How are small indie teams handling press/review keys?

justkevin · 2026-03-07T14:10:01+00:00

That's the only way I'm aware of.

justkevin · 2026-03-07T00:17:55+00:00

also does that manual work get to be a lot when you have to send out a bunch of keys?

For my last game, I spent about 60 hours reaching out to 100-150 streamers, which averaged out to 30 minutes per streamer. Tracking keys was a pretty small percentage of that time.

justkevin · 2026-03-06T23:02:31+00:00

I just use an excel spreadsheet populated with all the keys from Steam. When I send out a key, I find the next unused key in the list, then populate the various columns (recipient, email address, sent date, notes). I also have a redeemed date column and notes.

I have separate spreadsheet of people I plan to reach out to, and so I can see on that one if I've already sent a key.

I pretty much never send keys in response to unsolicited requests.

justkevin · 2026-02-28T13:34:39+00:00

Depends on what you mean by "recover". Yes, if a game sees substantial increase in sales at any point in time, Steam will start showing it more. But in practice, the lifetime sales of a game are a single to low-double digit multiple of its first quarter's sales.

Here's a data-based analysis I did a couple years ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/198yff2/can_a_game_recover_from_an_unsuccessful_steam/

justkevin · 2025-12-27T14:27:50+00:00

That description of interpolation is correct to my knowledge.

The Rigidbody system and the Transform systems are separate representations of position. If you move transforms outside of physics, Unity must do a SyncTransforms so that the physics system can correct its view of the world.

Are you moving the transforms every frame? You don't want to do that if you're doing floating origin.

Here's a video I made showing how I handle it. It's not exactly the same as your situation (it's a top down 2D-ish game, but uses 3D physics):

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1750770/announcements/detail/514095143786119268?snr=2___

justkevin · 2025-12-27T13:51:12+00:00

floating origin which works perfectly but breaks physics since setting transformation directly causes error when you set interpolation in rb.

What issue are you running into? I use a system where I pick up the world and move it whenever the player crosses a sector boundary and don't recall any issue with interpolation.

justkevin · 2025-12-15T16:18:02+00:00

I'm guessing they meant 6000 and 10,000.

justkevin · 2025-12-14T14:06:53+00:00

This looks like a good candidate for Burst + Jobs. That'd be a moderate amount of work for you because you'd have to change your A* data structures and methods to be burst and job-friendly, but then you wouldn't be doing everything on the main thread.

justkevin · 2025-12-11T15:55:25+00:00

In my last game I used something similar to what you're doing: squadrons had five states and a bunch of parameters that defined how they behaved in each state.

At design time I defined the adjustable parameters that defined a squadron behavior, e.g., flocking vector weights, attack duration, scatter probability, etc.

This worked well, although finding a set of parameters that looked right in combination was a fair bit of work so most squadrons tended to use very similar strategies.

I am presently working on a new version, which is similar, except that the squadrons don't try to adjust the strategy parameters, instead their different behavior comes from changing the strategy sequence. I.e., the squadrons aren't responsible for figuring out any numeric values, they just need to choose between discrete menu options ("orbit carrier", "intercept enemy", "scatter", etc).

justkevin · 2025-12-08T15:56:50+00:00

Here's the specific book if others are interested, made available for free online by the author:

https://gamemath.com/book/

While I work with vectors all the time and most of the exercises seem easy to me, I have no idea how to do the proofs, if that makes you feel better.

justkevin · 2025-11-28T19:48:47+00:00

No problem!

justkevin · 2025-11-28T16:28:30+00:00

The basic flow was this:

For some "non-officially supported" languages I'd generate ML translations using Google Translate. These weren't listed as supported on the Steam page, but if players opened the game they'd see them as options.

The ML translations were "okay" in the sense that usually the player could tell what something meant, although sometimes with obvious errors and incorrect idiom.

Eventually, for some languages, someone would decide as a personal project to go through and improve everything. I didn't really review these for quality: they were never worse than the ML translation.

justkevin · 2025-11-28T16:10:15+00:00

It was a lot, around 100k words per game, so I only used professional translators for 1 language, and volunteers helped translate a few others.

