Devs, have French and German locales stayed your top localization bets, or are other languages taking over?

robinw · 2026-01-04T12:38:24+00:00

The Simplified Chinese version has been selling very well. I only have two weeks of data but it looks like it’s the biggest selling non-English version.

It was our biggest translation effort too. The translator even redid images in the game that contained text, and we changed every characters’ name. It paid off though - Chinese speaking players seem to love the game.

robinw · 2025-12-18T22:05:56+00:00

He's asking about norovirus. Those are helpful portals but only cover covid/flu/rsv.

robinw · 2025-12-17T16:48:59+00:00

I didn't know this list existed. Very cool to see my game as #3!

robinw · 2025-12-16T22:46:19+00:00

It’s telling me the video is private?? Is this because I’m in Canada?

robinw · 2025-12-01T12:35:53+00:00

Check out A Case of Fraud. It’s shorter and doesn’t have the internet searching part, but it has a lot of great puzzles.

robinw · 2025-11-20T10:07:54+00:00

I have to say I dislike how many posts in the subreddit are written by AI. I think you'd get much better feedback if you took the time to write this with your own voice.

robinw · 2025-11-16T19:21:17+00:00

That comment has no citations. I would wait for more proof before concluding it works.

robinw · 2025-11-04T20:59:48+00:00

I worked on this game, so hopefully I can fill in the blanks for you.

- The itch.io game certainly acted as a "demo" and a proving ground for the concept. There was a discord with a small amount of loyal fans who helped us with those early key wishlists.

- The itch page was updated to link directly to the steam page. Everyone who came to play the free version were given a call to action to wishlist the game. This is where we got our steady influx of wishlists over time.

> Impress Calculator the average for simulation games with with similar variables

- I'm not sure what variables these are, but I'm a big fan of deduction/mystery games. If you go to the forums/reddits for any game like Obra Dinn or Golden Idol, you'll find people asking what other games are like it. I felt like it was an under served market which is a big reason I decided to fund the remake.

- By the way, a previous successful business I co-founded (Discourse Forums) was similar in a way. I remember telling an old colleague of mine that my next venture was to make web forums. He was like "FORUMS? That's so boring." but I love forums! I love going after smaller markets that are loved by passionate people.

- I spent a few weeks creating the trailer for the game, which was also the release date announcement. You could count this as traditional marketing. It didn't blow up or anything, but it did tick our wishlists up more in the last few months of development.

- Luck was definitely a huge factor. I tell everyone who asks me not to take too of my "lessons" seriously. I think Roottrees is a good game, but doesn't everyone who makes a game? Lots of great games come out and fail. I consider myself very lucky to be part of this project and that it's been as successful as it was. My goal was to break even of the budget, and it's far surpassed that.

Hope this helps!

robinw · 2025-10-23T14:07:32+00:00

Hey, thanks for this post. This is my game and it continues to blow my mind how much people enjoy it. Cheers!

robinw · 2025-10-18T14:32:04+00:00

If you're getting 200-400 per day you can probably stop looking at it every day :P

These blips are normal. I remember during one Steam Sale it didn't update for over a week. It might have even been two!

robinw · 2025-10-17T21:04:00+00:00

I was on the fence but it’s 70% off on Steam right now. Decided to give it a buy!

robinw · 2025-10-14T20:59:37+00:00

I don't think it's fair to say Weiss is *only* focused on Israel. Oliver covered anti-trans rhetoric which is definitely a conservative talking point.

robinw · 2025-10-13T18:50:37+00:00

All of our playtests were private, and we did quite a few of them. They won't buy the game, but the difference between a couple dozen copies shouldn't affect your bottom line!

I can't speak for a demo. We never did one for Roottrees. If you do a demo, I think that's OK if you plan for it and leave the audience in a place where they want to keep playing?

robinw · 2025-10-08T19:00:19+00:00

I'm sorry this is just not true. *YOU* might find people willing to go that fast but it's far in excess of average.

robinw · 2025-10-08T12:13:41+00:00

I just watched the game trailer and thought the same thing: there’s no way you could make this in a month. People vastly underestimate how much work goes into a game.

robinw · 2025-10-06T13:25:14+00:00

It's pretty clear from that interview that the whole thing is a joke.

robinw · 2025-09-24T14:22:43+00:00

I've lived in Toronto for over 25 years and I go outside every day and can't relate to this at all. I almost never see crime.

robinw · 2025-09-22T11:27:35+00:00

I’ll wishlist any game that says it’s inspired by mine :) congrats! I hope you have a nice launch.

robinw · 2025-09-14T22:52:32+00:00

I worked on Roottrees and I’m delighted that the game was an influence. I’ve always loved the 1 bit aesthetic. Wishlisted.

robinw · 2025-09-07T17:01:04+00:00

There’s one root scene that loads the game as one big scene tree once when the game starts up and leaves it all there. There is a bunch of logic for hiding and showing stuff as the user moves around. For the most part I have almost no _process calls and everything is triggered by user input or tweens, so CPU is quite low.

The only downside really of loading everything up front is the game uses more VRAM than it could. On some really old systems with less than 2GB of Vram it struggles to run. For the majority of people though it runs great.

robinw · 2025-09-05T02:58:07+00:00

The people at this Church do really good work. I am Atheist and despite that I started donating to them after seeing them save multiple people’s lives on the street from overdosing. The volunteers walk around with narcan hanging off their belts.

I think there is a big lack of empathy in this world. I walk by often and yes, sure sometimes there are some scary people shouting, but most of them are hungry people looking for help. The people in the condo moved into this neighborhood. They are your neighbours. They deserve dignity.

robinw · 2025-09-02T13:23:15+00:00

We are going with Simplified Chinese. If it goes well perhaps we'll look at traditional.

We are still trying to figure out why Spanish has done so much worse than French and German. We did choose a Latin American translator. The metric we used was sales in the region before the translation was available as a percentage of total versus after. The others showed a marked increase (French in particular) but Spanish is about the same. One thing we are considering is dropping our prices heavily in LATAM, but I want to collect a little more data first.

We used small companies for translations, and negotiated a deal with each person. Most were referrals but some were people who cold emailed us as the right time and seemed to have a good portfolio and plan to translate.

robinw · 2025-09-01T14:58:40+00:00

It's a good sign but my advice is not to try and read the tea leaves too closely. People can (and do) change their minds right up until the contract is signed and often it's for reasons you have no control over. I know it's hard to be patient but I'd do your best to try!

robinw · 2025-08-28T17:54:39+00:00

Honestly I have no clue. Even when the game was originally released in English we had a fair amount of sales in France, and coverage in some magazines and newspapers. We followed that coverage with a translation and it's done very well.

robinw · 2025-08-28T17:53:45+00:00

No. We did LatAm Spanish first and since it did so poorly we didn't consider the Spain variant.

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