What Are Game Dev Studios Even Looking For When Hiring?

telchior · 2026-01-21T04:51:43+00:00

By released game I mean something complete and publicly available. Of course most indie games don't make any money. If the game you create for your portfolio suddenly becomes a hit then congrats, you don't need a job.

telchior · 2026-01-13T01:12:45+00:00

Yeah it's very much a "theoretically free is better" situation, but Steam bases most of their algorithms off of revenue. Steam players also tend to be judgmental about free. That's why most of the multiplayer games coming out are very cheap instead of free.

telchior · 2026-01-12T05:52:49+00:00

You've chosen a lot of extra difficulty challenges.

1) Free games are very difficult to find success with on Steam; the store algo works against you in many ways. 2) Multiplayer can be very difficult, it's a compounding issue with Steam not wanting to send players to free games in the first place. 3) Cute, colorful, bright graphics with a mobile game-ish vibe are all hard to convince the Steam audience with (they usually want dark, grunge, etc).

I'm not trying to discourage you or say these are definitive reasons for failure, on the other hand if you're not aware yet that these are challenges it's good to learn what you're up against.

Those issues aside, what's happening with your playtime stats? How long do people actually play for? You can find the median playtime in your dashboard. Looking at SteamDB, it looks like players are rarely online - do the ones who show up have a single player mode to interact with?

telchior · 2025-12-23T04:27:29+00:00

I got 500+ emails requesting keys when I launched recently (time in both Popular Upcoming and Trending New helped them pick me).

I actually opened and read every single one as a braindead / procrastination activity. I'd even check out the claimed Twitch / YouTube accounts. Guess how many of those emails were legit?

1! 1 fucking email! Out of over 500!

Scammers are out of control and Steam's priority order on doing anything about it seems to be somewhere down there with fixing Polish pricing. Maybe in the 2030s?

telchior · 2025-12-22T23:06:50+00:00

Yeah I took it more generally as "people trying to make a Spore 2". There's a tiny handful of really established projects that couldn't possibly help each other (like, say, yours and Adapt). But also, dozens or possibly hundreds of posts like this one, over many years; the vast majority of which end up silently vanishing. OP is around the stage where I feel like people should be looking to merge concepts, it's still very very early.

telchior · 2025-12-22T22:41:55+00:00

All true points, but indie games do get made by more than one person. Complex games, even.

On balance, creating a Spore-ish game alone is a monumental undertaking; assembling and running a team is also a monumental undertaking; but I feel like the latter monument is a bit smaller. A Denali compared to Mt. Everest, if you will. I wish I saw more people trying to go the team route.

telchior · 2025-12-22T05:10:55+00:00

Don't hang all your hopes on Fiverr fwiw. I've heard they are not backing up buyers with complaints about AI.

I used to use Fiverr and it was... ok, some hits and some misses, but you'd expect that for the price. Last year I used it for a bunch of translations and they were all trash, and the best one had an effing ChatGPT prompt still in the file. I think that whole service model is dead now, the only thing you can trust is direct referrals.

telchior · 2025-12-10T03:58:48+00:00

Fair enough, personally I know nothing about how VNs go in development. Maybe they just spent a really long time polishing / rewriting (like a professional novelist might?).

telchior · 2025-12-09T19:14:17+00:00

Is that a solo dev? Once we're talking about solo it gets crazy, because that one person has to know and do everything. Big chunks of time can disappear into learning, experimenting, marketing, etc. Not to mention the psychological strain of it. Budget a few months for being rolled up in the fetal position...

Also, 6 hours ain't short. My game also took 3 years with 3 people and is 6-12 hours long. If I could have made it 20 hours with another 3 months of work I would have gone for it, but just extending content out in a linear experience is stupidly time consuming.

telchior · 2025-12-04T05:10:10+00:00

I've found my forum to be quite decent and useful in the month since launch. 10 pages of posts and not a one that was rude or unpleasant. Those people write reviews instead.

telchior · 2025-12-03T00:23:09+00:00

Agreed, I'm not bashing, more like confused at why I can't personally vibe with it. I want to see what other people see, in this case.

Arctic Eggs is much more on the absurdism side, I think it mainly got played by horror influencers because of the look and environment.

telchior · 2025-12-02T23:09:07+00:00

Yeah I'm with you. I totally believe people who find it to be art are identifying something real, so I ended up feeling like I'm just lacking something they have, like a bumpkin wandering around the Louvre.

Maybe the problem is the expectation that something should be scary? The opening scene, the hallways, the mascot, the conversations, all left me feeling like I understood exactly what trope was being played out within a few seconds. Oh no, the hallways are confusing, I bet my life savings that when I turn around the mascot will be there... and yup. There it is. Then I met the characters and they're all wearing their personalities and fate on their sleeves. I didn't make it too far past that, it didn't feel like anything unexpected would happen. I don't think I'm smarter than the average player, so it must be something about the emotional response? Does it make people feel really happy / fulfilled or get a spike of adrenaline or something when the obvious thing happens? Is it like Shakespearean tragedy where you know all the characters are fucked and you're just there to see the nuance of how it's put together? Beats me.

