Today I released the demo for IF Enemy: SMACK!, a deterministic auto battler where you program your heroes and let them fight it out. Given that there is no randomness, everything becomes somewhat predetermined... almost like a puzzle. Can you find the best solutions? Climb the leaderboards?
It took me 3 weeks to get to 1000 Wishlists, here is everything I have done, what worked, and what didn’t. This will be a longer read! Sharing is caring!
Tl;dr: I spend money on Reddit Ads and pretty much fall flat elsewhere!
If you feel triggered by someone spending money on advertisement, please leave, otherwise stay and see if there is something to learn here.
My strategy to market the game is based on who I am and my personal strengths, and the game I am building! What works for me might be the wrong approach for you and vice versa.
My game is a programming-based Autobattler. That is a niche thing, and not something that will easily go viral + I am not a social media person. So my strategy can’t rely on Social Media posts, which is a relief!
Very basic strategy overview: Do Reddit Ads and reach out to news outlets. Then do playtests (public ones), Wait for 1000 Wishlists, [we are here] release the Demo, contact 500-1000 content creators, offering the best fitting youtubers money to cover the game. Participate in festivals, SNF in Feb27.
Here is what I did, when, and what I learned.
Week -5 (5 weeks before launch):
[Research] I started investigating Reddit Ads. Meaning I used Gemini, started a “Deep Research” (you can trigger one from within the chat window, it’s an actual thing) on how indie developers use Reddit Ads, and how to best set it up. Read that Deep Research, took the sources of it, and put them into notebookLM (Google ecosystem, it’s a AI chat, but it only knows stuff from the sources you gave it, can read in youtube videos, reddit posts and so on, handy!). Here I was able to ask all my stupid questions, without feeling the awkward anxiety that I get from asking strangers on the internet.
[Mistake] I created my Reddit Ads account. Which turned out to be massive mistake, because Reddit Ads give you a 500$ free credits after you spend 500$ on Ads, but only if you claim it within 30 days of the signup, and only if you spend 500$ in 30 days after claiming. I was too early, because I wanted to have everything setup. Annoying!
Week -4:
[Research] When I started building my game in December 2025, I did some investigation on similar games and found a few niche titles. Now I had to find where those players are!
Task: Find the subreddits that belong to games that share your players interests.
Some titles keep coming up: Optimization Games like Opus Magnum, similar games like Gladiator Guild Manager, and some autobattlers like BackpackBattles. The issue here is that the subreddits are small, which is not good for Ads. So I had to think around the corner, asking “where are players that love to theorycraft and think before jumping into the battle. I found a nice niche in ARPGs, especially PathOfExile and the r/PathOfExileBuilds subreddit is filled with players who love to think heavily about their setup! I noted them down and went on! Had around 30 subreddits researched.
Week -2:
[Homework] Research news outlets, German speaking that cover indie games, find the email addresses of the editors. A painful job! Ended up with a list of 8 outlets and 12 editors. Hoped they would like to cover a game by a “local”. (no one cares, Sean!)
Launch!
Day 1:
Ended the day with 12 wishlists, mainly a couple of my friends. Spent 7€ on Reddit.
Day 2:
[Homework] Let’s talk Reddit Ads Setup:
On Reddit you define a Budget per day, that the system tries to spend for you (how polite of it!). You have two options: Lowest Cost (tries to get you as many clicks for your money), Cost Cap (you specify the maximum amount you are willing to pay per click).
I started with Lowest Cost in EU, and Cost Cap in US, having set the Cost Cap to an unprofitable 40 cent per click.
Nothing! Not a single click over the first days from the US campaign, and to this day, I have absolutely no idea what happened. But I was thinking something must be totally off. In retrospect, I know that the algorithms need to run a few days (or better weeks) before getting into a good zone. But at 20€ ($?) minimum budget per day, that might be a big, big hurdle for many indies.
But the EU algorithm started to work okay. At the end, you pay per CLICK, not per impression, so you don’t really care about “CTR” (Click-through-rate) at the beginning. So I ended day 2 on 34 and day 3 on 58 WL, spent 78€ on that and started to get nervous!
My Carousel was at around 0.6% CTR in EU, absolute shit! This means reddit shows my ad to 1000 people and 6 clicked (I know you guys know what a percentage is, unless you don’t, so bare with me the “spelling it out”)
Day 3:
[Learning] I decided to take a funny clip from the trailer and put it out there. It got clicked! Averaging 2.5% CTR in EU, it was miles better then the screenshots! So on the same day, I decided to cut a 4x5 ratio clip of a coding -> action pattern and put it live alongside.
Here is what happened:
The “funny video” was sitting at 2.5 CTL, the “boring, but real to the game” at 1.5%. Both are okay numbers for EU market. I made sure that I have the utm tracking set correctly. The funny video converted 14% of Clicks to WL. Meaning I need 7 clicks for a wishlist, at 20 cent, that’s too high! The simple, boring gameplay clip, converted 28% of clicks to wishlists! A way better rate!
[Excourse UTMs]: Steam tracks the UTMs that are attached to a url for you. It’s those things: URL?utm_source=homepage&utm_campaign=summer_sale&utm_medium=web
There is a source, campaign, medium, content, and term. They are essentially small free text fields that you can put anything in, and anything will be tracked. Source is usually the biggest group, and then you go into detail. E.g. source=reddit campaign=us medium=funnyvideo.
