u/mengusfungus

Wanted to chime in with another entirely average wishlist journey for a first time (solo) dev. No I did not get 10k in a week with zero marketing, no I did not randomly get promoted by taylor swift, no I did not have a video go viral from earth to andromeda.

One obvious takeaway is that organic discoverability is nil. I imagine you need to be in the tens of thousands of WL range at the least to get significant store visibility. The spike you see in the middle is me posting over the course of a day in subs like r/automationgames and r/basebuildinggames. I've done basically zero promotion besides that.

Two, needed to back out of june next fest. Everything I've read online is telling me to save next fest as my last and best prelaunch marketing beat.

Other takeaways are less clear. I concluded that my game, an automation game that I wanted to make using drone based logistics, did not fit genre expectations well enough. So I spent this week adding conveyor belts. I THOUGHT I could push my game as a TD game but I got zero interest, just downvotes, in r/towerdefense.

Next steps after overhauling gameplay and some more visual polish is another trailer and another round of posting. I aim to cut a shorter trailer, I've been told the current one is too long (and I agree). If I'm confident enough about it I aim to make an actual website and press kit at this point and email a couple of indie trailer channels. I don't feel ready to approach big sites like IGN, but I'll try my luck after making more eye catching content (fancy visual effects, big scary enemies).

As for content creators my gut feeling is that it's pointless pre demo release. My game doesn't have a unique tiktok friendly gimmick. Which tbh does get me thinking, for my next game after this I should make something with such a gimmick, it's not like I don't have any such ideas. Also for the next game I should wait much longer before launching my steam page as I basically wasted the initial visibility boost from a new page. Being early, as you can see, is doing me no favors.

tldr: you don't learn if you don't fuck up

Steam page here

Seriously though if anybody has advice for the trailer and page I'm all ears. I'm not completely new to making games, but I am completely new to marketing them. I know the description is very bare bones, I've been really focused on visual polish and replacing placeholder terrain and ui last week.

I'm barely 50 days into this project so there's some consolation in knowing that it's early and there's plenty of potential content to show off in the future but sometimes I do wonder if there's some deeper intractable issue like a bad genre fit for current player tastes.

Making all my models by hand for an automation / tower defense / rts game. It's pretty slow going but getting faster over time. Oh and programmer art capsule art too for the store page.

Been working hard for the past week to improve the look of my game and hopefully get out of the dreaded placeholder art zone as soon as possible.

Trailer on yt

Hey all updated the trailer for this TD game I'm working on. If any of you have played mindustry or vectorio, my game slots in roughly in between the two in terms of how heavily it leans into automation. Hopefully that's the sweet spot for somebody!

Also playing around with a lot of other ideas too wrt stocking and using active abilities, global and localized environmental effects, enemies that intelligently choose wave compositions, and so on.

Hey all, I just updated my steam page assets and they're at a point where I'm at least not totally embarassed to ask for strangers' advice so here I am. I've never released a game solo, I don't want to shit the bed right out of the gate. All capsule art and trailer cuts are done by moi and I'm a programmer by trade so any and all advice welcome.

I do plan to update the detailed description too of course with gifs and nice looking headers and such but I really just haven't put much thought into copywriting at this point when I'm not even 100% sure what mechanics will make the cut.

Anyway if the advice is to hire an actual artist / video editor I totally respect that (I'm not broke, just extremely stubborn).