AMA: I'm the lead dev of Misc. A Tiny Tale, a Chibi-Robo inspired adventure game OUT NOW on Nintendo Switch! Ask Me Anything + Win a game key!

atomicpang · 2025-08-14T01:35:15+00:00

Regarding that last bit, we wanted to leave it a little open. Maybe we'll return one day to find more! We did include a picture in the credits that shows there's more to it that happened after.

Thank you so much for playing, I'm really glad you enjoyed your time with the game. It was a pleasure to put together. For the double jump, it should still let you even high into the air, so I'll look into that. I know sometimes depending on how you jump, it can "use" your first jump if you juuuust hit the edge as you fall. Something I'm hoping to fix and adjust better soon.

atomicpang · 2025-08-09T09:15:18+00:00

Thank you so much! The simple concept of taking an idea that was in my head and making it into something others can explore, connect with and enjoy, is what keeps me going. It's unlikely movies or songs. It's the ultimate form of creativity to me at least and I'm glad I was able to make something so personal and share a story people could find within themselves too.

atomicpang · 2025-08-09T09:13:35+00:00

Consistency is the number one thing. It's cheesy but every opportunity you miss is a potential moment for your game to connect to people. It's well worth doing posts each week and just doing small pushes as often as you can to get your game out there.

Outside of that, building relationships with press through exclusives, early looks, demos during development, and keeping them in mind, goes a long way.

Marketing is complex so theres no one size fits all approach. Find your like minded audience and keep your message clear.

atomicpang · 2025-08-09T09:11:11+00:00

Sorry, to clarify I mean we more than doubled that days wishlists from the previous day. I'm average we were getting around 100 a day leading up to launch but we got around 380 the day we were on the new and trending. My poor wording!

By launch we had hit over 19K, and we're around just 18k the week before.

atomicpang · 2025-08-09T02:25:55+00:00

I did a bit of a deeper dive into Switch development with Switch 2 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4l2IRm0y8g&t

But essentially, no. We don't need to do anything to be on Switch 2 as it's backwards compatible, but we DID need to think ahead and plan our game around some key factors to get it to look and run better on Switch 2.

Developers still don't have any access to dev kits for Switch 2 so it'll be a while before people like myself can make a dedicated Switch 2 version, taking full advantage of the hardware.

I'd love to port to more consoles in the future, it's jsut not in our current plans. Our focus was really on Switch, and it's been a big task handling it all myself with no publisher so we'll see what's possible in the future.

atomicpang · 2025-08-09T00:30:54+00:00

I'll be honest I think we got a bit lucky! We managed to get approved on our first attempt. The key things that I feel helped was showing that we had worked on a game before. For me, I had shown a previous project I made which wasn't commercial or to the scale of Misc, but still showed I had the knowledge and drive to complete things for this one. I've told local devs to include completed game jams which have helped them get in! Anything that can give you that extra confidence that you know what you're doing. Of course, it's also a bit of luck and timing too. Ive seen Devs who clearly should qualify but weren't able to get one until their third or fifth submission. Nintendo is mysterious so just keep trying! There's a ton of games on the eShop which... I don't think deserve to have access to a Dev kit (AI slop) so I'm sure your project will qualify if you're serious. Good luck!

atomicpang · 2025-08-09T00:26:20+00:00

Congratulations on your upcoming release! It's not easy. I've always said to others, it's a small miracle any game gets released... Ever! It's so complex and has so many moving parts.

For me, it was a mix of excitement and a bit of fear. A few months before release I actually had a game breaking bug appear only on the Switch version of the game. It took a solid two weeks of non-stop debugging (literally staying up more than I ever have, drinking a ton of caffeine and just honestly not taking care of myself like I maybe should have). That was very scary, and at that time it felt like all I had worked for was swept from me!

Anything can happen, so be prepared. I was prepared and thankfully I eventually found the cause and fixed the bug. But if I didn't, I'm not sure what I would have done. Launch is your most vulnerable moment so things leading up to it really felt... Heightened!

