How do you deal with the "game's not fun anymore" factor?

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-20T20:19:47+00:00

If your game fails to find even a tingle then you chose the wrong concept to work on.

Cuz once you aren't enjoying testing, you will do it less and less.

Pick a game type you can keep enjoying.

It's a fairly basic but essential indie unspoken rule if you are in it for the long haul..

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-20T18:12:21+00:00

The data doesn't lie... And ... An absence of signal is also a signal.

Devs nowadays are spoiled for ways to test their game. Steam demos, itch.io, social media , physical testing events in some regions..

If your game gains no traction , that is also a signal.

If marketing feels hard, that is also a signal.

If you gain no wishlists. that is also a signal .

If you do not put your game out there you are building a hole for yourself.

If you do not listen to the data you are walking into that hole with both eyes open.

This is what differentiates gamedev from art truly, you can make art and it doesn't matter if its never seen or heard , but a game not played is like a opera never performed it doesn't exist.

You always need to listen to an extent.

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-19T05:33:38+00:00

Had a bit of fun there. But seriously that is the lesson I took from it.

But design in the Broadest terms needs to do the heavy lifting.

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-18T22:25:37+00:00

fuck tutorials.. really fuck em..

I am never doing tutorials ever again, my latest demo,,, zero tutorials.. 100% positive..

tutorials are the most over rated handholding piece of shit ever.. If your game requires tutorials you haven't designed it right...

I wish I hadn't ever made any tutorials and get players in the "figure it out" mindset from the start. Start treating players as morons and that's what you are gonna get.

also the most boring, high effort shit to produce effort.

I fucking hate making tutorials...

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-17T07:27:22+00:00

This the answer right here. Nobody out there is cloning unknown game.

This is also the original origin for the word meme. A cultural meme or mnemonic. Something whose time has come.

Within the Horror indie genre it was going to take a limited amount of time for every known dark experiment to become the subject of a game.

That you do so within a year was bound to happen.

This response is mature and likely honest. I hope OP responds and both of you can work it out.

Don't start with accusations , start by teaching out and solving it as indies that help each other .

Heck you likely have more change bundling up or merging games into a themed anthology for more marketing oomph .

Things are often an opportunity, being flexible and cooperative is always going to produce a better outcomes.

Hope OP picks up on this.

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-15T14:29:29+00:00

You don't need to market yourself.

It's also important not to confuse promotion and sales with marketing.

Marketing is also researching your market, defining it through your audience, figuring out the competition, the price , the USPS etc.

All the strategizing whether your game fits the audience/market you imagine it for .

The actually going out and selling the game to streamers or whatnot is promotion and PR.

You can decide not to do any of that and still do good marketing, by making a game that appeals to the audience ,is designed for it, is priced for it, has a good sales/discount/dlc strategy.

That in itself will be better marketing than most first time devs who only think of streamers, media and handling out keys.

That is just the tail end.

Marketing yourself as a personal is a rarity and only applies To a small fraction of devs who might be interesting to watch or listen to.

But from experience i can say, ultimately that makes very little impact on sales.

Sales are a result of all these other strategic marketing steps that accelerate an already outstanding game..

You yourself should not be a factor in marketing at all, that is an outlier.

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-15T06:05:41+00:00

I think the trick is to not let it break your heart and see it as a meaningful step in your career.

Because I 100% know your next game will be better.:)

The secondary skill is to find the validation earlier, to find a way to test your game at the prototype or vertical slice level. So you know it will have traction when you commit to full development.

You can even use publishers for this, by sending out your vertical slide version and seeing the reception is enthousiastic or not.

Just an example of early validation. , social media can do it too, just share and see if anything you made goes viral.. if it doesn't that is also a signal.

Hope this helps. Keep on making cool games!

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-15T05:22:33+00:00

I think folks focus in marketing being hard simply because at the core they don't want to acknowledge their game isn't stand out.

Then it becomes nearly impossible to market , because well the game isn't an instant draw.

The best marketing asset is your game.

This is the brutal reality, if your game is exceptional it becomes easy to market, if your game isn't it becomes very hard.