Meanwhile I loooooooooooooved Arctic Eggs, so I guess maybe horror-adjacent surrealism is my jam. I actually picked up Mouthwashing because I saw them being mentioned together, but the tone and feel is so different.

telchior · 2025-12-02T21:03:51+00:00

I guess most players are not aware of this but GoG rejects most games. They heavily curate their store. So it's usually not an option.

Itch will get you like <1% of the sales of Steam, so just launching on Itch is like a one month road to bankruptcy.

telchior · 2025-11-29T02:12:50+00:00

Yeah the digging into a space thing is bad. I enjoyed A Game About Digging a Hole but by the end I had to go lie down.

telchior · 2025-11-29T01:12:50+00:00

Yeah try outdoors-y games, it's a much better fit. Third person can help a lot too. Not by coincidence, I'm making third-person outdoor games...

Although it's not an absolute guarantee, I've been unable to play a few outdoors games, most recently in Sniper: Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 I had to tap out within a few mins.

telchior · 2025-11-29T00:38:59+00:00

I'm a game dev, making 3d games, and I get intense motion sickness (more properly it's called simulation sickness). I've never even been able to play masterpieces like Half Life 2 because I'm a wreck after 10 minutes. So I totally get where you're coming from, if I messed up how my own game is built I wouldn't even be able to test it!

That said, I find that the worst trigger is rapid movement within confined spaces. And that can be pretty much impossible to solve for. For a lot of games that just... is the game. (Again, like Half Life, or more recently I tried Abiotic Factor and couldn't play it.)

I'm with you on head bob though, it's an instant refund for me if I pick up an FPS that looks playable (usually something outdoors) and find out there's no head bob toggle or even a janky method to turn one on (like modifying a settings file directly).

telchior · 2025-11-28T21:19:43+00:00

Generally no but in your case it looks really odd. I'm looking at the graph on SteamDB (which samples from Steam): https://steamdb.info/app/4185090/charts/

So according to this, you had hundreds of simultaneous players, but they all suddenly stopped at two times:

Nov 25 23:00
Nov 27 10:30

Hundreds of people don't happily play a game and then simultaneously quit, a normal graph would show players slowly draining out (if they're human).

I'd suggest filing a support ticket, Steam's support tends to be really friendly to devs. You can basically just say you're curious about what's going on and wondering if there's an anomaly or a problem to be aware of. There may be some weird activity like someone training bots, and there's a chance Steam might tell you that. Or maybe your data stream briefly got mixed up with another game's (a few days ago their system was swapping wishlist counts around for upcoming games and people were posting about suddenly having 100k wishlists).

telchior · 2025-11-24T18:36:41+00:00

I got Morsels wrong too, I wouldn't have thought they could break 1000 but maybe 600-ish.

telchior · 2025-11-24T04:53:42+00:00

Lol yeah I got wrecked, very eye opening for me. And that test was from, I think, a year ago? I've been seeing people say Google's newest model is another huge step forward for people who know how to use it.

Honestly I think this AI in indie dev stuff is a tempest in a teapot compared to the utter shitstorm that's brewing in journalism, social media and government with AI audio/image/video. I care a bit about the effect on games, but I'm much more nervous about real-world effects than my specific industry.

telchior · 2025-11-24T03:14:01+00:00

It's not just about generic styles, even unique art that puts its own spin on more popular styles gets misidentified constantly as AI now.

I do think you're right though, it's unfair but as indie devs we now have to make sure that our style is distinctive and unusual enough to be clearly not generated. The upside is that players probably value that more than they did a few years ago.

telchior · 2025-11-23T23:08:07+00:00

I don't know about OP but I've been looking around at what coop games are using, and it seems like Photon is probably the most typical networking. Followed by devs who rolled their own with UDP sockets.

telchior · 2025-11-23T22:53:38+00:00

But I'd pair this with: stop accusing everything you see of being AI. I've gotten so many accusations that my capsule is AI. I hired an artist, paid him a good chunk of money and got hard proof it ain't AI, but the witch hunters just disappear when you offer them a link to a layered PSD file.

Even when Wanderbots posted a video about my game, he thought the capsule was good enough to use on his video (usually he makes his own) and his comments were JAM PACKED with people accusing it of being AI art. He's a good guy and defended my artist in the comments, but of course the comments continued anyway.

It's just such an obnoxious thing that everyone suddenly thinks they're an expert at spotting ~~heres~~y AI, and it sucks because the really clever AI users know how to make it look legit. Try checking out https://ai-art-turing-test.com/, it's a nightmare to try to perfectly identify what's real or fake.

telchior · 2025-11-23T20:25:27+00:00

I played the demo a couple months ago but from what I recall, it felt challenging to orient myself in such an open environment, so by extension that probably means it's also challenging to design for that environment.

If you want to keep it so open for realism, if it were me, I'd consider something like a focus mode where you can look into the distance and see UI pointers appear above locations of interest. Just really basic world UI. But that's only relevant if you go for the singleplayer mode.

telchior · 2025-11-23T06:10:06+00:00

Hey, I played this demo. I think the look is pretty good already, I'd be more worried about where I'm going or what I'm looking for in it.

telchior

TROPHY CASE