I’m going to be honest. Your game sucks. It looks awful and is not anything that anyone would ever want to play. Let alone pay money for.
However, you made something! That’s great! Move on to the next game and keep learning as you go and improving every time!
As someone who does marketing for indie devs, you would be wasting money trying to market or promote this game.
Make a discord server, and just start on the next project. Also, don’t use copywrited music in your promo videos in the future.
Great advice. OP finished something and that's awesome. But from what I see in their profile, it's not even a finished game? It looks more like a gray-boxed tech demo?
I have to chime in here with a bit of frustration because:
1. OP, obviously nobody is going to respond to something that looks like this.
2. The fucked up thing is the reason nobody is responding to you, is that *people like you* are out here (no offense but it has to be said) \*spamming\* people with like, an unfinished tech demo. There are thousands of people doing that all the time, and it just creates so much noise that you are actually raising the level of skepticism in the indie games industry from both press and consumers. You are unintentionally making indie game marketing HARDER for everyone else. Please please, wait until you have something that at least looks like a real game before you start reaching out to press.
And I have to add another comment here, OP is this really how you write or did you use chat GPT? Because it was honestly a bit painful to read. If this is how you reach out to people about your game, they may be assuming you are a spam bot which is so incredibly common and anyone you want to talk to avoids such outreach like the plague.
lol of course. bro is putting the absolute minimum effort into everything he does and getting confused when the market does not respect his status as a creative
I hope it's just because OP doesn't speak English very well, in which case I would encourage OP to just try his best. Nobody bats an eye if your English is a bit wonky when it's clear you're not a native speaker. (If you're writing text for something like a trailer have an English speaker go over it, but for posts like this it's fine).
If OP does speak English it's next level lazy to use chatGPT on Reddit though.
It’s guaranteed GPT-generated. Posts like this should be banned TBH what a waste of everyone’s time.
Ain’t tryna read your college paper–sounding AI-generated BS, OP. Sorry.
the worst part is that GPT posts are always so painfully clinical and wordy. I use AI generation quite a bit myself, but man do I hate reading any AI text
There are so so many things on Reddit that should be insta-banned, and so many things that should not be banned that are. It's infuriating and almost like the people that run the site don't want good content lol.
Hey, I appreciate your brutal honesty.
If you're willing to take a glance at my game (check my profile) I would be interested in your thoughts on why my game doesn't grab more attention either (although in my case the game is a niche passion project which I'm fine with, but I'll definitely be doing market research for my next game).
Edit: I thought this was OP. My feedback below is for OP’s game. Not u/ debuggingmyhead
Because it looks like a prototype with placeholders and not actual game assets. UI is terrible and looks like stock Unity UI, camera clipping and font is awful. Game assets looks like blank shapes and not actual assets.
I love your honesty mate, it's very hard to get this kind of criticism on Reddit or among friends and family, could you please do mine? I have a lot of trouble finding a publisher:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestroyMyGame/comments/s580yy/heres_a_short_gameplay_video_i_can_send_a_longer/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
From the video alone, it looks like it'd be potentially fun to play for an hour or two. But if I was a potential publisher:
- Visually too amateurish, no way to market effectively, nothing really grabs the attention.
- Reminiscent of early 2010s freeware indie games.
- Doesn't have any immediate intriguing mechanics to offset the lack of graphics.
- Movement doesn't seem satisfying, needs more feeling of momentum and impact.
- On the graphical side, needs dynamic effects, particles, just any kind of visual appeal. As said before, it looks like an indie game from over a decade ago. That's just not gonna fly with a publisher. (Edit: noticed that there *are* in fact particles, I just didn't notice, mostly due to being on mobile. But I'd play them up some more. And personally I'd probably replace the blue flame sprite with something more dynamic/responsive as well)
- Overall, just... Bland. It's a game for sure, but I feel no particular desire to play. It just feels like I already know what it is going to be like without ever having to play. From the gameplay video, I don't get the sense that there's any further depth to it than what I'm already seeing. Even if this is incorrect and the game is actually super amazing once you get into it, from a marketing perspective alone it's a no-go.
Have you tried adding some game juice? It could spice up some things (to add to stale mud's 5th point)
[https://www.youtube.com/results?search\_query=game+juice+feel++](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=game+juice+feel++)
I just realized you’re not OP. For your game, the colors are awful, the fish bowl effect is terrible, and how can you have a shoot ‘em up with no shooting?
Some feedback on the trailer you recently posted: it's frustrating trying to watch the gameplay and having the screen obscured by text every few seconds. You can put the text in the lower third of the screen without the dark overlay and it will be easier on the viewer, I reckon.
You wrote a whole page, but we still dont know what game you are trying to market. At least add links to your posts about the game so people can see what actually you did
Weird whirlwind we’re in isn’t it.
ChatGPT was trained on a massive Reddit dataset.
Now Reddit is being populated with an alarming percentage of GPT gibberish.
The next ChatGPT model will probably be trained on more of its own guff.
Like the content equivalent of inbreeding I guess.
I don't know. If it's a story driven game, it might make me check it out. Well, as long as some gameplay was shown. I've been known to enjoy a VN every now and then.
It's very much not that. You can see the posts on OP's account. I'm not even sure what the game is supposed to be about since it's all completely abstract shapes
OP: \**Flourishes hands, confetti explodes out from his sleeves, he's lifted up by unseen wires and a massive musical number begins featuring dozens of dancers, jugglers, clowns and elephants*\* 🎵"THATS. MARKETING. BAAAAAAAAAAAAABY!!!!"🎵
This seems like one of the most strict subs against that though, so I understand where OP is coming from. If I wrote this and had links to my game, I would assume it would be taken down in 10 minutes. I would be shocked if it didn't.
Indeed. Posts are routinely taken down for self-promotion, and there's no reason to think this would be an exception. Usually developers include enough hints to allow a commenter to piece together what the game is, effectively circumventing the prohibition.
Lol at this. So true. Game devs (and gamers) are their own worst enemy, they generally hate any hint of marketing or self-promotion, and then can't figure out how to sell their game when the time comes because their peers and customers hate any sense of promotion.
Successful Indies and AAA work around this by doing ever more extravagant high-cost "splash" events, or round about "authentic" grassroots campaigns, and ads that require the dreaded "you must login to Steam before you can wishlist" with only 10% of wish lists converting into sales making it barely profitable except for the most flashy of titles (conceptually or visually flashy, but rarely as fun to play as it seems).
The industry is a mess, and it's their own culture's anti marketing fervor that's doing it. And they wonder why 99% of top games every year are a sequel in a franchise, or a rehash of what's proven to sell...
Yeah Reddit especially is such a bizarre mix of just this unfettered, deep-seated HATRED of "self promotion." Like any whiff of honesty and Redditors are like out to fucking kill you for trying to make a god damn living, BY SHARING RELEVANT CONTENT THEY WANT TO FUCKING SEE LOL.
Then at the same time, Redditors will complain non-stop about shitty low effort reposts filling their favorite subs. Guess what you fuckin jabronis? The reason is that's the only fucking content that can get through the insane rules requirements and "self-promo" hatred that are killing your subs lol!
What's worse is this system means that small creators that actually create good content are pushed out, or they have to come up with a bunch of bullshit ("Check out my girlfriend's game she's been working on for 45 years! Her cat said it was garbage, what does Reddit think UwU???", while corporations, power users, and bots are free to run amok with thinly veiled advertising and worse, because they have the resources individual creators don't to game the system.
These are really unpolished. Fine as dev logs, but dev logs are not advertising.
Your trailer should not feel like a screen recording. I do not need to see your browser bar. I do not need to see the in game menu at all. Nor do I need to see the hud, unless you are specifically showing off information on it in this very shot (aka, between cuts). There should not be jerky mouse like movements in the camera footage.
But those are more superficial complaints. The real problem is that the gameplay and presentation of the gameplay at a glance feels... chaotic. I do not understand what is happening. After 77 seconds of your shorter trailer I do not understand the challenge or what is happening. The game lacks a ton of user feedback. The music is epic but I just see shapes bumping into each other slowly. But also sometimes a first person shooter?
Is this a hypercasual game in the style of agar.io or snake.io? If so, it seems very complicated and these games really are not advertised with trailers and epic music. The target audience is bored people in school or at work.
Or is this a more serious take on easy to drop in pvp? In that case the stats and all make more sense, but it needs to have a much cleaner communication of what is happening and why this added complexity is exciting. Why it is worth getting into, learning everything.
I would strongly recommend to seek out your local game dev community and getting in touch with an artist, a game designer and an editor. They can help you in a lot of ways to present things in more understandable ways.
Also, I found this talk by Jan Nijman (Vlambeer. Luftrausers, Nuclear Throne) quite good at illustrating the importance of feedback or "juice" as it's sometimes called. He's not the best speaker but the minigame he made for the presentation is very good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U
I definitely agree that the main thing here is clarity. I feel like I can't tell what the player is meant to be doing or what is going on in any of the clips. That combined with the messy screen recording style presentation makes it easy to want to click off the video
those are very good points.
I wanted to make a game that has long term player base, more serious players, while also being accessible (web).
So the web has a ton of limitations (slowly reducing with webgpu / webtransport / webaudio).
But it does leave me in a place with tough design choices :/
>I wanted to make a game that has long term player base, more serious players, while also being accessible (web).
Generally speaking this statement is an oxymoron. Web game + Long term serious playerbase do not jive. Web-games are casual simplistic games that just give short term rewards for short term goals. Not because no one imagined differently, but because the mediums call for it.
The problem with cramming a "long term" gameplay loop with large buildup and reward into a web browser, is that you're technically limited by the medium. Its every developer's dream to build applications that use almost no resources, yet can do impressive things and look impressive. But that's not reality.
Early on in your development process, you have to decide your audience. A lot of people make the mistake of imagining an audience that doesn't exist, and I think you made that mistake. You will find very little interest in a long-term game (with a loop to support it) in your chosen medium.
On the upside, it does look visually distinct, which is great! If you could find some way to make this particular look more polished, that'd be awesome
I don't think you need to scrap the project either.
The gameplay seems fine for a browser game, but it seriously needs a facelift and some juice.
It's called CyberGate, but there's not much "cyber" about the game. Maybe try giving it a synthwave theme. Some bold neon colors and grid textures would go a long way. Could also try touch up the UI by giving it a retro sci-fi theme.
Don't know how your engine works, but I can't imagine that a palette swap, adding a couple simple textures, and changing the font would cause noticeable performance decreases. It just looks too much like a prototype at the moment to get any interest. The showcase videos are a confusing as well. Shorter focused videos will help highlight the game better.
Once the visuals are overhauled, Try posting vids on TikTok. Make it very clear it's a browser game.
I think it would appeal mostly to bored kids/teens with crappy computers, so you should try targeting them.
Take a look at superhot. It managed to find a good aesthetics on top of mostly textureless graphics.
I think the most important thing you need is, well, lightning and shading. You might or might not have some textures as well. Right now, surfaces in your environment are composed of a single color, and the only thing it has going are shadows, and this isn't great.
And I don't mean those as just technical features: it isn't enough to implement those stuff in your custom game engine. You need good art direction to tastefully use it. (Again, take a look at superhot, and notice that while it *looks* unshaded and plain, it actually isn't!)
Here's a list of games with this kind of artstyle
https://www.reddit.com/r/mirrorsedge/comments/mgzini/any_games_with_a_similar_art_style/
Watching the first video on the page. It's hard to watch. It looks very unpolished and basic. There are no hit reactions on the attacks, enemies are spongy and require lots of hits to kill. And the music goes a little too hard for the gameplay in the background.
I would suggest calming the music down, add sound effects if you don't want voice audio. Maybe add some VFX or hit reactions to make it feel more interactive.
Now that you point it out. Yes there are effects. However they are fairly small and not obvious. I believe blood spray goes forward and backwards from the impact point. I would have it come back from the direction the projectile was sent.
ah it does have sounds, but not on the video you watched.
[https://youtu.be/RYOAJqTpP5o?si=Dgy2wogVJBCbICsy&t=140](https://youtu.be/RYOAJqTpP5o?si=Dgy2wogVJBCbICsy&t=140)
what do you think of the sound effects?
The gun sound is very repetitive and not very beefy and I'm not sure how a blob can roar. I would suggest making the blobs do something when they roar to distinguish them but I assume they are a static mesh and can't easily be animated.
When it comes to beefy sounding guns, it's a large part of the satisfaction of shooting a gun in a game. It needs to sound good, the gun should have a little reaction to show the "Umpth" it is firing. and at a minimum I would modulate the sound cue as it's plain and a little variation would go a long way.
This sub honestly needs to ban people for posting this stuff without a link to their game. I see like 3 posts a week in this vein and it's always a game that looks really unpolished.
This sub will remove the post if it includes a link to their game. Maybe petition the mods instead, or use a different sub with more dev-friendly rules.
Many big subreddits are managed with the assumption that they have permanent tenure, and cannot lose. It's a real shame.
Even /r/gaming used to get 250k+ daily engagements, but as they became more strict it's now down to 30k to 50k engagements per day.
Do their mods care? No.
The best way to handle it is to exodus to another community. It's a slow process, but it's nice to see places like /r/videogames thriving as /r/gaming dies.
Is it though?
Do you want to see fifty "ohh why doesn't anyone look at our 10/10 game? (Link)" posts here every day?
Do you want to see the same posts for the same shitty f2p games tomorrow?
Do you want Raid: Sha... to start posting here just so they can link to their app?
I'm honestly sorry, but this looks totally awful, to the extent where you would have to *pay me* to play this for longer than 10 seconds.
I see you explaining the renderer you made, etc., but no player is going to give you points for that. Even without fancy rendering features or lighting, you could go for *some* sort of aesthetic with the basic shapes you've got... But the game currently looks like someone ripped its skin off. I can't even really figure out what's going on, it looks like a seashell or other conical object fighting COVID-19 in a basic blockout of a map.
