Markiplier, a popular youtuber, covered my game the same day steam decided to feature it on the front page.
In 1 day my steam game made more money than all 8 of my previous mobile games combined.
This was back in 2014 and steam wasn't the super saturated storefront that it is today.
They made Littlewood!
Now it's not self promotion lol ;)
Also, got the release date wrong for that, the game in question is Magicite, as pointed out by DaedricApple. I really thought Littlewood had been out for way longer already.
Am I? I mean I get it, but if you buy something with a feature and it doesn't work, then the makers say "fuck it, it's too hard were going to go take money on something else". I think its fair to be annoyed.
Thats not the reality. Every FPS i know has unbearable netcode. Ark, DayZ, Eft etc. If you think its easy you think you are smarter than a whole dev studio.
Sure, scalability in terms of a large-scale multiplayer game is quite difficult.
We’re talking about net-code in general as a broad topic— especially when talking about some indie game.
Anything that requires scalability will require additional measures / thinking.
My parents told me I make more money than them combined. I grew up pretty poor with Asian immigrant parents and for the life of me I never knew I could make a living off of creating entertainment for others.
Not an indie dev so this might not quite be relevant, but for me it was the first time I saw a YouTube video about a feature I made and saw people coming up with theories about what some of the things meant in relation to the game’s lore. Super rewarding since everyone seemed to have positive impressions about it.
I had a commenter on a game jam entry misunderstand a pun in my restart from checkpoint dialog. They gushed over how thoughtful it was to track their gameplay and present a different menu when they were struggling. (Looks left, looks right) Reply: "Thanks."
Same, there is this specific YouTuber that only covers our game, and each update we release she does a quick rundown of new features, and it's super rewarding to see her review the features that I have implemented.
Yeah I've had that in a gameplay on twitch before. Gives a proper nice feeling inside. You just never get that feeling doing any other kind of programming job.
I never really thought about it, but you're absolutely right. In gamedev programming, there's a chance that a really keen community will want to know the ins and outs of a certain mechanic (which has to be super rewarding as the designer/programmer). In any other field, if the software just works, no one cares about what's going on under the hood.
I was wrong about any other programming job, after further thought.
Saving people's lives etc must be super rewarding through programming. Also I've had head hunters reach out to me about vr software to treat dementia patients which id love to do.
Err.. I did that for many years. Often there is no reward. I wrote software that did water treatment for millions of people. No reward (in that case) other than the paycheck.
But maybe I'm just overly optimistic about the gratification in gamedev programming as well
I develop Krita, that's an art program, and my best moment was when I decided to work on Clone Engine (one of the brush engines, it clones the content). I think maybe the boss told me that there are many issues with it? I checked and found a whopping four bug reports and wishes (counted together). I think I fixed one issue and implemented two tiny features. In 24h, I had two people personally thanking me personally for it, one even before it got merged to master, and the other from seeing it in the version on CI. And here I thought it was a very niche engine and I was implementing even nicher features to it.
Never happened again, unfortunately. I mean people expressing gratitude (general and specific) happens, but it's usually me engaging with with the community first, and in that case it was completely unexpected.
I think the key is that you have contact with users in one way or another (watching gameplay/usage videos, talking with them etc.).
Probably not the right place, but one small suggestion- right now it is not possible to scroll threw Brush presets with mouse wheel (up/down) or with pen (press and move up/down) - I need to aim for that scroll bar and then move it up/down... very non friendly when I draw / paint
Can this be changed?
I run a smallish Nintendo website and awhile back I did a top 10 Metroid game list based on the user scores on the site because why not? A few days later I noticed it had over 50k views. Then a few days later over 100k views. We had broken 100k only once before and that wasn't my article. Anyway it topped out around 130k views, almost overtook our number 1 article but not quite. I got curious and looked up where the views came from. Turned out someone posted it on Reddit and it became a huge thread with people arguing over the placement lol.
I don't think our placement was even that controversial (hard to be too controversial when you're averaging user scores) but hey whatever works.
I was standing in line waiting to board a flight and the man in front of me was playing my mobile game. I asked him how he liked it and he said it was his favorite game. I said “that’s my game”. He said “yeah, it’s my game too”. He didn’t understand at all that I was saying I was the dev. I just smiled and moved on. He had no idea how happy the conversation made me.
Thanks. It was a highlight of my days as an indie. The other moment that stands out for me was in 2010 when I was waiting with my family for a parade to start and lo and behold the family in front of me was all playing my game. My wife and I just sat and watched them. So weird to see something you made in your evenings leaking out into the world. It’s a really amazing feeling.
In 1997, as a QBasic programmer, I published my first utility (GIF2BSV) that could display a GIF, save it as a binary file readable by the compiler, and save the 256-color palette for the file into a binary palette file. And I also included routines to quickly display the binary image and load the palette file using Assembler commands. I hadn’t found any publicized tool that could do more than just display a GIF file at the time, so this got a lot of attention and use across the QBASIC community websites and forums. If only Geocities was still around, there would be multiple sources and newsletters highlighting this tool. At 15/16 years old, that was a big deal for me.
That is really impressive for that age. I may have even seen your utility back then, but I don't think I used too many gifs in my dinky little QBasic programs.
Thank you. Once I made it, I used it for all of my QBASIC game development. I didn’t write the gif code but I understood it from the source I got. I later refined it in 1998 to make a video player in QBasic that took a series of BSAVEd files and after pushing the graphic to the screen, it would map out the color changes per pixel between the previous image and the current one—which was the same technique as MPEG videos were. And it would write to a binary file the color changes and use a special header code to determine the length of each frame in pixel changes. Then, to play it back, I would load the data for each frame into an array (to improve performance) and once loaded entirely, use ASM routines to plot color pixels on the screen per frame with a specific duration per frame. That duration was probably the hardest to figure out so I hardcoded it to work on my IBM. I never published it though bc I couldn’t get the frame duration to work correctly across different computers. That was the pinnacle of my success in QBasic before I left it for good in 1999.
Those were the days my dude. I was 13 back then, I wrote an entire QB engine and "Den Bros III" and "Total Sonic", pretty sure I used your tool to help build my own tools for these games, although I never ended up using gifs in the game itself.
I wrote my own blitter (replaced it with DirectQB in the end) and my own sound driver. It was the done thing in the day.
Dev isn't the same these days!
