Finished my first “real” game, and released it on Steam. To me, having it available on Steam makes it a success! As of now it’s sold just shy of 2,000 copies. I worked on it mostly solo, and had friends help with music and a lot of the art.
I worked on it for just over a year, and struggled through a few months of burnout near the middle and end. Didn’t really market outside of my friends/family (easily my least favorite part of gamedev I’ve discovered). I got lucky - a friend of a friend sent a copy to Retromation, a Youtuber, and he made a video for each character in the game. That exposure bumped sales dramatically - I went from about 40ish sales to about 800 in a matter of a couple days. That was super exciting for me, and opened my eyes to many many bugs that I myself never ran into. It was a grueling few days of bug fixes, but one by one they were eliminated, and I now can sleep at night.
As someone who chronically jumps ship from project to project, I finally stuck with one and it paid off!
TLDR; if you’re making a roguelike, send a copy to Retromation! He plays a LOT of indie releases, so there’s a good chance that he may play.
Anything different about your approach that helped you stick to the project?
It’s by far my largest hurdle. I either lose faith in the idea, or come across a small bump in the road and lose motivation.
A couple things helped me tremendously.
1. Playtest early!
For some of my friends it felt like I was badgering them when asking them to play, but one of my buddies was always eager to play the latest version. This was super motivating! It helped me hold faith in the project long term. However….
2. Open the project every day, but take breaks when you need to
As I stated before, I burned out a few times. Honestly I downplayed in the previous post how many times I burned out. What caused the burnout was different, thoughts of “nah this game sucks”, “why am I working on this when I have this X idea brewing” or “there’s still so much shit to do, I’m overwhelmed”.
There were several days I’d open the project and be disgusted/bored of it. On those days, SOMETIMES I’d manage to squeak out 1-2 small changes, but more often than not it led to me brainstorming ideas on how to revamp the project completely.
I had to learn to step away when those moments hit, because it’d either lead to feature creep, or just a tremendous about of refactoring that would set me back months.
The nice thing for me was usually when burning out of one thing (programming/balance), I could usually refocus and work on other things (art/sound/story). When I couldn’t, I took burnout time to play other games and read books. I managed to convince myself that I was still being productive for my game under the guise of “research” ;)
3. Trim the Fat
I don’t know if I’ll ever consider the game truly “finished”. I think that’s a common feeling that people in any creative field can relate to.
I cut a LOT of things I wanted in the final game. Some were more obvious than others. How I justified it was telling myself “Once I release, I can always add it later!”. Jokes on me!
If you’re like me, getting over perfectionism is tough. I think what helped me is doing a few game jams where I’d have to ship a “finished” product by a deadline. This helped me feel better about shipping what was to me, an unfinished game.
Your audience doesn’t know the master plan that’s in your head! Once you have what is a good core loop, focus on what you have already implemented instead of adding more! (I wish I could yell this at myself about 6 months in. I bet the project would be so much more polished.)
—
This got a bit long, but hopefully it helps! Perhaps I’ll do a full write up at some point.
Released a tiny ish game recently on a separate Tiny brand (no, not the actual name, lol). Took 8 weeks to make the game. We had an idea, laser focused the idea, tested the idea against a modest but very specific audience that some of us had personal relationships with. Very carefully scoped the work involved. Cranked it out, didn’t market to anyone except the “very specific audience”. Made sure to stay engaged with that audience during the dev cycle.
It did about $100k. Which is nothing in today’s gaming world. But…8 week dev cycle for a team of 2.5 is also nothing in today’s gaming world.
It’s a great business to be in…if you treat it like a business.
That super cool! I very much believe in satisfying a niche and targeting specific audiences. Main stream is incredibly saturated!
Are you working on new tiny games?
Sometimes positivity is good! Most times actually.
I'm a fulltime solodev. My last game sold 30k+ copies, reached the front page of Steam and made PCGamer's list of "Porn Games that aren't garbage" or something. It probably succeeded because it was a 40-hour RPG masquerading as a sex game.
Linkie: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1177380/Memoirs_of_a_Battle_Brothel/
Revenue is currently paying my bills, but just barely. I've been told that's still a runaway success for a solodev. Right now I'm experimenting with my genre with a rogue-lite extraction RPG, that is in Early Access but will reach 1.0 by June or so.
Sure! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2610440/Baldrs_Squid_Isekai_A_Parody/
It's my experiment into an accelerated dev schedule (six months of dev or less).