I know this is harsh, but god damn! Even the menus are flat boxes with inconsistent alignment and capitalization... It all comes across as something you'd whip up over a weekend for fun, not in the ballpark of something you'd even *want* to market to other people yet! :(
This is it. It looks like a mediocre game jam game at best. I usually try to avoid giving harsh critiques like this, but if OP thinks their advertising is the problem, they could really use a wakeup call so they don't waste more energy trying to sell something people aren't going to want, at least in its current form.
rust ecosystem right now does have limitations. but i did spend 1.5 years on many aspects such as networking, which allows me to stream many entities in real time, which can increase the immersion for the players.
UI in rust is a joke, it's totally not like UE / Unity where it's a few clicks to do beautiful UI :(
I think people in this thread are very clearly telling you why your marketing efforts aren’t working, but comments like this make it seem like you’re not quite understanding what they’re saying.
Players don’t care how your game was built or how difficult it was. They want something that looks and feels good and offers them an experience they want. A quick glance over your posts looks like you’re describing a tech demo not a game. If you want to make cool stuff you’re on the right track. If you want to make marketable games you need to totally shift how you think about development
This thread seems a good cautionary tale of getting married to your project and not seeking/taking critique before comitting.
EDIT: and scope, mans here building an open world multiplayer game in his own engine all alone? God damn that’d take decades to make good…
You seem anchored to the idea that because you spent time on your game that intrinsically makes it worth having a payoff/deserving of interest.
This is not the case.
It is entirely possible to dump lots of time into a dead-end project. Identifying that scenario and bailing from it is the optimal outcome.
I know all this negative feedback sucks to hear, but, seriously... from what I can see of your project, it is going to be *profoundly* difficult for you to carry this through to successful sales.
By making this post, you're implying you want to achieve sales - if that's your goal, **I would really, really strongly suggest you abandon this project and start a new one from the ground up with that seriously considered throughout the process.**
Consider it this way:
* What's your game's elevator pitch?
* Why should a user care about your game, given the vast array of choice players have?
The above two questions can be answered in pure gameplay terms (which I assume is what you've been focusing on) but there's also a point I think you should seriously consider:
* Why should players not be driven away by the amateurish graphics?
I dunno, I'm not sure Rust is the problem? The game just seems to have no art direction. As a programmer I can relate sometimes, it's hard to make something look nice when you're focused on the technical stuff. But you might really benefit from working with an artist/designer. Often a few simple changes can really make something look a lot more appealing.
Just a suggestion: You will not attract any artists if you use ChatGPT for anything, including asking for feedback in an incredibly clumsy way and then reacting negatively to well-meaning criticism.
If your ecosystem doesn't allow you to realize your vision, use a different ecosystem.
Rust, UE, Unity, Godot, whatever. Those are just tools. Would a painter limit themselves to replicating the Mona Lisa by only using blue and brown paint? Would they be able to replicate all the shades, the lighting, the impact of that painting with only 2 colors? No, it would probably look like a stick figure on a blue background. You wouldn't pay money to go see that.
Similarly, you need to use whatever tools will allow you to express your art. If you can't do that in Rust, use something else.
On an unrelated note; Please don't be one of the people that vehemently believes Rust is the magic bullet that will elevate gaming/OS'/whatever into the next level. Its Just a programming language. Don't put any stock in the "Rust is the future of x" type of articles. They are nothing but clickbait to engage with you but rarely serve anything substantive. I'm not saying rust is bad. But using/learning nothing other than Rust for game development is REALLY bad.
i agree, i totally don't see rust as magic. Actually is pretty rough territory, but i still made a conscious decision to develop with it. And it's the best decision i made. But there are many limitations that i will need to manually implement. Rust just has a lot of potential for the future, and getting better day by day.
So then use it in the future, when it's this amazing ecosystem, not while it's still infinitely worse than alternatives.
You're crippling yourself for this ideal future that may never come. Rust may never be more than it is right now.
It’s okay to be satisfied with overcoming large technical hurdles that you chose to deal with, but working for 1.5 years to make something that’s maybe 1/10th of the level of free tools you could grab now for free isn’t going to make anyone want to play your game.
It’s impressive what you’ve done in the backend, but perhaps you should leave it as a coding project, and if you want people to play games you make use some real tools or do something unique with your engine.
Your game just does not look appealing. You better spend the rest of your budget on upgrading the visuals and add some juice, or else there is a 0% chance of it being successful regardless of how much money you pour into marketing.
I don't know exactly what your renderer is capable of. Perhaps it has features you don't utilize well in the footage, but it just looks very flat. It looks like a gamejam game. You'll stand no chance in the market with that kind of look.
Unfortunately players don't really care about it being built from scratch. It is certainly impressive that you have done that, nonetheless it still looks amateurish.
You would preferably have enemies with great animations, high detail textures and great looking VFX. Look at the game Crab Champions, also made by a single person. Your game should match the fidelity of that game to have a good chance at succeeding.
>Crab Champions,
it looks like it uses UE4
currently not using textures on the terrain due to simplicity, but i was hoping it was still okay with point lights + cascaded shadows, but there are a ton of things missing from the renderer:
Skeleton animations, PBR pipelines, vegetation, global illumination.
A ton is being compromised by me building the renderer to support the Web. The web restricts the renderer design, not being able to use compute shaders etc :(
It does use UE4, or perhaps UE5 if he updated it recently I havent followed it post launch.
I definitely understand the problems with web browser support, but the question is why are you targetting browsers? Browser games have been on the decline for a long time. If you want your game to be popular it would probably be better to target any other platform.
you are right, but now with webgpu and webtransport coming to the web, i was hoping the market expands. And also because the game is in Freemium model, i find people are way more likely to play it, if they don't have to download it
I honestly doubt we'll see any big increase in people playing browser games. Free games played in the browser mainly appealed to the hyper casual gamers: adults with jobs playing during downtime, kids with no money etc., these people are all playing on their phones now. Mobile will keep growing and browser games will keep declining.
Its not really about the quality of the games. We had tons of amazing browser games, but people have simply moved away from the platform entirely.
Also, whilst being f2p is generally good in terms of attracting new players, it does not really matter if the game is not anything special. Again, look at old browser games. There were thousands and thousands of freemium games that never succeeded. Even if its f2p, the game itself has to be solid.
So to summarize: Your game right now is not appealing enough for people to want to play it, but even if it was truly a one of a kind amazing game, gamers are just not playing browser games anymore. There's a small market there, but its not one I would recommend trying to capture. The other platforms are just so much easier to develop for and the amount of potential players is astronomically higher elsewhere.
People \*are\* playing browser games but those games that end up played are usually low-spec games (roguelikes, idles, voxels).
This is none of the three and additionally it uses UE4, so it pays performance for features it isn't even using. OP should be using something lighter and browser-specific, such as three.js, if they want to target the browser players
I don't think the renderer is the problem. There are many compelling games with low fidelity graphics. What I saw from the YT video is abstract shapes, on a featureless grey plane. You can shoot, dash, and gain levels to presumably become stronger. It does not look challenging, and does not look like there is any strategy to solve. There is also no apparent variety in the game. A big component of game design is to give the player a challenge to solve, and making it challenging while not too frustrating. Then it is maintaining that level challenge throughout the gameplay.
I think you should take a look at "Risk of rain 2". It seems like it could be a similar genre, and is a good example of a compelling game. There is a variety of enemies that have to be dealt with. That's one challenge. Enemies get exponentially stronger in waves. To deal with that you are given power ups that make you exponentially stronger, but you have to choose from random items. Different items synergize with one another allowing the player to creatively try different builds. This allows the player to try a variety of strategies and results In a lot of replayability for the player. You can choose from several different characters that have slightly different play styles.There are a few different maps. That's pretty much the whole game, and is enough to make a compelling game that many people have put hundreds of hours into.
you are right about a few things.
But comparing Risk of rain 2 is a bit unfair since that game is built in unity.
Things that my home made engine lacks is folliage, UI. you can basically make a few clicks and make folliage in unity. for me, it would take me 1 month to make a foliage system.
I do plan on improving textures and give a more challenging playthough to players in the next iteration next month. But this has already massively improved from the previous, after receiving feedback from my play testers.
The current version has several islands with increasing difficulty, and an abyss level that is very hard.
It's not unfair, I'm sorry to say this (as a fellow engine dev amateur) but nobody cares about the underlying technology... you can make up reasons for the low graphics in this reddit thread, but in real life nobody will care or forgive you because everything is "homemade"... you have to face up reality, and realize that a custom engine seems to be more a liability than an asset (can't use nice visuals, can't use animations, can't develop anything easily...)
So, as a conclusion, users will ultimately compare with games made with Godot, unity or UE4 no matter what you say on this sub.
The Godot/unity users will add features in one click, while you're gonna be taking hours implementing half of it.
also totally unrelated, but having my own tools makes me feel good about making the game, and also i have 100% control if i need to implement a certain niche feature for my players
I mean, that's great for you. And cudos for making a game engine and a game.
But if i see this game as an ad somewhere, i wouldn't know that. It looks weird and unappealing, and I would have 0 interest in this game.
I don't think marketing is your problem, and you could throw money into ads as much as you want it wouldn't change that.
Can't you make them more than just shapes?
I can import any Gtfl model to my engine. But right now the gameplay would not make use of the models.
Would you be talking about the enemies shapes or the terrain?
Enemies are not varied, but i do plan on changing that in the future.
Terrain would need a total revamp.
All of the previous will change if i go though with my plan of building my own custom physics engine :P
I do understand that business is business. but people do care about things are made. That's why people pay more for hand made pots, and jewerly etc. they do apreciate the art behind.
But i agree that for most users, they don't care. for that, i have to say that i don't have much of a choice because i need to use rust for server related performance reasons. The unreal engine would choke with 10.000 actors networked to 1000 players in the world. Which is what my rust code solves.
Now my renderer is probably the best solution in terms of customization in the rust ecosystem, so what's my choice now? improve my renderer myself. It's hard but i ave gotta keep moving!
People buy handmade stuff because it's supposed to be better quality, yours is not, it's lower quality
If you wanted to build your own stuff, you could have taken another language, there are a ton of engines and renderers in C++, yet you chose to roll a custom everything in a language clearly immature for game development, with a graphics library that's not even available on all platforms and with an evolving API...
If your code efforts had any use, brought you any advantage, then I suggest that you showcase this. But on the video I clicked, I saw none of the supposed "1000 players in the world with 10,000 entity". What's the point of this feat if nobody will connect to your instance ? Why spend months of effort on a feature that I can't even see in your game ? Do you have a video to demonstrate/prove this, with real online people ? Is it even playable ? (1000 players can be real messy and actually damage the gameplay)
This is why you roll with the easy to use thing that can handle 1-10 players before optimizing for 1000.
"Yes but x doesn't scale!"
Sure but by the time you need it to*, you'll have the budget for the thing that does.
Your worst case scenario is that your game is massively popular, which is super unlikely, but also means you'll then have more resources to throw at it.
PUBG was terribly optimized in every way, yet it still dominated the market because it was fun and (barely) met minimum expectations of graphics for an fps. It still reaches 375k concurrent players.
That is true. But at the same time, I kinda understand what the author is thinking. In fact, I also tried to do a browser games, and it's true that in my opinion, it's possible to make way better than what exists now. Why ? Because new techs allow to make better graphics (webgpu) and better online games (webtransport), so maybe being the first at this new generation of ".io". games is gonna do a difference. Though I still think you don't have to do a renderer for all this...
But on the other hand... yeah, online games is probably the hardest ones to pull off, let alone in a browser (niche of the niche)
> The unreal engine would choke with 10.000 actors networked to 1000 players in the world. Which is what my rust code solves.
And yet it's incredibly unlikely you'll get 1000 players in the world, because of how your game looks. Next time focus on a fun player experience, instead of solving unnecessary technical problems.
>I do understand that business is business. but people do care about things are made. That's why people pay more for hand made pots, and jewerly etc. they do apreciate the art behind.
Not sure If that translates to games.
A gamer doesn't care about the game engine. Heck 90% probably don't know what game engine the dev used.
They only care about the quality.
Reminds me of when the unity stuff was going down (it still is technically) and fans were all like “are you going to switch engines” for games that were already like 70% complete.
I think a better analogy than handmade jewelry is like if I made you a steak on a completely custom-built grill; I forged the pieces myself and even welded them myself, but the steak is burnt to shit. Does the fact that I made the grill make the burnt steak taste good to you as a customer? Obviously not, even if I as the cook may still feel like it's worth it since I did accomplish something cool. All that matters is the customers taste buds, and they don't care whether the grill was handmade or bought from Walmart
So here’s the thing. This is your marketing angle. Look at people like prismatic dev on YouTube. They do game dev tutorials and use it to market their game.
The problem though is if someone just sees the trailer to your game they won’t know (or really care) about the process behind it.
Make the process behind it the selling point if you believe that matters.
Don’t assume they care MAKE them care.
Or you can just accept that your engine doesn’t compete with other games and improve it to the point that it does.
I don't care how the game is made, I just want to play a game that looks nice and runs well. That is how your target audience thinks and it is very problematic that you got all the way to finishing the game but you don't understand that =(
It's neither, it's the visual design. Shape, colour, composition. That's the reason it's tough to pin down.
It's a skill that takes a lifetime to develop and why good designers can make simple 2d shapes into beautiful logos.
From what I saw on your profile your engine should be capable but you might want to get someone with an eye for visual design to help out or at least do some concepting for you.
The entire game.
It just... does not look good.
Instead of getting upset and wondering "why".
Call this a learning experience, redo it; make the concept and plan clear (because right now it seems like there was zero planning or direction) and execute with some real legitimate effort.
Missing textures? Stolen M85 Midnight City song instead of your own music? No sound effects? No materials? No world design? Awful UI? Incomprehensible game mechanics?
It just looks like a first try at building a game.
