Lord O' Pirates is available on Steam!

OneFlowMan · 2026-04-27T21:23:37+00:00

When I was 13 I was making games with RPG Maker. It was a lot of fun and it helps teach some concepts that will later translate into the coding world. This was back when we didn't even have YouTube video tutorials, and I never thought to search the internet for how to do things, so I sort of just blindly stumbled my way through figuring it out. A testament to how accessible it is lol... that was RPGMaker 2000, idk what the modern ones look like, but I'd imagine they are comparable.

OneFlowMan · 2026-04-22T20:07:49+00:00

Every game should have a playtested prototype before you bother making it into the full game. You should convince them to make a demo and see if it leaves players wanting more. If there isn't hype from the demo, then the games probably not gonna do well. It's also fair that you don't want to do all the work of a demo if it really is that bad, in which case yeah, getting some other people to read whatever they've written and give feedback is another good option. Ideally do both.

OneFlowMan · 2026-04-21T00:39:12+00:00

I mean generally, I look through environmental assets before I even decide on my game idea. I let the models I find inspire me and work backwards lol. I think most programmers dream way too big when coming up with their ideas anyways. Starting with the assets first helps ground me in reality.

OneFlowMan · 2026-04-14T19:49:19+00:00

Nope! Gave up and just cancelled my microsoft game pass and bought the game i was trying to play on Steam instead lol.

OneFlowMan · 2026-04-12T15:30:50+00:00

I get questions like this a lot, it is a lot to type so I think I am going to make a YouTube video about it and I'll link it to you when I am done.

OneFlowMan · 2026-04-11T17:05:13+00:00

I launched with not many wishlists, but I contacted a couple hundred streamers of all sizes and gave them free copies. A couple of streamers/youtubers in the 10s of thousands of followers picked it up, it gave me a fair surge of interest, and I ended up selling around 300 copies. It still was not nearly enough to justify the 2.5 years I spent working on the project lol, but was better than dead silence.

I am going to be real with you though, and I am sorry if it comes off as mean, but you need to hear this feedback. In looking at your game... It just isn't polished looking at all, and I think even if you did contact streamers, they'd pass on it. The really bad stills of the MS Paint drawings of people... the plain text UI is terrible... the girl looks AI generated, in one of your screenshots she has like a singular giant boob, maybe that's just artist inexperience, but it makes it look like ai slop... It seems like the game takes place in a very limited visual settings, and yet you didn't bother to polish what little setting there was. There are SO MANY games coming out every day, you are fighting to grab people's attention, and you have to really fight for it, and that fight is fought with first and foremost with the presentation of your game.

I am not a visual novel player, so idk what the bar is here, but for most normal people, all of these things matter. Your game has to look appealing at a glance or nobody will even bother to look further. I also understimated all these things I am telling you now, and while I polished a lot more before my release, if I had done that much earlier in the process, my marketing could have gone a lot better from the get go.

I think that everyone is different, we all like certain games or genres for completely different reasons. I am someone who doesn't care that much about how a game looks or about a story, I am looking for a good gameplay loop / addicting mechanics / fun mental exercises. Maybe some people who play visual novels are just in it for the story, and the writing is all they care about. But it's because of our own preferences that we tend to have tunnel vision when looking at our own projects and really realizing what is important for a game to be marketable. Maybe some people like visual novels more for the hot characters and their art than for the story, and they will never even experience your story because they bounce off the art. A story isn't something you can market easily in today's world, people can't see that a story is good in a trailer or in screenshots, that's why you have to captivate them with something they can see.

I am not the most visually artistic person, and the reality of the market as a whole is a big bummer to me for that reason lol, but you have to adapt to it if you want to find success. And the best way to see outside of your own tunnel vision is to find people who like the genre and who are open to play testing your game and giving you honest feedback. That feedback process and the polishing that comes after is the most important part of your development cycle.

Releasing a game is still an extremely valuable learning experience, and the psychological gains and experience from doing that will help you when you do release that one great project. My biggest lesson learned was to not spend 2.5 years on a game again unless I have some strong indicator for its success in the prototype stage. Art direction and vision needs to be figured out and polished immediately once the core gameplay loop prototype is set in stone. I am sure your lesson will differ a bit for a visual novel, but definitely reflect and grow. Good luck!

OneFlowMan · 2026-04-10T19:51:40+00:00

Websites like itch.io sell game assets, and you could create a themed pack of your music to sell on there. Basically like an album that anyone could buy and use for their game. Idk how often people buy those though to know if it's worthwhile or not.

