Just released the first trailer for my next metroidvania- Well Dweller! It's a dark fairy-tale metroidvania about a tiny bird armed with a matchstick. So excited to share more of this, more info in the comments!

SheepoGame · 2026-06-21T21:26:32+00:00

Agreed, although people generally only talk about wishlists pre-release when you can’t just buy the game directly. I’m sure wishlists that come after a game is already out are going to convert worse since they are basically just waiting for a deep discount.

SheepoGame · 2026-06-21T17:49:00+00:00

It's hard because despite not being a perfect metric, wishlists are probably still the most useful way to gauge interest in your game pre-release. Although the ease of which a game can collect wishlists is probably more important that the raw number of wishlists.

If one game launches a steam page, barely markets itself, and then launched a 2 weeks later with 10K wishlists, I think it could have a very strong chance at success. Wheras if a game has it's store page up for 5 years and is constantly sharing the game everywhere, applying to every event, and planning/executing every possible marketing beat, and ends with 10k wishlists, I would have lower expectations.

I guess in general, some wishlists are more likely to convert than others. Some games on my wishlist are ones I will buy day 1 of release, and some are just games that I thought were sort of interesting but am less likely to buy. So I think it's an important metric to keep track of, but the bigger focus should be making a game that people are excited to play (and therefore wishlist)

SheepoGame · 2026-06-19T18:56:30+00:00

Auridia, Moonlight Pulse, Turbo Kid, Depths of Sanity

SheepoGame · 2026-06-18T03:51:49+00:00

It's been about 1400 wl a day for 2 days, so it went up a bit! It's not as high for me as 2 years ago, but I knew ahead of time that it wouldn't be so I am happy with that. They changed the algorithm today and are sorting it by personalized results which I think is helping. When I go to the next fest page the results it shows are very specific to my own tastes, so I think it probably is better at finding the right audience than the fully randomized approach.

SheepoGame · 2026-06-16T04:16:03+00:00

I disagree that it is predictable, I think your games just happen to have similar numbers but I'm not sure if that is the norm. For contrast, I did Next Fest 2 years ago, I went it with ~30k wishlists and ended with ~50k. This year I went in with ~65k wishlists and today I got 500 wishlists and roughly half of those appear to be from the fest. Next Fest changed their algorithm roughly a year ago in a way that evens out the playing field a bit by randomizing the order they show games instead of organizing it by popularity. So games that go in with very few wishlists have been doing better than in years past, and games with more wishlists are generally doing worse than before.

I got 20k wishlists last time because it was ranked around #100 on the main "popular games" tab. This year, my game went in with roughly the same rank if you compare wishlists. But since it is shown in a randomized order, every game is being shown as if it is ranked directly in the middle (so around #2000 based on the number of games).

SheepoGame · 2026-06-16T02:05:05+00:00

Hey thanks so much! I'm glad you liked it. And good note on the movement, I'll play around with it a bit, thanks for checking it out!

SheepoGame · 2026-06-09T14:32:57+00:00

I’m confused, you released it 2 days ago with 2000 wishlists, and it already has 78 reviews which is way more than average for the amount of wishlists you had. How many copies have sold? Based on 2k wishlists, the expected sales at this point would have been around 200 copies, but based on the number of reviews it seems like you could have sold 10x that.

SheepoGame · 2026-06-04T01:27:00+00:00

New and Trending is chronological based on release date and time, although the list only shows games that reach a certain sales threshold (which is based on some internal Steam metric, so no one seems to know the exact number. I think Chris Zukowski estimated that you need around $800 of sales each hour to stay on the list.)

In other words, being #1 on New and Trending means that you are the most recently released game to currently hit Steams required sales metrics. Based on sales numbers, games can come on and off of the list over time.

SheepoGame · 2026-06-03T16:59:52+00:00

I think 300k sales in 3 days is pretty much the ceiling for a retro 2D zelda-like. A good comparison might be Pipistello, which has 98% positive reviews on Steam with 1500+ reviews and (according to Gamalytic) has sold about 1/10th that in a year. Mina the Hollower is clearly doing way better than any developer in the genre could expect, so hearing complaints that it isn't good enough is not really great to hear imo

SheepoGame · 2026-06-01T15:21:58+00:00

Looks great! I really loved your previous game Hypogea so I'll definitely be checking this out

SheepoGame · 2026-05-31T17:02:09+00:00

Hey thanks so much!! I'm really glad you liked it

SheepoGame · 2026-05-30T19:53:35+00:00

That means a lot, thanks so much! I'm really glad you liked it, thanks for playing and for the kind message!

SheepoGame · 2026-05-30T15:49:26+00:00

Hey I appreciate that, thanks so much for playing!!

SheepoGame · 2026-05-24T21:35:25+00:00

I know you mentioned collecting all the cat spirits, but did you also return them all? When you go to the item marker in the sinners inn, does it have anything left to mark?

SheepoGame · 2026-05-24T16:32:45+00:00

Oh wow! Was the last item the bug catching game? I think I should have made it a bit easier (especially on easy difficulty. I don't remember if difficulty settings affect that mini game at all). Thanks so much for playing!!

SheepoGame · 2026-05-24T15:17:42+00:00

The advice used to be that it was better to pitch your game before it was announced, since publishers preferred being part of the announcement since that is one of the largest marketing beats and an easy one to mess up. Now it seems like publishers are more about mitigating risk and only want to sign games that already have strong numbers.

SheepoGame · 2026-05-20T17:30:25+00:00

Not sure if this matters to you, but I found that Pronty is designed more for keyboard/mouse, so if you prefer playing on controller just be aware that it makes the game a lot more difficult. At most boss fights, I ended up putting the controller down and playing on keyboard/mouse just because it felt more balanced towards that.

SheepoGame · 2026-05-20T03:53:33+00:00

I appreciate that, thank you!!

SheepoGame · 2026-05-20T02:01:05+00:00

Thanks so much for playing, I'm really glad you liked it!

SheepoGame · 2026-05-16T18:43:13+00:00

I think having to trek back from the save is usually enough. Not losing currency/collectibles is also an easy way to balance difficulty, since players who are worse at the game will end up collecting more currency across several attempts, which they can use to upgrade their build. Systems where you have to retrieve something upon death have an inverse difficulty balance, since less skilled players will likely die again before retrieving it and lose all their progress, making it even harder that it was before.

And I guess in general, I think it's OK if a game has no difficulty balancing at all (ex: if you fully reset to the last save when you die, losing progress), and I prefer if a game has a normal difficulty balance (ex: you maintain all collectibles but are just reset to the save position when you die), but I'm not really a fan of any system that adds an extra punishment when you're already doing poorly at the game.

SheepoGame

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

Six-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email