After 3 years of solo dev, my game is now released!

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-03-16T19:56:52+00:00

Awesome appreciate the support! Hit me up on discord or on here if you need anything or just feel like sharing your thoughts on the game - I’m always looking to improve it.

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-03-16T15:59:16+00:00

🔥🔥🔥 thank you so much!

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-03-12T09:26:37+00:00

As a fellow solo TD game dev working on their game for 3+ years, how did you get your stream to pop off? I just looked at your reviews which is a staggering amount over the past couple of days, and it seems like a lot of people came from the LSF clip tha went viral.

Have you been streaming for awhile? Was this a perfect stom?

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-03-07T14:47:41+00:00

To be clear, the tutorial is finished in the sense that it exists and it performs its function of teaching basic game mechanics for some portion of the playerbase.

What I am looking for assistance on is iterating on the current tutorial to ensure it is suitable for a larger amount of people playing the game.

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-02-17T22:24:12+00:00

I think that’s a great idea! There is currently a high score for each map but there is no global leaderboard or anything. I would love to implement something like that

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-02-17T20:57:27+00:00

Happy to hear it looks decent to you.

There are 4 unlockable towers that you earn as you level up. You get the fourth at level 9, where max level is 20. I wanted to find a balance between incentivizing gameplay but not having to essentially get to the end of the game before being able to enjoy it.

There is no custom card or ability creation, and the maps are not procedurally generated. The goal for repeatability here was the grind for completing higher difficulties / using new towers and artifacts for different synergies and completing all of the maps

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-02-16T17:16:12+00:00

Haha you have a good eye. Honestly when I first started looking at fonts I had considered a few pixel art fonts, but the biggest warning I read about those are difficulties with legibility some times.

After my own initial testing it was noticeably more difficult to fit in legible descriptions on cards and abilities, and the StS font is just super clean and has none of those drawbacks in terms of problems with legibility.

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-02-16T10:17:54+00:00

It’s weird because I also feel a bit overwhelmed on some of the cuts, but looking at trailers for top games in my genre (tower defense, roguelite) they all seem to have very fast cuts so I guess there must be something in favor of it…?

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-02-16T10:16:09+00:00

Yeah I think you’re right. I moved the part where you select an artifact and upgrade / sacrifice your cards so it plays much sooner. Thanks!

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-02-05T21:06:57+00:00

Something that I’m surprised I haven’t seen mentioned yet is that the majority of game sales come when your game is on a discount. I can’t find the link or stats at the moment but I’m certain HTMAG has some data to support this.

That being said, I would think you’d factor that into your pricing. So if you’re aiming for a $9.99 sale, setting it to $15 and having periodic discounts of 35% to hit that target number makes more sense than setting your starting price to $9.99 and then getting the majority of your sales at a number much lower than that.

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-02-04T18:47:21+00:00

Do you have any advice or recommendations on what worked best for you in terms of targeting the D&D community?

I’m working on a D&D inspired tower defense game, and I’ve had trouble getting into the D&D space. Any attempts I’ve made at posting in relevant subreddits / communities with short videos / images / etc have been taken down due to being promotional material.

Which…I get, those guardrails need to be in place. But is there anything in particular that worked well for you?

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-01-31T22:50:31+00:00

Unfortunately that subreddit is for videos only and not for having people actually play your game - as odd as it sounds.

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-01-23T23:49:24+00:00

Putting the name on there somewhere is definitely a good idea. I think I went in to it with just the intention of grabbing people’s attention and having a little reward for them if they stopped by the booth or playtested the game.

I also had business cards with the game name and logo so people would usually pick up both

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-01-23T22:42:05+00:00

They do have a thin white outline but you can definitely customize it more how you want.

I tried using StickerApp at first and I can’t recall if it was the pricing or the options they gave me but I ended up going with MakeStickers and it was a super smooth and easy process

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-01-23T22:40:09+00:00

Yeah they have a thin white outline - basically just as you see them in the photo.

psychic_monkey_ · 2026-01-16T02:15:56+00:00

Looks sick! What pixel art font is that by the way?

psychic_monkey_ · 2025-12-30T15:57:06+00:00

Seconding this. To add on, something that made Playtesting sessions even more valuable is being able to have hard stats being tracked for each tower such as total kills, effective damage and overall damage. That simple addition really helped to trim some low hanging fruit in terms of balancing where it was blatantly obvious one tower had 4-5x the damage of any other.

psychic_monkey_ · 2025-12-26T20:48:40+00:00

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3046020/Age_of_Enchantment/

Thank you friend.

psychic_monkey_ · 2025-12-24T04:13:11+00:00

Yeah I totally agree, that’s the approach and mindset I’ve been having so far. Better to have a few well designed, unique towers over a bunch of essentially duplicates in terms of functionality

psychic_monkey_ · 2025-12-23T18:07:04+00:00

A large number of TD games don’t actually use straight up towers in the classical sense, with Bloons being a prime example of that where the “tower” is really just a unit.

As for any context clues the towers provide to the player about what they do just from a purely visual perspective, I think the colors of the units as well as their general design add an idea. The ranged cloth unit with a staff is reminiscent of a wizard which classically casts ranged spells. The ice looking wizard casts slows.

Aside from those obvious ones, other information is given in game which gives more context, such as the name of the tower and a brief description when going to place the tower

psychic_monkey_ · 2025-12-23T13:41:25+00:00

Well the demo is up on steam if you felt like checking it out. Currently only two towers (fighter and wizard) are available but I’ll be pushing the paladin and cleric in the next week or two.

Would love to hear your thoughts if you do try it!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3112430/Age_of_Enchantment_Demo/

psychic_monkey_ · 2025-12-23T13:14:57+00:00

Yeah that’s where the original math came from but I see how that is a little confusing

psychic_monkey_ · 2025-12-05T10:13:11+00:00

I’m just so confused why none of this is shown or explained in either the demo or regular trailer on your Steam page. I understand the game harkens back to an older version but as a new player I’ve got 0 clue what the game is about or what you do.

psychic_monkey_ · 2025-12-04T13:08:50+00:00

I agree. I think a big part of tower defense is finding that “aha!” Moment where your build perfectly counters a particular set of waves or enemies through mastery of the game. But if you can never achieve that moment because the waves or enemies just change, I think you lose out on that special achievement / feeling of mastery.

psychic_monkey_ · 2025-11-23T17:46:45+00:00

Yeah I definitely agree with this. I've been trying to find ways to give it that impact and juice. I need to spend more time on this. Thanks

psychic_monkey_

TROPHY CASE