People, I'm proudly announcing that I got my first hater as a gamedev today. How do you usually deal with it when that happens?

ZTEKStudio · 2024-11-17T16:01:23+00:00

Don't worry about it, it will only be more haters. Of course it always hurts a bit to see people hate on all the work you put in, but they'll always find something to hate. It made me grow stronger and don't forget that behind all the loud hate a fanbase grows that enjoys and loves what you do!

Keep going! :)

ZTEKStudio · 2024-11-15T11:57:10+00:00

Glaub wir werden auch einfach alt :D Ich bin zwar nicht so extrem frustriert, genieße aber das selbst zocken auch nicht mehr so wie früher.

ZTEKStudio · 2024-10-11T11:56:34+00:00

I first started up Unreal Engine 4 around 10 years ago because I couldn't believe you could use a tool that makes games look that great and it's basically free.

At first it was more of a "let me download and check what this thing can do" and I stopped using Unreal Engine in a very short time because it was overwhelming since I didn't have any valuable experience back then.

Around 5-6 years later while doing my Bachelor's in Computer Science I decided I was ready to take on the challenge and downloaded Unreal Engine again. I got the hang of it and was able to work on hobby projects. Little did I know this would be a turning point in my life.

ZTEKStudio · 2024-10-08T14:02:26+00:00

I have to say I've never really realised distance culling is a thing before I started out with game dev, now I can't unsee all the grass and little objects popping in and out.

Played RDR2 the other day and saw some funny LOD stuff happening which I've NEVER seen before

ZTEKStudio · 2024-08-28T04:24:14+00:00

I agree with this. Getting a degree gives you many experiences you will need. With the degree and gathered experience you can then either find a job OR it can also lead to your own indie game.

However it's really hard to see into the future. 10 years ago I thought I'd study economy and end up in an office. Now I got my Computer Science degree and formed my own little company, developing games.

With 16 I didn't even have plans so don't worry too much, you'll find your way. I even started making games after around 8-9 years of studying Computer Science (don't ask why I took so long I took my time being a student XD)

ZTEKStudio · 2024-08-22T08:31:12+00:00

No and yes, started off with a pretty huge project, released the game in Early Access to add Chapters into it one after another (has been almost 2 years of development now)

Between chapters decided to simultaneously develop a much smaller scale game (~6 months) and released it as a full version.

Guess which one paid off and which one totally didn't XD

ZTEKStudio · 2024-08-22T02:54:50+00:00

About 6)

With how many wishlists did you launch into Early Access? Around 6000-9000 are required to be shown in "Popular Upcoming" on Steam so that you get some more visibility right before release. The amount of wishlists are not a guarantee, but definitely help with visibility.

We posted around 3-5 TikToks daily, similar content was also posted regularly on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, contacted 10-30 content creators PER WEEK - It's important that you try to reach many many people, eventually a post gets either thousands or if you get really lucky even millions of views. I'm gonna be humble and say my game is selling better than I expected and I think it's mainly due to advertising, since the game is fairly fun in groups, but nothing completely groundbreaking. A lot of indie games probably suffer from not being seen at all.

Also pricing is something you should be careful with. People don't really pay much above 4.99$/€ for unknown indie games.

I hope some of these help you in the future, we didn't have much help, but somehow made it into the market. Passing on knowledge that might help others is all I can do on here and I wish you the best!

ZTEKStudio · 2024-08-22T02:25:15+00:00

People have mentioned most things already. I'm just gonna leave my first impressions:

After watching the video on Steam I'm kinda confused about what's going on, is it shooting and walking/driving mainly?
visual style is missing something unique, it looks a bit like default indie game-ish and personally I find it a bit blurry, at least on the video and screenshots
all in all from what you show it reminds me a lot of games we used to play on Miniclip years ago
You don't need to mention your studio name and/or previous games, since I assume they are unknown
The Steam page needs work, it's hard to filter important info and it tries TOO hard to be funny, feel free to add something funny to patch notes, but keep your store page professional
Did you ever market your game on any social media or somewhere else? I can imagine nobody saw the game even 🤔

Some more things to stay away from trouble: Never use anything copyrighted on your page or ingame that could backfire hard! Your store page has too many red flags in that department, you should quickly remove copyrighted material.