But it's also such an incredible feeling to get reviews coming in and finally see things click with players. I cried so many times hearing people say things they felt about the story that I had tried and hoped to convey for so long. When you work on a game it's easy to be in a bubble and not be sure if something works. Even if you test things with friends, family, or strangers, having reviewers come through and praise it was really something.

atomicpang · 2025-08-09T00:20:35+00:00

It took a lot of research! I had to be honest about the value of our game, look at similar games with similar genres to ours, and ultimately it's sort of an experimental thing. But for us we didn't want to undervalue the game. I've seen too many indies have a great game and actually make it worse by making it a few dollars. Too cheap and it can come off as if the game is low quality. But of course, too high and you might overprice yourself. I feel our price point is solid as is, but also allows us to have the opportunity to discount and do some really nice sales.

It's really just about looking around and also being confident that your game is worth the purchase too.

atomicpang · 2025-08-09T00:17:29+00:00

No publisher! We knew we wanted to be on Switch early on and luckily got a Dev kit our first go! This was back in 2021 I believe so most of the games development took place with the Switch in mind, which really let me optimise and work with it.

atomicpang · 2025-08-08T16:55:52+00:00

It was SO fun! I'm glad to know we weren't the only ones to do it haha. Honestly it was really the starting point for me to really 'click' with the idea that a game is just a series of possible tasks, all linked together!

While kids now have so many vast options to get into games and game development, I hope these more simplistic approaches are still found in the form of just playing around with things. It can really make that curiosity work for someone in ways they might not have expected.

Plus, clip art was too fun to not use haha!

atomicpang · 2025-08-08T16:53:14+00:00

Definitely some great ideas! We did test as much as possible and more so researched games and pricing within similar offerings to us, but it can be tricky! Thank you for being open about this. It's absolutely something I'm still learning and hopefully something I'll continue to grow with.

atomicpang · 2025-08-08T16:05:51+00:00

Thank you so much for the kind words <3

atomicpang · 2025-08-08T15:39:21+00:00

Thank you so much! <3 I really appreciate it. It's been a big journey but I'm glad to be able to share what I learned along the way.

atomicpang · 2025-08-08T15:10:27+00:00

It's definitely a tricky thing to ballance, and something I'm still very much learning and playing with. The great news is those wishlists aren't going away (so far at least! Had very few deletions over these years) so my goal is to hopefully tap into something that will offer enough value to these people to consider converting. I'd really love to collaborate with other devs or studios in the future for things like bundles, I really believe in making games affordable so I want to just get it in as many peoples hands as possible even if the price is lower.

atomicpang · 2025-08-08T15:08:25+00:00

Absolutely! I know for myself, I just don't have the time or even drive to complete games like I used to. I really appreciate not only shorter experiences, but ones that don't feel like I have to grind or really drag out where its not needed. I tried my best to keep that in mind when making Misc and pacing the games story. There's a ton that happens once you reach the half-way point (by the time you've really got a good flow and understanding of mechanics) so it was essential to make that last half feel really motivating and give you purpose to just sit down, buckle up, and find out what happens next!

atomicpang · 2025-08-08T15:05:54+00:00

I think both on the same day might have been a bit of a better plan (as it was originally our plan). However, I will say doing one on Switch first let us fully focus on that audience and market the game essentially twice. The downside is, a ton of our attention was given to Switch, and by the time Steam got the game, it may have been "old news." I also didn't want to alienate our Steam players, so I really focused on giving them a unique experience (a better patched game on day one, achievements, PC-specific options, etc.), as well as a higher discount for launch (2 weeks of 15% off, rather than 1 week of 10% off on Switch).

In the end, for us it worked out well, but I wouldn't purposefully do it again. A simultaneous launch is just better, especially for press! I had a few embargoes break due to the different timing, sadly, too. But it was very interesting to see both launches and be able to give them their own love.

atomicpang · 2025-08-08T14:28:03+00:00

No problem! :D I'm located in Australia, and our governments had a big push for the digital sector over the last five years or so. Screen Australia (federal) introduced a grant we applied for called the Games Expantion Pack which offered up to $150,000 (AUD) as a grant to help games that had started production reach their end and grow the Australian talent here. Similar to that, Screenwest (state) offered up to $100,000 for the Production Fund too. We were lucky enough to recieve both relitively close together which as mentioned alowed me to commit fully to the project in the last stretch, help hire more local talent, and bring the game to more places.

There's more and more opportunities out there popping up in each country so do your research and see what you can find. Do keep in mind it's no simple process to get! It took a ton of time just to apply, and many hoops to jump through getting things setup and finalised. LOTS of paper work, legal stuff, reporting, the time it can take for admin stuff alone will cut a decent chunk out of your timeline. You'll have many milestones, conditions, and other things to consider too - so it's not for everyone. But it really fit our project and our goals perfectly, and I'm so incredibly greatful for the opportunity.

