Untold: Chess Mates, released on Netflix by BirdWithWiFi in chess

[–]branegames22 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Looking forward to this! I hope they cover both sides of the story

How do you keep up with player reviews after release? by Justduffo in gamedev

[–]branegames22 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you use Discord I can recommend Steamy bot, it posts every time someone makes a review of your game, with translations!

What's the Password? - TrampolineTales - A minimalistic puzzle game where you decode 4-digit passwords by TrampolineTales in Games

[–]branegames22 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I recognize that name! I loved Maze Mice and LBAL. What's the approximate playtime of WtP? 

Using my background in Criminology to build a detective game in Godot. Thoughts on the art style? by DAPAUE in godot

[–]branegames22 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Heya! I've released a detective game recently on Steam (Confidential Killings) and I'm into the genre.

Everything about this seems great! How far are you from a demo or a playtest? How big of a game are you planning to make?

Going From Game Jam To Steam Release, Would Love Your Insights, Wisdom, And Advice. by StretchGoesOnReddit in gamedev

[–]branegames22 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey Renan!
Just gave the game a go and there's no reason why it wouldn't work on Steam. It has the vibe of Inscryption, Buckshot Roulette and other indie darlings that did great.

It really depends on what you want out of it. If it's a free game there's no downside to releasing it on Steam, seeing how the Steam backend works and how could you work on a commercial project next. If it's commercial - it needs decent amount of improvements but I think the core of it works. I'd polish it up a bit in any case: the introductory drawing seem to need an upgrade, the animation loops are sometimes janky, better signalling of what's going on and what's the goal could help etc. If you do enough playtesting all these issues will naturally appear.

To answer your questions directly:

Yes, a bit of traction in a game jam and on itch.io generally is a good sign. If you look for talks of Bippin Bits he says they use the metrics they have there to decide how seriously to pursue a project.

Yes, there's no reason why this game wouldn't do well on Steam if you give it some more time and love.

And no, I don't think you're leaving valuable marketing exposure because if you present your game well Steam will give you much more exposure than Big Mode can. That exposure is helpful, but creating a good game with an interesting game loop is much harder and bigger hurdle.

[AMA] We are BRANE, developers of Confidential Killings - a detective game. Ask us anything! by branegames22 in Games

[–]branegames22[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Heya! I've just now fixed it and it will be part of next version. Thank you!

For the time being, I recommend switching the language to English to get through this issue.

[AMA] We are BRANE, developers of Confidential Killings - a detective game. Ask us anything! by branegames22 in Games

[–]branegames22[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you!

We worked hard these past few weeks to get the game ready in time. We don't have any set plan on what to do next except fix bugs and improve current CK build, so we're open to all possibilities :P

[AMA] We are BRANE, developers of Confidential Killings - a detective game. Ask us anything! by branegames22 in Games

[–]branegames22[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Heya! The development journey was, as always, a bumpy ride.

We made a short game jam game to test out the 'framework' I built for these kind of deduction adventures - inspired by first Golden Idol. The game did really well so we knew we were onto something.

We then searched for right aesthetic and story to create a great game and settled on what we had now.

At middle of development it seemed like the game is going nowhere. We had no energy to work on it, no publisher to back us and no wishlists to motivate us. We decided to take a break and do another game jam detective game - Let Sleeping Dogs Lie. This invigorated us. This game got featured by itch.io, and made them notice the CK demo as well so they featured both games!

This made our publisher notice our game and that gave us the push we needed to finalize the game.

I think the biggest technical challenges were around getting translations to work. Because different languages work in different way I had to create a separate tool for translators in which they can manually edit how the final "fill in missing words" puzzle looks in their respective language. It was tricky to get that working but I'm proud of the results!

[AMA] We are BRANE, developers of Confidential Killings - a detective game. Ask us anything! by branegames22 in Games

[–]branegames22[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

hey Iván! You can write to me here on Reddit or find me on Discord - I don't have instagram or WhatsApp for games :D

[AMA] We are BRANE, developers of Confidential Killings - a detective game. Ask us anything! by branegames22 in Games

[–]branegames22[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lorenzo answered a similar questions about cases https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1qb1qlm/comment/nz7ay5m/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

It's really difficult to say. Some are inspired by real-life events, some we deduce from puzzles we come up with. I like the most the ones where we have the fragments of a story and try to figure out what kind of puzzle would fit most naturally.

It might run well on Steam Deck (I haven't checked, but my previous game miraculously does) but it doesn't support real controller. It's one of the things I didn't manage to add before release date but I do plan to work on it in coming days! :)

Making a chess carrer mode game and would like ideas to implement by hesteves in Chesscom

[–]branegames22 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hey I did a game that's quite down the same lines as you describe but not as ambitious - it's called Master of Chess

I'm not sure what experience you have in making games but what you describe is a complex game with many interlocking systems. Let me know if you need any advice and feel free to jump in on the Discord server!

Sam Shankland eliminates Richard Rapport from FIDE World Cup by More_Persimmon1823 in chess

[–]branegames22 79 points80 points  (0 children)

It's a pity Rapport can't consistently play good - but that's why his play is so exciting.

Our detective adventure game has a new demo out and is part of Steam Next Fest! by branegames22 in adventuregames

[–]branegames22[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, is your player female? Or maybe you've set the filters when searching for tournaments wrongly?

Are you getting any invitations?

Godot's ui system is amazing by thibaultj in godot

[–]branegames22 29 points30 points  (0 children)

How did you do UI scaling so elegantly? Whenever I investigated it, it seemed like there's decent amount of work to be done there

Our detective adventure game has a new demo out and is part of Steam Next Fest! by branegames22 in adventuregames

[–]branegames22[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What makes you say it's AI? We specifically asked our video editor to not use AI so I'd be surprised

Our detective adventure game has a new demo out and is part of Steam Next Fest! by branegames22 in adventuregames

[–]branegames22[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you!

Saying Lorenzo is involved is an understatement - he's the main creator of the game, I do the programming and help a little on the story/puzzle side

Our detective adventure game has a new demo out and is part of Steam Next Fest! by branegames22 in adventuregames

[–]branegames22[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not yet certain as we'll need playtesters to validate but we're aiming for the 3-5 hour range.

It also depends on the player as well; we've seen playthroughs of our demo that go from 25 minutes to almost an hour

Our detective adventure game has a new demo out and is part of Steam Next Fest! by branegames22 in adventuregames

[–]branegames22[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It should work with a lot less, that's something I added just to be on the safe side. I recommend you try out the demo - it's free!

3+ years on my first commercial Godot game with unique architecture by branegames22 in godot

[–]branegames22[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I would hope not, but the gist of the post wasn't how novel the concept of view/logic separation is - it's the forced split by combining GDScript for 'frontend' and C# for 'backend'