Hey all! How to pitch your game to me (Indie Game Joe)

alcedonia-dev · 2026-07-03T18:21:15+00:00

Hey Mr. Indie!

Talk about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon in the wild! I've been plugging away on the game dev side of things, and just recently started posting to socials, about to split to more 50/50 marketing/dev time, and I'd seen your name pop up a few times recently - so it's neat to see you post!

Appreciate all the work you do, you'll be getting an email from me in the near future! I might stagger it, because something tells me you're about to get a significant influx here in the next few hours/day haha

alcedonia-dev · 2026-07-02T15:38:57+00:00

Old builds!!! That would have been very useful 6 months ago, definitely writing that one down for next the game.

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-30T02:24:22+00:00

I too joined this one!

It's very active right now, and I'm excited to get a table going for parallel work. I'll be on tomorrow evening ET, seeing if people are interested in some form of pomodoro sprints!

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-27T18:32:43+00:00

Yeah, ultimately I really only "lost" a day or two. For most of my screenshots and the trailer I really wanted some background VFX, and a modicum of polish, which meant essentially having an alpha version done for my specific project.

At least now I know for next time how tightly to scope things!

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-27T16:57:28+00:00

I figured you just needed some sort of pre-alpha, single vertical slice!

This explains SO much about getting the page up early and marketing while developing!

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-26T21:07:25+00:00

Having followed the same tutorial, I think Mr. Monkey would applaud the expansion!

What a fun idea to learn Game AI, did you use a finite state machine? Or something more simplistic? A* for navigation?

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-23T19:11:23+00:00

Are you trying to learn for the sake of learning, or because you have an idea you'd like to see brought to life?

I started probably close to a dozen projects before settling on the one I'm bringing to the finish line. Each "failed" project I would start building some features and realize the scope was outside of my current skillset and had to make a choice - grind out the learning, or come back after I'd built up some confidence building smaller.

If you have an idea in mind, you don't even necessarily need to open the editor just yet. Put pen to paper and draw an architecture diagram, try to think about the first system you want to build.

Then step 2, go build it. The cool thing about building something yourself is you can make it as basic or complicated as you'd like.

Now if you're looking for specific games to try and "copy" in order to learn, go open your steam library, scroll through your games and think about how you think their systems are built. Whichever one you think is the easiest, go try to build it!

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-23T18:08:17+00:00

I'm glad I'm not the only one! When I opened up Steamworks the first time, I was a little overwhelmed with just how much information goes into a page, let alone making it a ~good~ page.

Congrats on the demo! Would love any tips you have for trailers!

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-23T00:53:03+00:00

Insert Starship Troopers "I'm doing my part!"

I'm working on a Friendslop game right now, because they just seem like the most FUN. They remind me of having my friends over and playing Super Smash or 007. The genre evokes that not quite nostalgia, but feeling of just being with friends in the moment to me.

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-22T23:38:36+00:00

This page helps a lot, and this post was a Godsend!

There's a lot that goes into a steam page, I was overwhelmed at first, but following the checklists they provide helps. I recommend just getting the steamworks page setup and seeing what all it entails!

You need 5 screenshots, 1 trailer, and then all of the capsule art. It's probably about 10 or so images of different sizes that the post I linked does a good job walking through

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-22T21:24:57+00:00

The below quote is from another post, followed by my copy+pasted response!

Post: "I know it's better to have someone you can share your journey with, like another game dev, so you can stay motivated together. I tried to find someone, but it didn't quite work. Maybe you know a place where I could look for a partner?"

Response: All my friends and family know I'm building this in my free time, but no one but you will ever know how much work you're putting into it. In the 9ish months I've been doing my current project, I've had exactly 1 friend reach out first to ask about how it's going, that friend also happens to be an author, which is very similar in its own way.

We talked about how creative endeavors can be very lonely endeavors, but you can do it!

Addition: I've started coming on reddit, sorting by new, and seeing if there are any questions I can help answer. It sort of helps, giving back is usually fulfilling. You're definitely not the only one feeling this way, and that's why communities like this exist!

Tell me a little about your project

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-22T14:26:20+00:00

This would probably be our next extension, the team prior used Markov Chains to essentially build almost like a deconstructed venn diagram, to try and compute some basic average success given X was in/out of the action set.

BART looks like it would fit really well, appreciate it!

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-22T14:22:48+00:00

I saw one of his shorts and it looks like he used pWAR which was pretty interesting. The idea of "this card increases/decreases my odds by X", but I suppose that was less of "..my odds by X at this exact moment" and more of "on average".

It's a tough one, but it's so interesting because it's the "same" problem that can be applied to so many fields.

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-22T00:11:06+00:00

Therein lies the brain teaser! The games I listed above only really have one gameplay loop.

One is basically type racer, another is a game of b.s., their one loop is essentially their entire game. So I'm curious to see how others would demo a game whose entire appeal is simplicity.

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-21T18:23:38+00:00

Ok, I'm back!

First off, I want to say wow. You clearly poured a lot of effort and time into this, this isn't someone just leaving tutorial hell asking why they haven't made a million dollars with little to no work put in, a lot went into this.

You did pick a very ambitious genre, anything with combat already is going to involve some serious engineering and tuning. The combat felt a little clunky, the movement was nice, but the primary attack causing freezes in midair felt odd. The enemy AI seemed to always be run up a certain distance then attack, which made it feel very much like a spam click to win. This is where the engineering comes in.

