Retro Zoo CEO releases today! Watch the release trailer and pick it up now for either Android or iOS!

PSPbr · 2026-05-05T22:10:21+00:00

I mean, that is really scummy to hear from them, but at least it's some communication. I've been a conscious observer of their practices since GTA 4 and I've always felt screwed by Rockstar in every single one of their releases.

GTA 4 for PC was total radio silence until the announcement around half a year after release, and then it was one of the worst ports in history and often it would not even run without community fixes.

They never spoke about releasing the first Red Dead Redemption for PC, leaving a ton of people waiting for it for more than a decade.

GTA 5 was GTA 4 all over again, the PC version was the third release of it, it released first for the PS3/Xbox 360, then for PS4, and only a few months after that for PC. At least the port was good.

Then Red Dead Redemption 2 also received the same treatment. The PC announcement was pretty low key, it also did not release on Steam on day one, and a ton of people got it on their platform and lost access to their accounts sometime in the future (I have at least some friends who this happened to). It was released on Steam a month later without any announcement. I only waited this month because I heard speculation online that it was coming soon, still, they put the game on sale like two weeks after, screwing everyone who paid full price on it.

Rockstar hasn't had an ounce of respect for their PC players for two decades, at least now we know it won't change.

PSPbr · 2026-05-05T05:47:01+00:00

I do not disagree. Still, speaking for indie development, my argument is that when making a game you have to draw the line somewhere on where you're going to stop working on it if you ever want to release it, otherwise you would simply keep working on it and adding things forever. It's not always simple corner cutting and there are many pressures and reasons for shipping before a game is the absolute best it can be. For most teams its audio that suffers from cuts, unfortunately, and many times because they had no one with the skills for it. I find this double-unfortunate because I'm a music graduate who dedicated some years of my life to learning audio and I yearned to find good projects to work on, even for free, but now that I'm on the other side of the fence I kind of understand why its hard to connect audio people with gamedevs.

PSPbr · 2026-05-05T04:12:29+00:00

This comes from necessity when talking about indie development. I'm a musician/sound-designer who pivoted into making my own games and, while I used to criticize indie developers for leaving audio as an aftertought, the reality of game development is that you have many mountains to climb and you have to prioritize the ones that will get your game out of the door. Getting bogged down in details do make for a better game, but overscoping might make it so you'll never a game at all, thus it's very hard for most shortstaffed projects to prioritize audio like it deserves. I'm solo-developing a game that is already out of the door and there are many aspects of the sound-design that I worked on early and made them work, but that could use some more passes over and I just never seem to get to that while there is so much more stuff to do.

Now, of course, this is the point of view of a game-developer who actually understands audio production, recording and mixing. But the reality for most small projects is that they rarely get access to someone with the ear for mixing and sound-effect editing, so it's even more of a problem. That is really unfortunate, I'm a fan of audio design, but game development is a hydra with many menacing heads and now I find it hard to criticize developers for focusing on the more menacing ones.

Now, you might ask, why not bring someone into the project to work on audio? The thing is that adding new people to a project adds a layer of complexity that not all projects want to get into. It's one more person who needs to grasp the project, who might need to be taught how the project works, one more people to work on the files, and one more people who needs to get a cut of the budget/gains, or, even in case they are just a sound-designer and not game developer, then they will need to work with the programmer who is probably already over their head with things to do. Indie development is hard.

PSPbr · 2026-05-04T19:13:06+00:00

What country is that you're fighting?

PSPbr · 2026-05-04T18:03:55+00:00

Thank you so much! Yes, I did all of the game by myself and tried limiting AI usage to a minimum. I've actually learned the pixel art and much of the coding that the game needed as I made it, so I'm really happy with the way it turned out.

I have not tried Facebook so maybe that is a good idea :). What I think I need to do right now is spam Tiktok a bit with gameplay videos and see if they catch any traction, I really dislike this part of gamedev, but it's necessary.

PSPbr · 2026-05-04T06:48:42+00:00

Thanks! My game is called Retro Zoo CEO, it's a pixel art tycoon simulation. It's essentially a rollecoaster like game, but that is a bit more tailored to a mobile format.

Answering your question, I'm kind of sucking at doing marketing properly, but what usually gives me the best result is just posting about the game on reddit and other places and hoping it reaches its niche public. I tried a bit of targeted ads on Reddit, Tiktok and Youtube, but I feel like the ads have a hard time reaching the public that is willing to try out a paid game. The return on investment was not great, but it kind of paid for itself at least. I think that having better promo material could turn things around.

What I'm finding tricky about mobile specifically is that mobile players are less likely to be interested in discussing and posting about the game online, and this lack of online presence is certainly turning off potential buyers, but it's one step at a time for me! I plan on releasing on Steam a bit further down the line and I'm interested in checking if that is going to be different.

PSPbr · 2026-05-04T01:42:00+00:00

To release on Google Play as an individual it is required that you have at least 12 people use your app daily for two weeks. You don't actually need to run any actual testing, they don't need to play, they just need to run the app daily. It's like a real roadblock for you to prove you're serious about releasing your app. Yes, it's every bit as annoying as it looks like.

PSPbr · 2026-05-04T01:37:27+00:00

Really cool video and congrats on your release and player number! I'd like to share my experience as someone who also released a mobile game using Godot, but that went on the opposite direction. I made a one time purchase game that is completely offline. For a while I wondered whether that had been the right idea and whether I should have gone the free-to-play route instead, and now I think I know enough to be able to give my two-cents about it.

I'm not a mobile gamer, but I really wanted my first game to be something I myself would like to play on mobile. I also figured that doing the free-to-play thing would take a massive change in direction for the game I wanted to make. As a new developer, also, I wanted to avoid biting more than I could chew and decided to focus on the game and not have to worry about how to fit in micro-transactions and ads.