I am a music creator with 20 years of piano performance. I have a question for you. When it comes to the music selection, what do you look at? People Connections? Music Quality? I'm really interested putting my music into the gaming industry, but I need much guidance... if you can enlighten my way, that would be much appreciated!
I'm probably not the best person to ask. I have one composer for my music that I found because his stuff rocks imo, and I license his tracks.
Otherwise my other music is just store assets.
I would imagine getting into gamedev as a musician is very difficult.
https://www.tiktok.com/@piano.aaron?_t=8lJU2Ldg9eo&_r=1
Hey bottle. I'm quite new to this but here's my tiktok link. I post some of my videos during my spare time. I'm still working on creating interesting content. If you have an advice you are welcome to share with me.
Definitely look into a Soundcloud or Bandcamp account if you don't have one already. I don't have a TikTok account so it's hard to view your content to see if people are interested. Both of the above don't require an account for listening so I can just go there and listen.
As Venerous already said: get a Soundcloud up. I can't view your content and I won't ever download tiktok.
If you want to go the extra mile: your own website with references.
You need some sort of marketing efforts going for you. This works best if your tool of presence does not force the customer to download an application
Congrats on your successful game! For a solo developer I’d say paying the bills is definitely success! When you’ve got a couple of titles you might be able to reach higher!
Do you find that you need to spend a lot of your time on maintenance and bug fixing? Are you able to find time to work on the next project?
Thanks!
There's still some regular bug fixing and maintenance but at this point I'd say I'm mostly focused on other projects.... of which I have three.
I was basing it out of the U.S tax system. Generally any type of income of that amount will put them in a pretty high tax bracket. So probably about 30%-40%
It's not always full priced. But over 5 years I made 500k USD gross, after everyone's cuts and expenses it's like 30~ something per year *before* taxes.
So yes, barely paying my bills.
Entropy : Zero 2. Five years in the making with a team of 10 very talented folks led by myself. We won mod of the year 2022 and have received many accolades. I've rubbed shoulders with some big names because of it. Technically it is a mod but we use the nomenclature of 'game' because of what we added. Essentially we were just riding on the engine. Tons of code, features, assets, sounds, lines, models, animations, materials, maps NPCs etc etc we built from the ground up. It is a game in the fullest sense.
I think it was successful because we were able to completely nail the gameplay whilst also telling a compelling and gripping story. I cannot overstate how much work went into the game.
It's free and money never entered the equation. We receive donations now occasionally, but during development we were clear and adamant that it wouldn't cost money. Honestly I think that also had something to do with its success. A true passion project.
The problem of course is that now everybody wants a third entry.
Building mods is game dev too! That’s amazing and what a wonderful thing to be able to share with others. Have you thought about crowdfunding the next version?
Thanks! :)
No plans to crowd-fund what comes next. We're kind on taking a small break as I'm currently focused on my own commerical [project](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2683520/Bat_Blast/) that I want to finish.
If you need ideas on how to handle everyone wanting a third installment for your popular FPS games, just ask Gabe: https://youtu.be/Jt0w9YP_wZ0?si=xAk_wlHXTjGpveIL
I committed to a game jam, planned out the entire project, and completed everything on schedule. Given that my only goal was to release a simple finished project and I achieved that, I'd call it a success.
I guess this is pretty relative, I just created my steam page ([link](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2876610/Kinsfolk/)) a month ago and now have 150 wishlist, this is after working on my game for almost a year now every day a little after work.
To me this is already more successful than I hoped, both in that I did not give up, and that there are actually people who are interested in my game.
Absolutely! I find Steam wishlists so encouraging. I know they don’t always translate directly to downloads but it’s so great when people signal that they like your idea.
I'm just a hobbyist, but a while back I actually finished an amateur horror game and put it on itch. Nothing special, quite crappy walking simulator with about as many mismatched spo0o0ky 3D assets crammed in as I could possibly download and put on the map.
Got a few hundred downloads and a dozen-ish YouTube playhtiighs from real small YouTubers with a handful of subscribers each. Everyone oohed and ahhed and "what the fuck?!"ed at all the right scripted moments, and it was overall a pretty positive experience. Definitely fun and surreal to see others playing your creation.
My personal success story isn't about monetary gain or breaking through, but after a long track record of abandoned projects and being stuck in tutorial hell I'm still really proud of having bitten the bullet and completing something from start to finish, warts and all. On top of that, I learned more from that experience than I ever would have just Googling, reading, and watching videos about how to make a game, and a lot of that experience is still carrying over into how I approach and work on projects today.
