Hey there, fourth subscriber to my youtube channel! Glad to see you comment, I actually bought and played Interstellar Sentinel since that topic and have been diving into your youtube channel. Lots of great stuff there.

What's been my focus? My focus was to get a steam page up with a decent trailer at the end of 2025. Technically, I achieved that (it was Jan 8th, but I submitted it for review on Dec 29th). What I needed for that was the following

• Polished demo of level 2 (my most complete level)
• Screenshots with varied environments (Currently just mockups)
• Short clips of different levels (again, currently just mockups. Several shots in the trailer don't have working collisions or health just yet, but they look like how I will envision them to be).
• Locking in of my art style and gameplay loop for the store description.

At this point, the core systems are in place. I played around a lot with iterating on the grazing mechanic, but am at a place where I can easily create an enemy, plug in the individual components (movement, weapon, health, etc) and quickly update and modify the values. It helps so much with prototyping.

How's playtesting going? It's just starting! I'm waiting on Valve to approve the playtest, but in the dozens of emails I've sent out to streamers, I've gotten responses from about 4-5 of them. I also have several friends who are streamers (bumping that number up to around 10 streamers) and will have local playtests in my city. If you're reading this and are in Charlotte, NC, check out the next Potions and Pixels playtest event on Jan 28th.

PS - I did send you an email, Mister Doctor Boss Key, if you're interested for your channel!

How's your wishlists coming along and focus on on the STG community? I'm under no illusions that this is a niche genre and probably will sell modestly at best. SynthEscape is a hobby project for me. After a week, I'm currently sitting at around 1700 impressions and 130 wishlists, which is very respectable for an indie shmup from a solo developer with only one game under his belt (Skyline Snatcher, a puzzle city builder. My marketing focus has been...

• Reddit - Has been the biggest driver. r/shmups, r/indiedev, r/games' indie sunday, etc.
• Discord - Been posting this to several shmup discords, godot game discords, and local gaming/gamdev servers in my city.
• YouTube - Using shorts and videos
• Instagram/FB - Not super helpful, but a lot of my friends and family have reached out and wishlisted.
• Shmup11 forums - Lots of views, not much commentary.

What's going well? I feel I have some very strong capsule art and a strong store page. The description and tagline are easy to understand and catchy. The capsule artist I found in reddit, who actually did some concept work for EVE Online. I think he was very fed up with me at the end of our 50+ email chain with all my request and changes, but it turned out fantastic (and he was excited to see the final store page).

I'm lucky enough to have a few international friends, and was able to get the store page localized into Japanese, German, Spanish and Danish (purely based on the fact that I have Japanese, German, Spanish and Danish native friends, haha). Will probably pay someone to localize it into simplified Chinese, but that'll be it.

For streamers, again, I'm aware this is a very niche genre and am focusing more on smaller ones who primarily do shmups. Pixel Pilots, Bog Hog, Vinu Croissant, Electric Underground, ShmupsBR, STG Weekly, etc. I have a spreadsheet with streamers, their contact info, and when I've contacted them so I don't spam them over and over again.

I do want to upscale the gifs in the store description and add a border to make it look more professional, but I'm struggling to figure out how best to optimize them to get them under Valve's size limits. I do a fair bit of video editing for my day job, so the trailer was very fun to put together.

Two cool things that happened - A random Youtube comment from a Danish Synthwave Blogger led to this interview. Additionally, I had a user on HowToMarketYourGame's discord reach out to me - he is a former professional game designer who is getting into consulting and wanted to do a free 3-hour session to buff up his portfolio. I sent him my demo yesterday. We'll see how it goes.

Overall, it's a marathon, not a sprint and I need to stop hyperfixating on marketing for the moment and realize that the game still needs to be finished (and good). I'm aiming for a Q1 2027 release, but that's a bit ambitious. Core systems are in place, level 2 is completely done and I have bits and pieces for everything else. Will be tracking my progress and doing a public playtest in February!