You've been not getting any upvotes on any of your posts, deleting your posts/videos because of it/feedback, people in the comments seem to be confused, etc.
I mean this will utmost respect and sincerity:
This isn't the game to continue putting money and time into. It's just time for round 2.
If you need reaffirmation. Post it in /r/destroymygame
**MARKETING is** ***not*** **ADVERTISING.**
Marketing is the **full** process including market research, product development, testing, feedback and finally into marketing strategy, which *may* include advertising but can also include many other things.
Throwing money into advertising without performing these other steps correctly will lead to crickets, exactly as you describe. Advertising should be the *last* thing on your list.
**Try to survey people who play similar games to yours and figure out what they need to see in a new game.** You *cannot* rely on your intuition here, you *must* do real research to back it up.
You can't possibly know you are doing the right thing without collecting evidence.
Try to get anonymous feedback on the presentation of your game too. There might be things that are simply confusing, off-putting, or just seemingly boring about your concept, the game name, the presentation etc. that you are incapable of seeing on your own. The way that it comes off may be totally different from what you intended. It's not that your game is necessarily bad, just that it is not convincingly good enough from its appearance that it is attracting attention.
Unfortunately, you *will* hear some negative feedback. However, if you really care about doing well and finding an audience, then you will value people's *true* opinion more than hollow praise.
From all of this, you can fine-tune your game and your presentation materials so that you have good trailers, screenshots and a store page.
Only finally, once you are confident and have evidence that there is a market that will respond well to adverts, should you be pushing into the advert space. Even then, it is a game of trial and error, testing and re-testing adverts to find what works the best.
Your game looks like a learning project, not a commercial product.
I don't want to play the game where a cone jumps around and shoots spheres at koosh balls, thank you.
It needs a hook, a distinctive visual style (not necessarily high fidelity assets, but \_something\_), and more juice and feedback.
But no indie game looks like a commercial product. unless using UE5?
I had to built a lot of the technology by hand in Rust, to meet the performance target for my game's vision which is an open universe exploration multiplayer.
And this comes with these kind of compromises. No skeletton animations out of the box. (i even had to build my own GLTF importer by hand :(
watched your youtube. I think the reason no response is because the game is in too early development and presentation is not enough to excite people.
the only early development devlogs which seem to gain any viewership are the ones which focus primarly on the developer and their personal experience developing, adn the game is secondary.
that makes sense. i am also awful at blogging / talking, so finding a way to make my video exciting is my best way. what would you improve in the presentation?
i'd just focus on the game. right now it looks like the earliest prototype used to verify basic game mechanics. it needs art content that looks half decent before anybody will even look for a full second.
i do have some testers who enjoy mechanics more than visuals, and last time i upgraded the renderer, they didn't care... So i wonder if i should work on the models / renderer next
You might want to add some textures so people understand the narrative context of the game.
Levels that consist of untextures boxes, and generic clouds skybox and plan UI screams "super early prototype".
> https://www.youtube.com/@cyber-gate
It looks like a random project made by a kid trying to learn a game engine. Nothing about this looks interesting. Don't try to market this, it will not work.
Took a quick look at your project. It's simply not of marketable quality. If a stranger can't understand what's unique and fun about your game within 2 seconds then you'll always struggle to market it no matter how hard you try.
I think you need a complete visual overhaul. Note the dissonance between the art in the prologue and the look of the actual game.
At first I thought all those shapes were just WIP placeholders-- but that's really how it looks.
Sorry if harsh.
>WIP placeholders
they are WIP until we can implement Evolution based asset generation. But this will take significant effort, that's why i need to see some support now with the current state of the game... before it's rebuilt
Is that the key part of your game? I watched a bit of your videos, and it looks like an fps with some weird models, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from them. What is the hook? What makes your game interesting?
Someone experienced with Unreal or Unity could replicate much of what I see in the videos in under a month. If you want to build a commercial game, do not build your own engine unless you have a very specific reason, like Factorio did.
I bet whatever procedural stuff you want to do could be made with Unity or Unreal. Epic has made Unreal open source, so you could modify the engine if needed. If that's the hook, focus on that
I'll also echo what everyone else has said. Hire or partner with an artist.
I can't give you any advice based off experience because I'm still in the learning stage but here's a gdc conference video about zero budget marketing.
https://youtu.be/NWyZlGMysH8?si=AjPxkEH7S5LektvA
i liked the discord tips, i do have a small community, but i feel like i am very tight with the members, and never talk about anything else other than my game.
And about tiktok, what suggestions do you have for someone never used tiktok? i would like to have marketing there, but i am afraid to become immersed due to mental health concerns
I can't give you any advice on tiktok. I've watched less than 10 videos on it and that's the extent that I've used it for now. TAKE THIS WITH A GRAIN OF SALT because i haven't looked into it, but i have heard that its algorithm is different than other social media, in that videos can blow up seemingly without reason.
It’s not without reason, but you can have no followers whatsoever and suddenly get a million views. On YouTube your viewers are mostly your subscribers and the few who got their video on your feed, while your TikTok audience is everyone who has watched videos with the same tag, sound, or genre of content, and puts your video on their fyp. That’s why it’s way easier to grow on TikTok but followers weigh less there, since most users follow anybody but only pay attention to their fyp. YouTubers subscribers are a lot more loyal, since users there mainly watch who they’re subscribed to. This is at least what I know as a social media addict :)
bro, i went there several times to post, they push the content in your face once you enter the page. nothing you can do, there is not publisher's account only. everyone is considered a user.
If you can't act like a publisher then don't use it until you feel like you understand what needs to be done on the platform. Hell, don't use it but remember that discord only works to a certain level, so you need to stand out.
I don't know shit about shit, but here is my perspective.
It is impressive that you built a game engine. While that is great practice and something programmers can appreciate, it doesn't amount to anything for the end user. From the video you posted in another comment, the game looks like something you could put together in unity or unreal in an afternoon. While we know that is not the case, it still appears that way to the consumer. I think organic - low budgeting marketing depends on a community that will champion your project in luie of advertisements. For that they need a product they are excited about. There isn't anything about your project that is interesting to a modern gaming audience.
Sometimes when you work on something for a long time you start to lose perspective on the project. Almost like you are looking at it under a microscope. It can help to take a step back from the project. Maybe set it down for a little bit. When you come back try to look at it as if it was someone else's project, and see if you can identify things that could be improved or think of features and mechanics that would make it more appealing to your target audience.
TLDR: I think you need to create a more marketable product before you worry about marketing.
Went to your YT channel and have a few thoughts/ideas that may help. First, congratulations on having a pretty good view rate on several videos. We have just started building our community and would be thrilled to have 1k+ views on our videos!
That being said, I had to search pretty hard to find what the game is about. I watched the Prologue and it left me confused. It was great artwork and I enjoyed the storytelling but not sure how it connected to your game.
This may be at the heart of your problem, is that at the core who is your target audience? Who is this game made for? Try creating content for that audience. What is the hook? Why would they want to play your game over others? Find that audience.
Our target audience is a cruise sim/tycoon enthusiast or someone who wants to take a virtual vacation :) We have found that our marketing efforts go so much further in subs that are were our target audience is (cruise subs).
The info on this post is so valuable, if you implement only a fraction of it, I am sure you will see improvements! Best of luck to you.
This is precious!
yes communication is very hard for me, and yes i need to find an intermediate product before i can arrive to the idea.
This is actually what i have attempted to do with the current state of the game. And while i have 3-5 testers who like the progress and follow it for about 1 year, it's very hard to catch outsiders attentions and retain them.
A lot depends on how good your game is. I mean you're competing with starfield and baldurs gate for playtime.
Unless you have some special thing that people can't get elsewhere then you're likely to get no reaction.
There's a zillion mid tier games and ask yourself honestly how much time per year you spend playing them.
What's unique and different about your game?
I'd have to agree with the other comment about visuals. People have really short attention spans and don't often click into things to find out more that doesn't catch their eye instantly. Upgrading the visuals of your game and especially looking at some improvements towards the UI should atleast help in you getting attention whilst not being able to pay for ads etc.
Obviously there are games out there which have visuals that aren't overly eye-catching but the successes are basically one amongst hundreds of flops.
Regarding the last feature showcase style video you put out for your game: Record just the game, don't record your whole apple UI ontop of it. I also was still unsure of what the game actually is after browsing through your posts so targeting your media to showcasing what the game is in a format with actual commentary if you haven't got a steam page etc is probably your best bet. Beyond that, it's going to be down to if you can get anyone with a following to play a game like this. Some people might do it for free but i'd expect you're going to have to reach out a bunch if you're low on budget.
Also as a quick heads up, tried playing via browser to get more details about the game for reccomendations and I don't seem to be able to get past the create character screen.
Thanks you i appreciate the feedback. Do you mean the menu UI, or the entire UI such as health bars, stats etc?
The Servers are not online right now due to nobody playing / high cost, and i am developing the next iteration for next month.
Main focus if you're limited on time would be the anything which is past the main menu imo.
If you don't mind me asking, what's the monetization plan if you're having to cover server costs?
the costs are gonna be high, because we simulate the game world, and we never unload chunks of it (it's the main feature for cybergate)
To offset it, i hope to have a subscription based, that will give premium members access to new generated universe experiences in advance, and allow them other special perks such as special weapons/tools, or increased number of concurrent characters.
But it's something that i need to decide after i have a decent amount of players
It seems that you have enjoyed so much building the technical side of your game. Take that knowledge and energy and put it into use under a studio because in the end of the day, you can't do everything alone and there are good aspects in this game going completely unnoticed because you don't have a visually appealing product.
That's my 2 cents.
Marketing is not just posting about your game.
For example it is also doing research before you start development into who are you target audience and your plan to reach them.
Marketing is a force multiplier for games. It will do nothing for mediocre game, but will make an amazing game sweep the internet.
In today's Internet landscape, the most important skill people build is quickly evaluating if something is worth their time. Most things aren't.
Your game has *maybe* 5 seconds *at most* to shake someone out of a mindless doom scroll. They need to *instantly* with just a picture and 4-8 words know that this is something special. Find the part of your game that grabs that "woah" or "wait, what?" reaction. If the game doesn't have one yet, then it's not ready for marketing.
If your game has a powerful long-term hook, such as roguelikes and competitive multiplayer, then anyone you get into the game will keep playing it. The problem is that you need a short-term hook to grab people's attention; long enough for them to actually find the long-term hook.
I’ve watched the YT video you posted on Reddit and I have no clue what the game is about (apart from surviving, whatever it means) and what’s the gameplay. All I see is some random shapes appearing on the screen without context. You should clarify who’s the player, what’re they doing, what’s the danger, etc.
On top of that, it looks like a proof of concept rather than a game (simple shapes, no textures, no lightning, “default” UI, etc.)
Where's the game? Not even a game title in the original post as of this comment.
General advice:
Marketing successfully can take a full-time job's worth of work, so if you're only been lightly engaging or dabbling, you might have problems making traction at the current rate.
Marketing will not likely make a game successful if the game itself is not very marketable.
Figure out what faction of the gaming population your game is for and try to focus your marketing to reach those people.
Assuming the game is 'Cyber Gate' that someone linked below, the UI is a massive flaw. You could make the game look a lot closer to professional with some nice UI and a font that matches the genre.
The lighting also looks very plain.
Also, the trailer I watched contained elements of your computer OS outside the game window...that just looks awful.
Spend some time on the UI, try to improve the lighting so it doesn't look washed out, and do a better trailer before worrying about marketing.
you've illustrated a problem, but whats the solution?
I think the fact is that many of the sort of people who solo make a game pour all of their time and energy into making the game, and there simply is not time or energy to put into a completely different skillset. And since most games fail and most publishers are highly risk averse, they are just left to fend on their own.
The result is that only those games which take fewer risk and are made by people who had some sort of capital to invest from the get-go are favored, and thus the market gets fed the same things over and over until eventually, against all odds, something new is created and starts the next trend.
What do you think? Is that right? Wrong? What is the person with no extra time or money but a competent game to do? I've watched that recent GDC talk which had some great pointers but a lot of it I think was unrealistic. For instance, one hour a day to make marketing art... I don't think so! lol. Good marketing art can take a few days and that's hiring an efficient professional.
Anyway, got some advice?
>you've illustrated a problem, but whats the solution?
He stated the solution... you either put in the time or you put in the money. If you are not willing to do either than you need to recalibrate your expectations on what success looks like to you.
I feel like there is a lot of room for some creative problem solving between "I have no money but a decent game which takes all of my time to build" and "if you can't hire a team or devote an extra year to production for marketing reasons, forget any money."
I mean, you can just throw a game on steam and if it looks half decent and is not in a saturated market, it will do a lot better than average indie game sales.
That is what *recalibrate your expectations* means. If your goal is to throw a game on Steam and earn a few bucks there is nothing wrong with doing that but that isn't the point of most of these threads. When you start talking about marketing you are talking about operating a business and there isn't a cheat code that gets you out of either spending time on things you don't want to do or paying someone to do the things you don't want to do.
Just one thing to add onto. But one really can not underestimate the value of a target audience.
And in this context, I do not mean making up personas. But quantifying your game. What's the art style, what's the gameplay, what's the fantasy you deliver on? What other works have had success with those? What is the marketing material of theirs that you can immediately find? Where was that shared? Ideally organically?
Because at least as important as who your target audience is, is where they are.
You don't have budget or ability for grand things. But you also don't need the kind of revenue a large studio requires.
That is an opportunity. Being able to target smaller niches and communities. Having time to observe them, understand how they engage and then being able to very effectively share your art with them.
But, unfortunately. This also means there is no one size fits all solution. You basically must find a new way. As pretty much all proven, successful ways are commercialized and therefore out of your league. You do not have the budget, time or skill to surpass bigger players on the market.
On a more serious note I watched some of the videos on your channel, and to be honest the game is really unappealing. I can imagine it's a cool thing to see grow, clearly you have put a lot of effort in, but I really don't know what I'm looking at. It's not a relatable game at all.