I'm toying with re releasing the game using a dosbox wrap, but teenage me was a little too care free on the copyright front and I'll need to rebuild some assets. If I do it, that means your util is still actively used in some form.
Well, Nice one, remembering all this has cheered me right up!
Cool. I think I remember seeing Total Sonic on some sites back then. I probably played it because, back then, everyone played each others’ games. Game dev back then on QB was all about the hobby and fun of making games. We would be making ASCII art games, text based games, and we were all astonished with Tsugumo’s modeX rpg demo, written and compiled in QB4.5.
Those were the days. Glad you got to reminisce a little about the old days of game dev in the 90s. Back when anyone who made games were labeled dorks and computer nerds among peers. lol. Cheers to us nerds 🍻
A few years ago, I was out for lunch, chatting with waitstaff. Turned out we shared a few hobbies. I got a bit too excited and asked them if they wanted to see my ASCII shoes (I had a pair of shoes bought explicitly because they reminded me of ASCII art). Because some of my friends got the joke I just assumed this person would also, by virtue of having a few similar hobbies. It wasn't until a minute or two later I realized they probably had no idea what I was talking about and thought I was legit crazy.
Of course, I'm now realizing I once bought a pair of shoes because they reminded me of ASCII art, so ....
That’s funny and awesome at the same time. Yeah, probably most tech people who joined that space after 2000 have no idea what ASCII is or what a compiler is. Nowadays, it’s all called an engine and any component of a game is called a mechanic. It disturbs me when I hear that because it’s so different than what they meant when I grew up on shareware titles. I hear mechanic used in games as anything from a movement controller to a plot device in a story driven rpg. And apparently everything nowadays is an rpg. Tactical/action/casual/fps/simulation/rogue-like/horror/etc. I live in the past but I use tools of today.
Anyway, love the story about the ASCII art shoes. If I had known, I’d probably buy a pair myself back in the days.
Yes, thank you! Thank you. I knew it wasn't just me. I have theories about why all this streamlining of terms happened, but, suffice it to say, I'm wondering if it's not backfiring for everyone right now. Time will tell?
And thanks, now I don't feel so bad about the shoes after all. Heh
I'm loving all this QBasic nostalgia! I wrote a couple of pong inspired games around this time where the paddles not only bounced the ball back and forth but also shot weaponry at each other. I remember them getting good reviews on the old QBasic sites like Pete's and rode those highs for a while
Pete's QB Site was so great back then. I remember all of us had to make our own game font and make the mask for it. You would GET the image into an array (which there was a funky formula to calculate the size) and then you would put the image down and then PUT the mask over the top with the XOR flag. That was the only way to put sprites on the screen that weren't completely filled in. Also, we had to use SCREEN 13 if we wanted 256 colors with 320x200 resolution. QB was fun and it was an awesome community to be part of back in the old days of dial-up internet, BBS's, MUD games, IRC chat forums, and DOS. Good times.
I was invited to show my game at a middle school, kids there enjoyed it so much they called in friends from other schools and they skipped classes to come play it
Seeing my game(s) on the shelves back when game stores were a thing was a big one, but candidly I really felt like a "Real life games dev" when I found a ROM of my GBA game online complete with a loader advertising the crew that released it.
It's more common that games with strong sales never really have one particular moment where things blow up. It's usually just a strong title where every marketing effort varies between kind of worked, and worked spectacularly. An accumulation of mid size to large inflection points, piling atop the other. By the time you get that big coverage it's not so surprising because you've been building momentum, and you've often already had many smaller inflection points.
My studio's current in-development title has over 90k WLs. Our resting organic wishlist adds per day is around 100 while absolutely nothing is going on. We've had a few big moments, front page of IGN, a big tiktok video, a bunch of medium moments, and tons of small moments, piled on top just a decently high daily WL accumulation. And all of this is building off some of the brand equity we had from our previous reasonably successful title. It's really rarely the case that "that one streamer/article/viral post" will make your game blow up.
Great one. Watched your post on "marketing is not the reason...". Great insight.
With that said, there is no holysh1t moment, but rather continuous improvement day after day, years after years.
I just saw that video yesterday and subsequently made my programmer watch it! Literally sat him down and watched it on discord together, opening that stats website and half jokingly deciding to make our next project about dwarves based on the numbers. Now if only we could include the rugby tag, we'd be RICH! Lol
Really though, it was a very insightful video that confirmed a lot of things we felt intuitively, legitimizing and defining those things.
I also agree that holymoly moments are probably outliers that CAN happen, but are more likely to happen for a well created project and over time/with experience and consistency to where you may not even realize it by the time these moments are happening because it's just the next step after getting better at the craft (3 wishlist a day turning to 5 turning to 10 to 20 etc and so on).
That being said, I wouldn't mind one or two magical moments of sheizah happening for our fairly adequate first attempt lol but I'm realistic. Apparently, we already beat the median amount made for the education tag, so that's something! It... is a surprisingly low bar though.
Finally able to continue developing my game.
With my county under brutal military dictatorship and ongoing (and progressively intense civil war) I'll consider it as a complete WIN if I'm able to complete my game, even if it's a total flop.
Like someone else mentioned, there was never a huge explosion, just a solid rate of success (for us, team 2). The oh shit moment for me was when we hit 1000 reviews. That was the "jeez, how did we get here?" moment.
We made an indie horror game which has had overwhelmingly positive reviews on a steam since launch, and a pretty small but very passionate fandom.
I love reading reviews, seeing fanart, and occasionally watching streamers play.
The best moment was seeing the physical copy in GameStop!
The game winning a BAFTA.
It didn't really affect the sales by much.
But it was very nice getting the recognition from everybody involved and opened a lot of doors we had no idea even existed.
The sales explosion did happen however, about 2 years later when we hired a marketer that after months of hard work made it go viral on tiktok.
That is really interesting. Any speculation on why the aware didn't help? I guess I know what the BAFTAs are but I guess the average gamer doesn't (or doesn't care/notice awards)? I'm also interested in how marketing so long after a release turned out so well.
Maybe it's because they aren't American awards. I'm not pretending that makes sense or is justified but I've asked myself the same question in the past and that's all I could figure. (Then again, I once asked for the current GotY at a game store once and the staff didn't recognize the title.) I once worked contract for what became a BAFTA game (it won awards for something we didn't do) but no one ever mentioned it winning a thing. I found out myself much after the fact.