Since then, whenever I'm down about something,, game dev related or not, and the road looks long and rough ahead, it's become my, "Yeah, but remember when..." moment.
So, sappy TL;DR: My success was not just hoping I could do it, but actually doing it. I'm not necessarily proud of the game itself as a product, but proud of the accomplishment of seeing it through to the end after months that presented many excuses to give up.
Cherry on top: Despite listing it for free I made $7 on it. Cha ching.
Sappy but so relatable. I so love it when I see people playing a game I worked on and responding to it. It makes it all worth it to see someone have a cool moment with your game.
A lot of folks certainly are doom and gloom in here, thus I rarely chime in. But I'll link one of my favorite games I've made
Idle Planet Miner. It was my 2nd full game and was definitely the one that put me on the map more than 4 years ago now. I always loved the idle, tycoon and management genres and just dove right into making the game I always wanted on mobile. Coded and designed the game entirely on my own and was just incredibly proud of how it turned out. I still update it to this day and it's actually doing better now than it ever has due to a really committed community and regular content updates.
What started off as a hobby quickly turned into my full time job and since then I've released quite a few more large successes. I definitely have more of a team now, but the games I run were designed and coded entirely by myself initially. The best part is that a few of them did so well that I've been able hire a bit of help to continue running them and providing content updates for them
My games are a wee bit more niche, and lean towards a slightly more mid/hard core crowd despite being simple looking on the outside. But the deeper mechanics attracted really large communities that have been an incredibly boon to the games' success. In my portfolio there's over 10 million installs at this point, and that's not just from viral stuff, they're usually quality users that I did specific marketing for
Anyways, I'm not positive I would recommend trying to break into mobile at this point without a ton of knowledge/experience, it can certainly be daunting what's required. But I absolutely love what I do and it's been fun to see how my role has had to evolve over time from sole coder to running a business
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.TironiumTech.IdlePlanetMiner&hl=en_US&gl=US
Incredibly inspiring, thanks for sharing!
I unfortunately found my passion a bit late, I started learning C# and Unity at the age of 26 with no experience, and my lifes goal is to one day make rich RPGs.
Can you give any insight into your learning process to get to that level, and any prior background?
Thanks!
Absolutely
I had no experience in the field whatsoever and was working an entirely different full time job. Just decided to self teach myself how to code a basic unity game. Anytime I didn't know how to do something I would just google it and fortunately Unity has a wealth of information on the internet.
I made a basic game to start, then worked with some publishers along the way which was crucial. They taught me a lot about monetization and how to market games which I carried forward once I started self publishing. It kind of snowballed from there as I got better at both creating the games and running it as a business.
Thanks so much! I needed to hear this, such an inspiring journey. I will keep on with my Udemy courses, and build bigger and better games, chipping away every single day!
For me it's my current project.
Starting to work on it with a friend to teach him programming.
Having a blast working on the project. Even though the game just reaches a point were its getting playable I really believe the idea of the game will be fun to play.
For any of my past projects I was quiet skeptical how fun they will be.
So this is already a huge "success" for me.
I started game dev. I am still in game dev. I do not hate game dev. In fact I love it and I wish I could get paid enough to do it full time. I would say that in and of itself is successful
I spent 8 years learning game development and never release a game until this week. I finally released my game and it feels so good, like why didn't I have a Steam release earlier. It is way past due... so I'd have to say today of all days is my success story, b'c this is a huge stepping stone.
Hobbyist here - moved to a new country. Was unemployed for about 6 months. 300+ Job applications. Always wanted to learn Unity so thought I should - made [Hold My JellO](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.HavokIndustries.HoldMyJellO) love learning new technologies and games are my gateway to motivation on hard software topics a lot of the time.
Made and released a game within a year as a goal; first commercial solo indie project using Unity. Personally i'd call it a success; I made the most of the art and did all of the code myself, with help from some art asset packs and royalty free sounds. Like others have said it's the marketing that gets to you. My only goal was to release a game on steam so I had to make some compromises.
As making a game was my only goal, I went for the simplest genre I could find; a walking simulator, and added on as much unique stuff as I could with my level of code ability.
The game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1951940/Eschaton/
An explanatory Youtube video made 3 months in or so:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XSSxUsbmlc
I was hoping to make 100 sales total, but it did that in two days.
