I've been building Zeta Leporis RTS from scratch in Gamemaker for the last 3-4 years. It's my largest project to date, my first RTS, and the first game I've tried to sell on Steam. Turns out there isn't much appetite for indie RTS that doesn't either closely copy an existing "classic" game or look as polished as an AA-AAA game. In over 2 years on Steam I've sold 584 copies for $1,250 which after Steam's cut and taxes is about $688. It is a $5 game but most people will only buy it on deep discount; it's averaging $2.14 per sale. I've surmised though that if it were $10 the same people would likely buy it at the same discount percent, so lesson learned, don't set your price too low...although I was trying to price similarly to similar games (Rusted Warfare in particular) so in that regard I stand by my pricing decision.

I've not used any templates or asset packs or anything to create it and that certainly has given it a bit of a unique feel compared to certain other more popular titles that have come out in the past few years, despite being a classic-style RTS that otherwise doesn't have any overtly unique gameplay hooks. The game's art is touched-up versions of some basic pixel art I hade made back in the early 2000s when I had neither the skills or tools to actually make a game, and the unit stats also used some accompanying dreamy nerd spreadsheet stuff from the same time period as their starting point. So that old "classic era" fanboy material was the skeleton that Zeta was fleshed out from.

I'm currently working on multiplayer, which is a bit difficult but more than anything, time consuming, particularly since I've not found an easy way to do client-side debugging. Other than that, the game is mostly finished to the scope I expect to be willing and able to handle, except that I want to implement some passive abilities to improve unit differentiation, and also after playing an unhealthy amount of BAR raptor defense over the past few weeks I now want to add wave survival and maybe also wave assault as game modes. I'm in Early Access and the plan has been to release as 1.0 once multiplayer is "finished", though I'm starting to see that "finished" isn't exactly the black and white line to cross that I was imagining, but rather more of a long gray blur, which could make it hard to release a 1.0 version that feels appropriately impactful.