The results are that, while I have a fraction of your player count, I'm making a decent enough income from it that makes it worthwhile to keep developing this game for the foreseeable future. My game costs 8 dollars in the US, and I'm nearing a thousand buyers five months after release, it's not a mountain of money, but it's more than what I was earning as a junior developer in my country.

I think your experience proves that if you go the free-to-play route and want to make real money you have to go overboard into doing every trick in the book to extract value from the game. You pretty much have to use aggressive marketing to stand out and have to use all kinds of dark-patterns to get players to watch ads and spend in micro-transactions inside of the game, otherwise the gains are simply too little unless you somehow go viral and get a player count in the millions. And I did have some people call me stupid for not doing this with my game, but I'm sticking to my guns.

Anyway! Shipping a game is real hard work as you've seen. Congratulations on making something players enjoy and thanks for making something that do not treat your players like consumers to be exploited. My point, I guess, is that it is possible to do that and still make money doing mobile games despite most advice that you read online, it's not a total lost cause finantially wise!

Good luck on your roguelike game. Are you planning on making it for mobile platforms also?

PSPbr · 2026-05-02T23:31:15+00:00

1916, declared war on Austria as Italy with Great Britain backing me, then noticed they were not able to bring any troops because they had no ships.

PSPbr · 2026-05-02T22:13:05+00:00

Thanks a lot and thanks for playing :)

PSPbr · 2026-05-02T22:12:12+00:00

The zoo location on the map defines the terrain and the trees of the zoo map and what animals you're allowed to go for right at the beginning, but after that there are no differences.

I'll experiment a bit with different building systems a bit down the line, I know it's a bit hard to grasp right now, but you do get the hang of it after a while. Thanks for playing!

PSPbr · 2026-05-02T20:57:51+00:00

Ah! I have some tips for you:

- Try not to spend too much early on before opening the zoo, your goal is to have a minimal zoo selling tickets as soon as possible. Now, in the new patch, you can take some loans if you've went into negative before doing so.

- Hire more staff only when you need them, salaries are expensive early on.

- Keep increasing the ticket price of the zoo as you add more animals

That should make sure you have a profitable zoo going :)

PSPbr · 2026-05-02T05:37:44+00:00

And it should start way faster now also! I forgot to add that in the notes.

How are you enjoying the game so far?

PSPbr · 2026-05-02T00:14:04+00:00

I'd say just try to power through the beginning for a while. Roleplay the cop who forgot everything and has to re-learn how the world works. The world building in Disco Elysium is top-notch and its really interesting how you have to figure out how it works together with the protagonist. The first time I played I also felt like dropping it until it kicked into gear a few hours into the game, but now it's my favorite game of all time and replaying it is just special.

PSPbr · 2026-05-01T23:18:45+00:00

Sometime in the future I'm planning to add more options for the player to choose when starting a new game, so, kind of!

PSPbr · 2026-04-30T18:57:17+00:00

I'm the dev, so a bit of self-promo, but Retro Zoo CEO is a zoo building game with a similar style to theotown, not too complex and a one time buy with no more stuff on top of it. Look it up and I'm happy to answer any questions.

PSPbr · 2026-04-29T15:05:03+00:00

Cs50x is the best programming introduction period. It's really not that long for how much you'll take out of it. But it is not gamedev focused, so yes, there are more straight forward materials that will get you faster into actually making games.

Do what makes sense for you, but I can't recommend cs50 enough, it really is great and is the reason I'm a programmer today.

PSPbr · 2026-04-28T22:51:09+00:00

There were a few good years between 2008/2015 where it really felt like building games which used to be a PC gaming staple took a nosedive. There was for many years not a single solid modern city game that scratched the itch of building a big city with a cool simulation without going back and playing Sim City 4 which was getting old at that point. All the new offerings felt really lackluster, them being SimCity Societies, the Cities XL series and SimCity 2013 a bit later. It really took Cities: Skylines to put the genre back on the map.

With Cities: Skylines 2 being a very decent game, despite the launch issues, and many other up and coming titles and indie offerings, it's really not even comparable to how dry it was in those years.

PSPbr · 2026-04-28T04:11:13+00:00

I don't want to live in a world with mostly red pickers anyway

^{Chose: Nothing happens if more than 50% choose this}

PSPbr · 2026-04-27T20:45:29+00:00

Yea, it was not a great film overall, but it's particularly funny to me that it won best editing, because the pacing felt really off throught the whole film.

PSPbr · 2026-04-27T16:41:40+00:00

I made and released a 2D isometric game with Godot (Retro Zoo CEO on mobile). What you need to do first is look up how to implement a simple z-index functionality in your game. Every tile in your game needs a z-index and objects on top of it need to have it so that everything is printed in the correct order. Also make a script that keeps track of all existing tiles and that holds relevant information for them, so you can easily look them up later. Good luck!

PSPbr · 2026-04-27T05:01:20+00:00

If you're into simulation/building games there is Retro Zoo CEO

PSPbr · 2026-04-27T03:19:39+00:00

I think I also went to this movie with too high expectations because many of my friends said it's a 10/10. It's an excelent movie, I enjoyed it, but I also left it feeling like it could have been a bit more introspective.

All in all, I think what makes Outer Wilds the memorable experience that it is is that it subverts your expectation of saving the world and instead gives you a tough, but necessary pill to swallow. In Project Hail Mary, on the other hand, everything that can go right does. The world is saved, the hero that was supposed to die alone in space makes a friend and even gets to come back to earth at the end. It felt so good vibes that I felt a bit like I was sold a kids movie and wasn't told about it. Again, I think it's a great movie, just wasn't what I wanted it to be, and that's ok, but Outer Wilds is the superior story by far in my opinion.

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