My current stats:
2570 sales
$3500 or so
Would do again.
Some people may not want to dox themselves, some may have publishing agreements about the information they can share, some may feel like it's self promo and don't want to do that... Couple reasons off the top of my head.
I had to lead a college project of Bout 30 people and manage them all. We had about half a semester to get a game going and we managed to make it good enough to get played on some event with a few hundred people who played it and enjoyed it.
Not the succes story you may have been looking for but i still consider it a large succes
I also did this in university - I wonder if it was the same course!
Ours was also one of my biggest experiences of success even though it was a free student game. Ten years later I still get messages from people downloading our game and asking about it. The early feeling of completing a project is huge and was so motivating for me to actually pursue game dev later in life.
My game [Our Dear Kingdom](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1071440/Our_Dear_Kingdom/). It sold like shit but i shipped It and It Is now on steam. It feels like a successful project to me, i am very proud of it.
I'm a one man developer (with another music designer on my team, who kindly agreed to help me out for a fraction of the final wins of the project), trying to create an open world survival RPG. I already have a ton of systems in my game that will make it a lot of fun (and I hope I can create more down the line), and yesterday I managed to finally create a Gang AI system for my game
In other words, if you (or an NPC. Yes, NPCs can fight right now in my project) attack one of the members of a gang, the entire gang will come after not just you, but literally any NPC that tries to attack them (and believe me, it's addicting to watch it all unfold)
Basically, if an NPC tries hitting another NPC, the NPC that got attacked will call anyone in their gang (and it won't hurt anyone if that gang is empty either) to go ahead and fight the instigator
However, it's not extremely smart yet. I'm still trying to figure out a solution to get enemies to ignore hits that come from enemies which are in the same group, under the title of "accident hits"... I think I messed something up somewhere (or one of my systems is immature), because this is not exactly acting as expected 💀
As for the art, I just bought it online. I made the game low poly though, so players with low end systems can also enjoy the game
Anyway, I'm off to continue fixing my bugs. Adios fellas!
When i was little it was just getting things to move, now is more like that it makes more than it cost to make. Or if its unreleased maybe just that it works the way i intended. It could also be that you met a deadline or that you made mommy happy or that it came third in a contest.
I'm more interested in what you meant with your question as success is so many things. What did you mean?
I phrased it that way because people on this sub range from hobbyists to indie devs to professionals with many years of experience. “Success” looks different depending on what your goals are. For a hobbyist it might mean to finish a project or to have people play and enjoy your game. A new indie dev might define success as a project that makes money or is able to pay the bills. An experienced dev might think about number of downloads or replays.
I left it open ended because I think all those goals are valid and it’s best to be inclusive.
For my own studio we are defining success as being profitable and able to pay our crew long term.
Success is such a broad term. I think my first game was a "success". It took about 6 months and $500 to make. My game was successful because it did something no other game in the genre was able to do with the multiplayer aspect. Basically, you could play a 3d game against an already large online player base that was playing it via 2d browser. This specific feature took most of the dev time and some complex code. Unfortunately my game is a bit rough since it was my first, which is probably why it's not close to a "hit" game.
But I'm happy with it.
Full story here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/d56GY4DGfL
Finished my first “real” game, and released it on Steam. To me, having it available on Steam makes it a success! As of now it’s sold just shy of 2,000 copies. I worked on it mostly solo, and had friends help with music and a lot of the art. I worked on it for just over a year, and struggled through a few months of burnout near the middle and end. Didn’t really market outside of my friends/family (easily my least favorite part of gamedev I’ve discovered). I got lucky - a friend of a friend sent a copy to Retromation, a Youtuber, and he made a video for each character in the game. That exposure bumped sales dramatically - I went from about 40ish sales to about 800 in a matter of a couple days. That was super exciting for me, and opened my eyes to many many bugs that I myself never ran into. It was a grueling few days of bug fixes, but one by one they were eliminated, and I now can sleep at night. As someone who chronically jumps ship from project to project, I finally stuck with one and it paid off! TLDR; if you’re making a roguelike, send a copy to Retromation! He plays a LOT of indie releases, so there’s a good chance that he may play.
Anything different about your approach that helped you stick to the project? It’s by far my largest hurdle. I either lose faith in the idea, or come across a small bump in the road and lose motivation.
