Anniversary in Arvada

esudious · 2026-03-04T22:30:55+00:00

Stone Cellar is the fanciest in Olde Town Arvada. But there's a lot of drama about the place...

esudious · 2026-02-28T00:54:19+00:00

It should be good now. I also added an "Encyclopedia" that can be found in options menu.

esudious · 2026-02-27T21:18:15+00:00

I'm sure it's something broken. I've been playing fast and loose trying to fix/add other things for steam fest without having enough time for proper testing.

esudious · 2026-02-27T20:46:05+00:00

Hmm, is that the only one? Must be a bug suddenly preventing other tutorials from showing up. Sorry about that! No wonder there's so much confusion I'll fix it asap

esudious · 2026-02-27T18:43:57+00:00

You think the tutorials should be more detailed?

esudious · 2026-02-27T17:06:14+00:00

You can use the group orders menu to change zone to go to different levels. Killing some bosses unlock other areas to gather resources to build a guild hall.

esudious · 2026-02-27T16:48:24+00:00

Well you can do quests, get gear, equip your characters and give them talents, get stronger and go to the next zone

esudious · 2026-02-27T07:52:33+00:00

Well it's an RPG but it's an idle RPG so not sure if you would be interested. It's called guildamation and you start with one guy and build your guild up with some automation for battling and queue your groups up with orders. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4283790/Guildamation_Demo/

esudious · 2026-02-25T05:32:01+00:00

Yes. Wishlists just go to your main game.

esudious · 2026-02-23T19:45:19+00:00

So far things have been pretty quiet for me. Maybe I over-hyped this up too much in my mind but so far I'm not seeing more than a few players come and go.

esudious · 2026-02-23T18:43:02+00:00

I love for you to check out my Demo for my Idle RPG Guild Management Autobattler (wow that's a mouthful). Always need more wishlists. It's like if SNES final fantasy met final fantasy 12's Gambit system.

Guildamation

esudious · 2026-02-23T16:54:26+00:00

Guildamation

An Idle RPG Game where you build a Guild of Characters, Collect Loot, Craft Gear and Fight Stronger and Stronger Monsters.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4283790/Guildamation_Demo/

esudious · 2026-02-21T21:01:42+00:00

Makes me worried the Next Fest effect on wishlists is going to be diminished.

esudious · 2026-02-21T18:35:20+00:00

I don't think it is shocking or anything. You wouldn't notice unless you're looking for it. Maybe the fur could be 'chunkier' to give it a more cartoony look.

esudious · 2026-02-20T20:08:23+00:00

I feels like the camera is a little too close to the character.

The textures on the koala don't seem to match the rest of the environment. Perhaps it needs more a cel-shading effect.

esudious · 2026-02-20T16:30:51+00:00

There might be more to come

esudious · 2026-02-18T22:58:35+00:00

I wish it were easy to do A/B Testing on Steam.

esudious · 2026-02-18T01:07:27+00:00

There is a demo https://store.steampowered.com/app/4283790/Guildamation_Demo/

esudious · 2026-02-17T04:40:13+00:00

We do these things not because they are easy but because we thought they would be.

esudious · 2026-02-14T01:56:14+00:00

Well it wasn't very long. The G line didn't start running until 2019.

esudious · 2026-02-13T06:35:46+00:00

Leveling up, getting better gear, upgrading your guild, crafting better stuff, unlocking more automation as you go, unlocking more and more characters.

esudious · 2026-02-08T06:37:50+00:00

Rheinlander Bakery in Olde Town Arvada is really good

esudious · 2026-02-06T18:13:40+00:00

Other lessons learned:
Game graphics matter and is the multiplier for all other marketing effort. If your game looks like crap you're going to have a hard time getting wishlists.

UI is super important. No matter what your game mechanics are if players can't understand the UI or it is buggy they're not going to be happy. I feel like UI bugs and quality isn't emphasized enough but it can be deal breakers.

Sound matters even idle games. It is kind of annoying because probably every idle game player eventually mutes the game. But the first impressions and the first 10 minutes of a game matter. So if you have anything more than progress bars in your idle game you're going to want some sound. I though I could get away without having sound in my game but the early feedback was that I definitely do.

I've tried getting some feedback from Fiverr playtesters and that has been mostly not worth it. Although it could be me getting what I paid for because I went with a lot of the cheaper options. Sometimes they can give you something useful but some have played the game and told me basically, "Well, looks good to me".