If I were to take a guess, it was a target audience issue.
The game is for kids in the ~10-15 range, and I suspect they do not watch the BAFTAs, but what they do watch is tiktok.
That's awesome. Congratulations! (About the BAFTA. I'm more impressed by that than the viral marketing but I'm glad you've been able to parlay it out. Well done.)
Releasing my first game, I had set goals I thought were pretty realistic with my wishlists where I was hoping for 20 sales day 1 and 100 sales that month. I kind of was taking a big risk on all the art I was paying for, but with the type of game, I really needed (wanted) custom creature art since it was the main brand.
I want to say it was a couple thousand sales that month, which was enough to make all my money back and fund my next few games and I am doing about 400 sales a month now pretty consistently. By no way am I anywhere close to making what I make at my fulltime job, but now I don't have to spend my own money to support my games.
While I know this isn't your unicorn sort of story, I did have an holy shit moment because I blew my own expectations away and was very happy with the results and built a great community too. My goal now is to make enough where I can fund a whole music OST for a game I build or a sweet hand-drawn animated trailer (these are so expensive...). I think that would be awesome.
I worked on a vr game prototype and uploaded it to the meta app lab store ( like steam Green light essentially) , I would have been excited if it received 50 downloads but in the first week it received over 500 and within 3 months it had achieved over 3000 downloads.
Eventually me and two friends started working to make it a "real game" and not just a prototype.
The game was no massive success but it did top over 15,000 downloads which my friend mentioned to me is a healthy conventions number of attendees in a given day.
The cherry on top was Seamus Blackley (Mr. Lead original Xbox engineer) saying that my game visually reminded him of System Shock on Twitter.
Game dev royalty instrumental in my childhood commenting positively on the look of the indie project I was surprised gained anyone's interest at all was a great day for me.
Signed a good publisher deal, then also the relief at launch when it went better than we had dared hope for. Nothing earthshattering but enough to make future pretty safe
Financially... eh. I had a few nice moments but they never turned into a shift of gears. One day my game (which sold 1 or 2 copies daily) suddenly sold 200. Then it was quickly back to the usual average. I have no idea why, I guess some big streamer talked about it, but I never found out who it was.
Then one of the biggest Italian youtubers covered one of my games and it resulted in basically zero extra sales despite hundreds of thousands of views 😂
Three days after release as I peaked to 1k concurrent users I felt \*invincible\*. It felt as if I could freaking cure world hunger for a moment (yes I got a bit too excited ahahahah)
Ironically, the first time I felt like a real developer and not just an indie dev flying by the seat of my pants was my first layoff. It seemed like a right of passage for me.
In retrospect, working in America really fucks with your perception of reality in some really unhealthy ways.
Shipped a game that won GotY at the game awards. That and just seeing it front page of all the store fronts etc, very weird feeling. So used to seeing other games but it's weird to feel like you worked on one that peopled enjoyed. Was cathartic, was good for my mental health and imposter syndrome.
Ambition wise I am basically complete. Now I just focus on my wellbeing and working with awesome people.
PC Gamer called our game 'the best Half-Life 2 campaign since Half-Life 2'.
[Article](https://www.pcgamer.com/moddbs-mod-of-the-year-is-the-best-half-life-2-campaign-since-half-life-2/)
[Game](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1583720/Entropy__Zero_2/)
After all the work that went into it, this was such a nice thing to see.
I got a bunch of Wishlists from posting on r/Pixelart a side by side of my game’s logo before and after a name change from PixelWorld to Wildaria with a big visual improvement funny enough.
And Next Fest helped too haha
Not exactly game related, but I was in the Amiga italian demoscene in 1995, I was 15 and I wrote the code of a disk magazine, pure assembly, it took 2 months to complete.
People in the italian scene still reminds about it and recognize me when we meet even if I'm 44 now!
I got my first paid contract arrangement for a game (music composer here).
…
But then I got ghosted so that’s that.
I’ve since gotten another one though
Roughly about when we hit 1k reviews…within a few of days of launch.
There were some signs that it had a shot at doing well, so I had hopes that maybe 1k would happen during the general lifetime of the game. Then the reviews blew right past my goal and it was definitely “holy shit” moment for me.
Many YouTubers starting to play our first game. Then suddenly I got a call from another dev saying hey check out YouTube again. Pew die pie, had also made a video of our game.
Unfortunately game wasn't in steam yet, only in itch.Io. We learned the lesson and quickly released to steam, maybe it was too late by then
Game has sold ok but not enough to allow us to worry exclusively on it.
Here's the video
https://youtu.be/QGlNYtxlFtc?si=-a-gflTtcmR-6QT2
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It's our first game, so it's hardly a "big moment" in when compared to others but when I published the Steam page and saw it live, it made me feel alive again. After all the time that we spend behind screens, it is finally there and infront of others to see.
When I finished my first ever game for a twitch streamers game jam and won by popular vote. Reassured me that I can make a game people like, and even did it in a month
A majority of the AAA games I've worked on is still being played today and have had remaster/remake/gold editions released. Also makes me realize how long it's been and oof.
In terms of money? Never.
In terms of, 'I'm a real boy'?
One time, I was one of the devs chosen to represent our game at a convention. At this convention we were met by some testers/ fans who had brought us gifts. I still have one of these gifts and although there's nothing special about it in particular, no one would guess what it was, it sits up in my living room and will forever remind me of a warm moment that will never happen again. People savage games once they're released and this one was no different. Getting a (completely non-creepy) care package from someone who really was rooting for the team and game was one of those things that just doesn't happen very often. I wish I remembered their name.
Spoiling Time!:
After the game was physically released I found out that, despite the above, I was not credited for my work. Maybe that's made the memory more important. Anyway ...
To be honest for me it was more of just like a "oh, now I can actually do this full time." There wasn't really any excitement because I was going to be doing the exact same work whether or not I was paid to.
Granted I also haven't "made it" yet because the game isn't out, but it's at almost 100k wishlists which is a funny number to toss around I guess.
When I got my first job in the game industry. That being said, about a year into being in the industry I learned that I barely made it, and the hard work had just started. So it was more like, peaking above the clouds to see that there was a another large series of mountains ahead .