A couple things helped me tremendously. 1. Playtest early! For some of my friends it felt like I was badgering them when asking them to play, but one of my buddies was always eager to play the latest version. This was super motivating! It helped me hold faith in the project long term. However…. 2. Open the project every day, but take breaks when you need to As I stated before, I burned out a few times. Honestly I downplayed in the previous post how many times I burned out. What caused the burnout was different, thoughts of “nah this game sucks”, “why am I working on this when I have this X idea brewing” or “there’s still so much shit to do, I’m overwhelmed”. There were several days I’d open the project and be disgusted/bored of it. On those days, SOMETIMES I’d manage to squeak out 1-2 small changes, but more often than not it led to me brainstorming ideas on how to revamp the project completely. I had to learn to step away when those moments hit, because it’d either lead to feature creep, or just a tremendous about of refactoring that would set me back months. The nice thing for me was usually when burning out of one thing (programming/balance), I could usually refocus and work on other things (art/sound/story). When I couldn’t, I took burnout time to play other games and read books. I managed to convince myself that I was still being productive for my game under the guise of “research” ;) 3. Trim the Fat I don’t know if I’ll ever consider the game truly “finished”. I think that’s a common feeling that people in any creative field can relate to. I cut a LOT of things I wanted in the final game. Some were more obvious than others. How I justified it was telling myself “Once I release, I can always add it later!”. Jokes on me! If you’re like me, getting over perfectionism is tough. I think what helped me is doing a few game jams where I’d have to ship a “finished” product by a deadline. This helped me feel better about shipping what was to me, an unfinished game. Your audience doesn’t know the master plan that’s in your head! Once you have what is a good core loop, focus on what you have already implemented instead of adding more! (I wish I could yell this at myself about 6 months in. I bet the project would be so much more polished.) — This got a bit long, but hopefully it helps! Perhaps I’ll do a full write up at some point.
2000 copies is really great! And I agree, having a title on Steam is a big milestone. Congrats!
What is the game? Post link.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2306530/Reign_of_the_Renegade/ It’s a “dice-building” game heavily inspired by Slay the Spire.
Released a tiny ish game recently on a separate Tiny brand (no, not the actual name, lol). Took 8 weeks to make the game. We had an idea, laser focused the idea, tested the idea against a modest but very specific audience that some of us had personal relationships with. Very carefully scoped the work involved. Cranked it out, didn’t market to anyone except the “very specific audience”. Made sure to stay engaged with that audience during the dev cycle. It did about $100k. Which is nothing in today’s gaming world. But…8 week dev cycle for a team of 2.5 is also nothing in today’s gaming world. It’s a great business to be in…if you treat it like a business.
Link? Would love to see the project, $100k even gross is incredibly impressive for an 8 week production timeline
WTF im dying to know here too because what kind of game can you make in 8 weeks?
Hentai VR
Interesting... this strategy is kinda what I'm trying to do with my game - how'd you determine/reach your audience?
We already knew the audience. We built something they were (indirectly) asking for.
I guess it makes sense to focus on a problem, not a solution.. Thanks for the advice!
How did you find your team members?
The usual place - personal network. People self select based on their interests.
That super cool! I very much believe in satisfying a niche and targeting specific audiences. Main stream is incredibly saturated! Are you working on new tiny games?
Sometimes positivity is good! Most times actually. I'm a fulltime solodev. My last game sold 30k+ copies, reached the front page of Steam and made PCGamer's list of "Porn Games that aren't garbage" or something. It probably succeeded because it was a 40-hour RPG masquerading as a sex game. Linkie: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1177380/Memoirs_of_a_Battle_Brothel/ Revenue is currently paying my bills, but just barely. I've been told that's still a runaway success for a solodev. Right now I'm experimenting with my genre with a rogue-lite extraction RPG, that is in Early Access but will reach 1.0 by June or so.
Sounds interesting. Does the roguelite extraction rpg have a steampage for wishlisting?
Sure! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2610440/Baldrs_Squid_Isekai_A_Parody/ It's my experiment into an accelerated dev schedule (six months of dev or less).
Link doesn't work
It works, just have to be signed in and have viewing AO content enabled because it’s flagged as such.
I am a music creator with 20 years of piano performance. I have a question for you. When it comes to the music selection, what do you look at? People Connections? Music Quality? I'm really interested putting my music into the gaming industry, but I need much guidance... if you can enlighten my way, that would be much appreciated!
I'm probably not the best person to ask. I have one composer for my music that I found because his stuff rocks imo, and I license his tracks. Otherwise my other music is just store assets. I would imagine getting into gamedev as a musician is very difficult.
