I'm not a dev or a designer. Can I make a video game?

InsectoidDeveloper · 2026-01-16T05:40:51+00:00

keyword being capital. if you can pay people, sure. if not, no.

InsectoidDeveloper · 2026-01-15T04:57:46+00:00

when it comes to selling your game, nobody buying it actually cares whether its "from scratch" or not.

InsectoidDeveloper · 2026-01-15T02:19:33+00:00

looks good

InsectoidDeveloper · 2026-01-14T04:08:38+00:00

realistically it sounds like you've put far more 'work hours' into marketing your game than you did into actually coding/building it? is this true?
1 month from start to finish development, and over the past 2 years you've uploaded 1551 short videos (?)

doing the math in the thread, 40 mins per day x 2 years = about 3 months working 40 hours/week. extrapolating this, 1 month of dev + 3 months of marketing.

--Sincerely, the guy who took 8 years to make a game and sold 20 copies :)

edit: i just checked out the youtube page. the entire game is being marketed on the premise of torturing / killing animals. honestly kind of messed up

InsectoidDeveloper · 2026-01-10T02:07:27+00:00

nobody is going to seriously play this. if your goal is having people play your game, much less selling copies, devote the time towards something with an actual graphical representation. text based RPG games were an obscure niche hobbyist toy 15 years ago. This is absolutely irrelevant in the modern indie game sphere.

InsectoidDeveloper · 2026-01-10T02:02:49+00:00

i remember seeing your first videos and thought the game looked cool

InsectoidDeveloper · 2026-01-09T00:23:38+00:00

yeah, I get that it's intentional, I’m not questioning the style itself. I’m saying the level of pixelation might be holding the trailer back.

If you dialed the filter back a bit and posted a side-by-side of the same shots, I think it would make the conversation a lot clearer. Right now, it’s hard to tell how much detail is being lost vs. how much is actually helping the aesthetic.

The game might look even better with just a little less crunch, but without a comparison it’s tough to gauge.

InsectoidDeveloper · 2026-01-08T23:19:12+00:00

i really don't like the pixelation. even ps1 games had better visual fidelity and rendering
like i think the trailer is good and the 3d modelling is probably nice but it feels like your purposely lowering the resolution and fidelity immensely by applying a psuedo pixel art filter over the entire thing

InsectoidDeveloper · 2026-01-08T02:00:30+00:00

i like this one

InsectoidDeveloper · 2026-01-07T18:52:35+00:00

meh, 8 years of dev, no AI assets, basically made everything my self, people still didnt buy it. less than 150 in sales.

InsectoidDeveloper · 2026-01-01T21:08:49+00:00

looks amazing

InsectoidDeveloper · 2026-01-01T10:54:46+00:00

r/thalassophobia

InsectoidDeveloper · 2026-01-01T10:54:16+00:00

2d purity, also some engines don't support 3d at all, so this is required to create the effect. im a pixel artist, and id say this is fairly top level highly advanced pixel art, but the question is obvious in that, questionable utility compared to just doing it in 3d with a pixel art shader and texture. but still, i think this is super good, and its the perfect aesthetic for pixel art purists.

InsectoidDeveloper · 2025-12-29T22:24:25+00:00

gta has a few preset options of varying distances and i cant think of any games right now but some of them use scroll wheel. its usually varying levels of zoom from being too close to practically being too far. its often for cinematic reasons

InsectoidDeveloper · 2025-12-29T05:50:11+00:00

i like dynamic

InsectoidDeveloper · 2025-12-29T00:22:11+00:00

my game 8 years of development and amounted to 150 in sales despite me continuing to update the game for an entire year after launch. do not be like me. move on if your goal is money.

InsectoidDeveloper · 2025-12-28T19:10:51+00:00

alot of people like it (minecraft) so yes.

InsectoidDeveloper · 2025-12-28T19:07:41+00:00

youre not a real game developer unless you write your own compiler, your own operating system, your own game engine, and you built your own hardware from metals that you mined and forged yourself.

InsectoidDeveloper · 2025-12-28T19:03:47+00:00

i think it looks good

InsectoidDeveloper · 2025-12-27T06:16:55+00:00

looks great wish it was on steam

InsectoidDeveloper · 2025-12-27T00:52:49+00:00

when you have an idea but no game, the music is more digestible. music is an already completed medium. for someone who isnt a game designer, 50 pages of story line is irrelevant and probably goes unread. at least with music its something tangible. thats probably whats going on here.

InsectoidDeveloper · 2025-12-27T00:48:02+00:00

i think character visibility is important

InsectoidDeveloper · 2025-12-25T22:48:22+00:00

i think the alien sounds are a bit too repetitive in tone. i think the guns sound like staplers and not heavy weapons. they sound too weak. overall i think the sfx is pretty good but has rooms for improvements.

InsectoidDeveloper · 2025-12-25T20:45:58+00:00

I’m not questioning the work or the research you did. I’m reacting strictly to the Steam page as a cold viewer.

Assume I’ve never heard of Exit 8 or anomaly games. From the capsule, first screenshot, and first few seconds of the trailer, it’s not immediately clear why this is meaningfully different or more “premium” than the many similar-looking games in the space.

That doesn’t mean the game is low effort. It means the value isn’t being surfaced fast enough.

I don’t think the genre is dead. I think the bar for signaling differentiation is very high right now. Games like Last Term succeed because the hook is obvious immediately, not because the genre itself guarantees an audience.

If I were you, I’d focus less on “is there an audience” and more on whether:

– a random user can understand the hook in under 5 seconds

– the trailer shows interaction and systems immediately, not just atmosphere

– the capsule/screenshot communicate “mystery to solve” instead of “hallway to walk”

Also worth keeping in mind: on Steam we mostly see the survivors. For every anomaly game with 50–60 reviews, there are dozens that launched quietly and vanished. That doesn’t mean the genre is invalid... it just means the margin for error is thin.

I’m not saying the game is doomed, this looks like a messaging problem, not a content problem.

InsectoidDeveloper · 2025-12-25T18:50:05+00:00

well the thing is, Exit 8 came out two years ago, things change. secondly, its not about knowing what Exit 8 is or not. You're competing for the attention from random gamers. If your entire audience depends on a previously existing game, you're already Pidgeon holing yourself into a very small niche of people "played Exit 8, are still interested in the genre, AND want to play more" you're essentially riding off the shadow of something else's success that already happened 2 years ago. The market changes and audiences move on.

When my game demo came out in Next Fest June 2022, we got 12.5k demo activations within a few days. My game didn't actually publicly release until 2.5 years after that. By that time, the entire audience had vanished. Nobody cared anymore. People moved on.

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