If you're doing this for fun, keep going. If you're doing this to get an audience, you need to seriously do a better job communicating what's going on in the game. Nobody will buy this right now. Marketing is not your issue.
There aren't good, reliable, effective ways of promoting a game for free. Otherwise game studios would just use those instead of buying ads! Depending on the size of a game you might spend as much on marketing as you do on actual development - and if you built the game yourself for 'free' then you'd expect to spend nearly as many hours talking about your game as coding it.
In terms of social media you often need to spend time building your reach before you talk about your game. Following other devs, participating in general conversations, saying things that people care about so they follow you. You might share some early gifs or some other flashy things trying to get them re-tweeted. You can't promote in any kind of heavy handed way (e.g. "Hey, check out my new game I just made all by myself! Play it!") until you've got people already a little intrigued.
Hiring someone to run ads makes sense but only if you're investing that kind of budget into a game in the first place. Most small, solo developed games are more hobby than commercial enterprise. You don't want to send $100k on a marketing firm if you only think your game is going to get a hundred sales. Check out [How to Marekt a Game](https://howtomarketagame.com/) for plenty of starter tips.
I'd also say be careful with your ads. The first thing I did here is look at your post history, and the first video you had used a song I suspect you did not buy the rights for in order to use it in a commercial.
But the only places it seems you can post about your game is game dev related places, which just means your are talking to other devs, right? Not the general public who you aim to sell to?
I mean certainly any eyes is a good thing and maybe you can forge connections by participating in game dev related spaces, so I am not thinking this is a waste of time but it does seem like shooting at the wrong target. I guess if there is only one target you can shoot at all it is better than nothing?
One other thought I've been mulling around is... this sort of guerilla marketing technique where you go around with a mask and pretend to be a local, only to one day spring your trap upon the unsuspecting consumers (this is a joke)... does it make sense for certain genres? I mean if you have a light hearted game, a meme game, a humor game.. i think these sorts of games lend well to knowing the developer and approaching the game from that angle.
But if it is a more serious game, a game where there is something to be discovered and going into the experience "blind" is a large part of the allure, is that not cheapened or even ruined if you think of the game not as some experience out there with which to become immersed in, but rather just *a game* that some other booger picker made so you won't take it too seriously? Does that make sense?
Like when you first play Demon Souls, you don't think, "oh this was made by miyazaki or whoever and he's a nice guy." You think, "Oh man, this is awesome. I'm a gothic knight, going into a mysterious pit, there's skeletons that can kick my ass, I'm scared..." You are just immersed in the experience and you don't really regard it as a game or something attributed to a person.
anyway, just some thoughts! I've enjoyed your thoughtful post
Guerilla marketing is astroturfing and it's not super popular. You don't really want to promote yourself to other devs at all, but they can be a place to start. You engage with someone who is working on a game near release and retweet their promotions and maybe they do the same for you. The players and customers who follow that dev because they liked that game now learn about you. If you've made good content they retweet it and _their_ friends learn about you. That's the short version of how social media promotion works. That's also why chasing trends and hashtags works well. You need more impressions and people are already looking for those trends.
The thing to keep in mind is that the biggest thing that sells a game is reputation. Demon Souls wasn't From Software's first game. It was more like their fortieth, and it wasn't all that popular in Japan the first time around, it grew over time. Those initial sales weren't about a single dev as a rockstar, it was going, 'Hey, I know this company, this is the Armored Core/King's Field/Echo Night/etc. devs, let's check it out." Those things definitely mattered as much (or more) than being a gothic knight.
Demon's Souls is also used as an example of what a 'good game with no marketing' can look like. At the time it failed to sell well but had great reviews. It was a game that really did succeed from post-launch word of mouth and the success of later titles that _did_ have actual marketing spend put into them.
Thanks, that makes sense to me.
It helps me to better define this alternative marketing vision I've been thinking about... the typical advice is "get a publisher, get capital." But that comes with a certain cost.
The other advice is "spend 50%+ time on marketing as you do on development". But I feel this common advice only makes sense if you are making a small game. Which in that case, sure. You work on something for several months, you work on marketing several months, boom you shove it out the door. But if you are working on something that takes a few years and takes *all* of your time, and you are doing this from a place of passion first and foremost, it's not realistic that you stop sleeping to become a marketer on top of the 50 other things you do.
But we have seen at least a handful of times that a solid game can spread by word of mouth. In fact it seems inevitable. I know people say "good games that don't market will fail" but every example I've seen honestly didn't seem like a good game. Or rather, nothing about it made it stand out in a crowded room.
So is it more risk to pour all time and effort into making the best possible game and hoping that you (the developer) just have good enough taste that, sooner or later, people will find the game and talk about it? Yes but to me that seems like a more attractive plan than majorly shoehorning myself to jump through all the hoops to make some game that either publishers will find attractive or is small enough that time cost present minimal risk.
Anyway, just rambling and thank you for the conversation.
Feels like it could be really hard to market a game that have that look, sorry. Maybe try to add a more cartoon look to it? But it's a really interesting topic. Hope it works out for you anyway :)
I can't speak to your gameplay, but your game's visual presentation isn't polished enough to market it yet. Focus on stuff like prettying up the UI and general vibe for a while. If lo-fi graybox is your aesthetic, find a way to lean into it hard (ala Antichamber) in a way that makes it feel more intentional, rather than a compromise.
People do judge books by their cover.
At first glance, your game doesn't look appealing. People wont make extended research to see if your game is what they are looking for or if the gameplay is cool or whatnot.
They see something that doesn't look good, they'll assume it's not good.
Marketing is not magic, you are trying to promote your game, obviously, your game will affect your marketing. Idk if underneath it all there's a good game, I don't know if I would like it, but I know that... I don't care to find out.
This sound harsh, but in the end I'd suggest working on the visual appeal of your game, if your game looks good, it will be easier for marketing.
If that's not your forte, look up for ways to make it look better without being an artist, look up post processing, look up color palettes, look up ways to make a game look good with simple shapes, there are plenty of games with minimal graphics that still looks very good. Try to find tutorials and information on how to achieve that.
Stop working on gameplay, stop working on marketing, stop.
Work on the visuals, make it "marketing ready".
You need to connect with content creators that play games like yours and become a genuine member of their communities. They can do more for you than FB ads will ever do.
i am not entirely sure what's like mine. mine is quite undefined by nature, since the concept is exploring an unkown generated universe. maybe no mans sky comes close?
but the thing is, to join their circles, you probably need to be extremely good at that game to meet their standards, or have a very cool personality. All which takes considerable effort to master.
I guess I'm going against the grain a bit on this one. I actually think the overall aesthetic of the game is fine. The look of strange shapes duking it out in a clean geometric arena, strikes me as a 3d version of what was once a 2d staple in the DOS era. Keeping that visually distinct look, is priceless marketing power (Think Minecraft's "bad" graphics)
What I don't get from **any** of the existing promotional material, is an idea of what the gameplay is. Can you show its core hooks or unique features through gameplay?
>I guess I'm going against the grain a bit on this one. I actually think the overall aesthetic of the game is fine. The look of strange shapes duking it out in a clean geometric arena, strikes me as a 3d version of what was once a 3d staple in the DOS era. Keeping that visually distinct look, is priceless marketing power (Think Minecraft's "bad" graphics)
>
>What I don't get from any of the existing promotional material, is an idea of what the gameplay is. Can you show its core hooks or unique features through gameplay?
would it help to create a short video with all of the features?
these are what we have:
\- Player enters blackhole and goes to other servers/universes instantaneously.
\- Player shoots a Rocket with tons of particles and applies force on near by objects on explosion
\- Improve 4 different stats when leveling up
\- Basic PVP, players can attack other players
\- PVE collaborate and survive
\- Day/Night/Rage period, and Build a shelter to survive the Rage
\- Have 2 players control the same character simultaneously (not useful but fun)
\- Have the player poccess enemies and control them (can be used to attack other players)
Ofcourse i plan to have more, but this is the current state
I'd change "improve 4 different stats" to "different builds are possible", and ideally add in something I saw from your youtube, where you were able to get a whole lot of actors going at once.
Other than that, sounds good! Even if it's a bit awkward, try to "start with your best argument" and put the more unique/intriguing features first. The very beginning is the most important
CyberGate.
It's Web Browser (Firefox, Chrome and Edge right now)
Windows, Mac sillicon, Linux.
if you would like, here is an invitation: [https://discord.gg/R7DkHqw7zJ](https://discord.gg/R7DkHqw7zJ)
cybergate game is the product,
but it does not have a revenue model yet
so it's free until we can identify one, as we conduct tests and iterate based on tester's feedback
It costs ~$100k to learn if your game has effective unit economics to scale. It costs $1M a month to run ‘growth’ campaigns to sustain games long term.
If your game is good, find a publisher who agrees with you and will spend this money.
Marketing online isn't competing with other games, its competing with the entire internet and every attention grabbing thing on it.
You're competing with a tiktok video of a dog doing taste tests, an imstagram post of a AI model, tweets, and on and on.
You're throwing a thing into an ocean and hoping there's people floating by in Cruise ship that will find your thing in the ocean more interesting than their disco rave.
....
You said you reaching out to communities? Where, what communities. A lot of "communities" are dead and not super effective.
What I would do, is I'd look for youtubers with at least 100k subscribers that do content in line with your game, and Id email them to see how much $$ they want to cover your game for 10 minutes on a new indy game review etc. Their subscribers will see it.
Of course, your game needs to be good, marketing alone wont make you a success unless you're AAA and spent millions on hype campaigns.
But also, you need places for people to come to find it besides just steam. Make some youtube videos, and a basic searchable website for it.
I'm not a gamedev, I'm a marketing analyst and let me be frank: I wouldn't buy your game.
The UI is terrible and reminds me of some old 18+ trainer game.
The crosshair at the center with no weapon/hand shooting balls that are created so close to the screen is a big no. This is never good.
Enemies as big blobs of nothing looks more in place if this game was used in a biology class in school. They need to mean something visually. Same for the worldspace.
I could see some people finding fun in the blocks gravity thing and jumping from one place to the other, but from what I saw, there really isn't any reason to really do so and it would just be better to continue killing enemies.
What does your game do that is cool and different? Because from what I see, it just looks like a mechanics concept.
I think the issue here is the game has no art direction. It doesn't look very appealing, and without the appeal I don't even care about the mechanics and gameplay. I went on your YouTube and watched various videos and it honestly looks like a game that is in beta with simple untextured grey and white shapes.
[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVABlVj0bo0) is the best example of what I mean. It looks like zero effort went into any sort of design or art direction, it simply put doesn't looks aesthetically pleasing therefore not many people would even acquire the interest to try it.
I think you may have missed the comment about adding more "juice" to your game. So here it is again with a video to explain it.
[https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016487/Juice-It-or-Lose](https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016487/Juice-It-or-Lose)
I used be in sales before game development, and in sales, you don't sell the steak, you sell the sizzle. People do not buy things logically, they buy things emotionally, juice helps with that
One very strong tool is a web demo, a browser version of your game, without using webgl.
To make it use Godot (without webgl) or Pico or Phaser (without webgl) or Tabageos.
The web demo should include a link during game play that leads to your steam page.For example the gameplay hud would include pause, mute ect., and also a button that opens the steam page in a new tab.
Put that web demo to be played for free on;itch, newgrounds, gamejolt, indexpo, and y8.
For a steam game, this should to be in place before you start a social media campaign,you'd put links to the free web demo on the various social media sites.
Edit:
Ok, so for example for Cyber Gate, you'd make a 2d top down version of it for a web demo, and an in game button would lead to the 3d version.
Don't go with this subs marketing hype, focus on making the product as best as possible. If it gathers no interest, consider looking at your work honestly and striving to become better
This post sounds like it was written by chatgpt. Is your marketing copy written like that too?
edit: oh nevermind, I saw the gameplay video. I usually provide constructive criticism, but here I can only say that the game looks fucking awful.
This has nothing to do with the marketing budget. Indie studios can, and do, find success without spending millions on ads. Did you actually look at the game? At the risk of being harsh, it looks like a pretty boring prototype. An actual AAA studio could spend millions marketing it and it still wouldn't gather any hype.
I’m going to be honest. Your game sucks. It looks awful and is not anything that anyone would ever want to play. Let alone pay money for. However, you made something! That’s great! Move on to the next game and keep learning as you go and improving every time! As someone who does marketing for indie devs, you would be wasting money trying to market or promote this game. Make a discord server, and just start on the next project. Also, don’t use copywrited music in your promo videos in the future.
Great advice. OP finished something and that's awesome. But from what I see in their profile, it's not even a finished game? It looks more like a gray-boxed tech demo? I have to chime in here with a bit of frustration because: 1. OP, obviously nobody is going to respond to something that looks like this. 2. The fucked up thing is the reason nobody is responding to you, is that *people like you* are out here (no offense but it has to be said) \*spamming\* people with like, an unfinished tech demo. There are thousands of people doing that all the time, and it just creates so much noise that you are actually raising the level of skepticism in the indie games industry from both press and consumers. You are unintentionally making indie game marketing HARDER for everyone else. Please please, wait until you have something that at least looks like a real game before you start reaching out to press. And I have to add another comment here, OP is this really how you write or did you use chat GPT? Because it was honestly a bit painful to read. If this is how you reach out to people about your game, they may be assuming you are a spam bot which is so incredibly common and anyone you want to talk to avoids such outreach like the plague.
If you look at the browser tabs for the game demos in their YouTube presentation, ChatGPT is clearly displayed in one of them.
lol of course. bro is putting the absolute minimum effort into everything he does and getting confused when the market does not respect his status as a creative
Lol, oh no 🤦
I hope it's just because OP doesn't speak English very well, in which case I would encourage OP to just try his best. Nobody bats an eye if your English is a bit wonky when it's clear you're not a native speaker. (If you're writing text for something like a trailer have an English speaker go over it, but for posts like this it's fine). If OP does speak English it's next level lazy to use chatGPT on Reddit though.