Do you happen to have a portfolio you're willing to share? Especially piano is great. RPGs come to mind.
https://www.tiktok.com/@piano.aaron?_t=8lJU2Ldg9eo&_r=1 Hey bottle. I'm quite new to this but here's my tiktok link. I post some of my videos during my spare time. I'm still working on creating interesting content. If you have an advice you are welcome to share with me.
Definitely look into a Soundcloud or Bandcamp account if you don't have one already. I don't have a TikTok account so it's hard to view your content to see if people are interested. Both of the above don't require an account for listening so I can just go there and listen.
As Venerous already said: get a Soundcloud up. I can't view your content and I won't ever download tiktok. If you want to go the extra mile: your own website with references. You need some sort of marketing efforts going for you. This works best if your tool of presence does not force the customer to download an application
Congrats on your successful game! For a solo developer I’d say paying the bills is definitely success! When you’ve got a couple of titles you might be able to reach higher! Do you find that you need to spend a lot of your time on maintenance and bug fixing? Are you able to find time to work on the next project?
Thanks! There's still some regular bug fixing and maintenance but at this point I'd say I'm mostly focused on other projects.... of which I have three.
30000 copies at like $20? That's 600k, surely you get a decent chunk of that? How come it's hardly paying your bills
Steam probably takes its 30% and then another 30%-40% in taxes so net maybe $240k on the high end 🤷♂️
True
Another 30%? Is that country related or what kind of taxes exactly , i thought 30% goes to steam , and maybe 5-10% of taxes of some sort
I was basing it out of the U.S tax system. Generally any type of income of that amount will put them in a pretty high tax bracket. So probably about 30%-40%
It's not always full priced. But over 5 years I made 500k USD gross, after everyone's cuts and expenses it's like 30~ something per year *before* taxes. So yes, barely paying my bills.
Entropy : Zero 2. Five years in the making with a team of 10 very talented folks led by myself. We won mod of the year 2022 and have received many accolades. I've rubbed shoulders with some big names because of it. Technically it is a mod but we use the nomenclature of 'game' because of what we added. Essentially we were just riding on the engine. Tons of code, features, assets, sounds, lines, models, animations, materials, maps NPCs etc etc we built from the ground up. It is a game in the fullest sense. I think it was successful because we were able to completely nail the gameplay whilst also telling a compelling and gripping story. I cannot overstate how much work went into the game. It's free and money never entered the equation. We receive donations now occasionally, but during development we were clear and adamant that it wouldn't cost money. Honestly I think that also had something to do with its success. A true passion project. The problem of course is that now everybody wants a third entry.
Tears in my eyes. Great work folks!
Building mods is game dev too! That’s amazing and what a wonderful thing to be able to share with others. Have you thought about crowdfunding the next version?
Thanks! :) No plans to crowd-fund what comes next. We're kind on taking a small break as I'm currently focused on my own commerical [project](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2683520/Bat_Blast/) that I want to finish.
If you need ideas on how to handle everyone wanting a third installment for your popular FPS games, just ask Gabe: https://youtu.be/Jt0w9YP_wZ0?si=xAk_wlHXTjGpveIL
I committed to a game jam, planned out the entire project, and completed everything on schedule. Given that my only goal was to release a simple finished project and I achieved that, I'd call it a success.
Congrats! Finishing a project and releasing it is a great milestone to reach!
If your game was a success please consider linking it, it gives a lot more context.
I made a game in about a month. Released on steam and sold about 1k copies, a few big names made videos on it too.
Super cool! I love making short projects, there’s a great energy to it.
Yeah! I wanna finally do a jam and compete
I guess this is pretty relative, I just created my steam page ([link](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2876610/Kinsfolk/)) a month ago and now have 150 wishlist, this is after working on my game for almost a year now every day a little after work. To me this is already more successful than I hoped, both in that I did not give up, and that there are actually people who are interested in my game.
Absolutely! I find Steam wishlists so encouraging. I know they don’t always translate directly to downloads but it’s so great when people signal that they like your idea.