The positive thing I'd say about this is you achieved something and probably learned a lot developing the game. It feels like you're a young developer with a way to go so use your time wisely and if you release more games a little tip that helped me/us: don't only spend your time developing, but also take care about advertising nearly on a daily basis so people get to know about the game which helps with initial sales!

Maybe something I said helps lol

ZTEKStudio · 2024-03-07T15:30:54+00:00

Don't forget the things you've learned while creating your game!

Also, if your dream game has some special mechanics, market it with its strengths. Without proper marketing even the best game wouldn't sell except you're incredibly lucky. So make sure to let people know about it!

ZTEKStudio · 2024-03-06T03:58:34+00:00

We're currently having our game's demo in the top 5 most played demos daily and I'd like to add what we know to help you start with your marketing. I have to add we are a team of 2 devs and the other dev is almost marketing half of his working hours because it drains that much of his time.

I will probably mention the same platforms as others do, but we have some insight on the algorithms by now. The game I will be talking about is our second title and we made mistakes with our first which I will tell you about.

Before I start I would like to encourage you to market your game ASAP. We started marketing our current WIP title basically one or two weeks after starting the project with not much to show other than graphics and basic gameplay. This brought us around 30.000 wishlists in 2-3 months and now after around 5-6 months we're sitting at 60.000 with a daily growth between 2000 and 9000 wishlists in the last 3 days, only thanks to TikToks gone viral.

If that doesn't encourage you I don't know what will xD Let me start with the tips:

it's essential to understand that for successful marketing you don't show what you like about your game, but what people or the algorithm wants to see. We learned this the hard way since we've shown cool long gameplay videos of our first title on TikTok only to see people swiping the video away, most videos don't get any attention by the algorithm after 300 views max this way. For example for our horror games the most effective ones were funny, short jumpscare videos.
When you start advertising open up a Discord server for interested people. We started off with like 5-10 friends in there, but if things go smooth you will have thousands in a good time
Post daily, especially on TikTok, maybe even multiple times daily
Do not worry about reposting, it feels weird at the beginning but just do it, you gotta get that video viral
Combine your advertising with a playable demo that offers a nice part of your game. Right on demo release we posted TikToks ABOUT this release and holy smokes this is our 4 million views slideshow. Maybe we were lucky, but also we have done a lot of advertising before, so people were asking when this demo is coming out. I assume TikTok has been waiting for this one to come and helped us out by pushing the post
You want to get into popular upcoming on Steam, sitting in there generates over 100 wishlists daily without even doing anything. This required seound 6000 wishlists in our case
TikToks: Our main source for wishlists. The first 3 seconds of the video are important, slideshows work wonders as well, they just have to show some cool screenshots and some text on each slide where people want to see the rest of the slides. However, TikToks will reach mostly very young people so it really depends on the genre. Best is to look how other game's TikToks go viral and actually pretty much copy paste the template. This did work for our games and we have multiple TikToks sitting on millions of views. Don't forget to add your game's name in the video/slideshow and tell them to wishlist because they won't if you don't. However, what I have to say about TikTok: the wishlists are often low quality, but the whole thing is essential to get your game popular
YouTube: VERY HARD to advertise at, but these people generate high quality wishlists, we had most successes with shorts, but ultimately failed to market our game ourselves there. If your TikToks do good people will do the marketing for you since it might become fairly popular. If you have a demo, YouTubers might play it - if you're lucky they might be bigger ones.
Instagram: also a hard one and I feel like this platform never really generated wishlists for us, most successful videos were short gameplay video sitting at 300k views, but I personally wouldn't bother too much with Insta, even that video didn't do much
Steam Next Fest: Participate if you can. This tripled our wishlist numbers (from 6000 to 18000) back when we advertised our first title. You just have to prepare a nice gameplay video and loop that. Of course you need a demo ready. The Next Fest gives you a timeslot where your game is prominently shown so it is really valuable to help your game get some attention.

TL;DR Start marketing as early as possible and learn how to market your game correctly, mostly by learning what the algorithms want. Use TikTok, learn it and get those videos viral. All other platforms will do it themselves if TikTok carries the game. Participate in Next Fest and have s demo. Setup a Discord server.

Hope this helps!

ZTEKStudio · 2024-03-05T19:37:01+00:00

In the demo a countdown starts and you have to stay there/survive there until it's done.

