u/Nazariglez

Yesterday I finally released Karma Keepers!

I have been working on it full-time for more than a year, although it spent around six months being "probably one month away." I am very bad at estimating how long games take, apparently...

There were many moments where I wondered if I was making a terrible decision. I built my own framework, redid the UI more times than I want to remember, spent weeks balancing upgrade trees, and kept finding small things that suddenly felt extremely important because release was getting closer.

My dogs supported me through the whole process by making sure I occasionally left the computer. Their contributions to programming and marketing have been limited but they are still paid fairly in treats and walks and belly scratches!

The launch itself is going okish. People seem happy with the game, and technically everything is holding up well. The main criticism so far is the onboarding, some players feel there is too much information at the beginning while others say everything works once it clicks. Watching people play without being able to explain anything to them makes the problems much easier to see.

I thought release would feel like reaching the finish line but instead I spent most of yesterday refreshing steamworks far more often than is healthy and writing another list of things to improve.

Anyway, seeing the buy button where the wishlist button used to be feels very strange. The game is real and people are playing it. I am trying to enjoy that part before going back to the tutorial.

Karma Keepers is 40% off for the first two weeks if you want to check it out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3979140/Karma_Keepers/

For the solo developers here who already released a game, how long did it take you to stop checking the dashboard every five minutes? My dogs would like their walks back...

Hello again!

I posted here around six months ago about Karma Keepers, the incremental game I was making with Rust and my own framework. Yesterday I finally released it!

I spent a lot of time worrying about all the things that could go wrong once the game was running on machines other than mine. So far, things are going much better than I expected. People are reaching the end of the game with a lot of stuff happening on screen, and I haven't received any performance complaints yet. I am sure something will appear eventually but so far so good hahaha.

There is one technical issue I am investigating. A few people with older Windows laptops are getting crashes when the game starts with Vulkan. Using DX12 fixes it for them. My framework (wgpu) currently tries Vulkan first, so I will probably make DX12 the first option on Windows and keep Vulkan as a fallback. I cannot say for sure that the drivers are the problem yet, but that seems to be the common part between these cases.

The funny thing is that the biggest problem after release has nothing to do with Rust or the framework. It is the onboarding.

Some players understand the game quickly, but others feel that the beginning is slow or gives them too much information before everything clicks. I already knew this part was difficult, but seeing people play without me sitting next to them makes the problems much more obvious.

Would I use Rust again? Yes, at least for another 2D game. I still think making my own framework was probably not the smartest choice if the plan was to finish the game in less than a year. It took a lot of time, especially the UI, but now the framework exists and I know how everything works. The next game should be easier. At least I hope so. Althought I am not sure yet, I need to move fast with the next one because I have invested lot of time and money on this one that I am not getting back, so still the next game and what I'll be using is unknown. I am just focusing on the release now.

The game is here if you want to see how it turned out. It is also 40% off for the first two weeks: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3979140/Karma_Keepers/

If anyone here has released a wgpu game on Windows, which backend did you use by default? I would love to know how other people handle this.

The stack was mainly:
* wgpu.rs
* kira
* bevy_ecs

If you have question, just let me know!

I've shared Karma Keepers here since it was still a rough prototype, and feedback from this community helped me improve it a lot. Now that the full game launches tomorrow, I'd love to celebrate by giving away 10 Steam keys.

Karma Keepers is a short incremental strategy game about restoring lost souls and building a realm that gradually learns to run and defend itself.

Making it wasn't short, though. It's been a long journey for me, and I've learned a lot along the way. I'm really happy to finally share the finished game with you.

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3979140/Karma_Keepers/

To enter just leave a comment answering this question:

>If you could be reborn with one permanent upgrade, what would you choose, and how would it change your next life?

Entries close tomorrow (August 13 at 15:00 UTC). I'll choose 10 winners randomly (using RedditRaffler), and I'll update this post with the results, and send the keys by DM once the game is live.

Thanks!!!

AI Disclosure: No AI was used to create this game, you can see credits and all people involved in the credits.