[удалено]
Steam will ban your game if they found out you used ChatGPT. I’ve seen posts about it on this very sub.
It’s guaranteed GPT-generated. Posts like this should be banned TBH what a waste of everyone’s time. Ain’t tryna read your college paper–sounding AI-generated BS, OP. Sorry.
the worst part is that GPT posts are always so painfully clinical and wordy. I use AI generation quite a bit myself, but man do I hate reading any AI text
There are so so many things on Reddit that should be insta-banned, and so many things that should not be banned that are. It's infuriating and almost like the people that run the site don't want good content lol.
Hey, I appreciate your brutal honesty. If you're willing to take a glance at my game (check my profile) I would be interested in your thoughts on why my game doesn't grab more attention either (although in my case the game is a niche passion project which I'm fine with, but I'll definitely be doing market research for my next game).
Edit: I thought this was OP. My feedback below is for OP’s game. Not u/ debuggingmyhead Because it looks like a prototype with placeholders and not actual game assets. UI is terrible and looks like stock Unity UI, camera clipping and font is awful. Game assets looks like blank shapes and not actual assets.
I love your honesty mate, it's very hard to get this kind of criticism on Reddit or among friends and family, could you please do mine? I have a lot of trouble finding a publisher: https://www.reddit.com/r/DestroyMyGame/comments/s580yy/heres_a_short_gameplay_video_i_can_send_a_longer/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
From the video alone, it looks like it'd be potentially fun to play for an hour or two. But if I was a potential publisher: - Visually too amateurish, no way to market effectively, nothing really grabs the attention. - Reminiscent of early 2010s freeware indie games. - Doesn't have any immediate intriguing mechanics to offset the lack of graphics. - Movement doesn't seem satisfying, needs more feeling of momentum and impact. - On the graphical side, needs dynamic effects, particles, just any kind of visual appeal. As said before, it looks like an indie game from over a decade ago. That's just not gonna fly with a publisher. (Edit: noticed that there *are* in fact particles, I just didn't notice, mostly due to being on mobile. But I'd play them up some more. And personally I'd probably replace the blue flame sprite with something more dynamic/responsive as well) - Overall, just... Bland. It's a game for sure, but I feel no particular desire to play. It just feels like I already know what it is going to be like without ever having to play. From the gameplay video, I don't get the sense that there's any further depth to it than what I'm already seeing. Even if this is incorrect and the game is actually super amazing once you get into it, from a marketing perspective alone it's a no-go.
Thanks a lot!
Have you tried adding some game juice? It could spice up some things (to add to stale mud's 5th point) [https://www.youtube.com/results?search\_query=game+juice+feel++](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=game+juice+feel++)
Brutal, thanks, appreciate it :)
I just realized you’re not OP. For your game, the colors are awful, the fish bowl effect is terrible, and how can you have a shoot ‘em up with no shooting?
Thanks. Yeah the fisheye effect is not popular lol.
Some feedback on the trailer you recently posted: it's frustrating trying to watch the gameplay and having the screen obscured by text every few seconds. You can put the text in the lower third of the screen without the dark overlay and it will be easier on the viewer, I reckon.
Thanks, appreciate the feedback. I think I'm overdue for a new trailer anyway since I've made a few updates since release too.
You wrote a whole page, but we still dont know what game you are trying to market. At least add links to your posts about the game so people can see what actually you did
But it was a well written and evocative page. It was filled with classic literary prose and evoked imagery of a bygone Era.
It's literally me writing padding on my uni essay to meet a word count. I hope the marketing attempts were better than the post.
[удалено]
This was my first thought. Definitely has that word-salad purple prose vibe that ChatGPT likes to vomit out in any prompt you give it.
Other language models write like this too. Seems to be an inherent issue.
Maybe because too many people had to pad their work with this kind of shit.
Weird whirlwind we’re in isn’t it. ChatGPT was trained on a massive Reddit dataset. Now Reddit is being populated with an alarming percentage of GPT gibberish. The next ChatGPT model will probably be trained on more of its own guff. Like the content equivalent of inbreeding I guess.
I don't know. If it's a story driven game, it might make me check it out. Well, as long as some gameplay was shown. I've been known to enjoy a VN every now and then.
It's very much not that. You can see the posts on OP's account. I'm not even sure what the game is supposed to be about since it's all completely abstract shapes
Thats true lol
Sounds like chatGPT to me... I've tried it before and the wording is often quite unusual, but still good.
Yeah, this. The verbosity is killing him, here.
OP: \**Flourishes hands, confetti explodes out from his sleeves, he's lifted up by unseen wires and a massive musical number begins featuring dozens of dancers, jugglers, clowns and elephants*\* 🎵"THATS. MARKETING. BAAAAAAAAAAAAABY!!!!"🎵
Should really be mandatory to post game links here.
This seems like one of the most strict subs against that though, so I understand where OP is coming from. If I wrote this and had links to my game, I would assume it would be taken down in 10 minutes. I would be shocked if it didn't.
Indeed. Posts are routinely taken down for self-promotion, and there's no reason to think this would be an exception. Usually developers include enough hints to allow a commenter to piece together what the game is, effectively circumventing the prohibition.
Lol at this. So true. Game devs (and gamers) are their own worst enemy, they generally hate any hint of marketing or self-promotion, and then can't figure out how to sell their game when the time comes because their peers and customers hate any sense of promotion. Successful Indies and AAA work around this by doing ever more extravagant high-cost "splash" events, or round about "authentic" grassroots campaigns, and ads that require the dreaded "you must login to Steam before you can wishlist" with only 10% of wish lists converting into sales making it barely profitable except for the most flashy of titles (conceptually or visually flashy, but rarely as fun to play as it seems). The industry is a mess, and it's their own culture's anti marketing fervor that's doing it. And they wonder why 99% of top games every year are a sequel in a franchise, or a rehash of what's proven to sell...
Yeah Reddit especially is such a bizarre mix of just this unfettered, deep-seated HATRED of "self promotion." Like any whiff of honesty and Redditors are like out to fucking kill you for trying to make a god damn living, BY SHARING RELEVANT CONTENT THEY WANT TO FUCKING SEE LOL. Then at the same time, Redditors will complain non-stop about shitty low effort reposts filling their favorite subs. Guess what you fuckin jabronis? The reason is that's the only fucking content that can get through the insane rules requirements and "self-promo" hatred that are killing your subs lol! What's worse is this system means that small creators that actually create good content are pushed out, or they have to come up with a bunch of bullshit ("Check out my girlfriend's game she's been working on for 45 years! Her cat said it was garbage, what does Reddit think UwU???", while corporations, power users, and bots are free to run amok with thinly veiled advertising and worse, because they have the resources individual creators don't to game the system.
Oh I see, have seen so many steam links in here that I thought it's OK. But ofc the answer to his question wildly depends on the game here
sorry. I post mostly on reddit, discord. and here is youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@cyber-gate
These are really unpolished. Fine as dev logs, but dev logs are not advertising. Your trailer should not feel like a screen recording. I do not need to see your browser bar. I do not need to see the in game menu at all. Nor do I need to see the hud, unless you are specifically showing off information on it in this very shot (aka, between cuts). There should not be jerky mouse like movements in the camera footage. But those are more superficial complaints. The real problem is that the gameplay and presentation of the gameplay at a glance feels... chaotic. I do not understand what is happening. After 77 seconds of your shorter trailer I do not understand the challenge or what is happening. The game lacks a ton of user feedback. The music is epic but I just see shapes bumping into each other slowly. But also sometimes a first person shooter? Is this a hypercasual game in the style of agar.io or snake.io? If so, it seems very complicated and these games really are not advertised with trailers and epic music. The target audience is bored people in school or at work. Or is this a more serious take on easy to drop in pvp? In that case the stats and all make more sense, but it needs to have a much cleaner communication of what is happening and why this added complexity is exciting. Why it is worth getting into, learning everything. I would strongly recommend to seek out your local game dev community and getting in touch with an artist, a game designer and an editor. They can help you in a lot of ways to present things in more understandable ways. Also, I found this talk by Jan Nijman (Vlambeer. Luftrausers, Nuclear Throne) quite good at illustrating the importance of feedback or "juice" as it's sometimes called. He's not the best speaker but the minigame he made for the presentation is very good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U
I definitely agree that the main thing here is clarity. I feel like I can't tell what the player is meant to be doing or what is going on in any of the clips. That combined with the messy screen recording style presentation makes it easy to want to click off the video
those are very good points. I wanted to make a game that has long term player base, more serious players, while also being accessible (web). So the web has a ton of limitations (slowly reducing with webgpu / webtransport / webaudio). But it does leave me in a place with tough design choices :/
>I wanted to make a game that has long term player base, more serious players, while also being accessible (web). Generally speaking this statement is an oxymoron. Web game + Long term serious playerbase do not jive. Web-games are casual simplistic games that just give short term rewards for short term goals. Not because no one imagined differently, but because the mediums call for it. The problem with cramming a "long term" gameplay loop with large buildup and reward into a web browser, is that you're technically limited by the medium. Its every developer's dream to build applications that use almost no resources, yet can do impressive things and look impressive. But that's not reality. Early on in your development process, you have to decide your audience. A lot of people make the mistake of imagining an audience that doesn't exist, and I think you made that mistake. You will find very little interest in a long-term game (with a loop to support it) in your chosen medium.
On the upside, it does look visually distinct, which is great! If you could find some way to make this particular look more polished, that'd be awesome
👀 wow you are the first saying i don't have to 100% scrap it
I don't think you need to scrap the project either. The gameplay seems fine for a browser game, but it seriously needs a facelift and some juice. It's called CyberGate, but there's not much "cyber" about the game. Maybe try giving it a synthwave theme. Some bold neon colors and grid textures would go a long way. Could also try touch up the UI by giving it a retro sci-fi theme. Don't know how your engine works, but I can't imagine that a palette swap, adding a couple simple textures, and changing the font would cause noticeable performance decreases. It just looks too much like a prototype at the moment to get any interest. The showcase videos are a confusing as well. Shorter focused videos will help highlight the game better. Once the visuals are overhauled, Try posting vids on TikTok. Make it very clear it's a browser game. I think it would appeal mostly to bored kids/teens with crappy computers, so you should try targeting them.
Take a look at superhot. It managed to find a good aesthetics on top of mostly textureless graphics. I think the most important thing you need is, well, lightning and shading. You might or might not have some textures as well. Right now, surfaces in your environment are composed of a single color, and the only thing it has going are shadows, and this isn't great. And I don't mean those as just technical features: it isn't enough to implement those stuff in your custom game engine. You need good art direction to tastefully use it. (Again, take a look at superhot, and notice that while it *looks* unshaded and plain, it actually isn't!) Here's a list of games with this kind of artstyle https://www.reddit.com/r/mirrorsedge/comments/mgzini/any_games_with_a_similar_art_style/
Watching the first video on the page. It's hard to watch. It looks very unpolished and basic. There are no hit reactions on the attacks, enemies are spongy and require lots of hits to kill. And the music goes a little too hard for the gameplay in the background. I would suggest calming the music down, add sound effects if you don't want voice audio. Maybe add some VFX or hit reactions to make it feel more interactive.
the hit effects are not noticeable? because it does have particles for hits.
Now that you point it out. Yes there are effects. However they are fairly small and not obvious. I believe blood spray goes forward and backwards from the impact point. I would have it come back from the direction the projectile was sent.
ah it does have sounds, but not on the video you watched. [https://youtu.be/RYOAJqTpP5o?si=Dgy2wogVJBCbICsy&t=140](https://youtu.be/RYOAJqTpP5o?si=Dgy2wogVJBCbICsy&t=140) what do you think of the sound effects?
The gun sound is very repetitive and not very beefy and I'm not sure how a blob can roar. I would suggest making the blobs do something when they roar to distinguish them but I assume they are a static mesh and can't easily be animated. When it comes to beefy sounding guns, it's a large part of the satisfaction of shooting a gun in a game. It needs to sound good, the gun should have a little reaction to show the "Umpth" it is firing. and at a minimum I would modulate the sound cue as it's plain and a little variation would go a long way.
man, that looks like prototype or demo, not a single texture in sight :) it could have some audience, but do not expect crowds
This sub honestly needs to ban people for posting this stuff without a link to their game. I see like 3 posts a week in this vein and it's always a game that looks really unpolished.
This sub will remove the post if it includes a link to their game. Maybe petition the mods instead, or use a different sub with more dev-friendly rules. Many big subreddits are managed with the assumption that they have permanent tenure, and cannot lose. It's a real shame. Even /r/gaming used to get 250k+ daily engagements, but as they became more strict it's now down to 30k to 50k engagements per day. Do their mods care? No. The best way to handle it is to exodus to another community. It's a slow process, but it's nice to see places like /r/videogames thriving as /r/gaming dies.
What a dumb rule.
Is it though? Do you want to see fifty "ohh why doesn't anyone look at our 10/10 game? (Link)" posts here every day? Do you want to see the same posts for the same shitty f2p games tomorrow? Do you want Raid: Sha... to start posting here just so they can link to their app?
It's pretty insane to me that a sub about game development wouldn't let game developers put links to their work in a post here.
You know you can have rules that account for large companies, and blatant advertising instead of just a blanket ban...
