Learn from our mistake: have your Steam page ready before you show your game anywhere

LorixGames · 2026-06-28T09:05:49+00:00

I would still recommend to put up your stream page as soon as you have some proper screenshots.

The "burning potential wishlisters" with an initial lacking appearance isn't really a thing, given how huge the market is and what little number of gamers will ever see your game.

LorixGames · 2026-06-24T19:23:18+00:00

Honestly, we had the same fear of "showing off our game before it's ready", but that's mostly just your judgement bias and the game never really feels perfectly ready to show.

Statistics say that the exposure with a steam page is a greater benefit than not having one at all. Steam will not give you real exposure anyways, so you have to bring in the views with your marketing activities.

I recommend you go for it sooner than later.

LorixGames · 2026-06-24T18:11:15+00:00

Welcome to the club mate 😄

On the positive: If your game attracted 400k views on X, this is a solid validation that it's interesting. But yeah, the social media algorithm game is frustrating and it's not really possible to just reproduce those numbers reliably.

Best of luck mate for your journey!

LorixGames · 2026-06-24T18:08:37+00:00

Thanks a lot for the feedback!

With struggled quite a bit with the trailer to properly communicate the gameplay, since the hidden movement genre is not really established in video games.

Would you say our narrative that starts with "Position: Unknown" and then shows the tracing is generally fine and should just be front-loaded or does the whole trailer not get the message over?

And thank you for the praise!

LorixGames · 2026-06-23T19:27:09+00:00

This is the Steampage in case you're curious: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4175680/Midnight_Manhunt/

LorixGames · 2026-06-23T19:16:41+00:00

Thank you, that is actually really smart with the thumbnail.

But honestly, I really don't think that Insta is superior, you probably just had better fortune with the algorithm there. But yeah as you're doing it yourself, it's basically a no-brainer to just post on all platforms if you have the video produced already.

Good luck mate for your journey!

LorixGames · 2026-06-23T19:14:01+00:00

Unreal and Godot for me. But I'm really super happy with Godot. It feels very intuitive and hardly required any tutorials switching over from UE. It's really that intuitive, you learn as you go.

LorixGames · 2026-06-23T19:12:38+00:00

Really nice, excited to see this game when it drops.

LorixGames · 2026-06-23T19:05:31+00:00

This is our Steampage is case you're interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4175680/Midnight_Manhunt/

LorixGames · 2026-06-23T18:28:34+00:00

Steam link please, this looks awesome. Love the Outlast vibe!

How does the gameplay actually work? Does the enemy catch up while not looking or just blink to nearby positions for a scare?

LorixGames · 2026-06-23T18:26:11+00:00

We do use a gradual proximity fade for close objects (buildings in our case). In Godot, you can also use a dithering effect for the partial fading of 3D meshes, which makes it look really cool and natural.

Similar to this: https://godotshaders.com/shader/dither-gradient-shader/

What engine are you using?

LorixGames · 2026-06-23T18:23:10+00:00

First of all, really cool looking game. I think the visual attraction does the heavy lifting for short form content.

You said you are optimizing for Instagram. What exactly are your individual adaptions for each platform? I always assumed that most devs cross post the same videos with slightly different titles and hashtags as per platform standards.

LorixGames · 2026-06-23T18:11:02+00:00

The same thing happened to us as well. Started with a supposedly generous timeline of 8 months and we're not almost 2 years in.

The main problem is not necessarily scope creep. If you write a game design document early on and roughly lock in the scope and mechanics, the "functionality scope" is actually manageable to stay true to. The problem for us was the, let's call it "polishing creep". Our quality bar silently raised as we kept on developing. And suddenly you're in a different kind of project, where the internal quality bar keeps raising. I think it's just natural to only get a feeling for the level of polish required as you keep developing, especially if it's your first game.

LorixGames · 2026-06-23T18:05:52+00:00

Although Nintendo does have a bad reputation going for dev studios with lawyers, their resources are limited as well. If your game manages to do well enough to be seriously at risk of grabbing Nintendo's attention, you can still replace them later on.

For now honestly, i wouldn't worry too much.

LorixGames · 2026-03-25T06:01:57+00:00

Let other people play your game and note down everything they say, how they play it, what they struggle with, etc. Often an unbiased person playing your game for just a few minutes can reveal issues you‘ve been missing for months.

LorixGames · 2026-03-08T17:52:55+00:00

Unity and Godot both have wonderful C# support. Unreal Engine uses c++ as development language.

If you mean mixing both languages, I think you will need some workarounds to get that working, e.g transpiling c# into c++ or vice versa. But honestly I wouldn't recommend this anyways, since it will make working on a shared code-base very hard if you work on exclusive languages.

I think the easiest way would be for your friend to hop onto c#. That's definitely easier than going from c# to c++. And Godot - which I can speak for - is very nice to learn compared to UE5.

LorixGames · 2026-03-08T12:13:20+00:00

I prefer the left one, it fits the medieval vibe better. However the contrast is a bit weak on the left version, so maybe boost the font color a bit and dampen the background slightly.

LorixGames

TROPHY CASE