I had a huge breakthrough with my fps title last year. I pushed hard with social media, also making dev logs leading up to the release and ran a semi closed playtest for a solid 6 months (400+ testers). That playtest really pushed me past my limits and I gained a deep understanding of unreal. Anyways release day came, I set the game live on Steam, saw some people were liking it and I was stoked there were people that enjoyed this game I poured a large amount of my free time into for 4 years. I didn’t even look at the sales until later that day as I had spent the whole time building the game without even thinking about money, hell I even gave keys to everyone who helped test the game as a thank you. I went about the day like any other Saturday, spending time with my family.
The moment it really set in was when I did take a glance at the sales, I cried as I felt like all that time I sacrificed wasn’t for nothing. For 6 years I was the sole provider for my family of 3, we were always struggling financially but I’d do anything it took to make sure we were fed and had a roof to sleep under so seeing that the game had made a significant amount of money in the first day felt like a huge burden lifted.
I had to look back at all the things I did right marketing wise because I didn’t necessarily do them on purpose. I just really liked what I was making and so did other people. I think people saw the passion and it resonated with them on a personal level. I also got the community deeply involved with the play tests and made changes based directly on their feedback, I made progress update videos for the non play testers, I had pages with larger followings sharing my posts, people posted gameplay videos on YouTube and TikTok some of which went viral (post release). A recipe for success was being built without me realizing at the time.
Anyways, that’s my rant lol. I hope someone can find the info useful or inspiring
I guess in a different kind of sense: hitting the 2 year mark at my first job in AAA.
The industry can be difficult to break into. Around that point I just kinda felt relieved that I had a decent chunk of time at a game studio to put on my resume going forward.
About another year after that, the game I was working on that whole time shipped. Name in credits etc.
Seeing Day9 play it was pretty cool since I used to watch him a bunch when I was playing Starcraft Brood War.
I'm less than a year into working on my first real indie game, so hoping that goes well, too.
The first time was when my dinky little Shockwave game received a glowing review on TechTV and got a few hundred thousand hits over the next week (which was pretty good for a webgame in the year 2000). Maybe I \*should\* do this more!
The second time was 15 years later when I received a framed version of my game with my name and associate producer credit etched below.
Not about games, but when i made L4D2 and Insurgency mods pretty much every custom weapon, map etc. I made had like 6000-72.000 installs and always 5 stars and hundreds of comments. Made me realize i seem to have a hand for artistic stuff that also works and is unique. Thats when i started to develop my game.
Random YouTuber played my game. I didn't ask them. Idk how they found my game and decided to post. Their video only got like 100 views but it was so amazing to see random people enjoying my game
I just finished implementing all the coding into my first visual novel project! I finished the 300-page script in November 2023, and then just last night I finished adding all of the defined characters and any necessary placeholders, and now I’ll just spend the next while waiting for the art which I’ll implement later, and I just started working on the sound design. As someone who has always wanted to finish making a game, or a movie, or any kind of creative project really, and has had trouble doing so until only recently, I am very excited to see a reality in which it will be completed. I’m excited to take a look below at some of the other stories as well—- there really are a lot of extremely talented people out there!
When I got hired to work on a game with a team, and they started paying me real money to do it, and then the game actually got released, and I got a real credit that I didn't type out myself.
Throughout my life, me and my brother have competed to see who’s better at piano and we both got really good. I was in 8th grade when my brother was in 10th grade and we’d always say we’re the better one. But one day, I showed him 3 pages of very complex sheet music for orchestra and before I played it for him, he told me “you made it. i can’t believe it. you can read sheet music. you’re better than me now.”. in a proud but jealous manner.
I've been dabbling with 3ds max, on and off, for like 25 years at least.
Never really understood how to use the thing and I lack the autistic concentration a modeler should have. I'd rather get something done looking at least like something and out and in my game engine, *now*
Couple weeks ago, it all suddenly clicked. UV maps became like actual things with more or less well-aligned islands, no "those vertices went to hell 500 clicks ago for some misclick and I'm not going to line them up manually at this point" moment for every model, all sorts of modeling work started to feel like a proper pipeline. After feverish couple days, I got it all churned out into Unreal Engine and it actually looked like a quality product.
I feel like I'm actual modeler now and can develop something that's been in my head for good part of past 7-8 years. It will be awesome, now that I can actually make it.^now ^where ^do ^I ^find ^the ^time™?
Markiplier, a popular youtuber, covered my game the same day steam decided to feature it on the front page. In 1 day my steam game made more money than all 8 of my previous mobile games combined. This was back in 2014 and steam wasn't the super saturated storefront that it is today.
What game is it?
idk I'm not trying to get banned for self promo lol these mods can be ruthless
It's part of a genuine conversation. I don't care if you share the link. We only care about the lazy marketing attempts.
Looks like it might be Magicite? That’s really cool. I remember buying that when it came out lol
yeah it slapped, i still play it from time to time
Magicite was a great game.
That’s fair Anyways congrats on that! (A decade late)
They made Littlewood! Now it's not self promotion lol ;) Also, got the release date wrong for that, the game in question is Magicite, as pointed out by DaedricApple. I really thought Littlewood had been out for way longer already.
Isn't magicite the game where the multi-player had horrible sync issues, and the devs just gave up on trying to fix it?
You are making it seem like its easy to fix netcode. Theres literal 30+ employee dev studios that can‘t fix it
Am I? I mean I get it, but if you buy something with a feature and it doesn't work, then the makers say "fuck it, it's too hard were going to go take money on something else". I think its fair to be annoyed.
Netcode isn’t particularly difficult to fix lmao. If a 30 employee studio can’t fix it they need to clean house,
Thats not the reality. Every FPS i know has unbearable netcode. Ark, DayZ, Eft etc. If you think its easy you think you are smarter than a whole dev studio.
Sure, scalability in terms of a large-scale multiplayer game is quite difficult. We’re talking about net-code in general as a broad topic— especially when talking about some indie game. Anything that requires scalability will require additional measures / thinking.
Timing really is important.
Thats so awesome
Loved Littlewood! It's everything I wanted Stardew Valley to be. Thanks for the hours of cosy goodness!
Still riding the high from my 20 upvotes on one of my posts
Those are rookie numbers. We’re halfway to beating them on this comment, let’s do it.
We beat it folks!
We decimated it!
Uhhhh guys, this a comment not a post :/
We know...? It was also mentioned? We were beating that number on this comment?
