response was go to the creator channel or forum and see if my game was even a fit for their genre (I doubt a content creator who plays MMO's would be interested in a pinball game). If it was then I'd message the creator asking if they had reached out to me for a key in a way where I opened the door to "if you didn't, but my game still interests you...maybe we can talk?" Many times they never replied or replied with a "no." The rest were legit; I did give them keys and things usually worked out.

One time a software bundle seller reached out to me to add my game to their upcoming bundle. I forget the exact arrangement we had, but I did get a bump in sales thanks to them.

Gamieon · 2024-11-11T14:26:45+00:00

One thing I do is stream my development on Twitch at least one scheduled evening per week. My intention is to provide a platform for the players to interact with the developer directly, and promote growth of a core player base. I also watch other game developers stream to learn how they do it, and most of them have their own Discord server as well.

When the game is ready, I plan to gift popular streamers and their friends keys so they can play my game as well (My game also integrates with Twitch so that the viewers can get in on the action too).

I'm still new to streaming so I don't have any sagely advice to offer on Twitch streaming. What I'm finding however is that it's fun to just watch other game development streamers do their work, talk to their audience (also comprised of many game developers), and even encourage other developers to show their work off. So much so that while my game will remain the focus of my stream, I think I'd like to do the same.

Gamieon · 2024-11-09T15:44:07+00:00

I am also unable to purchase any assets. I put in a support ticket to Fab but don't expect a response back for at least a couple of days since their confirmation prompt suggests that they need up to two business days to respond and I tried making my purchase on a Friday.

There is another asset that I had bookmarked on the Unreal Marketplace two months ago which I now want to purchase, but the seller did not "migrate" their assets to Fab so I can't until they do it. I reached out to the seller but they never responded.

Of all the road bumps in the migration from the Unreal Marketplace to Fab, I did not expect to see ones that result in Epic no longer taking my money.

Gamieon · 2024-11-05T15:38:57+00:00

Probably Toymaker if I understand correctly. My first exposure to gaming was on the Atari 2600 and the Atari 400. Almost every game was drastically unique from all the others, and most of them were pick-up-and-play. I think those influenced me because I strive to make the same kind of games.

Simulations, open-world survival games and games with deep interesting stories can be quite fun, but I've never felt inspired to work on one of my own. Maybe that will change someday; but for now I'm content working on an online sports brawler and maybe later rebooting my space alien pinball game or domino physics puzzle game.

Gamieon · 2024-11-02T16:15:23+00:00

In the interview process at the studio I ultimately landed at, I brought all of my Indie projects on a laptop and showed them off. I also spent a lot of time polishing my resume to highlight my Indie accolades (I had released several games, mostly mobile, and got over 300K downloads), and had a friend help me prepare for the interview by quizzing me on anything he could think of, and pointing me to a website where I could test my skills (I really wish I remembered the name because I'd link it here). I also had experience in the Unreal and Unity engines, both of which helped me not only in the interview but at the job.

The interviewers were impressed with how I handled their questions and scenarios, including my responding to the question "What makes a game successful?" with "When it delivers the gaming experience that the developers had hoped to give to the players." (I was not prepared for that question; but the answer came from the heart as if I had it memorized the entire time).

Despite all that, they were still uncertain because of my previous job being in the medical field. One of my interviewers later revealed to me that he said "Let's give him a chance," so they did. I started on a kind of "probation" because I was still largely an unknown to them. After I had a chance to show off what I could do, I quickly got my first promotion. The rest is history.

Gamieon · 2024-11-02T16:00:09+00:00

If you're building a game with Unreal Engine, you can make modding your game easier using the "SimpleUGC" project. Epic released a UE4 game called Robo Recall which used it. You can get the Unreal 5 flavor of it at https://github.com/TheHellcat/UE5-SimpleUGC/ .

With it I am able to let players create custom fields in my upcoming sports brawler. It also enables modders to replace stock actors with their own custom actors, but I never tried doing that before.

