u/bright_shiny_cat

Hi everyone!

We have worked on games before, but never released something entirely built by ourselves from start to finish.

A few years ago we left AAA/mobile dev and started making a strange retro puzzle adventure called Lost in Cheese. Today we finally released the launch trailer, and honestly it feels a bit surreal seeing release day this close.

Finishing and releasing our own game has always been one of those big bucket list dreams for us as developers, getting to check that off soon feels pretty special.

Lost in Cheese launches May 21 on Steam!

Back in 2023, we entered steam Next Fest with an early demo that was honestly much closer to a tech demo than a polished game.

Now we’re releasing our indie puzzle game Lost in Cheese on May 21, and our biggest marketing mistake was getting visibility too early.

We entered Steam Next fest with almost no wishlist, a very rough steam page and a demo that was not polished.

The surprising part: it actually got traction.

• ~16,000 demo downloads
• Steam featured the game in one of their Next Fest videos

At the time, this felt huge.

But it converted very poorly into long-term momentum.

Looking back, I think we made several mistakes:

• The game wasn’t polished enough
• The Steam page/hook wasn’t clear enough
• The core gameplay and direction still changed a lot afterward
• We got attention before people had a reason to really care
• Resulting in a wishlist boost but it quickly resulted in a LOT of deleted wishlists.

Since then, we’ve spent a long time rebuilding, scaling the project down, polishing the visuals/music/vibe, and clarifying what the game actually is: a relaxing 3D sokoban-style puzzle game about a box-shaped cat pushing cheese blocks.

Now we’re close to launch (May 21), sitting at less than 1k wishlists.

A few other marketing observations from our journey:

• Reddit/Bluesky posts gave roughly ~1 wishlist/post from other devs.
• YouTube Shorts surprisingly performed better for us (200–1700 views)
• Trailer got ~1500 views and some wishlists
• Use steam curator and send out keys to matching steam curator before release to get a recommendation - you get to send out 100 keys that way.
• Paid ~$300 for streamer/press outreach, still waiting to evaluate results / still sending out keys .

Big lesson for us:
Visibility is great, but visibility before product readiness can be almost wasted. So if anyone is reading this, our biggest advice would be: Do not use steam as an early testing ground, wasting your one shot at the Steam Next fest, it should really be a late part of your marketing where you have already nailed your hook/steam page and polished a demo.