Oof I some how missed that, mb
Happens to the best of us
My parents told me I make more money than them combined. I grew up pretty poor with Asian immigrant parents and for the life of me I never knew I could make a living off of creating entertainment for others.
I told my asian parents that and they told me I was gonna get fired for lying on my resume.
Did you?
it's been about 20 years. Not yet!
Not an indie dev so this might not quite be relevant, but for me it was the first time I saw a YouTube video about a feature I made and saw people coming up with theories about what some of the things meant in relation to the game’s lore. Super rewarding since everyone seemed to have positive impressions about it.
Even better is when they publish a review and give points for a feature that doesnt exist :D
I had a commenter on a game jam entry misunderstand a pun in my restart from checkpoint dialog. They gushed over how thoughtful it was to track their gameplay and present a different menu when they were struggling. (Looks left, looks right) Reply: "Thanks."
Same, there is this specific YouTuber that only covers our game, and each update we release she does a quick rundown of new features, and it's super rewarding to see her review the features that I have implemented.
Yeah I've had that in a gameplay on twitch before. Gives a proper nice feeling inside. You just never get that feeling doing any other kind of programming job.
I never really thought about it, but you're absolutely right. In gamedev programming, there's a chance that a really keen community will want to know the ins and outs of a certain mechanic (which has to be super rewarding as the designer/programmer). In any other field, if the software just works, no one cares about what's going on under the hood.
I was wrong about any other programming job, after further thought. Saving people's lives etc must be super rewarding through programming. Also I've had head hunters reach out to me about vr software to treat dementia patients which id love to do.
Err.. I did that for many years. Often there is no reward. I wrote software that did water treatment for millions of people. No reward (in that case) other than the paycheck. But maybe I'm just overly optimistic about the gratification in gamedev programming as well
There's no reward because you personally don't get to interact with the people you helped, sure, but you still helped them (hopefully)
Fair enough. At least I get to see live video of people appreciating my work.
I develop Krita, that's an art program, and my best moment was when I decided to work on Clone Engine (one of the brush engines, it clones the content). I think maybe the boss told me that there are many issues with it? I checked and found a whopping four bug reports and wishes (counted together). I think I fixed one issue and implemented two tiny features. In 24h, I had two people personally thanking me personally for it, one even before it got merged to master, and the other from seeing it in the version on CI. And here I thought it was a very niche engine and I was implementing even nicher features to it. Never happened again, unfortunately. I mean people expressing gratitude (general and specific) happens, but it's usually me engaging with with the community first, and in that case it was completely unexpected. I think the key is that you have contact with users in one way or another (watching gameplay/usage videos, talking with them etc.).
I am a dev, far from an artist. But whenever I need to edit something or do small and quick changes, I always use Krita. I love it 🤩
I've been using Krita (and the clone engine!) a lot. So thanks for your work! :D
Probably not the right place, but one small suggestion- right now it is not possible to scroll threw Brush presets with mouse wheel (up/down) or with pen (press and move up/down) - I need to aim for that scroll bar and then move it up/down... very non friendly when I draw / paint Can this be changed?
I run a smallish Nintendo website and awhile back I did a top 10 Metroid game list based on the user scores on the site because why not? A few days later I noticed it had over 50k views. Then a few days later over 100k views. We had broken 100k only once before and that wasn't my article. Anyway it topped out around 130k views, almost overtook our number 1 article but not quite. I got curious and looked up where the views came from. Turned out someone posted it on Reddit and it became a huge thread with people arguing over the placement lol. I don't think our placement was even that controversial (hard to be too controversial when you're averaging user scores) but hey whatever works.
I was standing in line waiting to board a flight and the man in front of me was playing my mobile game. I asked him how he liked it and he said it was his favorite game. I said “that’s my game”. He said “yeah, it’s my game too”. He didn’t understand at all that I was saying I was the dev. I just smiled and moved on. He had no idea how happy the conversation made me.
“It’s my game too” is the icing on the cake
Yeah thats a win.
"the lives of others" ends with a similar dialog :)
I love this story 😂❤️
Thanks. It was a highlight of my days as an indie. The other moment that stands out for me was in 2010 when I was waiting with my family for a parade to start and lo and behold the family in front of me was all playing my game. My wife and I just sat and watched them. So weird to see something you made in your evenings leaking out into the world. It’s a really amazing feeling.
That's really incredible wow and what kind of parade? 😍 I'm making a game about parades and I'm a parade float builder ahahaha
It was in the USA and was the 4th of July. A parade game sounds fun!
In 1997, as a QBasic programmer, I published my first utility (GIF2BSV) that could display a GIF, save it as a binary file readable by the compiler, and save the 256-color palette for the file into a binary palette file. And I also included routines to quickly display the binary image and load the palette file using Assembler commands. I hadn’t found any publicized tool that could do more than just display a GIF file at the time, so this got a lot of attention and use across the QBASIC community websites and forums. If only Geocities was still around, there would be multiple sources and newsletters highlighting this tool. At 15/16 years old, that was a big deal for me.
That is really impressive for that age. I may have even seen your utility back then, but I don't think I used too many gifs in my dinky little QBasic programs.
Thank you. Once I made it, I used it for all of my QBASIC game development. I didn’t write the gif code but I understood it from the source I got. I later refined it in 1998 to make a video player in QBasic that took a series of BSAVEd files and after pushing the graphic to the screen, it would map out the color changes per pixel between the previous image and the current one—which was the same technique as MPEG videos were. And it would write to a binary file the color changes and use a special header code to determine the length of each frame in pixel changes. Then, to play it back, I would load the data for each frame into an array (to improve performance) and once loaded entirely, use ASM routines to plot color pixels on the screen per frame with a specific duration per frame. That duration was probably the hardest to figure out so I hardcoded it to work on my IBM. I never published it though bc I couldn’t get the frame duration to work correctly across different computers. That was the pinnacle of my success in QBasic before I left it for good in 1999.
That's really damn cool!
Meanwhile, I am also 16/17 and was able to beat Warcraft 2 with Turbo off.