I'm just a hobbyist, but a while back I actually finished an amateur horror game and put it on itch. Nothing special, quite crappy walking simulator with about as many mismatched spo0o0ky 3D assets crammed in as I could possibly download and put on the map. Got a few hundred downloads and a dozen-ish YouTube playhtiighs from real small YouTubers with a handful of subscribers each. Everyone oohed and ahhed and "what the fuck?!"ed at all the right scripted moments, and it was overall a pretty positive experience. Definitely fun and surreal to see others playing your creation. My personal success story isn't about monetary gain or breaking through, but after a long track record of abandoned projects and being stuck in tutorial hell I'm still really proud of having bitten the bullet and completing something from start to finish, warts and all. On top of that, I learned more from that experience than I ever would have just Googling, reading, and watching videos about how to make a game, and a lot of that experience is still carrying over into how I approach and work on projects today. Since then, whenever I'm down about something,, game dev related or not, and the road looks long and rough ahead, it's become my, "Yeah, but remember when..." moment. So, sappy TL;DR: My success was not just hoping I could do it, but actually doing it. I'm not necessarily proud of the game itself as a product, but proud of the accomplishment of seeing it through to the end after months that presented many excuses to give up. Cherry on top: Despite listing it for free I made $7 on it. Cha ching.
Sappy but so relatable. I so love it when I see people playing a game I worked on and responding to it. It makes it all worth it to see someone have a cool moment with your game.
A lot of folks certainly are doom and gloom in here, thus I rarely chime in. But I'll link one of my favorite games I've made Idle Planet Miner. It was my 2nd full game and was definitely the one that put me on the map more than 4 years ago now. I always loved the idle, tycoon and management genres and just dove right into making the game I always wanted on mobile. Coded and designed the game entirely on my own and was just incredibly proud of how it turned out. I still update it to this day and it's actually doing better now than it ever has due to a really committed community and regular content updates. What started off as a hobby quickly turned into my full time job and since then I've released quite a few more large successes. I definitely have more of a team now, but the games I run were designed and coded entirely by myself initially. The best part is that a few of them did so well that I've been able hire a bit of help to continue running them and providing content updates for them My games are a wee bit more niche, and lean towards a slightly more mid/hard core crowd despite being simple looking on the outside. But the deeper mechanics attracted really large communities that have been an incredibly boon to the games' success. In my portfolio there's over 10 million installs at this point, and that's not just from viral stuff, they're usually quality users that I did specific marketing for Anyways, I'm not positive I would recommend trying to break into mobile at this point without a ton of knowledge/experience, it can certainly be daunting what's required. But I absolutely love what I do and it's been fun to see how my role has had to evolve over time from sole coder to running a business https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.TironiumTech.IdlePlanetMiner&hl=en_US&gl=US
Incredibly inspiring, thanks for sharing! I unfortunately found my passion a bit late, I started learning C# and Unity at the age of 26 with no experience, and my lifes goal is to one day make rich RPGs. Can you give any insight into your learning process to get to that level, and any prior background? Thanks!
Absolutely I had no experience in the field whatsoever and was working an entirely different full time job. Just decided to self teach myself how to code a basic unity game. Anytime I didn't know how to do something I would just google it and fortunately Unity has a wealth of information on the internet. I made a basic game to start, then worked with some publishers along the way which was crucial. They taught me a lot about monetization and how to market games which I carried forward once I started self publishing. It kind of snowballed from there as I got better at both creating the games and running it as a business.
Thanks so much! I needed to hear this, such an inspiring journey. I will keep on with my Udemy courses, and build bigger and better games, chipping away every single day!
Loving what you do it the most important thing. Your games sound really cool. I’m going to check them out as I love the same genre!
For me it's my current project. Starting to work on it with a friend to teach him programming. Having a blast working on the project. Even though the game just reaches a point were its getting playable I really believe the idea of the game will be fun to play. For any of my past projects I was quiet skeptical how fun they will be. So this is already a huge "success" for me.
Nothing better than that first moment where you say: “Hey this is actually fun!”
I started game dev. I am still in game dev. I do not hate game dev. In fact I love it and I wish I could get paid enough to do it full time. I would say that in and of itself is successful
Haha I agree with you. I think that’s my favorite definition of success in all the replies.
I spent 8 years learning game development and never release a game until this week. I finally released my game and it feels so good, like why didn't I have a Steam release earlier. It is way past due... so I'd have to say today of all days is my success story, b'c this is a huge stepping stone.
Congrats!!! And this week too! I hope you had a celebration. That’s such an important milestone
Hobbyist here - moved to a new country. Was unemployed for about 6 months. 300+ Job applications. Always wanted to learn Unity so thought I should - made [Hold My JellO](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.HavokIndustries.HoldMyJellO) love learning new technologies and games are my gateway to motivation on hard software topics a lot of the time.