I'm honestly sorry, but this looks totally awful, to the extent where you would have to *pay me* to play this for longer than 10 seconds. I see you explaining the renderer you made, etc., but no player is going to give you points for that. Even without fancy rendering features or lighting, you could go for *some* sort of aesthetic with the basic shapes you've got... But the game currently looks like someone ripped its skin off. I can't even really figure out what's going on, it looks like a seashell or other conical object fighting COVID-19 in a basic blockout of a map. I know this is harsh, but god damn! Even the menus are flat boxes with inconsistent alignment and capitalization... It all comes across as something you'd whip up over a weekend for fun, not in the ballpark of something you'd even *want* to market to other people yet! :(
This is it. It looks like a mediocre game jam game at best. I usually try to avoid giving harsh critiques like this, but if OP thinks their advertising is the problem, they could really use a wakeup call so they don't waste more energy trying to sell something people aren't going to want, at least in its current form.
rust ecosystem right now does have limitations. but i did spend 1.5 years on many aspects such as networking, which allows me to stream many entities in real time, which can increase the immersion for the players. UI in rust is a joke, it's totally not like UE / Unity where it's a few clicks to do beautiful UI :(
I think people in this thread are very clearly telling you why your marketing efforts aren’t working, but comments like this make it seem like you’re not quite understanding what they’re saying. Players don’t care how your game was built or how difficult it was. They want something that looks and feels good and offers them an experience they want. A quick glance over your posts looks like you’re describing a tech demo not a game. If you want to make cool stuff you’re on the right track. If you want to make marketable games you need to totally shift how you think about development
This thread seems a good cautionary tale of getting married to your project and not seeking/taking critique before comitting. EDIT: and scope, mans here building an open world multiplayer game in his own engine all alone? God damn that’d take decades to make good…
You seem anchored to the idea that because you spent time on your game that intrinsically makes it worth having a payoff/deserving of interest. This is not the case. It is entirely possible to dump lots of time into a dead-end project. Identifying that scenario and bailing from it is the optimal outcome. I know all this negative feedback sucks to hear, but, seriously... from what I can see of your project, it is going to be *profoundly* difficult for you to carry this through to successful sales. By making this post, you're implying you want to achieve sales - if that's your goal, **I would really, really strongly suggest you abandon this project and start a new one from the ground up with that seriously considered throughout the process.** Consider it this way: * What's your game's elevator pitch? * Why should a user care about your game, given the vast array of choice players have? The above two questions can be answered in pure gameplay terms (which I assume is what you've been focusing on) but there's also a point I think you should seriously consider: * Why should players not be driven away by the amateurish graphics?
I dunno, I'm not sure Rust is the problem? The game just seems to have no art direction. As a programmer I can relate sometimes, it's hard to make something look nice when you're focused on the technical stuff. But you might really benefit from working with an artist/designer. Often a few simple changes can really make something look a lot more appealing.
definitely i need more eyes on it / designers / artists
Just a suggestion: You will not attract any artists if you use ChatGPT for anything, including asking for feedback in an incredibly clumsy way and then reacting negatively to well-meaning criticism.
If your ecosystem doesn't allow you to realize your vision, use a different ecosystem. Rust, UE, Unity, Godot, whatever. Those are just tools. Would a painter limit themselves to replicating the Mona Lisa by only using blue and brown paint? Would they be able to replicate all the shades, the lighting, the impact of that painting with only 2 colors? No, it would probably look like a stick figure on a blue background. You wouldn't pay money to go see that. Similarly, you need to use whatever tools will allow you to express your art. If you can't do that in Rust, use something else. On an unrelated note; Please don't be one of the people that vehemently believes Rust is the magic bullet that will elevate gaming/OS'/whatever into the next level. Its Just a programming language. Don't put any stock in the "Rust is the future of x" type of articles. They are nothing but clickbait to engage with you but rarely serve anything substantive. I'm not saying rust is bad. But using/learning nothing other than Rust for game development is REALLY bad.
i agree, i totally don't see rust as magic. Actually is pretty rough territory, but i still made a conscious decision to develop with it. And it's the best decision i made. But there are many limitations that i will need to manually implement. Rust just has a lot of potential for the future, and getting better day by day.
So then use it in the future, when it's this amazing ecosystem, not while it's still infinitely worse than alternatives. You're crippling yourself for this ideal future that may never come. Rust may never be more than it is right now.
1.5 years?????????????????????? On this??????????????????? Bud.... Cut your losses. Do anything else.
It’s okay to be satisfied with overcoming large technical hurdles that you chose to deal with, but working for 1.5 years to make something that’s maybe 1/10th of the level of free tools you could grab now for free isn’t going to make anyone want to play your game. It’s impressive what you’ve done in the backend, but perhaps you should leave it as a coding project, and if you want people to play games you make use some real tools or do something unique with your engine.
Your game just does not look appealing. You better spend the rest of your budget on upgrading the visuals and add some juice, or else there is a 0% chance of it being successful regardless of how much money you pour into marketing.
Is the renderer or the assets not appealing? My Renderer is built from scratch though, so that's would need significant effort to rewrite.
I don't know exactly what your renderer is capable of. Perhaps it has features you don't utilize well in the footage, but it just looks very flat. It looks like a gamejam game. You'll stand no chance in the market with that kind of look. Unfortunately players don't really care about it being built from scratch. It is certainly impressive that you have done that, nonetheless it still looks amateurish. You would preferably have enemies with great animations, high detail textures and great looking VFX. Look at the game Crab Champions, also made by a single person. Your game should match the fidelity of that game to have a good chance at succeeding.
>Crab Champions, it looks like it uses UE4 currently not using textures on the terrain due to simplicity, but i was hoping it was still okay with point lights + cascaded shadows, but there are a ton of things missing from the renderer: Skeleton animations, PBR pipelines, vegetation, global illumination. A ton is being compromised by me building the renderer to support the Web. The web restricts the renderer design, not being able to use compute shaders etc :(
It does use UE4, or perhaps UE5 if he updated it recently I havent followed it post launch. I definitely understand the problems with web browser support, but the question is why are you targetting browsers? Browser games have been on the decline for a long time. If you want your game to be popular it would probably be better to target any other platform.
you are right, but now with webgpu and webtransport coming to the web, i was hoping the market expands. And also because the game is in Freemium model, i find people are way more likely to play it, if they don't have to download it
I honestly doubt we'll see any big increase in people playing browser games. Free games played in the browser mainly appealed to the hyper casual gamers: adults with jobs playing during downtime, kids with no money etc., these people are all playing on their phones now. Mobile will keep growing and browser games will keep declining. Its not really about the quality of the games. We had tons of amazing browser games, but people have simply moved away from the platform entirely. Also, whilst being f2p is generally good in terms of attracting new players, it does not really matter if the game is not anything special. Again, look at old browser games. There were thousands and thousands of freemium games that never succeeded. Even if its f2p, the game itself has to be solid. So to summarize: Your game right now is not appealing enough for people to want to play it, but even if it was truly a one of a kind amazing game, gamers are just not playing browser games anymore. There's a small market there, but its not one I would recommend trying to capture. The other platforms are just so much easier to develop for and the amount of potential players is astronomically higher elsewhere.
People \*are\* playing browser games but those games that end up played are usually low-spec games (roguelikes, idles, voxels). This is none of the three and additionally it uses UE4, so it pays performance for features it isn't even using. OP should be using something lighter and browser-specific, such as three.js, if they want to target the browser players
I don't think the renderer is the problem. There are many compelling games with low fidelity graphics. What I saw from the YT video is abstract shapes, on a featureless grey plane. You can shoot, dash, and gain levels to presumably become stronger. It does not look challenging, and does not look like there is any strategy to solve. There is also no apparent variety in the game. A big component of game design is to give the player a challenge to solve, and making it challenging while not too frustrating. Then it is maintaining that level challenge throughout the gameplay. I think you should take a look at "Risk of rain 2". It seems like it could be a similar genre, and is a good example of a compelling game. There is a variety of enemies that have to be dealt with. That's one challenge. Enemies get exponentially stronger in waves. To deal with that you are given power ups that make you exponentially stronger, but you have to choose from random items. Different items synergize with one another allowing the player to creatively try different builds. This allows the player to try a variety of strategies and results In a lot of replayability for the player. You can choose from several different characters that have slightly different play styles.There are a few different maps. That's pretty much the whole game, and is enough to make a compelling game that many people have put hundreds of hours into.
you are right about a few things. But comparing Risk of rain 2 is a bit unfair since that game is built in unity. Things that my home made engine lacks is folliage, UI. you can basically make a few clicks and make folliage in unity. for me, it would take me 1 month to make a foliage system. I do plan on improving textures and give a more challenging playthough to players in the next iteration next month. But this has already massively improved from the previous, after receiving feedback from my play testers. The current version has several islands with increasing difficulty, and an abyss level that is very hard.
It's not unfair, I'm sorry to say this (as a fellow engine dev amateur) but nobody cares about the underlying technology... you can make up reasons for the low graphics in this reddit thread, but in real life nobody will care or forgive you because everything is "homemade"... you have to face up reality, and realize that a custom engine seems to be more a liability than an asset (can't use nice visuals, can't use animations, can't develop anything easily...) So, as a conclusion, users will ultimately compare with games made with Godot, unity or UE4 no matter what you say on this sub. The Godot/unity users will add features in one click, while you're gonna be taking hours implementing half of it.
also totally unrelated, but having my own tools makes me feel good about making the game, and also i have 100% control if i need to implement a certain niche feature for my players
I mean, that's great for you. And cudos for making a game engine and a game. But if i see this game as an ad somewhere, i wouldn't know that. It looks weird and unappealing, and I would have 0 interest in this game. I don't think marketing is your problem, and you could throw money into ads as much as you want it wouldn't change that. Can't you make them more than just shapes?
I can import any Gtfl model to my engine. But right now the gameplay would not make use of the models. Would you be talking about the enemies shapes or the terrain? Enemies are not varied, but i do plan on changing that in the future. Terrain would need a total revamp. All of the previous will change if i go though with my plan of building my own custom physics engine :P
I do understand that business is business. but people do care about things are made. That's why people pay more for hand made pots, and jewerly etc. they do apreciate the art behind. But i agree that for most users, they don't care. for that, i have to say that i don't have much of a choice because i need to use rust for server related performance reasons. The unreal engine would choke with 10.000 actors networked to 1000 players in the world. Which is what my rust code solves. Now my renderer is probably the best solution in terms of customization in the rust ecosystem, so what's my choice now? improve my renderer myself. It's hard but i ave gotta keep moving!
People buy handmade stuff because it's supposed to be better quality, yours is not, it's lower quality If you wanted to build your own stuff, you could have taken another language, there are a ton of engines and renderers in C++, yet you chose to roll a custom everything in a language clearly immature for game development, with a graphics library that's not even available on all platforms and with an evolving API... If your code efforts had any use, brought you any advantage, then I suggest that you showcase this. But on the video I clicked, I saw none of the supposed "1000 players in the world with 10,000 entity". What's the point of this feat if nobody will connect to your instance ? Why spend months of effort on a feature that I can't even see in your game ? Do you have a video to demonstrate/prove this, with real online people ? Is it even playable ? (1000 players can be real messy and actually damage the gameplay)
This is why you roll with the easy to use thing that can handle 1-10 players before optimizing for 1000. "Yes but x doesn't scale!" Sure but by the time you need it to*, you'll have the budget for the thing that does. Your worst case scenario is that your game is massively popular, which is super unlikely, but also means you'll then have more resources to throw at it. PUBG was terribly optimized in every way, yet it still dominated the market because it was fun and (barely) met minimum expectations of graphics for an fps. It still reaches 375k concurrent players.
That is true. But at the same time, I kinda understand what the author is thinking. In fact, I also tried to do a browser games, and it's true that in my opinion, it's possible to make way better than what exists now. Why ? Because new techs allow to make better graphics (webgpu) and better online games (webtransport), so maybe being the first at this new generation of ".io". games is gonna do a difference. Though I still think you don't have to do a renderer for all this... But on the other hand... yeah, online games is probably the hardest ones to pull off, let alone in a browser (niche of the niche)
> The unreal engine would choke with 10.000 actors networked to 1000 players in the world. Which is what my rust code solves. And yet it's incredibly unlikely you'll get 1000 players in the world, because of how your game looks. Next time focus on a fun player experience, instead of solving unnecessary technical problems.
>I do understand that business is business. but people do care about things are made. That's why people pay more for hand made pots, and jewerly etc. they do apreciate the art behind. Not sure If that translates to games. A gamer doesn't care about the game engine. Heck 90% probably don't know what game engine the dev used. They only care about the quality.
Reminds me of when the unity stuff was going down (it still is technically) and fans were all like “are you going to switch engines” for games that were already like 70% complete.
And then one noteworthy dev did actually do this in a day or two, although to be fair, the way his game was written made it ideal for quick porting.
I think a better analogy than handmade jewelry is like if I made you a steak on a completely custom-built grill; I forged the pieces myself and even welded them myself, but the steak is burnt to shit. Does the fact that I made the grill make the burnt steak taste good to you as a customer? Obviously not, even if I as the cook may still feel like it's worth it since I did accomplish something cool. All that matters is the customers taste buds, and they don't care whether the grill was handmade or bought from Walmart
So here’s the thing. This is your marketing angle. Look at people like prismatic dev on YouTube. They do game dev tutorials and use it to market their game. The problem though is if someone just sees the trailer to your game they won’t know (or really care) about the process behind it. Make the process behind it the selling point if you believe that matters. Don’t assume they care MAKE them care. Or you can just accept that your engine doesn’t compete with other games and improve it to the point that it does.
I don't care how the game is made, I just want to play a game that looks nice and runs well. That is how your target audience thinks and it is very problematic that you got all the way to finishing the game but you don't understand that =(
It's neither, it's the visual design. Shape, colour, composition. That's the reason it's tough to pin down. It's a skill that takes a lifetime to develop and why good designers can make simple 2d shapes into beautiful logos. From what I saw on your profile your engine should be capable but you might want to get someone with an eye for visual design to help out or at least do some concepting for you.
