u/Unique_Unersame

For context: this is my first shipped game, solo dev, and I just crossed 200 units sold and 273 wishlists on Steam. Small numbers, but the shape of how I got here might be useful to someone about to make the same mistakes I did.

I hit "Publish" the moment Steam allowed it. Up until then I'd been heads-down on the dev side only, zero marketing. I didn't have a demo until 4 weeks after launch. Before launch I'd collected maybe a handful of wishlists, nowhere close to hundreds.

So launch day was basically silence. No wishlist runway, no audience, no plan beyond "ship it."

What actually worked afterward:

• Posting to r/tetris. By a wide margin the best channel for this specific game. Most other subreddits I tried did poorly by comparison.
• Improving the trailer and store page. Still plenty of room left to improve both, but even the first pass made a visible difference.
• A small Discord community that formed on its own. Not big, but genuinely helpful, several bugs and balance issues got caught there before they became bigger problems.

I'm still committed to developing and polishing the game. Currently building an asymmetric multiplayer mode (attacker vs. defender), the biggest addition since launch.

The thing I keep telling myself: I think I got away with a lot of this because the game is niche. A Tetris roguelite hybrid isn't competing for attention the way a deckbuilder or a metroidvania is, so my marketing mistakes cost less than they would somewhere more contested. Not a strategy I'd recommend on purpose, more an honest read on why the damage wasn't worse.

What I'd actually do differently next time:

• Start building wishlists months out, not from zero.
• Have the demo ready at launch, not 4 weeks late.
• Post to the genre-specific sub (r/tetris here) early and often, it's clearly where the real audience lives.

Screenshots attached are today's Steamworks stats, for anyone curious what "small but real" looks like in numbers.

PS. Tetrogue is a Tetris roguelite: clearing lines damages the enemy you're battling across the board, with relics, gems, and a branching map layered on top https://store.steampowered.com/app/4871260/Tetrogue/

For those that haven't seen my last two posts here, Tetrogue is a Tetris roguelike where clearing lines is your attack. Every line you clear hits a monster on the other side of the board, and you build a run through a branching map with relics, gems, and permanent curses along the way. Solo dev, a bit over a month since Steam launch now.

Just shipped the biggest content update yet: 7 playable Heroes, each with a real passive ability that changes how you actually play, not just a reskin. Pick one before a run, unlock the rest by winning with whoever you've got.

• Ivy (I-piece): Whenever your board has a real Tetris well open, your next piece is guaranteed to be a long piece. No more praying to the bag. Quad clears also deal +50% bonus damage.
• Olaf (O-piece): Land 4 pieces into a perfect 4x4 square and they fuse for bonus damage: x4 if all 4 pieces matched, x2 if mixed.
• Jonas (J-piece): Hotlines. Line 7 and line 15 from the bottom are permanently marked as targets for the whole fight. Clear one and it deals +75% bonus damage.
• Link (L-piece): Consecutive line clears build a damage-multiplying streak, shown live as a growing combo counter, capped at x10.
• Turner (T-piece): Every Spin (T-Spin or All-Spin) deals +50% bonus damage. He'll even warn you on the hero-select screen if your chosen rotation system can't actually produce spins (Classic/ARS don't support them).
• Zoro (Z-piece): Clears fill a Rage meter, shown as his own body filling with a boiling red liquid. At full Rage he goes berserk for 9 seconds: time slows across the whole fight and his clears deal triple damage.
• Sabrina (S-piece): Pieces can spawn carrying a magic crystal. Clear crystal tiles together and cast a spell scaled by how many you cleared at once: Shield, Frost Nova, Fireball, or a multi-target Meteor Strike at 4+.

One detail I'm genuinely proud of: every hero's name starts with the letter of the piece they represent: Ivy/I, Olaf/O, Turner/T, Sabrina/S, Zoro/Z, Jonas/J, Link/L. Wasn't planned that tightly from day one, but once I realized I could make it work for all 7, I wasn't letting it go.

And Jonas specifically isn't just a letter match. He's named in honor of Jonas Neubauer. Figured a community like this one would actually get why that matters, and a game about clearing lines felt like the right place to put his name.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4871260/
Discord: https://discord.gg/6PszDbTAG

Hey r/roguelites — solo dev here, wanted to share where Tetrogue's ended up two weeks after launch.