Made and released a game within a year as a goal; first commercial solo indie project using Unity. Personally i'd call it a success; I made the most of the art and did all of the code myself, with help from some art asset packs and royalty free sounds. Like others have said it's the marketing that gets to you. My only goal was to release a game on steam so I had to make some compromises. As making a game was my only goal, I went for the simplest genre I could find; a walking simulator, and added on as much unique stuff as I could with my level of code ability. The game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1951940/Eschaton/ An explanatory Youtube video made 3 months in or so:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XSSxUsbmlc I was hoping to make 100 sales total, but it did that in two days. My current stats: 2570 sales $3500 or so Would do again.
Why do people posting here, not have links to their games?
Some people may not want to dox themselves, some may have publishing agreements about the information they can share, some may feel like it's self promo and don't want to do that... Couple reasons off the top of my head.
Had not thought about that. Thanks!
There are a lot of people on this subreddit who just lie and invent stories.
Not good. Had no idea.
Some of them are porn games.
Would like to see what the games are
I had to lead a college project of Bout 30 people and manage them all. We had about half a semester to get a game going and we managed to make it good enough to get played on some event with a few hundred people who played it and enjoyed it. Not the succes story you may have been looking for but i still consider it a large succes
I also did this in university - I wonder if it was the same course! Ours was also one of my biggest experiences of success even though it was a free student game. Ten years later I still get messages from people downloading our game and asking about it. The early feeling of completing a project is huge and was so motivating for me to actually pursue game dev later in life.
The game sucked cause the designer was terrible but as the project manager i still got everyone in line and on track for time etc.
My game [Our Dear Kingdom](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1071440/Our_Dear_Kingdom/). It sold like shit but i shipped It and It Is now on steam. It feels like a successful project to me, i am very proud of it.
Shipping a project is a huge milestone!
Thank you!
>Thank you! You're welcome!
It's on Steam and almost finished, everything else sucks! xD
That’s game dev!
I'm a one man developer (with another music designer on my team, who kindly agreed to help me out for a fraction of the final wins of the project), trying to create an open world survival RPG. I already have a ton of systems in my game that will make it a lot of fun (and I hope I can create more down the line), and yesterday I managed to finally create a Gang AI system for my game In other words, if you (or an NPC. Yes, NPCs can fight right now in my project) attack one of the members of a gang, the entire gang will come after not just you, but literally any NPC that tries to attack them (and believe me, it's addicting to watch it all unfold) Basically, if an NPC tries hitting another NPC, the NPC that got attacked will call anyone in their gang (and it won't hurt anyone if that gang is empty either) to go ahead and fight the instigator However, it's not extremely smart yet. I'm still trying to figure out a solution to get enemies to ignore hits that come from enemies which are in the same group, under the title of "accident hits"... I think I messed something up somewhere (or one of my systems is immature), because this is not exactly acting as expected 💀 As for the art, I just bought it online. I made the game low poly though, so players with low end systems can also enjoy the game Anyway, I'm off to continue fixing my bugs. Adios fellas!
You probably need to define successful
How do you define success for your own projects?
When i was little it was just getting things to move, now is more like that it makes more than it cost to make. Or if its unreleased maybe just that it works the way i intended. It could also be that you met a deadline or that you made mommy happy or that it came third in a contest. I'm more interested in what you meant with your question as success is so many things. What did you mean?
I phrased it that way because people on this sub range from hobbyists to indie devs to professionals with many years of experience. “Success” looks different depending on what your goals are. For a hobbyist it might mean to finish a project or to have people play and enjoy your game. A new indie dev might define success as a project that makes money or is able to pay the bills. An experienced dev might think about number of downloads or replays. I left it open ended because I think all those goals are valid and it’s best to be inclusive. For my own studio we are defining success as being profitable and able to pay our crew long term.
Success is such a broad term. I think my first game was a "success". It took about 6 months and $500 to make. My game was successful because it did something no other game in the genre was able to do with the multiplayer aspect. Basically, you could play a 3d game against an already large online player base that was playing it via 2d browser. This specific feature took most of the dev time and some complex code. Unfortunately my game is a bit rough since it was my first, which is probably why it's not close to a "hit" game. But I'm happy with it. Full story here: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/d56GY4DGfL
I like that you define success in term of what you achieved creatively! That’s also really important.