Steamworks shows you a breakdown under /apps/utmtrafficstats/
Over the course of the next days of experimenting, I dropped all the funny content. I dropped all the screenshots and images, and focussed only on 4x5 ratio, 10 second clips.
Best Practices
Day 7:
Day 8:
Week 2:
[Learning] There is no baseline! As soon as I turned off the Reddit Ads, I went to 0 WL a day. Okay, not fully true, I went to: -1, 1, 4, 1, 4 on the 5 days without doing something. So that’s a baseline of maybe 10-15 a week without a demo and without doing something. Not great! I hope that having the demo up soon will lift this a bit.
Week 3:
[Failure] Stopped after 2 days. Spend 50€, got exactly 0 tracked wishlists. Got a small spike of 10 WL on the second day, but not tracked, so in general can’t recommend, unless you have material that has to looks to go viral!
[Learning] Put eventtracking in your game!!! It’s super important to know what happens to your players, you can’t watch them all live. But ofc, ensure to ask for consent and respect it! I am using Unity and they have it all in the Unity Analytics Package, I was able to create custom events for crucial moments in the game, and send nice payloads. e.g. how often did the player attempted this dungeon already, what team comp are they running, did they use feature X,Y,Z. Do it!
[Learning] I came back to Reddit with the goal to get my terrible US campaigns to a better state. So I re-recorded 3 4x5 videos. Started a “Max Campaign” which is a Beta Feature on Reddit that claims to be AI powered. Here you can define up to 20 headlines, 20 Images, 5 Videos and it will do a massive AB test for you. Problem: It needs a long time to finetune. And with “time” I mean money. But I put it live, and it started okay with 20 cent per click, and a ~15% click-to-WL rate. Better then before. But over the next couple of days the system finetuned. As you read this, I am down to 10cent per click and ~30 CTWL (is that the abbreviation now?)
[Learning] Sadly, Reddit Ads and Steam don’t do the final handshake to track Click-to-Wishlist conversion, you got to do this on your own. But for the max campaign you can only give a single utm set. You see which headline is clicked frequently. Which image and which video is clicked frequently, but the conversion to wishlist is a mixed-calculation. So I am running individual ads to test the CtWL, and add the good stuff to the “Max Campaign”. By now I have a better feeling for what works:
Yesterday I started the playtests on steam, and already have 160 people asking for access. Way to many for a playtest, feels bad. So I admitted 60 of them, let’s hear their feedback, if they even care to play.
One of the players turned out to be a small German Youtuber who recorded the first ever Let’s Play, which makes me super duper proud! At the same time, a fantastic chance to observe a player while he speaks out all his thoughts.
Today, I reached 1000 Wishlists, with around 530 Moneys spent on Reddit Ads and 50€ wasted on Youtube. I optimized my stuff to get a wishlist for around 50 cent, which to me is a good price for now. So I will keep it up. Next: The Demo in 2-3 weeks. I want to create a new trailer, hope again for coverage of GameTrailers or Indie Games Hub, and try to hit the charts for the free playable versions.
Also, there are 3 festivals coming up, starting with the programming festival in September. Let’s see if I can get in there with my demo, according to my research, maybe :D
Also because they hurt so much: One guy wrote “boring” under the trailer (mentioned that), one guy said “use AI to playtest since your game is obviously AI” -> We only spend 2.5 months to craft a great capsule with the people at twinscreativestudio (can only recommend), just so that one random dude screaming AI at everything like he has tourette. And then there was the guy who wrote “Fuck off!” under one of my adds. As a German, I can relate to shouting at advertisement (Ralf Schuhmacher), but man. I really try to get a thicker skin, as those things will pile up, but they sting.
If you guys have any questions that I could answer, hit me up on discord SirDeMox.
BTW What didn’t do anything:
Game Title: IF Enemy: SMACK!
Playable Link: https://moxensgamedev.itch.io/if-enemy-smack
Platform: Browser
Description: IF Enemy: SMACK! is a fully deterministic puzzle wrapped in dungeon-crawler clothes. You program your skill rotation, write your conditions, watch it play out, and then spend the next hour optimizing because you know you could do better.
Free to Play Status: Playtest
Involvement: I am the solo dev behind the game. I wanted to replicate the feeling of flow you get when you played a MMO dungeon for the 100th time, and it’s really just about executing it. You know which mobs to kite, how to tank the boss, when to have your heals ready, when to burst. You know all the roles of your party, but then you have to play with others that are not on your level :/ In my game, you are the mastermind that can teach the heroes exactly how you want the dungeon to be played. I simplified it to a 4v4 fight inspired by Darkest Dungeon. Looking for early feedback!
Well, what to say, obviously my players had absolutely no idea what the heck the game wanted to tell them in the beginning. I had some very early playtesters literally not understanding the game, and it all began with them not comprehending what was so obviously clear to me.
So in Version 2 (which is actually version 8 or so), I started to split up information, but overload is still real.
Version 3 dropped all not needed information and gave visual clarity.
Version 4 is arranging things more neatly, and give elements more room again.
How shall Version 5 look like? Any tips on how to improve the layout? Making it a bit more compact again?
The entire layout is build around the lower two effect description boxes, which will scale vertically if more effects are added.
The idea originated from the feeling of flow you have if you play the same MMO dungeon for the 100th time, and everything clicks. You no longer need to worry about your fat fingers; you just follow your rotation of skills and execute to perfection. You start optimising for speed, rather than for victory.
Steam Page is now live :)