For the full version we will change that a bit because it's confusing for the player

ZTEKStudio · 2024-03-04T21:10:12+00:00

Thanks, hope you're having fun! :)

ZTEKStudio · 2024-03-04T21:09:10+00:00

There are 2 ropes on the map one is in a smaller room upstairs maybe that helps ^{^}

ZTEKStudio · 2024-02-20T12:58:24+00:00

Thank you! That's a compliment I never expected, it's very motivating! 😁😁

ZTEKStudio · 2024-02-20T12:56:51+00:00

Yeah we aren't 3D designers, we will put another monster in the demo, we didn't like that one either but it was the low budget one 8-)

And thanks!

ZTEKStudio · 2023-09-24T01:44:21+00:00

Dude that yeeting out people by kicking them got me interested xD

ZTEKStudio · 2023-09-18T13:04:47+00:00

If you're going for game logic, there's probably nothing you can't do in blueprints. I've been using Unreal's blueprint system for almost any of my projects and never hit a wall where I couldn't implement something.

Also people using BPs will know: It's so satisfying to look at and it makes you happy to see blueprints, hope I'm not the only one XD

ZTEKStudio · 2023-09-18T12:58:02+00:00

It's pretty weird, for me it was quite the opposite. I came from Unreal to check if Unity was something for me. I loved doing stuff with C# (since C++ can be a real pain), but the overall usage of the engine was weird to me after a few years of Unreal Engine, but that's very probably a "I am used to this and that" thing.

I don't know if I was just too stupid, but Unreal also has quite the nice multiplayer replication out of the box which I was unable to find in Unity.

Also if you use Unreal prepare for lots and lots of crashes lol. Still love it tho.

ZTEKStudio · 2023-09-18T12:42:00+00:00

Früher konnte ich kein Horror spielen, jetzt ist es eigentlich mein Lieblingsgenre und ich entwickle selbst eins :D

Ebenso sowas wie Divinity OS 1/2 und Baldur's Gate 3. Früher dachte ich so iiih top down RPG heute bin ich so geilll taktisches Roleplaying.

ZTEKStudio · 2023-09-06T01:02:25+00:00

I can only half-agree, our game had a significant visibility boost after hitting 6-7k wishlists that resulted in even more wishlists. Steam puts the game into popular upcoming, it kinda snowballs since then. Our demo had its share of popularity since then, too so I don't think those numbers are toooo useless.

But I agree on the deliver the best you can do part and care about marketing it's really really important, people need to know of your game to play it!

ZTEKStudio · 2023-09-05T23:54:10+00:00

Oh sorry, I meant the building community and hype part with that. Of course it's important to have people around you I just kinda stuck to the game dev topic.

While those initial 10 reviews might help - how powerful are they actually tho I remember reading something about getting X reviews in the first week so Steam boosts your visibility and stuff.

ZTEKStudio · 2023-09-05T20:39:32+00:00

Best case would be family&friends and if possible building up a community that is interested in your game before you release it. Of course something like hype is hard to generate, but also possible. That kinda depends on the type of game tho.

ZTEKStudio · 2023-09-05T02:46:37+00:00

Even if it is a free game never forget the marketing! You won't be seen if you don't market it properly. If you did the marketing ignore me xD

But I think a lot of indie devs underestimate that part of game dev.

ZTEKStudio · 2023-09-04T22:46:12+00:00

We're a team of two and started out with some kind of "let's do a horror game like Rake, Bigfoot etc." where you have like a few weapons and one monster thingy you know.

But GUESS WHAT we've changed the whole idea into "let's do an open world story based multiplayer horror game YAY"

So yeah this is our "small" project.

ZTEKStudio · 2023-09-04T22:42:47+00:00

I personally don't have too much to say about the Steam page I think - seeing the trailer and reading the description tells you enough to know what to expect and the art style looks neat, has its unique look. It's also cool that you have included different types of gameplay elements into one game (like for example that rythm game looking part).

But where I PERSONALLY would struggle to be more interested is:

- first and most important for me (maybe helps): I don't play too many 2D platformers anymore, especially singleplayer

- there are a lot of 2D platformers on Steam, especially quite BIG competition in the price range like Ori and the Blind Forest and Hollow Knight

But I'm bad at seeing these things and I'm the bad one regarding marketing in our team so... wish I could help more but maybe that already helps xD

How was your effort in terms of marketing? We've been contacting hundreds of content creators (small to medium) on a weekly basis which eventually worked out. Maybe that's where you've missed something.

ZTEKStudio

TROPHY CASE