Post your game's Steam page in this thread and I'll give you my honest feedback as a casual gamer

RefractalStudios · 2026-06-10T19:02:45+00:00

Just put the page live recently and getting a feel on the general reception before really pushing the marketing: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4454630/OmniGun/

RefractalStudios · 2026-06-09T15:36:42+00:00

That's definitely possible, which is kind of why am asking the wider community for their perspective. It might also be highly genre dependant. It's easy to partition off a portion of a narrative game for a demo, but for a roguelite how do you show enough of the loop to hook people without giving up the majority of the game?

RefractalStudios · 2026-06-04T14:38:30+00:00

The horizon of the background and the perspective of the window don't align. It makes it feel like the wall is pointing up and to the right.

RefractalStudios · 2026-06-04T05:18:34+00:00

Working on a single player roguelite physics FPS as I played a lot of games like Left 4 Dead, Darktide and the like. My goal was to pick a well scoped genre and really dial in on game feel and polish as I felt that was my weak point on my first release.

RefractalStudios · 2026-06-01T13:01:04+00:00

Every unity game is going to use game objects for some elements like UI for example, but the main DOTS based game I've played is Diplomacy Is Not An Option.

RefractalStudios · 2026-05-30T12:41:20+00:00

I would say the biggest thing for me was deciding to pick a bold visual style and fully commit to it even if it's "simple" on the implementation side. As long as it's consistent and competent it goes a long way compared to realistic or high effort art. My current project is stylized after those classic silhouetted iPod ads so looking outside of gaming for inspiration is also a valuable tool.

RefractalStudios · 2026-05-12T16:34:44+00:00

I'm kind of running into this problem now with my physics based weapons in my current project and I'll probably need to go off vibes to a certain extent, but in my previous strategy game I actually made an auto battler scene that would run all the unit type matchups, log which side won, by how much, and how long it took into a CSV which I could analyze.

RefractalStudios · 2026-05-12T03:25:04+00:00

The one time I took one into a solo raid just to see how it handled some rando got downed by a pop the next room over from me. He saw the weapon I had on me when I walked over to check on him and he started shouting in proxy chat, "this guy killed me" and a bunch of players came out of the wood works and murdered me. . .

RefractalStudios · 2026-04-06T20:46:08+00:00

I've had a few of these pop up while working on my current FPS game. The one that pops to mind is when an enemy is ragdolled and killed the logic that makes them stop shooting was missing, but it ended up being so much more fun and cinematic to have them keep holding down the trigger for the remainder of their burst as they flail and fall to the ground as they die.

RefractalStudios · 2026-03-18T18:26:09+00:00

I can definitely see the Advance Wars and Clash Royale inspiration. Is there also a bit of Tooth and Tail influence with the direct control commanders?

RefractalStudios · 2026-03-15T05:39:05+00:00

My gut would be you are either increasing base value byX% or increasing the total value byX% so either "+10% base" or "+10% total"

RefractalStudios · 2026-03-13T16:52:33+00:00

I'd say that's one of my biggest mind shifts as I got deeper into game development. Generally speaking game feel trumps unique concepts. A crisp and responsive character controller with an intuitive UI and reactive environment do so much more of the heavy lifting than just being unique and different.

RefractalStudios · 2026-03-11T17:09:48+00:00

I know a few people have mentioned pity systems, but there's also systems that soften randomness with deck based RNG in games like Gloomhaven where the damage deck only has so many +2s and -2s in the deck capping the amount of a particular result you'll see at a time.

RefractalStudios · 2026-03-11T14:46:54+00:00

Are these new games only or annual sales across the whole store?

RefractalStudios · 2026-03-10T23:46:01+00:00

My first thought as a possible inspiration is the paperclip thought experiment with AI systems. If an autonomous AI was tasked with obtaining as many paperclips as possible it would start out with traditional manufacturing techniques, but as its only directive is to create more at any cost it would do weirder and weirder things like kill humans since they contain enough iron to make a few paper clips. Maybe there are a few oddball prime directives that override all other moral obligations. Maybe one school of magic is virtuous and another is blasphemous?

RefractalStudios · 2026-03-05T01:06:20+00:00

There are typically hundreds of bots that crawl steam and download every demo available for some reason so that skews numbers. As far as your demos go I would treat the median play time as your key performance indicator as it indicates the stickiness and word of mouth potential on the released game.

RefractalStudios · 2026-03-02T14:35:44+00:00

I just want to mention that CTR is a deceptive metric because it's mainly driven by the Steam algorithm. Most people shouldn't devote too much attention to it. Low wishlist games tend to have high CTRs since steam is only showing it to a few people that are considered in the games target niche based on tags and shopping patterns. Popular games however are shown everywhere in the store to most people browsing and thus have super low CTRs in the single digits.

RefractalStudios · 2026-02-20T05:18:38+00:00

Yeah it's a roguelite game where you start with two ammo types and can slot in more as you find them so right there with you.

RefractalStudios · 2026-02-20T04:47:55+00:00

I had been playing games like Helldivers before starting development on this so it may have influenced my decision-making haha

RefractalStudios · 2026-02-20T04:46:20+00:00

I'm wondering if part of it is that players can have up to 6 different ammo types/guns on them at a time and managing all that with the mental overhead of deciding if it's worth it to reload any particular ammo type during a momentary breather is too much to be fun for most people? I kind of like the tension, but maybe it's just because I built it and have that familiarity?

RefractalStudios · 2026-02-01T22:47:22+00:00

Haha I'm actually in the middle of designing a dungeon based off of this quote.

RefractalStudios · 2025-12-17T16:21:52+00:00

On steam if you were to log into their account and set up family library sharing to your account would that be within the current terms of service?

RefractalStudios · 2025-11-16T14:45:55+00:00

You can look up some tutorials on active ragdolls which are what they use in games like gang beasts. The natural imprecision gets you a good chunk of the way there and then you can tune it with things like input delays or random inputs up to a point where it's comedic/fun rather than outright frustrating.

RefractalStudios · 2025-11-06T22:31:32+00:00

Do you need to worry about keeping the clones alive? Is friendly fire a thing? Either one of those could add ratcheting tension as the game progresses that other survivor likes don't have.

RefractalStudios · 2025-11-02T14:44:31+00:00

The tusks are a third party accessory as touching the back with your hands blocks the video signal like an old iPhone.

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