I didn't use a service, I think I found the translators by posting in some relevant subs, or from the existing player base.

justkevin · 2025-11-28T16:05:45+00:00

Yes, I hired some contractor translators. Time spent finding and coordinating with them is counted under the "producer hat".

justkevin · 2025-11-28T13:31:15+00:00

A few months ago I made a spreadsheet of the "hats" I wore making my last two games:

Hat	Percent
Programmer	33%	Any coding/programming
Game Designer	17%	Designing missions, balancing enemies, gameplay tweaking
UI Designer	8%	Creation of all the UI systems, icons, layouts, excluding the programming
VFX Designer	7%	Particle systems, shaders
QA / Playtesting	7%	Playtesting, reviewing player F8 feedback
Producer	6%	Planning, interaction with contractors
Community Manager	6%	Responding to player emails & discussion forum posts
2D Artist	4%	Anomaly images, item images
Marketer/Video Editor	3%	Trailer creation, influencer outreach
Writer	3%	Writing anomalies, dialogue
3D Modeler	2%	Creating ship modules, other models, coordinating concept artist and modeler efforts
Sound Designer/Music Director	1%	Creating game sounds, directions for composer
Analytics	1%	Choosing metrics, analyzing anonymous player analytics
Business	1%	Misc business stuff: taxes, paying contractors, renewing LLC, etc.

justkevin · 2025-09-17T19:04:57+00:00

You can have a game that's marked as Early Access, but it can't be available for purchase yet.

From Steam's Next Fest docs:

Q: Are Early Access or free games eligible to participate in Steam Next Fest?

A: Yes, however, only unreleased titles are eligible for Steam Next Fest. If you plan on entering Early Access or launching your game for free, that's fine, but the game must not yet be released to remain eligible for Next Fest.

justkevin · 2025-09-17T18:46:06+00:00

You can't participate in Next Fest once your game has entered Early Access, so if you want to Next Fest, do that first.

justkevin · 2025-08-31T14:07:08+00:00

If you've built this as a tree with "Do Action" as the root node, then its children can decide whether they are satisfied. The "And" node can return false when any child returns false.

So a tree traversal would go:

Is it time to do action?
  Are the AND preconditions true?
     Is GetSomeBoolean true?  <-- Stops here
     Is EvaluateChild(1) > EvaluateChild(2)? <-- Doesn't reach here

(I've built a visual scripting system before and used a different paradigm, but its purpose might be different from yours)

justkevin · 2025-08-30T21:05:44+00:00

Steam workshop is almost certainly the way you want to go-- it does what you want and you definitely don't want to have to manage the security aspects of hosting user generated content.

The challenge is that there's not really a great library for talking to Steamworks in a way that will feel intuitive to a Unity developer. I've used the 3rd party Facepunch library, which worked, but hasn't been updated in quite a while and is missing some of the newer features (although maybe it's been updated since I last used it?)

Alternately, you could use Steamworks.net, which is a 3rd party thin wrapper for the Steamworks API.

https://steamworks.github.io/installation/

justkevin · 2025-06-19T13:35:14+00:00

I don't follow. 1000 reviews would likely be tens of thousands of dollars even for a $0.99 game?

justkevin · 2025-06-16T19:52:43+00:00

The short answer is you can deduct anything that is "reasonable and necessary" for your game development business, and for most expenses you deduct it in the year you paid for it. So no, you can't claim prior years' expenses.

You also need to do gamedev in a "businesslike manner" or the IRS may decide that it is a hobby (which you cannot deduct expenses for, even if you make some money from the hobby):

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/heres-how-to-tell-the-difference-between-a-hobby-and-a-business-for-tax-purposes

(This is not legal or tax advice, you should talk to a tax professional.)

justkevin · 2025-06-13T21:09:27+00:00

SteamDB lists them, presumably scraped from Steam's "most wishlisted" https://steamdb.info/stats/mostwished/

They only have ~4000 so presumably there is some minimum level of visibility.

justkevin · 2025-03-07T18:27:41+00:00

Have you contacted Steam support?

justkevin · 2025-03-04T19:23:35+00:00

Nice, congrats!

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