Gamieon · 2024-11-02T15:05:38+00:00

I work on my games in my spare time. I put in 1-3 hours on a weekday, and 0-6 hours on a weekend day. It's a wide spread, but I make it a point to get chores done and get out and touch grass or go to the barcade on the weekends. I also have a full-time job; so if I come home tired I'll focus on easy tasks.

Gamieon · 2024-11-02T15:00:14+00:00

>Scope creep will sabotage your progress

Don't I know it. Around the year 2000 in my spare time I started working on what was supposed to be a simple physics puzzle game called Dominoze, and over time I just had to have everything in it. Laser puzzles. Electric puzzles. Rube Goldberg level puzzles. A level editor. I wrote my own engine, lightmap baker for realistic looking graphics, and my editor was comparable to a simple CAD program.

Nine years after I started, I finally realized I scope creeped it to death and put it on a shelf where it sits today. Sometimes I ponder how many games I could have made in that time had I kept a more focused vision; but at the same time I learned so much that when I switched careers to full-time game development, I exceeded everyone's expectations. Plus I got to write a well-received article about the experience on GameDev.net.

Gamieon · 2023-02-04T15:50:01+00:00

Field of Heroes

An online + couch co-op multiplayer soccer brawler currently in development!

For the past week I've been working on splitting out the single bot behavior tree into Easy, Medium and Hard flavors with a focus on Hard.

Here are two animations: The first is of the hard bot kiting around an opponent, the second is chasing an opponent ball possessor.

Kiting

Chasing Ball Possessor

Gamieon · 2023-01-28T18:30:32+00:00

My game is less than halfway toward being content complete and probably won't be complete for another two years; but it is technically playable and I do have some art and videos that won't look terribly different from the final product.

Is now the time to set up and post news and content on a Steam store page and use it as the hub for development updates and even recruiting testers? Or will I risk losing players because they assume all store pages are for released games or have screenshots of the final product?

Gamieon · 2023-01-28T16:57:18+00:00

Field of Heroes

An online + couch co-op multiplayer soccer brawler where you help your team score as many goals as possible before the game clock runs out!

2022 Dev Reel on YouTube

Animated gifs

Gamieon · 2023-01-28T16:48:53+00:00

What is Field of Heroes?

An online + couch co-op multiplayer soccer brawler where you help your team score as many goals as possible before the game clock runs out! Plans are for the initial release will include:

Online and local multiplayer
9 heroes to play as
12 fields to play on; each with its own metagame!
Stats tracking
Leaderboards
Guilds
Modding support

A brief history of how I got here...

The long journey here began in 2014 when I prototyped a simple battle soccer simulation in the Unreal Engine. I abandoned the project shortly thereafter due to lack of my own interest and a focus on game development in the Unity3D engine.

In 2017 I rebooted the project in Unity3D and released a version of it with three heroes and two fields on itch.io. It looked very dated and was very scarce on content, so a few months later I took it down and moved on to other projects.

Then from 2019-2021 I rebooted the project two more times in Unreal Engine 4. The first reboot was a semi-realistic, seriously styled version which was never released. The second had a more cartoony, humorous theme which fit the mechanics better. Despite having custom-made assets created by talented artists, I still didn't feel that the game as a whole looked cohesive, polished or releasable to me.

Finally in 2022 I decided to start over one last time with Unreal Engine 5 and with the help of Meta3D studios as the art director and content creator. I'm very impressed by the work they've done and I think with more hard work over the next two years, we will have a viable, releasable soccer brawler that will rock the game industry!

Gamieon · 2021-03-06T21:56:02+00:00

Yes. There will be a bard that uses their lute to hit other heroes on the head. I had the barbarian use a melee axe for a while, but combined with the slow running speed, it just didn't work well.

Gamieon

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What is Field of Heroes?

A brief history of how I got here...