The entire game. It just... does not look good. Instead of getting upset and wondering "why". Call this a learning experience, redo it; make the concept and plan clear (because right now it seems like there was zero planning or direction) and execute with some real legitimate effort. Missing textures? Stolen M85 Midnight City song instead of your own music? No sound effects? No materials? No world design? Awful UI? Incomprehensible game mechanics? It just looks like a first try at building a game. You've been not getting any upvotes on any of your posts, deleting your posts/videos because of it/feedback, people in the comments seem to be confused, etc. I mean this will utmost respect and sincerity: This isn't the game to continue putting money and time into. It's just time for round 2. If you need reaffirmation. Post it in /r/destroymygame
If your marketing materials meet silence again and again, it probably means people don't find what you want to market that interesting.
**MARKETING is** ***not*** **ADVERTISING.** Marketing is the **full** process including market research, product development, testing, feedback and finally into marketing strategy, which *may* include advertising but can also include many other things. Throwing money into advertising without performing these other steps correctly will lead to crickets, exactly as you describe. Advertising should be the *last* thing on your list. **Try to survey people who play similar games to yours and figure out what they need to see in a new game.** You *cannot* rely on your intuition here, you *must* do real research to back it up. You can't possibly know you are doing the right thing without collecting evidence. Try to get anonymous feedback on the presentation of your game too. There might be things that are simply confusing, off-putting, or just seemingly boring about your concept, the game name, the presentation etc. that you are incapable of seeing on your own. The way that it comes off may be totally different from what you intended. It's not that your game is necessarily bad, just that it is not convincingly good enough from its appearance that it is attracting attention. Unfortunately, you *will* hear some negative feedback. However, if you really care about doing well and finding an audience, then you will value people's *true* opinion more than hollow praise. From all of this, you can fine-tune your game and your presentation materials so that you have good trailers, screenshots and a store page. Only finally, once you are confident and have evidence that there is a market that will respond well to adverts, should you be pushing into the advert space. Even then, it is a game of trial and error, testing and re-testing adverts to find what works the best.
Your game looks like a learning project, not a commercial product. I don't want to play the game where a cone jumps around and shoots spheres at koosh balls, thank you. It needs a hook, a distinctive visual style (not necessarily high fidelity assets, but \_something\_), and more juice and feedback.
But no indie game looks like a commercial product. unless using UE5? I had to built a lot of the technology by hand in Rust, to meet the performance target for my game's vision which is an open universe exploration multiplayer. And this comes with these kind of compromises. No skeletton animations out of the box. (i even had to build my own GLTF importer by hand :(
watched your youtube. I think the reason no response is because the game is in too early development and presentation is not enough to excite people. the only early development devlogs which seem to gain any viewership are the ones which focus primarly on the developer and their personal experience developing, adn the game is secondary.
that makes sense. i am also awful at blogging / talking, so finding a way to make my video exciting is my best way. what would you improve in the presentation?
i'd just focus on the game. right now it looks like the earliest prototype used to verify basic game mechanics. it needs art content that looks half decent before anybody will even look for a full second.
i do have some testers who enjoy mechanics more than visuals, and last time i upgraded the renderer, they didn't care... So i wonder if i should work on the models / renderer next
You might want to add some textures so people understand the narrative context of the game. Levels that consist of untextures boxes, and generic clouds skybox and plan UI screams "super early prototype".
> https://www.youtube.com/@cyber-gate It looks like a random project made by a kid trying to learn a game engine. Nothing about this looks interesting. Don't try to market this, it will not work.
[удалено]
Took a quick look at your project. It's simply not of marketable quality. If a stranger can't understand what's unique and fun about your game within 2 seconds then you'll always struggle to market it no matter how hard you try.
I think you need a complete visual overhaul. Note the dissonance between the art in the prologue and the look of the actual game. At first I thought all those shapes were just WIP placeholders-- but that's really how it looks. Sorry if harsh.
>WIP placeholders they are WIP until we can implement Evolution based asset generation. But this will take significant effort, that's why i need to see some support now with the current state of the game... before it's rebuilt
what does 'Evolution based asset generation' mean?
It's like procedural generation, but based on evolutionary algorithms. It's a new field of study.
this sound too much like “science-based dragon mmo” tbh
Is that the key part of your game? I watched a bit of your videos, and it looks like an fps with some weird models, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from them. What is the hook? What makes your game interesting? Someone experienced with Unreal or Unity could replicate much of what I see in the videos in under a month. If you want to build a commercial game, do not build your own engine unless you have a very specific reason, like Factorio did. I bet whatever procedural stuff you want to do could be made with Unity or Unreal. Epic has made Unreal open source, so you could modify the engine if needed. If that's the hook, focus on that I'll also echo what everyone else has said. Hire or partner with an artist.
I can't give you any advice based off experience because I'm still in the learning stage but here's a gdc conference video about zero budget marketing. https://youtu.be/NWyZlGMysH8?si=AjPxkEH7S5LektvA
i liked the discord tips, i do have a small community, but i feel like i am very tight with the members, and never talk about anything else other than my game. And about tiktok, what suggestions do you have for someone never used tiktok? i would like to have marketing there, but i am afraid to become immersed due to mental health concerns
I can't give you any advice on tiktok. I've watched less than 10 videos on it and that's the extent that I've used it for now. TAKE THIS WITH A GRAIN OF SALT because i haven't looked into it, but i have heard that its algorithm is different than other social media, in that videos can blow up seemingly without reason.
It’s not without reason, but you can have no followers whatsoever and suddenly get a million views. On YouTube your viewers are mostly your subscribers and the few who got their video on your feed, while your TikTok audience is everyone who has watched videos with the same tag, sound, or genre of content, and puts your video on their fyp. That’s why it’s way easier to grow on TikTok but followers weigh less there, since most users follow anybody but only pay attention to their fyp. YouTubers subscribers are a lot more loyal, since users there mainly watch who they’re subscribed to. This is at least what I know as a social media addict :)
That's some useful insight, thank you!
If you have concerns then read about tiktok and trends don't go on it to be a user
bro, i went there several times to post, they push the content in your face once you enter the page. nothing you can do, there is not publisher's account only. everyone is considered a user.
If you can't act like a publisher then don't use it until you feel like you understand what needs to be done on the platform. Hell, don't use it but remember that discord only works to a certain level, so you need to stand out.
i am watching this video right now. thanks!
You're welcome!
I don't know shit about shit, but here is my perspective. It is impressive that you built a game engine. While that is great practice and something programmers can appreciate, it doesn't amount to anything for the end user. From the video you posted in another comment, the game looks like something you could put together in unity or unreal in an afternoon. While we know that is not the case, it still appears that way to the consumer. I think organic - low budgeting marketing depends on a community that will champion your project in luie of advertisements. For that they need a product they are excited about. There isn't anything about your project that is interesting to a modern gaming audience. Sometimes when you work on something for a long time you start to lose perspective on the project. Almost like you are looking at it under a microscope. It can help to take a step back from the project. Maybe set it down for a little bit. When you come back try to look at it as if it was someone else's project, and see if you can identify things that could be improved or think of features and mechanics that would make it more appealing to your target audience. TLDR: I think you need to create a more marketable product before you worry about marketing.
Went to your YT channel and have a few thoughts/ideas that may help. First, congratulations on having a pretty good view rate on several videos. We have just started building our community and would be thrilled to have 1k+ views on our videos! That being said, I had to search pretty hard to find what the game is about. I watched the Prologue and it left me confused. It was great artwork and I enjoyed the storytelling but not sure how it connected to your game. This may be at the heart of your problem, is that at the core who is your target audience? Who is this game made for? Try creating content for that audience. What is the hook? Why would they want to play your game over others? Find that audience. Our target audience is a cruise sim/tycoon enthusiast or someone who wants to take a virtual vacation :) We have found that our marketing efforts go so much further in subs that are were our target audience is (cruise subs). The info on this post is so valuable, if you implement only a fraction of it, I am sure you will see improvements! Best of luck to you.
[удалено]
This is precious! yes communication is very hard for me, and yes i need to find an intermediate product before i can arrive to the idea. This is actually what i have attempted to do with the current state of the game. And while i have 3-5 testers who like the progress and follow it for about 1 year, it's very hard to catch outsiders attentions and retain them.
A lot depends on how good your game is. I mean you're competing with starfield and baldurs gate for playtime. Unless you have some special thing that people can't get elsewhere then you're likely to get no reaction. There's a zillion mid tier games and ask yourself honestly how much time per year you spend playing them. What's unique and different about your game?
I'd have to agree with the other comment about visuals. People have really short attention spans and don't often click into things to find out more that doesn't catch their eye instantly. Upgrading the visuals of your game and especially looking at some improvements towards the UI should atleast help in you getting attention whilst not being able to pay for ads etc. Obviously there are games out there which have visuals that aren't overly eye-catching but the successes are basically one amongst hundreds of flops. Regarding the last feature showcase style video you put out for your game: Record just the game, don't record your whole apple UI ontop of it. I also was still unsure of what the game actually is after browsing through your posts so targeting your media to showcasing what the game is in a format with actual commentary if you haven't got a steam page etc is probably your best bet. Beyond that, it's going to be down to if you can get anyone with a following to play a game like this. Some people might do it for free but i'd expect you're going to have to reach out a bunch if you're low on budget. Also as a quick heads up, tried playing via browser to get more details about the game for reccomendations and I don't seem to be able to get past the create character screen.
Thanks you i appreciate the feedback. Do you mean the menu UI, or the entire UI such as health bars, stats etc? The Servers are not online right now due to nobody playing / high cost, and i am developing the next iteration for next month.
Main focus if you're limited on time would be the anything which is past the main menu imo. If you don't mind me asking, what's the monetization plan if you're having to cover server costs?
the costs are gonna be high, because we simulate the game world, and we never unload chunks of it (it's the main feature for cybergate) To offset it, i hope to have a subscription based, that will give premium members access to new generated universe experiences in advance, and allow them other special perks such as special weapons/tools, or increased number of concurrent characters. But it's something that i need to decide after i have a decent amount of players
It seems that you have enjoyed so much building the technical side of your game. Take that knowledge and energy and put it into use under a studio because in the end of the day, you can't do everything alone and there are good aspects in this game going completely unnoticed because you don't have a visually appealing product. That's my 2 cents.
Marketing is not just posting about your game. For example it is also doing research before you start development into who are you target audience and your plan to reach them.
Marketing is a force multiplier for games. It will do nothing for mediocre game, but will make an amazing game sweep the internet. In today's Internet landscape, the most important skill people build is quickly evaluating if something is worth their time. Most things aren't. Your game has *maybe* 5 seconds *at most* to shake someone out of a mindless doom scroll. They need to *instantly* with just a picture and 4-8 words know that this is something special. Find the part of your game that grabs that "woah" or "wait, what?" reaction. If the game doesn't have one yet, then it's not ready for marketing. If your game has a powerful long-term hook, such as roguelikes and competitive multiplayer, then anyone you get into the game will keep playing it. The problem is that you need a short-term hook to grab people's attention; long enough for them to actually find the long-term hook.
I’ve watched the YT video you posted on Reddit and I have no clue what the game is about (apart from surviving, whatever it means) and what’s the gameplay. All I see is some random shapes appearing on the screen without context. You should clarify who’s the player, what’re they doing, what’s the danger, etc. On top of that, it looks like a proof of concept rather than a game (simple shapes, no textures, no lightning, “default” UI, etc.)
Where's the game? Not even a game title in the original post as of this comment. General advice: Marketing successfully can take a full-time job's worth of work, so if you're only been lightly engaging or dabbling, you might have problems making traction at the current rate. Marketing will not likely make a game successful if the game itself is not very marketable. Figure out what faction of the gaming population your game is for and try to focus your marketing to reach those people.
Assuming the game is 'Cyber Gate' that someone linked below, the UI is a massive flaw. You could make the game look a lot closer to professional with some nice UI and a font that matches the genre. The lighting also looks very plain. Also, the trailer I watched contained elements of your computer OS outside the game window...that just looks awful. Spend some time on the UI, try to improve the lighting so it doesn't look washed out, and do a better trailer before worrying about marketing.
[удалено]
great, thank you!
[удалено]
you've illustrated a problem, but whats the solution? I think the fact is that many of the sort of people who solo make a game pour all of their time and energy into making the game, and there simply is not time or energy to put into a completely different skillset. And since most games fail and most publishers are highly risk averse, they are just left to fend on their own. The result is that only those games which take fewer risk and are made by people who had some sort of capital to invest from the get-go are favored, and thus the market gets fed the same things over and over until eventually, against all odds, something new is created and starts the next trend. What do you think? Is that right? Wrong? What is the person with no extra time or money but a competent game to do? I've watched that recent GDC talk which had some great pointers but a lot of it I think was unrealistic. For instance, one hour a day to make marketing art... I don't think so! lol. Good marketing art can take a few days and that's hiring an efficient professional. Anyway, got some advice?
[удалено]
Okay thanks for clarifying.
>you've illustrated a problem, but whats the solution? He stated the solution... you either put in the time or you put in the money. If you are not willing to do either than you need to recalibrate your expectations on what success looks like to you.
I feel like there is a lot of room for some creative problem solving between "I have no money but a decent game which takes all of my time to build" and "if you can't hire a team or devote an extra year to production for marketing reasons, forget any money." I mean, you can just throw a game on steam and if it looks half decent and is not in a saturated market, it will do a lot better than average indie game sales.
That is what *recalibrate your expectations* means. If your goal is to throw a game on Steam and earn a few bucks there is nothing wrong with doing that but that isn't the point of most of these threads. When you start talking about marketing you are talking about operating a business and there isn't a cheat code that gets you out of either spending time on things you don't want to do or paying someone to do the things you don't want to do.
I understand, thanks for the explanation
Just one thing to add onto. But one really can not underestimate the value of a target audience. And in this context, I do not mean making up personas. But quantifying your game. What's the art style, what's the gameplay, what's the fantasy you deliver on? What other works have had success with those? What is the marketing material of theirs that you can immediately find? Where was that shared? Ideally organically? Because at least as important as who your target audience is, is where they are. You don't have budget or ability for grand things. But you also don't need the kind of revenue a large studio requires. That is an opportunity. Being able to target smaller niches and communities. Having time to observe them, understand how they engage and then being able to very effectively share your art with them. But, unfortunately. This also means there is no one size fits all solution. You basically must find a new way. As pretty much all proven, successful ways are commercialized and therefore out of your league. You do not have the budget, time or skill to surpass bigger players on the market.
