u/SnooAdvice5696

For 5 years I had constant digestion issues. I spent so much time and energy worrying about what food or habit might trigger it, I visited many doctors and did plenty of exams that all turned out normal, I just assumed I had IBS and moved on. Later on I also started developing pelvic floor issues with symptoms similar to UTI to a degree where I sometimes couldnt even sit, I didn't connect the dots at first, I thought my bad sitting posture/chair caused it.

Turned out it was all caused by something called 'The Hourglass Syndrom' (hate to say it, but AI is what helped me figure it out).

'Hourglass syndrome is a muscular imbalance of the adomen It happens when you pull in or grip your stomach muscles all the time. This constant tension creates an unnatural line or fold across your belly. It often leads to a tight upper stomach and a soft lower stomach'

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/hourglass-syndrome-why-you-should-stop-sucking-in-your-stomach

I started doing breathing exercises and started consciously breath all the way down with my belly and magically all my digestion and pelvic floor problems went away (it's been 2 years at this point, they periodically come back when I pick up this bad habit again, and they go away as soon as I stop doing it).

Obviously most people on this sub do have IBS, but if like me you kinda self-diagnosed yourself after eliminating other options and if you have other symptoms tied to it, this could be worth looking into.

I've had some success with my most recent game Speak a diplomacy-inspired game where players secretly communicate over the phone while trying to take over the city. It's a project I started 3 months ago, the steam page/demo have been out for a week and the early numbers look promising, 500 concurrent users on the demo, 2 millions views on tiktok/insta and 0 to 9k wishlists in a week. And while this looks great and everything, this is the result of a very bumpy road and a lot of failures before that, so I want to share what worked this time.

To give some context, I've been working in the industry for 9 years, my first and only commercially successful game was The Matriarch, which I released in 2022 and basically enabled me to become a full time indie dev. After The Matriarch, I've had either failed or canceled projects, I spent 1.5 years on The Masquerade which was a flop, 1 year on SOS Cannibal which I decided to cancel because lack of traction and cursed design problems, and finally 6 months on 'Space S.L.O.P.' which I also decided to cancel before even releasing a steam page.

Space S.L.O.P. was basically 'Outer wilds X Lethal Company', a quota-based game in space where you explore asteroid cavities in 0 gravity, it was particularly hard to can it because I and the artist I worked with crunched really hard on it and the demo was already polished. But we got ghosted by publishers and it increasingly felt like the scope was too ambitious, the quota-based and space-coop were overdone and the 0 gravity gameplay wasn't standing out enough.

Then I had this 'fuck it' moment, and rather than focusing too much on 'what is commercially viable?' I decided to make a quick project inspired by a game I was genuinely passionate about: Neptune's pride, a diplomacy browser game I've been playing for the past 3 years. The main idea was to condense traditional diplomacy games into a 30min format and replace the private text chats by a phone that players use to secretly call each other.

One reason why Speak works well is because it doesn't reinvent the wheel, the rules are directly inspired by the board-game Diplomacy, but with slight iterations, and a phone. Most of my canceled projects failed because the moment-to-moment gameplay wasn't engaging enough, in SOS Cannibals I tried to combine survival and social deduction mechanics but realized too late those two don't work well together. Understanding how the moment-to-moment gameplay amplifies the main emotion you're trying to convey is the most important thing to nail down, and when you innovate too much, this can backfire hard.

Speak is inspired by games I genuinely like and understand, and I believe that's another big reason why it works, I spent 3 years playing diplomacy games and understanding how secret communication builds tension. In contrast when I decided to make Space SLOP, it was because I saw all these quota-based friendslops popping out and felt like it would be a miss opportunity not to try one myself. Not only was I too late to jump on the train, but because I don't play these games much nor do I have a passion about making characters with googly eyes, that puts me at a disadvantage compared to all the devs out there who understand these games and like to build them. While making Space SLOP, seeing all these coop space games being announced and looking objectively more fun than mine, made me realize I was making the wrong game.

Speak is what it is now because I made some quick, drastic iterations over the past 3 months BUT the phone was the core pillar that never changed. Iterating is hard because you can feel that your original concept is losing its substance/originality when you change too many things, and for that I believe it's important to have one core thing you strongly believe in, in my case it was the phone mechanic as a way to enable secret communication. But everything else changed, at first the game was basically 'Aliens doing diplomacy in a speed-dating format to try to take over the galaxy, in 2D, inspired by neptune's pride', 3 months later it's 'Gangsters backstabbing each other trying to take over the city, inspired by Diplomacy, in 3D'

Finally, I wouldn't have done Speak if I didn't decide to cancel SOS Cannibals and Space SLOP, the biggest mistake we can do is continuing riding dead horses. But recognizing when to cancel a game or push through is the hard part and I guess the easy answer is to make short games. In my experience though, there are 2 other metrics I use to validate if a game has potential:

'Do people genuinely have fun during playtests?' the emotional reactions and engagement when playtesting speak vs space slop or sos cannibal was night and day. After each playtest, I would spend 1 or 2 hours on miro dissecting a simple question 'Do people feel what I want them to feel, and if not, why not?'

The other metric is of course social medias, like for The Matriarch that became viral on tiktok, I only posted 4 videos of Speak on tiktok/insta, and they all made more than 150k views, with a total of 2M views. The potential was instantly apparent unlike my failed games which never took off regardless of how many videos I posted. That said, not all genres work equally well on these platforms AND a good editing is crucial (hook, pace, timing, focus). Tiktok is definitely better for cozy/coop, but if -despite having videos with good editing- you never gain any traction on any platforms, it's usually a telling sign its better to move on

Heyo, I wanted to share about an event I had the opportunity to participate in 2 years ago and which was honestly an amazing experience. The rabbit is a fully-funded, one-month residency for indie game developers, it's in germany but it's open to international teams/individuals. It's happening once again this year, the applications are opened until June 7th but the event itself happens over a month from October 26 to November 20.

https://coconat-space.com/the-rabbit/

- It's free: Travel, food and accomodation are paid for
- You get paid **€**500 to participate
- You get to meet cool devs from germany and all over the world
- You can apply as a team or as an individual
- You basically work on your game while mingling with other devs and participating in various activities, including games ground a gamedev conference in Berlin
- I think the past couple of years there were around 100 applications for 6 teams selected, so the chances of getting accepted are not negligible
- There is no catch, the event itself is sponsored by the city of Berlin

Feel free to ask if you have any questions