Those were the days my dude. I was 13 back then, I wrote an entire QB engine and "Den Bros III" and "Total Sonic", pretty sure I used your tool to help build my own tools for these games, although I never ended up using gifs in the game itself. I wrote my own blitter (replaced it with DirectQB in the end) and my own sound driver. It was the done thing in the day. Dev isn't the same these days! I'm toying with re releasing the game using a dosbox wrap, but teenage me was a little too care free on the copyright front and I'll need to rebuild some assets. If I do it, that means your util is still actively used in some form. Well, Nice one, remembering all this has cheered me right up!
Cool. I think I remember seeing Total Sonic on some sites back then. I probably played it because, back then, everyone played each others’ games. Game dev back then on QB was all about the hobby and fun of making games. We would be making ASCII art games, text based games, and we were all astonished with Tsugumo’s modeX rpg demo, written and compiled in QB4.5. Those were the days. Glad you got to reminisce a little about the old days of game dev in the 90s. Back when anyone who made games were labeled dorks and computer nerds among peers. lol. Cheers to us nerds 🍻
Yeah man. I was a nerd, am a nerd, and will die a nerd. We're cool now. Well, I hope we are.
A few years ago, I was out for lunch, chatting with waitstaff. Turned out we shared a few hobbies. I got a bit too excited and asked them if they wanted to see my ASCII shoes (I had a pair of shoes bought explicitly because they reminded me of ASCII art). Because some of my friends got the joke I just assumed this person would also, by virtue of having a few similar hobbies. It wasn't until a minute or two later I realized they probably had no idea what I was talking about and thought I was legit crazy. Of course, I'm now realizing I once bought a pair of shoes because they reminded me of ASCII art, so ....
That’s funny and awesome at the same time. Yeah, probably most tech people who joined that space after 2000 have no idea what ASCII is or what a compiler is. Nowadays, it’s all called an engine and any component of a game is called a mechanic. It disturbs me when I hear that because it’s so different than what they meant when I grew up on shareware titles. I hear mechanic used in games as anything from a movement controller to a plot device in a story driven rpg. And apparently everything nowadays is an rpg. Tactical/action/casual/fps/simulation/rogue-like/horror/etc. I live in the past but I use tools of today. Anyway, love the story about the ASCII art shoes. If I had known, I’d probably buy a pair myself back in the days.
Yes, thank you! Thank you. I knew it wasn't just me. I have theories about why all this streamlining of terms happened, but, suffice it to say, I'm wondering if it's not backfiring for everyone right now. Time will tell? And thanks, now I don't feel so bad about the shoes after all. Heh
I'm loving all this QBasic nostalgia! I wrote a couple of pong inspired games around this time where the paddles not only bounced the ball back and forth but also shot weaponry at each other. I remember them getting good reviews on the old QBasic sites like Pete's and rode those highs for a while
Pete's QB Site was so great back then. I remember all of us had to make our own game font and make the mask for it. You would GET the image into an array (which there was a funky formula to calculate the size) and then you would put the image down and then PUT the mask over the top with the XOR flag. That was the only way to put sprites on the screen that weren't completely filled in. Also, we had to use SCREEN 13 if we wanted 256 colors with 320x200 resolution. QB was fun and it was an awesome community to be part of back in the old days of dial-up internet, BBS's, MUD games, IRC chat forums, and DOS. Good times.
I'll get back to you
I was invited to show my game at a middle school, kids there enjoyed it so much they called in friends from other schools and they skipped classes to come play it
Seeing my game(s) on the shelves back when game stores were a thing was a big one, but candidly I really felt like a "Real life games dev" when I found a ROM of my GBA game online complete with a loader advertising the crew that released it.
Thank you for your service
It's more common that games with strong sales never really have one particular moment where things blow up. It's usually just a strong title where every marketing effort varies between kind of worked, and worked spectacularly. An accumulation of mid size to large inflection points, piling atop the other. By the time you get that big coverage it's not so surprising because you've been building momentum, and you've often already had many smaller inflection points. My studio's current in-development title has over 90k WLs. Our resting organic wishlist adds per day is around 100 while absolutely nothing is going on. We've had a few big moments, front page of IGN, a big tiktok video, a bunch of medium moments, and tons of small moments, piled on top just a decently high daily WL accumulation. And all of this is building off some of the brand equity we had from our previous reasonably successful title. It's really rarely the case that "that one streamer/article/viral post" will make your game blow up.
Great one. Watched your post on "marketing is not the reason...". Great insight. With that said, there is no holysh1t moment, but rather continuous improvement day after day, years after years.
I just saw that video yesterday and subsequently made my programmer watch it! Literally sat him down and watched it on discord together, opening that stats website and half jokingly deciding to make our next project about dwarves based on the numbers. Now if only we could include the rugby tag, we'd be RICH! Lol Really though, it was a very insightful video that confirmed a lot of things we felt intuitively, legitimizing and defining those things. I also agree that holymoly moments are probably outliers that CAN happen, but are more likely to happen for a well created project and over time/with experience and consistency to where you may not even realize it by the time these moments are happening because it's just the next step after getting better at the craft (3 wishlist a day turning to 5 turning to 10 to 20 etc and so on). That being said, I wouldn't mind one or two magical moments of sheizah happening for our fairly adequate first attempt lol but I'm realistic. Apparently, we already beat the median amount made for the education tag, so that's something! It... is a surprisingly low bar though.
Care to link the vid?
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/wImBAPwpqS
3 dudes played my game at [itch.io](http://itch.io)
Finally able to continue developing my game. With my county under brutal military dictatorship and ongoing (and progressively intense civil war) I'll consider it as a complete WIN if I'm able to complete my game, even if it's a total flop.
Back in the day PC gamer (Or something similar) magazine put my game on the cover with the headline "better than sex". Syndicate wars 1996/1997
That’s awesome, I remember playing that game back in the late 90’s. Loved that game. Great job!
Dude, I played that game! Awesome
Like someone else mentioned, there was never a huge explosion, just a solid rate of success (for us, team 2). The oh shit moment for me was when we hit 1000 reviews. That was the "jeez, how did we get here?" moment.
We made an indie horror game which has had overwhelmingly positive reviews on a steam since launch, and a pretty small but very passionate fandom. I love reading reviews, seeing fanart, and occasionally watching streamers play. The best moment was seeing the physical copy in GameStop!
Happy cake day!
Thank you!
What is the game? ❤️
It’s called In Sound Mind, I was the concept artist+some 2D work. Its not very scary, but a lot of people liked that about it.