The giveaway is over! You can check the RedditRaffler results here: https://www.redditraffler.com/raffles/1vmd27o

The winners are:

• u/DuckTapeAI
• u/Electronic-Dot1829
• u/everything3d
• u/KingCastroTTV
• u/Math1337Whovian
• u/matheod
• u/NoRelative4146
• u/ohmygooooooooood
• u/Rederth
• u/SuBw00FeR37

I tried to reply to everyone, but there were too many comments! I'm still going through them, though. I really enjoyed reading all your answers. There were so many great upgrades, and it was interesting to see how many of us wanted the same things!

Congratulations to the winners! I'll send your keys by DM once the game is live. I hope you enjoy it!

Thank you so much to everyone who joined in. I had a blast!

Well, that's it. I've struggled a lot to promote my game. For some people, getting wishlists seems almost as natural as breathing. For me, every one has felt hard-earned.

I thought I was going to release with under 2k wishlists, but it looks like I just crossed that line. That's still far from the 7k you often see recommended, but it is what it is.

I've contacted hundreds of creators since my demo came out early this year, without much luck. I ran some Reddit ads at one point, shared the game whenever I had the chance (mostly through devlogs on Twitter), and asked for feedback. Then I made fixes, shared it again, and repeated the process. Maybe I should've tried Instagram and TikTok too.

Still, 7k feels unreachable for this game, so I'm releasing anyway and taking what I've learned into the next one.

There also seems to be an obsession with wishlist numbers. I get it. Having 10k is better than having 1k because more wishlists can mean more sales, assuming they convert.

But that's the important part, the conversion. If people who aren't interested in the kind of game you're making wishlist it, they probably won't buy it. I'm also not sure how much Steam's algorithm uses wishlist counts to promote games.

There's a social side to it too. People see a game with tons of wishlists and assume it must be good, which can create a snowball effect.

Right now, I'm just happy to have reached 2k. I'm also happy to be releasing a game I made solo, using my own engine, after more than a year of work. I'm going to enjoy the release, see what happens, and learn from it.

If you're also struggling to get wishlists, you're not alone.

If anyone is interested, here's the game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3979140/Karma_Keepers/

And if you've released a game before, what would you do differently when promoting your next one? I'd love to hear what actually worked for you.

Hi everyone, almost two years ago, I started working on a different kind of incremental game inspired by "The Gnorp Apologue", but I wanted to try something different, combining boid simulations with incremental mechanics and making a game where your choices and builds actually change what happens on screen.

Then incremental games suddenly became much more popular. YouTubers started covering them, AI entered in the scene, and this community was hit by an avalanche of clones, and AI, etc... All trying to follow the trend. I cannot blame them, if I were smart I would have done the same I guess.

Honestly, that has been difficult to watch for me. Sometimes it feels like I chose the hardest possible path. I was trying to make something different while also programming the engine from scratch. There were times when I wondered if I had simply "lost" by not following the trend.

But this has always been a passion project for me, so I kept going.

This year has also been pretty complicated for me because of personal stuff. At times, even sitting down and continuing to work on the game was difficult. So yeah, getting it done feels like an achievement on its own.

The game will finally release on August 13, and the demo is already available on Steam.

The demo is at version 1.0 now. I've used a lot of feedback from this community to improve the onboarding and make the game easier to understand. Your build has a big effect on how the game develops, and the demo only shows a small part of the full experience.

There are no native Mac or Linux builds yet, but I plan to support both. It already works well on Linux through Proton and runs great on Steam Deck.

This release means a lot to me. It took a huge amount of time, experimentation, and stubbornness. Trying to make something different feels like the wrong decision tbh. More than once, I considered stopping and simply following whatever was popular.

I still don't know what my next game will be. A lot depends on how this one performs but I'd love to keep experimenting with strange ideas and making unusual games. Applying what I have learned and trying to make better games.

I mainly wanted to thank this community and give you a heads up about the release.

Thanks for reading and the help along the way.

Steam demo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3979140/Karma_Keepers/

PS: I am already out of energy today, so I leave for tomorrow the update of web builds across different platforms that are outdated.

AI Disclosure: No AI was involved on making this game. Credits section have links to everybody involved and everything used.