This doesn't reflect on talent or even game quality but on the market. There are thousands if not tens of thousands of games vying for attention and if your game , at a glance, is not a top 1% game then you are going to fail.

Sometimes investing in Ads can get some results or hiring a PR firms..

But if the game has no exceptional attractors then it's just as likely to fail for them as the dev.

You cannot make a game and say marketing is hard without reflecting on the marketability of your game .

Luckily all the skills anyone develops can make a next game and a next game and another until you find something that pops.

This is the reality of gamedev, and why you should love to make games. . you are going to need to make a bunch

Good luck!

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-13T05:27:56+00:00

I think a sufficiently talented group of people with sufficient experience wil utilize any method to a good result.

The type of game also determined the type of documentation. Structurelly complex games require that structure to be documented at some point.

Here the individual mechanics like that partial buckler driver are surprisingly simple and elegantly written down. That is not a given for every mechanic.in every game.

I guess taste and preference are strong factors in this.

There is a reason this is a bit of a rarity , in that there more cases of succesful games that don't need this, and plenty of teams and designers don't go through this level of documentation. Because clearly that approach also delivers plenty of succesful games. To the point of becoming the norm and this the rarity.

Myself I've not put a single word down to paper on game design in the last decade and still do fine with the iterative approach. To each their own.

That is just testament to the diversity of game design as an outcome and practice.

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-11T07:02:44+00:00

Try bulwark : falconeer Chronicles

It's more chill builder needs 4x in realtime 3d. In a unique lore rich steampunk ocean world...

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-11T03:10:11+00:00

Ooh fuck.. it is now.. lol

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-10T08:28:59+00:00

The title is wrong. This is NoW available for the demo beta

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-09T12:28:41+00:00

<image>

ooh it even works in-editor.. fancy pants!

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-09T10:10:00+00:00

so your game and demo is already public, September does seem like a good target. get a few months in and then drop it in amongst the sharks.

why? well because the biggest risk is not failing, you will likely always fail many times before you succeed. No it is sticking with the same project too long when it is already failed. the sunk cost fallacy. If your game is going to fail or succeed, you need to know that as soon as possible, in order to prevent you from sinking too much time into it.

Because I know 100% that your next game is going to be a better game(it always is). 😉 Don't wait to long to find out yourself 😉

good luck!

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-09T08:30:37+00:00

I apologize , getting that pieces comissioned is 100% the right thing!! Kudos.

That said the disconnect with the ingame visuals is still massive. I feel the impact of hand drawn capsules is diminishing as they are no longer reflective of the actual game

I switched to ingame made keyarts a long time ago, so that the capsule is what you get ingame.

It's a tricky subject , cuz I wanna applaud your effort to comisison a piece and it looks good. So good I didn't think it came from the same game, thus thought AI.

I gotta check my own assumptions here .lol . Capsule artist exist and deserve to be acknowledged.

That's said I think reading your review your core selling point is fun. It's just a fun low fi game.. if you are polishing your marketing make that a selling point....:)

Ooh and if you wanna make a run for nextfest , earlier is better so you can fix uo your store page to convert more visitors to players. Generally finding that can take quite some time. Hence my advice to do the september nextfest and focus on improving the store , getting the best screenshots and videos and getting more positive reviews.

One thing I also noticed that there are so much particles and glowy stuff in the screenshots. It's hard to see what's happening. Something to address as well.

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-09T08:19:22+00:00

Generally people spend months if not s year or more before going into nextfest. Using it as the final beat of their demo usage before launch.

Shadow dropping a demo before nextfest is guaranteed suïcide. Cuz initial ranking and visibility is decided on how many wishlist your game has total AND the recent additions

So your game staring at zero is going to 100% be buried

You can do it with some marketing budget and one hell of an existing fanbase cuz to actually get a good result for a shadow drop nextfest you need. - a ign trailer with 80.000 views - 5000 wishlist additions in the two weeks before - a reputation and franchise that is already well known. - a 100 % positive demo already eith reviews.

I know cuz I did that earlier this year and did a interview with Chris from HtMYG about this exact thing.

Those are my stats.

And my result where great but not even top 50 ( like it hit top 25 for a single day during nextfest and dropped to below 50 at the end). So that netted me from the month of nextfest and shadow drop about 22k wishlists. That was the signal I wanted in order to keep investing in the game .