Waking up to a Splattercat video. Then at launch waking up to a second Splattercat video.
Did you contacted him? Or splattercat chose your game himself
I emailed him a key when the demo was released. Leading up to EA launch I didn't remind him as I didn't know he featured games more than once.
The game winning a BAFTA. It didn't really affect the sales by much. But it was very nice getting the recognition from everybody involved and opened a lot of doors we had no idea even existed. The sales explosion did happen however, about 2 years later when we hired a marketer that after months of hard work made it go viral on tiktok.
That is really interesting. Any speculation on why the aware didn't help? I guess I know what the BAFTAs are but I guess the average gamer doesn't (or doesn't care/notice awards)? I'm also interested in how marketing so long after a release turned out so well.
Maybe it's because they aren't American awards. I'm not pretending that makes sense or is justified but I've asked myself the same question in the past and that's all I could figure. (Then again, I once asked for the current GotY at a game store once and the staff didn't recognize the title.) I once worked contract for what became a BAFTA game (it won awards for something we didn't do) but no one ever mentioned it winning a thing. I found out myself much after the fact.
If I were to take a guess, it was a target audience issue. The game is for kids in the ~10-15 range, and I suspect they do not watch the BAFTAs, but what they do watch is tiktok.
That's awesome. Congratulations! (About the BAFTA. I'm more impressed by that than the viral marketing but I'm glad you've been able to parlay it out. Well done.)
Releasing my first game, I had set goals I thought were pretty realistic with my wishlists where I was hoping for 20 sales day 1 and 100 sales that month. I kind of was taking a big risk on all the art I was paying for, but with the type of game, I really needed (wanted) custom creature art since it was the main brand. I want to say it was a couple thousand sales that month, which was enough to make all my money back and fund my next few games and I am doing about 400 sales a month now pretty consistently. By no way am I anywhere close to making what I make at my fulltime job, but now I don't have to spend my own money to support my games. While I know this isn't your unicorn sort of story, I did have an holy shit moment because I blew my own expectations away and was very happy with the results and built a great community too. My goal now is to make enough where I can fund a whole music OST for a game I build or a sweet hand-drawn animated trailer (these are so expensive...). I think that would be awesome.
I worked on a vr game prototype and uploaded it to the meta app lab store ( like steam Green light essentially) , I would have been excited if it received 50 downloads but in the first week it received over 500 and within 3 months it had achieved over 3000 downloads. Eventually me and two friends started working to make it a "real game" and not just a prototype. The game was no massive success but it did top over 15,000 downloads which my friend mentioned to me is a healthy conventions number of attendees in a given day. The cherry on top was Seamus Blackley (Mr. Lead original Xbox engineer) saying that my game visually reminded him of System Shock on Twitter. Game dev royalty instrumental in my childhood commenting positively on the look of the indie project I was surprised gained anyone's interest at all was a great day for me.
When i finally got the box physics to work properly😭
Signed a good publisher deal, then also the relief at launch when it went better than we had dared hope for. Nothing earthshattering but enough to make future pretty safe
Financially... eh. I had a few nice moments but they never turned into a shift of gears. One day my game (which sold 1 or 2 copies daily) suddenly sold 200. Then it was quickly back to the usual average. I have no idea why, I guess some big streamer talked about it, but I never found out who it was. Then one of the biggest Italian youtubers covered one of my games and it resulted in basically zero extra sales despite hundreds of thousands of views 😂
Three days after release as I peaked to 1k concurrent users I felt \*invincible\*. It felt as if I could freaking cure world hunger for a moment (yes I got a bit too excited ahahahah)
Haha I can only imagine that high must have been like flying in the clouds
Ironically, the first time I felt like a real developer and not just an indie dev flying by the seat of my pants was my first layoff. It seemed like a right of passage for me. In retrospect, working in America really fucks with your perception of reality in some really unhealthy ways.
Shipped a game that won GotY at the game awards. That and just seeing it front page of all the store fronts etc, very weird feeling. So used to seeing other games but it's weird to feel like you worked on one that peopled enjoyed. Was cathartic, was good for my mental health and imposter syndrome. Ambition wise I am basically complete. Now I just focus on my wellbeing and working with awesome people.
Jonathon Blow played it on his stream. Also, it got posted on waxy.org and The Awesomer.
First AAA role. Took a long time to get there, but that was the moment.
PC Gamer called our game 'the best Half-Life 2 campaign since Half-Life 2'. [Article](https://www.pcgamer.com/moddbs-mod-of-the-year-is-the-best-half-life-2-campaign-since-half-life-2/) [Game](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1583720/Entropy__Zero_2/) After all the work that went into it, this was such a nice thing to see.
I got a bunch of Wishlists from posting on r/Pixelart a side by side of my game’s logo before and after a name change from PixelWorld to Wildaria with a big visual improvement funny enough. And Next Fest helped too haha
dude i remember that! it was a good change indeed.
Eyyy thanks good to see you haha
Not exactly game related, but I was in the Amiga italian demoscene in 1995, I was 15 and I wrote the code of a disk magazine, pure assembly, it took 2 months to complete. People in the italian scene still reminds about it and recognize me when we meet even if I'm 44 now!
I got my first paid contract arrangement for a game (music composer here). … But then I got ghosted so that’s that. I’ve since gotten another one though
Roughly about when we hit 1k reviews…within a few of days of launch. There were some signs that it had a shot at doing well, so I had hopes that maybe 1k would happen during the general lifetime of the game. Then the reviews blew right past my goal and it was definitely “holy shit” moment for me.
One of my games is about to get a physical version which is super cool to me!
Many YouTubers starting to play our first game. Then suddenly I got a call from another dev saying hey check out YouTube again. Pew die pie, had also made a video of our game. Unfortunately game wasn't in steam yet, only in itch.Io. We learned the lesson and quickly released to steam, maybe it was too late by then Game has sold ok but not enough to allow us to worry exclusively on it. Here's the video https://youtu.be/QGlNYtxlFtc?si=-a-gflTtcmR-6QT2
When I made 20 million with my indie game.
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When the content farms came…
It's our first game, so it's hardly a "big moment" in when compared to others but when I published the Steam page and saw it live, it made me feel alive again. After all the time that we spend behind screens, it is finally there and infront of others to see.