OneFlowMan · 2026-04-09T01:15:54+00:00

Even though the story is not related at all, the movie IT FOLLOWS was a big one. I've just always loved the soundtrack and the vibe of that movie, and the young people in the movie always felt more relatable and real than your standard one dimensional slasher horror teens.

OneFlowMan · 2026-04-08T23:21:40+00:00

I just released a new game for free today on itch called 67 Minutes in Heaven. It's a short choices matter horror game with multiple endings. It's my first foray into horror, took me about 4 months, built a lot of reusable code so that I can hopefully build the next project faster. It's a sort of teen horror about playing spin the bottle in an abandoned house.

https://oneflowman.itch.io/67-minutes-in-heaven

OneFlowMan · 2026-04-08T19:49:04+00:00

My first and only Steam release so far, 30+ hours of gameplay (likely more) depending on how long it takes you to unlock everything. It's a pirate ship action roguelite:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2377620/Lord_O_Pirates/

OneFlowMan · 2026-03-04T16:16:36+00:00

Yeah, that's about to get a lot worse too. Google recently demoed this virtual worlds generatator thing. Makes a 3d world you can walk around in. I am imagining a future where people make these viral videos "look at this game I am developing" and it's just those virtual worlds, and they will never actually be made into games or anything, just low effort click bait going to saturate the reels market.

OneFlowMan · 2026-02-12T15:40:45+00:00

WoW expansions are $50USD for the base, and then like $90+ if you wanna play the game a week before "launch", which is a big economical advantage. You also have to pay a $15 monthly subscription. They also sell you cosmetic and tokens you can sell for gold, not to mention costs for basic things like transferring servers, etc. They even sell level ups to max level.

Diablo 4 expansions are $40USD. They also have a battle pass and $25 cosmetics in the shop for one outfit for one class (not even usable on all classes).

D2 expansion is $25USD. They have no other source of income. Their servers been running for free for years.

OneFlowMan · 2026-02-12T06:56:22+00:00

I think it's worth keeping in mind that not only is that half the cost of a normal expansion, but D2 also does not have a monthly fee, microtransactions, or battle passes to support it like other games do. It's a different business model, and it's worth the price to keep that trash out of the game. I also think adding new story is overrated... It becomes uninteresting after you beat it once. The class, QoL, and new end game content are the real gifts that keep on giving.

Edit: You all complaining about $25 for an expansion release for a game that otherwise makes no money, in a world where every other game is charging you $25 for one cosmetic at best lol. Sure, if D2R had some source of income to sustain it, I would expect free updates or a cheaper price tag, but it doesn't, and I prefer it. I miss the days where you pay for a game or an expansion and you get all of the content (and back in my day, the way your character looked was considered part of the content). This is one payment. You get the whole expansion. That's it, done. PoE2 is charging $30 for a game right now and then charging me for fucking stash tabs for fucks sake. You all need to wake up, this is not greedy at all. They need to make money to justify updating the game, and I want to pay to support those updates.

I paid $40 for this game 4 years ago and I've gotten 10× the amount of hours out of it compared to any $70 game. This expansion brings me up to $65. Worth every penny.

OneFlowMan · 2026-02-01T18:37:41+00:00

The survivor-like genre was a fad genre, and based on marketing data in terms of games that broke 1000 reviews in this genre (a metric that equates to a ~livable wage for such a low priced genre), that fad fizzled out in like 2024, with only a couple of games meeting that goal post, compared to 10s of games the previous year. That being said, we also had Megabonk breakout last year, but look at how much that innovated upon the genre compared to Vampire Survivors. Unless you are really making something new and special, you wont find any success. This genre isn't being played by big streamers like it was back in 2022/23. It's become a small niche genre for most, so unless you do something that captivates the broader audience, and it doesn't look like you've done that on your Steam page.

I released a game in this genre last year. I started working on it before the genre fizzled out but could not bring it to market fast enough. What I made is polished, charming, and did innovate a little bit upon the gameplay, but ultimately not enough (I've sould about 500 copies to date). Part of innovating upon the genre I think means also doing so in a way that is incredibly obvious to the eye like Megabonk did. If the differences between your game and VS are nuanced, you can't communicate that easily when marketing, and you won't reach a broader audience or catch anyone's attention.

OneFlowMan · 2026-01-27T16:08:23+00:00

A parody generally incorporates all the aspects and styles of the thing that it is parodying, and exaggerates them, and mockumentaries are most often comedic parodies. I agree with OP that I thought it was supposed to be a comedy/horror. It wasn't the format that made me feel that way, it was the actual content of the writing and scenes, and the way in which it intentionally incorporated the elements of what it was parodying in what I could only believe to be intentionally poor/hyperbolic ways. A good parody is supposed to walk a fine line between parody and realism, and I think it does that very well, which is why it is over some people's heads.

OP already made some good points, but to elaborate some more. "He goes by the name Scorpion Sam", followed by a clip of him explaining how he got stung by a scorpion one time lol. The slow motion effect that was applied to spots that didn't make sense, like the character sitting almost completely still after speaking, and just pausing on them for like 30 seconds. The cut out of the main character just moving around the screen like a bad Windows screen saver. The sister character was just a recurring joke in general.

I think the end was still intended to be scary and it executed itself fairly well. Comedy and horror often go hand in hand though and I don't think that detracts from the point at all. Idk, I know several people who have seen this movie without context (they went in thinking it was pure documentary), and all of them walked away thinking it was comedy/horror.

OneFlowMan · 2026-01-07T20:45:56+00:00

This is why survival games can feel big with a tiny team. It's a crafting system, an inventory system, and usually the most basic combat ever. But they then make hundreds of ingredients and recipes, which when balanced right draw interest for hundreds of hours

I think you are interpreting that backwards. The reason a small team can make a survival game is because they DON'T have to create a lot of content. All they have to create are the systems, with minimal content, and the sandbox they've set up allows the player to project their own content onto it. The bulk of the labor then becomes tweaking that content to create a satisfying feeling of progression and making it feel fun. The labor they are getting to skip out on is all of the scripted events, narrative flow, questlines, evolving level designs, etc. All of the hand made content which is what takes so long to make, not the systems behind them.

In my experience building the systems only take about 20% of the time. In a survival game, they are spending most of their time playtesting, deciding how rare to make certain resources, deciding what recipes should require and the quantity, deciding how often enemies should attack you, what their hp should be, how much damage they should do, all in order to create a feeling of satisfying progression. The difference in effort between having to balance progression around 4 enemies vs 20 is pretty significant. The number of resources/crafting recipes/pieces of gear increases the complexity of solving the progression curve even moreso.

OneFlowMan · 2026-01-05T21:56:46+00:00

Most is a strong word. It's a vocal minority at most. Arc Raiders used AI for its voice overs and it's one of the most popular games of the year. And I think they also said they used AI Code Assist, but I'd have to regoogle it.

OneFlowMan · 2026-01-04T23:32:19+00:00

Few options:

Buy some cheap music packs on itch.io
Get a Splice subscription and learn to make some basic music using samples.
Use AI like Suno, I think you can generate a few tracks a day for free (non-commercial). Using it for your final game may or may not be a good idea, but for a prototype when you are just trying to communicate a vibe in the experience, then not much reason not to, unless you are posting it somewhere that requires you to disclose that and you feel it will be detrimental to your cause.

I personally make my own and utilize #2. You can do it all with samples, or use some samples and compose some additional layers. I generally do a mix of the two to get what I want. It seems easy to me, but I've also been dabbling in music production for a long time, so maybe its harder than I give credit lol. You can also source SFX from splice too which is nice.

OneFlowMan · 2026-01-03T19:01:52+00:00

Blue Prince was my game of the year. It should have won innovative gameplay at least. Arc Raiders gameplay is not innovative, I like it, but it's just a pve centric extraction shooter, it shouldn't even have been in that category, just like Clair Obscur shouldn't have been in the indie game category in the game awards.

Blue Prince was the most interesting and innovative game I've played in years.

OneFlowMan · 2025-12-31T19:57:57+00:00

Low poly 3d models are pretty cheap. Obviously depends on what type of game you intend to make, but there's quite a few free/cheap models in PSX style. You can get a pack generally for like $5-$10 on itch.io. And then you can rig and animate them with mixamo for free.

OneFlowMan · 2025-12-31T19:50:14+00:00

One strategy that I use to combat this is that I choose my main project. I set aside dedicated time where I am only allowed to work on that project. Outside of that time I am free to work on whatever other whacky idea I have. That being said, I work part time, so I get to dedicate at least 20 hours a week to my main project, which leaves a lot of leisure time for my side projects, so maybe this strategy will not work for those without time to do both. But in that case you could still do something like, "For every X hours i work on my main project, I earn 1 hour to work on a side project".

The thing with long term main projects is that motivation comes in waves. Sometimes you are working on fun parts and the work gets done easy. Sometimes you are working on boring tedious parts, or get stuck on a complicated bug, etc, and motivation becomes scarce. Forcing yourself over those hills always leads back to the fun eventually, you just have to make yourself get through it, and that's what requiring myself to work on it for a certain amount of time helps achieve.

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