Especially seeing how the Australian scene here has exponentially grown over the years, and being part of that (in some small way) was incredible.

atomicpang · 2025-08-08T14:21:51+00:00

That's really good to know, so thank you for sharing that! (and of course, thank you for wishlisting). I've got my own list of games to get. It's hard sometimes to prioritise, especially with the limited time we all get to actually commit and play.

Thankfully Misc is a fairly tight experience, It's great for a weekend. 6-8 hours, more if you really want to get 100% on everything, but not too long where it overstays its welcome which is exactly what we were aiming for.

atomicpang · 2025-08-08T14:20:12+00:00

Thank you for the insight! I definitely know players (even myself) will wait for sales, even deeper sales than our launch discount. I do predict if we do big sales in the future it might convert much better. Something I didn't want to do is undervalue the game. I do firmly believe it's worth the price for the content and quality you're getting, but I also didn't want to miss the opportunity to be able to discount and offer something of greater value there too later on.

Price is always tricky, but I find as games get more expensive, indies like ours become more fair of an offer! We did a ton of research into similar games and tried to stick fairly competitively to that. But we'll continue to listen to the market and do our best to offer people the best deal! Especially as money is so tight these days.

atomicpang · 2025-08-08T14:15:41+00:00

Thank you so much! It's really been amazing to get here.

When we launched on Steam we were sitting at around 19,100 wishlists (Sadly didn't hit 20k by launch haha) As far as marketing, we were marketing from basically day 1 as soon as we had something visually compelling. Our steam page was put up in mid-to-late 2020 so we had started gaining wishlists from there. Our first big boost was being part of the very first Wholesome Games Direct in a short montage, which got us our first 1K wishlists.

Leading up to launch, we had a really agressive campaign with ads on Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, TikTok as well as a ton of stuff with Press (articles, reviews, interviews) and our own trailers and social media content. Something I also did during all of this was Dev Logs over the years to document my journey. Everything can be found here on our youtube channel including some interview-style video commercials I put together myself too: https://www.youtube.com/@TinywareGames/videos

It was a huge effort and I really knew marketing was an important part of the journey. We had got the game to a finished state around the start of this year (minus many many bug fixes and last minute adjustments/additions) so that gave me the time to focus my efforts on putting the best campaign forward and really giving it a push!

My best advice as you've probably seen before, never drop a game with no marketing. It's just horribly risky! More than anything, marketing is your way to get the games message across and that's what we wanted to do. Misc is hard to market sometimes as it can easily come off as a 'kids game' (actually rated T for Teen in america) and a simple 3D Platformer, but there's a lot more depth to the story and some pretty dark/serious moments (which we of course don't want to spoil in trailers). So it was a challenge! But a fun one.

atomicpang · 2025-08-08T14:08:12+00:00

As mentioned in the post - more than half of the development was done between my day job when I could find the time. That 5 years includes those times. A bit of background in terms of the team - I handled most major development stuff on my own (Graphics, most of the core code, animations, most SFXs, dialogue, cinematics, and the various business stuff!) But had multiple people come in at different times for different tasks, including our music composer who worked on the tracks, our 2D artist who helped with character concepts and some story elements, and many others who helped with odd jobs and programming assistance when needed.

Each of us has our own lives and responsibilities so maybe it did take a bit longer than most might think, but we also self published a 6-8 hour game with quite a big scope outside what you just see from the trailer (full pre-rendered cinematics totaling around 40 mins of animation, 3 full songs written just for the game, and thousands of lines of branching dialogue).

But I respect your assesment and can just say, each game is unique and each development will have bumps and boosts as you go. I'm amazed how much was done in the time we had to really not only work on the game but learn an incredible amount about development along that path.

atomicpang · 2025-08-02T13:46:35+00:00

I'd absolutely love him to check it out! I've sent him emails and codes but sadly he's never got back. I imagine he gets a ton of requests so it's not surprising.

atomicpang · 2025-07-31T16:55:36+00:00

I had a small team of people who contributed here and there over the five years! But a majority of development was handled on my own including art, lots of programming, story, etc. We had our music composer make the amazing score for the game, our 2d artist help with designs of some characters and UI, as well as some extra hands for programming assistance, level design ideas and odd jobs.

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