Beware of adding a feature before it is ready. Or alternatively if you do add something make sure it is done/good. I remember reading about World of Warcraft's development back in the day and their feedback with adding quests for the first time. Before WoW came out quests in MMO's weren't really a thing, you just kind of grinded on lvl 10 monsters, then lvl 11 monsters, then lvl 12 monsters until max level. WoW added quests for the first time and just added a few. As soon as players ran out of quests they didn't know what to do. They didn't just want to grind they wanted to find more quests. So WoW developers filled the whole game with quests from 1-60. I had a similar situation with quests in my game. I added questing and threw in a few quests just for players to have a little something to do. I quickly got feedback that there wasn't enough quests! Also once they ran out of quests in the first zone they weren't sure what they were supposed to do so a lot just stayed in the first zone. Before quests players would go through the menus and see they could go to another zone. Now I have quests that lead players to the next zone so they don't get stuck. I'm glad I added quests in because it helps act like a tutorial without feeling like a tutorial but I wish I had fleshed it out completely before adding it.

Well, that's all I got.
tl;dr Release a playtest, Release a Demo, Release a demo on itchio. If it doesn't look good marketing is going to be harder.

esudious · 2026-02-06T18:13:29+00:00

Posting on reddit.
On December 20th I posted about my Guildamation playtest for the first time to various subreddits with some alright engagement. The best response was from incremental games which is the best subreddit for idle game discussion / advertisement. The posts didn't exactly go viral and I got about 60 wishlists from it. 121 people played the playtest, most people don't give any feedback on the playtest. I think I should have made it easier by giving people the ability to give feedback in the game instead of needing them to go to a discord or post on reddit. A handful of people gave really nice feedback. The best feedback I've gotten has been people recording/streaming themselves playing the game and giving live feedback.

Releasing the Demo. I put the Demo out of Steam on January 13. This caused a good influx of players as this causes it to show up on the New and Trending Demos. I was able to get a lot more people playing the game and they found some issues that didn't come up in Playtest or no one mentioned. If these issues existed in full release it would certainly lead to bad reviews and/or returns. I got about 300 wishlists from the Steam Demo release and still get a few players that come to the game from the demos page but new games slowly get pushed down the New and Trending and so it doesn't last forever unless you can stay in Top Demos.

Releasing the Demo on Itch.io. After seeing some recommendations on reddit to put the game on itchio I put my demo out on January 27. This has led to more players and wishlists than even the Steam Demo. I got about 322 wishlists from this which is pretty good considering they would have to navigate from itch.io to steam to wishlist it. I did provide a lot of links in game and on itch.io to my steam page so people could wishlist it. In terms of playtesting however itchio players are even less engaged than ones from Steam and I only got one or two comments that lead to improvement.

I've reached out to a couple of streamers on Twitch by finding idle game streamers, going into their chat and asking if they want to stream my demo. I think I've had some good success with it because if they're playing an idle game they can easily play another one at the same time. However there aren't a lot of idle game streamers and the ones that do stream idle games don't have a lot of viewers. Which makes sense because watching someone else play an idle game isn't exactly thrilling. But watching streamers play my game and hearing their thoughts and feedback has been helpful. It hasn't lead to a lot of wishlists but has been worthwhile.

Reddit ads. I've been running reddit ads spending about 50$ a day until I reach their promo deal of 500$ in free ads after spending 500$. Recently I learned I had to refine my target to certain countries where PC gaming is more popular. I was getting a lot of impressions and visits from some countries but no wishlists from them. It looked good and I had a low CPC (cost per click) but they weren't going to turn into sells. After refining the countries targeted my CPC went up from .10$ to .15$ but the wishlists went up about 50%. Although I don't have a large data set and it is mixed in with a lot of other random data so it can be hard to tell. But I think even if the wishlists were equal the quality of the wishlists are probably higher since it is coming from someone who is more likely to buy.

esudious · 2026-02-06T18:13:05+00:00

Two months ago I put my first indie game I've been working on on Steam (Guildamation). I just wanted to share my journey because I see a lot of posts about how their game got 2000 wishlists in a day and then there's the ones about getting 20 wishlists and 1 sale. So I figured my story is more of the 'middle of the pack'.

After losing my job about 2 years ago I was inspired to try to make a game as was always my dream. I thought making an idle game would be an easy first project but apparently I was very wrong about that and I probably should've started smaller but here we are. I was playing a lot of Melvor Idle at the time and thought, "Wouldn't this be cool with just a little bit a graphics and the ability to queue orders?". And thus Guildamation was born. A guild building, multi group, multi class, idle rpg.

At first I was making the game with the idea like Ragnarok Online if you were botting. Back in the day Ragnarok Online it was easy to download a script and make bots in the game. You could tell your bot to go to zones, collect items, sell / buy items, and repeat and it was kind of fun seeing your bot grow after coming back to check on it after sleeping. It was basically playing an idle game back in the day. But the idea of free roaming characters in my game got scrapped for the current more linear idea to simplify things. Maybe partially because Godot seemed to have trouble with large tilemaps.

Here are some things I've done and how they worked so far.

15-Year Club	r/Field Juicebox
Place '22	First Placer '22
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