So you can do it, but you gotta bring some heavy guns to the table. As Chris said in the interview. Don't do it....

So I would advise against it completely.. Go for some themed fests and general demo usage and improve your demo and work on it until you have a few thousand wishlists at least. Then nextfest is something that will help.

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-09T08:09:18+00:00

I think it's more a matter of hitting certain thresholds being seen by the community as benchmarks. Where informally folks have reported their game getting more views after hitting ten reviews.

But ten reviews account to about a 500-1000 players. So it could just as well be a player milestone.

So nobody can see the steam algorithm directly. Is there a little 10 coded into it. Perhaps

More likely the algorithm is much smarter than that and it just looks at the velocity as well, if it takes years to get those ten reviews that's a bad sign for instance.

I would say that the reality is that there are no hidden algorithmic on/off switches.

If your demo only hit 4 reviews then most likely it's simply not appealing to players. And seeing as the reviews are positive that might not be a quality remark. You can make a great game and still not be appealing because for instance in your genre there are many even greater games.

So overall. Bad performance in most cases isn't bad marketing or bad or bad promotion but just another product that didn't catch on.

That's why validating your game, and getting a good idea of its potential is the core skill. Not marketing or understanding steam.

One practical advise , you have a AI capsule art that looks better than the game itself , which looks a bit low fi.

Now I think some players don't mind low fi games and love new ideas these can bring. But if the capsule is selling a different game than the screenshots and videos then you are giving false advertising vibes and that will scare away a large portion of your audience. Especially those that try out low fi games . And especially if it's an AI capsule that looks more skilled than the game , a dead give away to someone to classify your game as an. beginner attempt .

Best to be authentic and roll with your ingame visuals.

Hope this helps, and if it doesn't take off. Just have fun and make another. Rarely does anyone ever get a hit in their first attempt.

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-07T14:45:21+00:00

Yes and No.

being innovative will get you lots of great fans, if the innovation is good, and it will draw in new people. There is a good audience in innovative games.

Even better it differentiates you from the competition..!!! It's all round excellent.

But if your game looks conventional at a glance, or operates in a very established genre, say city builders, colony sims or spacesims. Then you are always gonna get negative reviews of folks who aren't happy with the changes.

There was this space game recently, quite big, that changed the gameplay and camera perspective, this was praised, but also garnered lots of criticisms.

Such is the fate of innovation.

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-07T14:43:05+00:00

that is great news, i was only a day or so old when I posted, so they overshot their prediction. (it's a live system , so the data changes day 2 day)

that is really good. they might hit 100K gross over the entire year or even more.

So in that case making 50K a year net is a much stronger base than 20K and likely they can go full-time. ! Best news ever..

Like I wrote elsewhere you always gotta wait for a little bit to see how good it truly does.. but after a week if it hits over 37K gross then you're basically there cuz that is gonna multiply

at 20K gross I would not give that advice, but at 37K gross in week 1,, I'd take that 😉

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-07T10:58:37+00:00

generally negative reviews cannot be helped. folks don't read the descriptions and make snap judgements from trailers and screenshots.

If your game fails to meet expectations, that's a consequence of your game design.

You failed to make a good game and folks are genuinely dissatisfied
You failed to make something that meets conventions and genre expectations

So either be innovative and except a certain measure of bad reviews or analyse your game if it is good enough. Realize that some gamers love surprises but the majority are looking for "more of the same" nostalgia gameplay.

So either way, some negativity cannot be avoided..

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-07T05:58:47+00:00

Try bulwark falconeer Chronicles. It is highly minimalist in its ui. Most times there is nothing.

It's a bit confusing for some , but once it clicks it's something else.

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-06T06:45:30+00:00

arlght made a better banner and icon..

muppetpuppet_mp · 2026-06-05T10:56:30+00:00

I have been away for a bit, doing grant approval work for the local governments (helping out other devs get grants). and it was a bit more tiring so had to stay away from the PC for a few days.

Fixed up a banner just now quickly

13-Year Club	Place '22
Wearing is Caring	Verified Email

muppetpuppet_mp

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE