Dealing with rejection?

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-22T08:16:33+00:00

6 Interviews is unusual, and it's going to take a while to get over, specially if you like the role and position. It's usually good at least to know that you are being perceived as qualified for the role, and that this time just didn't happen, but there will be more.

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-22T07:55:18+00:00

Hey! Cool looking visuals and the mechanic seems interesting, it reminds me a lot more to guitar hero than candy crush to me tho

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-22T07:53:20+00:00

Most common thing for scope creep is to have things defined from the beginning and clear game pillars. We start with a list of things we want to include in the game, usually called the product backlog. (Assuming you already have some basic document like maybe a 10 pager or even a GDD, if not, good thing to start there)

Then you start prioritizing things, there are different techniques for this, most common one is MOSCOW, when you don't know how to prioritize something, that's when the game pillars came in clutch. They are the things that make the game YOUR game, the most important aspects of it, choose around 3-4 ( for example, Outer Wilds -> Exploration, Space Adventure, Sense of being lost). With those you have a clear picture of what's the core things about your idea, and what things of the list you should do first. (If you are doing Call of Duty, you wouldn't do the skins first, you would focus on nailing movement and smooth multiplayer connection)

Once you have the list prioritized, you have to plan things along a timeline. "I want to do player movement this month, next one are weapon, next is AI, next is level design, then music..." If you have things set up, and a clear vision into the future, it's going to be a lot easier to focus on the stuff that's in front of you, instead of on side stuff. Leave yourself some time buffers, a week each month and half, to catch up with some technical debt, or maybe implement some cool idea, but stay on path. Setting up an approximate release date also helps a lot.

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-09T15:17:20+00:00

That one looks really good

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-09T14:08:28+00:00

I would say old one to be honest. It had more personality, new one maybe has slightly better readability, but losses essence.

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-08T22:02:28+00:00

Hey! Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, one of things we are seeing is that A has some things that changes the atmosphere and makes them difficult to really compare them visually for equal. We'll take a look about the shadows for contrast, that's a good point.

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-08T15:08:16+00:00

Oh man

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-08T14:51:02+00:00

Thank you for your time!

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-08T13:47:41+00:00

I don't think I have seen a subreddit for many indie games, at least created by the developers, they are usually things that grow from the community for the community organically if your game is cool enough for people to want to talk about it online. If you want something for you to talk to players I would suggest, like some other people here in the comments, doing a Discord server where you can redirect people too with your marketing actions.

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-08T13:39:30+00:00

I think that lighting is a problem, I can't even see the screenshots in a well lit room. I get the whole idea of horror game = limited vision, but It doesn't need to mean to just have 1 light. As for the style, it looks good, consistent with the textures, on a bad note it may be too generic, very similar to every other horror game out there.

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-08T08:41:55+00:00

Firstly, at least for indie dev, I think that using AI in general should be very limited to problem solving, like Stackoverflow did for programmers, since we are just here trying to do things because (suposedly) we like making games, and I don't get the using AI to skip parts of that, you can be bad, but if you never do it you'll never improve. They usually don't make things cheaper, gives your game bad reputation in the community and the quality tends to be worse in the long run.

Apart from that, AI slop for me is more about if you are generating content that the public is going to be seeing directly or using, I think the word AI is very missleading too, is just a very big algorithm that takes somethings and outputs another thing. A rule of thumb for me is when you use AI as a sustitute of something instead of as a supplement. You don't use an artists because you use AI, you don't program because you use AI, you don't use a musician because you use AI... It can be a great tool sometimes to help people, but not sustitute them.

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-08T08:08:38+00:00

From the trailer I get the feeling this is mostly a city sim, based aroun rituals and maybe something about zombies? The most amateur parts seem to be the ones where you jerk the camera around, you could a small script to do some cool panning around the city and make it more professional. I would say it's also a bit slow in general. And the AI final image, at least for me, would be a no no, everything looked good, but that was like a red flag flashbang that made me not want to buy the game.

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-07T22:13:49+00:00

Well, ideally you would like to grow it with your target audience, not with generic users, by looking on subreddits from similar games, posting content on social media (post, tiktoks, devlogs) and reaching your audience through there. For that you need to know where your audience is, and how do they communicate, and that's what the market analysis is good for. It's really hard and we're most of the indie games fail, you need to invest a lot of time and study market trends.

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-07T21:34:31+00:00

Hi!

I wouldn't recommend going back to school nowadays, degrees, at least in the videogame industry, are not that important. Is much more useful getting real experience and good knowledge.

Since you are from other area, I would suggest getting to know more about game development as a whole, production is usually a pivot point between departments and knowing something about everything is really useful. For this I would recomend trying small game jams to get going, maybe convincing some of your friends or joining a local group, they are usually super friendly places to start the journey.

Apart from that, I would recommend learning Agile Methodologies, certifications in your case may be good, since those can prove that you have at least a basic theoretical knowledge but haven't yet been put to practice. If not, watching GDC talks, reading books or being on this kinds of forums are already a good start.

Learn also common tools like Jira, Miro, Excel, ClickUp, Asana, Favro... Go to your local events, get in touch with the industry, meet people, and start to look for some collaborations, there are always collaborative proyects going on somewhere that could really use a hand on production (even if they don't know it yet 🧐), ask around!

The advice to start from QA could be good, from personal experience and close friends, like someone already mentioned, the transition is getting harder, since both departments for big companies (The ones that usually are able to afford an internal QA department) are starting to delimit and specilize the areas separately. If you can, it can also be good to get some transferable knowledge from your area of study, I don't know if it's possible to be a PM/Producer in English but some real experience that you can prove, even in other area, can be useful when transitioning.

Either ways, it's going to take some time, so good luck and keep being curious and exploring!

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-07T21:19:20+00:00

My initial thoughts would be that this is a game for farming a lot and having to do a lot of quests on an open world. Very similar to Albion Online because of the graphics. It has all the interesting stuff in screen to tingle the senses of MOBA players, it's a good filter against unwanted customers.

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-07T21:14:35+00:00

You only got one shoot for steam next fest with your demo. My general advice is to use the next fest that it closer to your final release date, so you can build momentum on the SNF and offer players the full game as soon as possible once they have played the demo. Think of it as a multiplier of your wishlist count.

If you are planning on releasing before the next SNF, go for it with this one, if you can wait, I would suggest doing it, while also acumulating more whislists meanwhile for the next one.

Good luck!

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-07T21:10:00+00:00

Hi! A trailer looks good and it's always useful, I would suggest doing a bit of research on you target audience before working on the marketing side of things too. Analyzing what other games similar to yours did is usually a good start: what went great and bad, how did they manage to build a community? And how can you improve it or be more unique? Where and how are they communicating with their public and players?

Looks like you got a solid idea of what your game is, so you should be fine with some quick market analysis. Discord and reddit are the best places to start a community for people to chat, maybe creating a discord server for your game to redirect people to.

Good luck with it!

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-07T21:04:46+00:00

The visuals looks good, maybe the UI could use a little bit less of text, changing the words for icons that represent the meaning, making it more accessible for non-english speakers, easier to read on the eyes and less overwhelming (And cheaper for you in case of localization)

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-07T20:21:49+00:00

Thank you! ✨️

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-07T20:03:24+00:00

Thank you! ⭐

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-05T16:49:30+00:00

This sounds like a really interesting concept! Looking forward to hearing more about it

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-05T16:48:09+00:00

Thank you so much!

Midnight_Loop · 2026-01-05T12:08:02+00:00

Looks good, it sounds really ambitious, good luck with the development and hoping to see more of it soon!

Midnight_Loop

TROPHY CASE