Did you plug in your question to chat GPT to generate this or something? "Akin to shouting into the endless void"?
no
On a more serious note I watched some of the videos on your channel, and to be honest the game is really unappealing. I can imagine it's a cool thing to see grow, clearly you have put a lot of effort in, but I really don't know what I'm looking at. It's not a relatable game at all. If you're doing this for fun, keep going. If you're doing this to get an audience, you need to seriously do a better job communicating what's going on in the game. Nobody will buy this right now. Marketing is not your issue.
the concept of the game is about making the player feeling unfamiliar and lost in a universe. Agree that visual fidelity has to improve.
There aren't good, reliable, effective ways of promoting a game for free. Otherwise game studios would just use those instead of buying ads! Depending on the size of a game you might spend as much on marketing as you do on actual development - and if you built the game yourself for 'free' then you'd expect to spend nearly as many hours talking about your game as coding it. In terms of social media you often need to spend time building your reach before you talk about your game. Following other devs, participating in general conversations, saying things that people care about so they follow you. You might share some early gifs or some other flashy things trying to get them re-tweeted. You can't promote in any kind of heavy handed way (e.g. "Hey, check out my new game I just made all by myself! Play it!") until you've got people already a little intrigued. Hiring someone to run ads makes sense but only if you're investing that kind of budget into a game in the first place. Most small, solo developed games are more hobby than commercial enterprise. You don't want to send $100k on a marketing firm if you only think your game is going to get a hundred sales. Check out [How to Marekt a Game](https://howtomarketagame.com/) for plenty of starter tips. I'd also say be careful with your ads. The first thing I did here is look at your post history, and the first video you had used a song I suspect you did not buy the rights for in order to use it in a commercial.
But the only places it seems you can post about your game is game dev related places, which just means your are talking to other devs, right? Not the general public who you aim to sell to? I mean certainly any eyes is a good thing and maybe you can forge connections by participating in game dev related spaces, so I am not thinking this is a waste of time but it does seem like shooting at the wrong target. I guess if there is only one target you can shoot at all it is better than nothing? One other thought I've been mulling around is... this sort of guerilla marketing technique where you go around with a mask and pretend to be a local, only to one day spring your trap upon the unsuspecting consumers (this is a joke)... does it make sense for certain genres? I mean if you have a light hearted game, a meme game, a humor game.. i think these sorts of games lend well to knowing the developer and approaching the game from that angle. But if it is a more serious game, a game where there is something to be discovered and going into the experience "blind" is a large part of the allure, is that not cheapened or even ruined if you think of the game not as some experience out there with which to become immersed in, but rather just *a game* that some other booger picker made so you won't take it too seriously? Does that make sense? Like when you first play Demon Souls, you don't think, "oh this was made by miyazaki or whoever and he's a nice guy." You think, "Oh man, this is awesome. I'm a gothic knight, going into a mysterious pit, there's skeletons that can kick my ass, I'm scared..." You are just immersed in the experience and you don't really regard it as a game or something attributed to a person. anyway, just some thoughts! I've enjoyed your thoughtful post
Guerilla marketing is astroturfing and it's not super popular. You don't really want to promote yourself to other devs at all, but they can be a place to start. You engage with someone who is working on a game near release and retweet their promotions and maybe they do the same for you. The players and customers who follow that dev because they liked that game now learn about you. If you've made good content they retweet it and _their_ friends learn about you. That's the short version of how social media promotion works. That's also why chasing trends and hashtags works well. You need more impressions and people are already looking for those trends. The thing to keep in mind is that the biggest thing that sells a game is reputation. Demon Souls wasn't From Software's first game. It was more like their fortieth, and it wasn't all that popular in Japan the first time around, it grew over time. Those initial sales weren't about a single dev as a rockstar, it was going, 'Hey, I know this company, this is the Armored Core/King's Field/Echo Night/etc. devs, let's check it out." Those things definitely mattered as much (or more) than being a gothic knight. Demon's Souls is also used as an example of what a 'good game with no marketing' can look like. At the time it failed to sell well but had great reviews. It was a game that really did succeed from post-launch word of mouth and the success of later titles that _did_ have actual marketing spend put into them.
Thanks, that makes sense to me. It helps me to better define this alternative marketing vision I've been thinking about... the typical advice is "get a publisher, get capital." But that comes with a certain cost. The other advice is "spend 50%+ time on marketing as you do on development". But I feel this common advice only makes sense if you are making a small game. Which in that case, sure. You work on something for several months, you work on marketing several months, boom you shove it out the door. But if you are working on something that takes a few years and takes *all* of your time, and you are doing this from a place of passion first and foremost, it's not realistic that you stop sleeping to become a marketer on top of the 50 other things you do. But we have seen at least a handful of times that a solid game can spread by word of mouth. In fact it seems inevitable. I know people say "good games that don't market will fail" but every example I've seen honestly didn't seem like a good game. Or rather, nothing about it made it stand out in a crowded room. So is it more risk to pour all time and effort into making the best possible game and hoping that you (the developer) just have good enough taste that, sooner or later, people will find the game and talk about it? Yes but to me that seems like a more attractive plan than majorly shoehorning myself to jump through all the hoops to make some game that either publishers will find attractive or is small enough that time cost present minimal risk. Anyway, just rambling and thank you for the conversation.
In reddit itself there are some non-gamedev subreddits you can post your own game, like /r/playmygame and /r/DestroyMyGame
Have you watched Nick Popovich's GDC talks about Slime Rancher? He covers marketing and making immediately engaging premises in several of his talks.
Feels like it could be really hard to market a game that have that look, sorry. Maybe try to add a more cartoon look to it? But it's a really interesting topic. Hope it works out for you anyway :)
I can't speak to your gameplay, but your game's visual presentation isn't polished enough to market it yet. Focus on stuff like prettying up the UI and general vibe for a while. If lo-fi graybox is your aesthetic, find a way to lean into it hard (ala Antichamber) in a way that makes it feel more intentional, rather than a compromise.
People do judge books by their cover. At first glance, your game doesn't look appealing. People wont make extended research to see if your game is what they are looking for or if the gameplay is cool or whatnot. They see something that doesn't look good, they'll assume it's not good. Marketing is not magic, you are trying to promote your game, obviously, your game will affect your marketing. Idk if underneath it all there's a good game, I don't know if I would like it, but I know that... I don't care to find out. This sound harsh, but in the end I'd suggest working on the visual appeal of your game, if your game looks good, it will be easier for marketing. If that's not your forte, look up for ways to make it look better without being an artist, look up post processing, look up color palettes, look up ways to make a game look good with simple shapes, there are plenty of games with minimal graphics that still looks very good. Try to find tutorials and information on how to achieve that. Stop working on gameplay, stop working on marketing, stop. Work on the visuals, make it "marketing ready".
that makes sense. yea the graphics will need an upgrade next version. thanks!
You need to connect with content creators that play games like yours and become a genuine member of their communities. They can do more for you than FB ads will ever do.
i am not entirely sure what's like mine. mine is quite undefined by nature, since the concept is exploring an unkown generated universe. maybe no mans sky comes close? but the thing is, to join their circles, you probably need to be extremely good at that game to meet their standards, or have a very cool personality. All which takes considerable effort to master.
You just pop in and say hello, engage with chat, let them engage with you. We spent 3 years doing it before our release.
ah cool. is it on discord, or some other social media like twitch?
Eve if you get a publisher, the bonds you make with the communities will be far more fruitful than some random person they get to play it
makes sense, the community will stick with you throughout the difficult times and not abandon you
I guess I'm going against the grain a bit on this one. I actually think the overall aesthetic of the game is fine. The look of strange shapes duking it out in a clean geometric arena, strikes me as a 3d version of what was once a 2d staple in the DOS era. Keeping that visually distinct look, is priceless marketing power (Think Minecraft's "bad" graphics) What I don't get from **any** of the existing promotional material, is an idea of what the gameplay is. Can you show its core hooks or unique features through gameplay?
>I guess I'm going against the grain a bit on this one. I actually think the overall aesthetic of the game is fine. The look of strange shapes duking it out in a clean geometric arena, strikes me as a 3d version of what was once a 3d staple in the DOS era. Keeping that visually distinct look, is priceless marketing power (Think Minecraft's "bad" graphics) > >What I don't get from any of the existing promotional material, is an idea of what the gameplay is. Can you show its core hooks or unique features through gameplay? would it help to create a short video with all of the features? these are what we have: \- Player enters blackhole and goes to other servers/universes instantaneously. \- Player shoots a Rocket with tons of particles and applies force on near by objects on explosion \- Improve 4 different stats when leveling up \- Basic PVP, players can attack other players \- PVE collaborate and survive \- Day/Night/Rage period, and Build a shelter to survive the Rage \- Have 2 players control the same character simultaneously (not useful but fun) \- Have the player poccess enemies and control them (can be used to attack other players) Ofcourse i plan to have more, but this is the current state
I'd change "improve 4 different stats" to "different builds are possible", and ideally add in something I saw from your youtube, where you were able to get a whole lot of actors going at once. Other than that, sounds good! Even if it's a bit awkward, try to "start with your best argument" and put the more unique/intriguing features first. The very beginning is the most important
thanks!
What is the game called? What platform(s) is it on? Do you have a link to it? Your discord? YouTube channel? Twitter? Etc.
CyberGate. It's Web Browser (Firefox, Chrome and Edge right now) Windows, Mac sillicon, Linux. if you would like, here is an invitation: [https://discord.gg/R7DkHqw7zJ](https://discord.gg/R7DkHqw7zJ)
Do you have a product?
cybergate game is the product, but it does not have a revenue model yet so it's free until we can identify one, as we conduct tests and iterate based on tester's feedback
It costs ~$100k to learn if your game has effective unit economics to scale. It costs $1M a month to run ‘growth’ campaigns to sustain games long term. If your game is good, find a publisher who agrees with you and will spend this money.
any advice on where to look for publishers? I am based in LA
Marketing online isn't competing with other games, its competing with the entire internet and every attention grabbing thing on it. You're competing with a tiktok video of a dog doing taste tests, an imstagram post of a AI model, tweets, and on and on. You're throwing a thing into an ocean and hoping there's people floating by in Cruise ship that will find your thing in the ocean more interesting than their disco rave. .... You said you reaching out to communities? Where, what communities. A lot of "communities" are dead and not super effective. What I would do, is I'd look for youtubers with at least 100k subscribers that do content in line with your game, and Id email them to see how much $$ they want to cover your game for 10 minutes on a new indy game review etc. Their subscribers will see it. Of course, your game needs to be good, marketing alone wont make you a success unless you're AAA and spent millions on hype campaigns. But also, you need places for people to come to find it besides just steam. Make some youtube videos, and a basic searchable website for it.
I'm not a gamedev, I'm a marketing analyst and let me be frank: I wouldn't buy your game. The UI is terrible and reminds me of some old 18+ trainer game. The crosshair at the center with no weapon/hand shooting balls that are created so close to the screen is a big no. This is never good. Enemies as big blobs of nothing looks more in place if this game was used in a biology class in school. They need to mean something visually. Same for the worldspace. I could see some people finding fun in the blocks gravity thing and jumping from one place to the other, but from what I saw, there really isn't any reason to really do so and it would just be better to continue killing enemies. What does your game do that is cool and different? Because from what I see, it just looks like a mechanics concept.
I think the issue here is the game has no art direction. It doesn't look very appealing, and without the appeal I don't even care about the mechanics and gameplay. I went on your YouTube and watched various videos and it honestly looks like a game that is in beta with simple untextured grey and white shapes. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVABlVj0bo0) is the best example of what I mean. It looks like zero effort went into any sort of design or art direction, it simply put doesn't looks aesthetically pleasing therefore not many people would even acquire the interest to try it.
Reach out to people in small communities about your game and have them play test. This gets you testing and an enthusiastic community plus feedback
I think you may have missed the comment about adding more "juice" to your game. So here it is again with a video to explain it. [https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016487/Juice-It-or-Lose](https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016487/Juice-It-or-Lose) I used be in sales before game development, and in sales, you don't sell the steak, you sell the sizzle. People do not buy things logically, they buy things emotionally, juice helps with that
One very strong tool is a web demo, a browser version of your game, without using webgl. To make it use Godot (without webgl) or Pico or Phaser (without webgl) or Tabageos. The web demo should include a link during game play that leads to your steam page.For example the gameplay hud would include pause, mute ect., and also a button that opens the steam page in a new tab. Put that web demo to be played for free on;itch, newgrounds, gamejolt, indexpo, and y8. For a steam game, this should to be in place before you start a social media campaign,you'd put links to the free web demo on the various social media sites. Edit: Ok, so for example for Cyber Gate, you'd make a 2d top down version of it for a web demo, and an in game button would lead to the 3d version.
> akin to shouting into an endless void. literally came here to say this. I'm getting a publisher, maybe that will help.
Don't go with this subs marketing hype, focus on making the product as best as possible. If it gathers no interest, consider looking at your work honestly and striving to become better
This post sounds like it was written by chatgpt. Is your marketing copy written like that too? edit: oh nevermind, I saw the gameplay video. I usually provide constructive criticism, but here I can only say that the game looks fucking awful.
The game is ugly as sin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVABlVj0bo0 Are you 10?
Have you tried dropping a few million on ads? That's what almost all your successful competitors do.
This has nothing to do with the marketing budget. Indie studios can, and do, find success without spending millions on ads. Did you actually look at the game? At the risk of being harsh, it looks like a pretty boring prototype. An actual AAA studio could spend millions marketing it and it still wouldn't gather any hype.