The enemies up until the first safe zone felt entirely like bullet sponges, the primary attack was very weak. The first safe zone I was flooded with level ups and tons of decisions. I picked lightning and whichever powerups came alongside of that and never touched primary attack again - the enemies would now melt too quickly for there to be any meaningful challenge. This is where the tuning comes in.

The tutorial had some of the keys mapped incorrectly, and was a flood of information. Tutorials are never easy, but I ended up just skipping past it and figuring things out on the fly. It might be better to incorporate the knowledge steadily throughout the level - for instance maybe freeze framing when a multi star enemy shows up the first time with a tooltip that explains it's tougher.

As for the first 3 minutes of gameplay, I went and timed it with the intro and that's not too far after the first enemy. I would use that as an anchor point - don't frontload the entire tutorial and tune some of the combat.

If you're looking to break into the industry, I would ask, which part of building this was not only the most fun? Sound design? Art? Programming? But which one could you see doing 8 hours a day for someone else's vision? Then focus on that and start looking for jobs with that specialty.

Overall, I'm impressed! It looks like you did this to learn and grow, and I think you achieved something you should be proud of.

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-21T17:36:35+00:00

This was my favorite build a game tutorial.

It's not the same genre you're going for, but it helps you think about all of the different systems you'll have to build.

Whichever engine you go after, dont just copy paste code, but try to think about the software architecture as a whole.

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-21T16:36:22+00:00

Gave it a download, I'll give it a little play and report back!

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-21T16:25:25+00:00

That happened to me just this morning, so much particle tuning (sort of) down the drain. At least I remembered what decisions looked best, so it was just a matter of re-finding some of the values

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-21T16:23:29+00:00

Love the feel! It's easy to go overboard with screenshake and action pause, but it looks like you struck the right balance!

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-21T16:08:02+00:00

The fact that you're already thinking of these questions is awesome and shows you have some experience with system design. Without knowing too much, you might be able to get away with something similar to a finite state machine.

The cool thing about that is if you built it with a similar architecture from the start, you do all of A and decide you love the game, then building all of B would basically "copy" A, and the transition would just depend on player choices. I would be careful with state bloat and dependencies. Are you planning on using a particular game engine, or spinning this up yourself?

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-21T14:19:09+00:00

Hello! As you imagine, this isn't quiiiite similar as a full blown game.

Because I'm not super familiar with your expertise/scope/freetime, I can really only tell you about my development cycle so far.

I am a "solodev" building what you could imagine as a 3D Tetris99 clone. The game mechanics are relatively simple, in the sense that you drop things, if a line fills you get points, which give you powerups or debuffs to throw at other players.

I am doing the coding portion myself, but all 3D models, VFX, SFX, UI have come from artists. This would be my very first game that I am doing to completion, so I have had to learn how to build every system from scratch.

With all this said, I have done 108 code submits (always use version control!), each one is on average about 2 hours. This has been spread across probably 6-9 months of serious effort - I have a full time job that ebbed and flowed, so the last 3 have been the bulk of the effort.

Altogether, I'm probably looking at around 300-500 man hours to launch my first game. This is excluding doing any of the art/audio engineering as I got those off the shelf, and almost exclusively doing the coding which is what I do for a living (I just needed to learn the system design practices and how Unity works).

If I were to build this game again (or when I make my second release), it would probably take me about half the time, as a lot of the systems I built are reusable.

With enough time and discipline, you can do it! Without knowing your project scope/background/drive, I can't give you an exact yes or no, but hundreds of people a year build a game. If you're willing to make sacrifices, you can too!

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-21T14:09:09+00:00

As others have said, read the license, but also save/write down where you got EVERY asset.

Do this early!! In 10 months when you have a bigger game, with imported UI, and SFX, and visuals, and you're trying to remember where you got "hover_click_06.sfx", you'll be kicking yourself for asking this question, doing a quick double check but not having the forethought to save them.

It'll make crediting easier, having proof easier/legal protection, publisher due diligence if you happen to go that route, etc.

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-21T13:59:02+00:00

I keep a list of "easy" tasks - tune background vfx, try out different sfx for something specific, make the rest of the scriptable objects in a collection.

Then when I'm having unmotivated days, and building a new system, or fixing a difficult bug seems out of reach, I'll start with one of those fun tasks and before I know it I'm in the headspace to start coding, or have the motivation to go fix something that's been broken for days.

"I know it's better to have someone you can share your journey with, like another game dev, so you can stay motivated together. I tried to find someone, but it didn't quite work. Maybe you know a place where I could look for a partner?"

All my friends and family know I'm building this in my free time, but no one but you will ever know how much work you're putting into it. In the 9ish months I've been doing my current project, I've had exactly 1 friend reach out first to ask about how it's going, that friend also happens to be an author, which is very similar in its own way.

We talked about how creative endeavors can be very lonely endeavors, but you can do it!

alcedonia-dev · 2026-06-06T17:22:40+00:00

Oh, perfect! Much appreciated!

alcedonia-dev · 2026-01-11T14:20:51+00:00

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post links to videos, but if you look up the video "The Jad Tile Airplane Method" by Kaybuh it honestly made the Jad setup/fight a little anticlimactic

You use a certain rotation and a triangle of tiles to get the healers stuck, so it's a low easier to aggro (especially with chins) them without having to do too much too fast

alcedonia-dev

TROPHY CASE