Yo!
Just sharing our experience so far, it's just the beginning! Road to 10k wishlists starts from 120!
(We're just trying to hypes ourselves up, lol)
IGN - not reply, UGC - too expensive, Meta Ads - not efficient, Reddit - thank you
We're developers of the game Ship Happens: Pirates Wanted!
It's an Overcooked styled gameplay with pirates.
I've bought this book a long time ago, Google said that this is the foundation of modern cyberpunk genre and certainly a must read for anyone interested in it. So after a couple of month on my bookshelf I decided to give it a go.
The thirst 10 pages were so hard to read that I switched from English (which is not my native language) to Russian. Although it got a little easier, I still struggled to read. It was interesting, but I had hard time to comprehend what's exactly going on, where some characters came from and where the action is taking place. Are we still on Earth? Did we go to outer space? So I was blaming myself for consuming too much short video format that my attention span and reading skills got so mediocre. Anyway, the story was so good, that I couldn't stop, although sometimes I had to reread some parts and even go back for a little to make sure I understand where the action is taking place.
I banned myself from reading reviews or any type of content before I finished and formed my own ideas. So it took my about 4 days to finish and then I turned to reviews. OMG, it was such a relief to realized that I'm not the only one who struggled to read, even native speakers had some hard time following the narrative. Technically, one can say maybe it's the author who wasn't quite coherent, but this doesn't matter, because the satisfaction from the story was so high.
It's crazy to think that the author back in 1984 came up with cyberspace with headsets, implants and so many things that now seem the "basics" of cyberpunk.
I'll try to read the English version after some time. Did anyone also faced some challenges when reading the novel?
In the previous post I’ve described our decision making process whether to release a demo or a play test. Then I promised to describe our experience of joining game expo - GameFest, so here it is.
As a small team from Uzbekistan, access to huge conferences and expos like GDC or Gamescom is pretty hard because of high budget demand and visa restrictions. However, this year a creative association of Uzbekistan decided to host a game expo - GameFest. Since we’ve joined the association, they allowed us to join expo without paying participation fees. The only requirement was to make sure to participate actively, represent our country to the best of our abilities for the foreign guests. So they made us an offer we could no refuse.
I’ll do a separate post about game dev environment in Uzbekistan. These days government is trying to promote this field quite actively.
Our preparation process.
The preparation is actually not that hard. We needed to submit the materials, posters, company information and so on. The requirement for media materials were quite clear, so it was just a matter of time and our creativity. Luckily, the host was responsible for the whole set up.
From our side we also prepared printed handouts, made sure that build is stable, PC and steamdeck works smoothly. We also researched guests from publisher/investors list.
Interaction with Guests/Players.
This was truly an amazing experience. Our game caught quite a lot of attention, we often had a crowd in front of our booth. People were playing, asking questions and leaving their feedback.
Generalized feedback: pretty good graphics, gameplay is good, but a little too hard.
As for narrative, we really wanted to have a great one, so we invested quite a lot of time into making cutscenes, working with cameras, and refining dialogues. However, we didn’t hear any comment on this. So I guess it’s either just “mid”, like not good enough to notice it and pay attention, but not as bad to complain or criticize. Or, which is also quite possible, because of the loud and chaotic settings, people skipped everything and jumped into gameplay asap.
Interaction with Investor/Publishers.
We’ve met quite a few investors and publishers. I guess I can split them into two:
Although we didn’t sign with a publisher or got investment, it was still a very good experience.
Final thoughts
Interactions with players was the best part, this gave us tons of motivation to keep working on our game. Watching people being engaged in your game, trying again and again after fails, and being excited once they finish the demo is incredibly inspiring. I guess this is why we’re making games after all!
You can try our game too! It’s an 2.5 action platformer in cyberpunk settings - Echo of Soul.
This year we’re participating in ChinaJoy2026 July 31 - August 2. I’m going to share the experience so stay tuned :)
I guess many developers have faced the same question: should they release the demo? If yes, then when? How? What to do before/after? How to know if game is good enough? Vertical Slice?
The most popular opinion is probably:
>If you have a vertical slice, then you can release the demo sometime before the Steam Fest. Promote as hard as you can before the fest itself to maximize your performance.
However, since you can participate in steam fest only once - then what if you fail to maximize your wishlists during the fest? Actually, there’re might be more caveats and so on…
Recently our team was facing the same dilemma. To demo, or not to demo…
After research and careful considerations we realized, that our goal wasn’t the demo itself. We just wanted a convenient way to distribute our build, be it for investors, publishers or play tester.
Initially, we started with build in google drives, which created extra friction for people to play. This was especially noticeable during our participation in expo - “Game Fest”. Visitors to our booth wanted to play it at home, or share it, but Google Drive set up was very inconvenient.
So we figured, that Steam provides an elegant solution - Steam Play Test. We created a build and opened the play test for anyone. So players just have press “Join Playtest” and they will get immediate access. This way we saved our “To Demo” button, and provided access to the game to the wide audience.
A nice bonus: it seemed like Steam promoted our game for a while. We saw a spike in store activity, which always feels great. Btw, you can find our game here :)
In the next posts I’m going to share about our experience of attending expo.