The pitch: it's Tetris, but line clears are your attack against an enemy on the other side of the board. On top of that sits an actual roguelite structure i.e. a branching map with events/shops/bosses per stage, relics and gems you pick up mid-run that change how pieces behave and how damage scales, permanent curses that can turn a run genuinely brutal, and a meta-progression tree that carries something forward even out of a loss.

Launch went better than I expected for a first Steam release! It's sitting Positive on reviews already, and a small community has formed around it faster than I thought it would this early. The best part has been how much of what's shipped since is just their feedback, directly: something like 8 updates already, and most of them trace straight back to a bug report or a "this run mechanic feels bad" note from someone actually playing it.

Also just finished a new trailer today, attached here. Genuinely curious if it lands for people who weren't already sold on the tetromino-combat hook.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4871260/Tetrogue/
Discord (feedback very welcome, that's basically how the last 2 weeks of patches happened): https://discord.gg/6PszDbTAG

For most of development I built my entire UI layer (Godot 4, a solo project) against a fixed 1280x720 internal viewport, and didn't think hard about it because it *worked* — until I decided to support windowed/ultrawide play properly, post-launch.

Every screen's `_draw()` function turned out to have literal pixel constants and direct SCREEN_W/SCREEN_H arithmetic scattered through it. There was no single layout abstraction to fix — it was 20+ screens' worth of copy-pasted-and-diverged draw code, each one assuming 16:9 in its own slightly different way.

The actual fix ended up being a sweep pattern rather than a rewrite: grep for hardcoded resolution literals, grep for named layout constants that assumed 16:9, audit every place that pushed a tutorial popup (separate positioning system), and check every autoload that cached a screen dimension at boot. Doing only one of those passes (e.g. just grepping "1280") missed entire categories of the bug — I'd think I was done, resize the window, and find another screen quietly broken. Screenshots attached are from mid-fix, at some genuinely broken intermediate states — board rendering off-screen, HUD elements stranded in a black void.

It's the kind of debt that's completely invisible until you go looking for it on purpose, because at the one aspect ratio you actually develop and test at, everything just looks correct.

Curious if other solo devs here made the same fixed-viewport bet early and how you clawed your way out of it, or if you set up ratio-relative layout from day one and dodged this entirely.

Built and shipped this alone in Godot — Tetrogue, a roguelike where clearing Tetris lines is your attack. Relics and gems change how pieces behave and how damage scales. On Steam now, 1.1.0 live.

Sharing here because the "solo dev learns a hard lesson" story is more interesting than the pitch: for most of development I let the entire UI assume a fixed 1280x720 window, because as a solo dev you cut corners somewhere and layout math felt like a safe place to cut it. It wasn't. When I finally went to support arbitrary window sizes and aspect ratios, I found the assumption wasn't in one place — it was baked into dozens of individual screen scripts as literal pixel values and SCREEN_W/SCREEN_H references, on top of a font-scaling system (Small→Huge UI sizes) that had to keep working through all of it.

No shortcut existed. It was a screen-by-screen audit, and I had to build a repeatable checklist (grep for resolution literals, grep for layout constants, check tutorial-popup positioning separately, check autoloads that cache screen dims) just to be confident I'd actually found every instance instead of the obvious 80%.

If you're early in a solo project and haven't decided how your UI layout scales — decide now, not later. It's much cheaper before there are 20 screens depending on the assumption.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4871260/Tetrogue/

I also hang out on Discord if anyone wants to talk shop further: https://discord.gg/6PszDbTAG

Hey all — after a long solo stretch, I'm launching Tetrogue, a tetromino-puzzle-combat roguelike where falling-block mechanics ARE the combat system. Clear lines to damage enemies, build a relic/gem loadout as you climb a procedurally generated map, fight bosses, die, try again.

This is genuinely the first thing I've made that I trust enough to put a price tag on and put out into the world, so this is a pretty big moment for me.

Normally $3, and it'll be on sale for an additional 40% for the first week — basically the price of a coffee either way.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4871260/

Would love any feedback, good or brutal.