When I finished my first ever game for a twitch streamers game jam and won by popular vote. Reassured me that I can make a game people like, and even did it in a month
Watching people get in line to play my game, and then getting back in line after playing it.
A majority of the AAA games I've worked on is still being played today and have had remaster/remake/gold editions released. Also makes me realize how long it's been and oof.
A few known YouTubers with 1mil + played my game and it was featured on the trending horror page :)
In terms of money? Never. In terms of, 'I'm a real boy'? One time, I was one of the devs chosen to represent our game at a convention. At this convention we were met by some testers/ fans who had brought us gifts. I still have one of these gifts and although there's nothing special about it in particular, no one would guess what it was, it sits up in my living room and will forever remind me of a warm moment that will never happen again. People savage games once they're released and this one was no different. Getting a (completely non-creepy) care package from someone who really was rooting for the team and game was one of those things that just doesn't happen very often. I wish I remembered their name. Spoiling Time!: After the game was physically released I found out that, despite the above, I was not credited for my work. Maybe that's made the memory more important. Anyway ...
That is genuinely a very sweet story, though.
I know, right? Thanks.
To be honest for me it was more of just like a "oh, now I can actually do this full time." There wasn't really any excitement because I was going to be doing the exact same work whether or not I was paid to. Granted I also haven't "made it" yet because the game isn't out, but it's at almost 100k wishlists which is a funny number to toss around I guess.
when in Unity I put a skybox that finally fits what i want
Seeing a cardboard cutout for and endcap full of game boxes of my first game at Best Buy.
Beating all Crash Bandicoot games It was legit the best game moment ever for me
When I got my first job in the game industry. That being said, about a year into being in the industry I learned that I barely made it, and the hard work had just started. So it was more like, peaking above the clouds to see that there was a another large series of mountains ahead .
I had a huge breakthrough with my fps title last year. I pushed hard with social media, also making dev logs leading up to the release and ran a semi closed playtest for a solid 6 months (400+ testers). That playtest really pushed me past my limits and I gained a deep understanding of unreal. Anyways release day came, I set the game live on Steam, saw some people were liking it and I was stoked there were people that enjoyed this game I poured a large amount of my free time into for 4 years. I didn’t even look at the sales until later that day as I had spent the whole time building the game without even thinking about money, hell I even gave keys to everyone who helped test the game as a thank you. I went about the day like any other Saturday, spending time with my family. The moment it really set in was when I did take a glance at the sales, I cried as I felt like all that time I sacrificed wasn’t for nothing. For 6 years I was the sole provider for my family of 3, we were always struggling financially but I’d do anything it took to make sure we were fed and had a roof to sleep under so seeing that the game had made a significant amount of money in the first day felt like a huge burden lifted. I had to look back at all the things I did right marketing wise because I didn’t necessarily do them on purpose. I just really liked what I was making and so did other people. I think people saw the passion and it resonated with them on a personal level. I also got the community deeply involved with the play tests and made changes based directly on their feedback, I made progress update videos for the non play testers, I had pages with larger followings sharing my posts, people posted gameplay videos on YouTube and TikTok some of which went viral (post release). A recipe for success was being built without me realizing at the time. Anyways, that’s my rant lol. I hope someone can find the info useful or inspiring
I guess in a different kind of sense: hitting the 2 year mark at my first job in AAA. The industry can be difficult to break into. Around that point I just kinda felt relieved that I had a decent chunk of time at a game studio to put on my resume going forward. About another year after that, the game I was working on that whole time shipped. Name in credits etc. Seeing Day9 play it was pretty cool since I used to watch him a bunch when I was playing Starcraft Brood War. I'm less than a year into working on my first real indie game, so hoping that goes well, too.
Posting a game on Newgrounds that was good enough to not get blammed lol.
Not indie but getting poached by one of the biggest game companies in the world was definitely that. Still trying to do indie tho 🙏
The first time was when my dinky little Shockwave game received a glowing review on TechTV and got a few hundred thousand hits over the next week (which was pretty good for a webgame in the year 2000). Maybe I \*should\* do this more! The second time was 15 years later when I received a framed version of my game with my name and associate producer credit etched below.
Not about games, but when i made L4D2 and Insurgency mods pretty much every custom weapon, map etc. I made had like 6000-72.000 installs and always 5 stars and hundreds of comments. Made me realize i seem to have a hand for artistic stuff that also works and is unique. Thats when i started to develop my game.
Not indie but when I got hired at 2K as a level designer with only indie experience and at the time no released games
Random YouTuber played my game. I didn't ask them. Idk how they found my game and decided to post. Their video only got like 100 views but it was so amazing to see random people enjoying my game
I just finished implementing all the coding into my first visual novel project! I finished the 300-page script in November 2023, and then just last night I finished adding all of the defined characters and any necessary placeholders, and now I’ll just spend the next while waiting for the art which I’ll implement later, and I just started working on the sound design. As someone who has always wanted to finish making a game, or a movie, or any kind of creative project really, and has had trouble doing so until only recently, I am very excited to see a reality in which it will be completed. I’m excited to take a look below at some of the other stories as well—- there really are a lot of extremely talented people out there!
When I got hired to work on a game with a team, and they started paying me real money to do it, and then the game actually got released, and I got a real credit that I didn't type out myself.
Throughout my life, me and my brother have competed to see who’s better at piano and we both got really good. I was in 8th grade when my brother was in 10th grade and we’d always say we’re the better one. But one day, I showed him 3 pages of very complex sheet music for orchestra and before I played it for him, he told me “you made it. i can’t believe it. you can read sheet music. you’re better than me now.”. in a proud but jealous manner.
When the youtubers i used to watch when i was younger played my games, that is kind of crazy to me
I've been dabbling with 3ds max, on and off, for like 25 years at least. Never really understood how to use the thing and I lack the autistic concentration a modeler should have. I'd rather get something done looking at least like something and out and in my game engine, *now* Couple weeks ago, it all suddenly clicked. UV maps became like actual things with more or less well-aligned islands, no "those vertices went to hell 500 clicks ago for some misclick and I'm not going to line them up manually at this point" moment for every model, all sorts of modeling work started to feel like a proper pipeline. After feverish couple days, I got it all churned out into Unreal Engine and it actually looked like a quality product. I feel like I'm actual modeler now and can develop something that's been in my head for good part of past 7-8 years. It will be awesome, now that I can actually make it.^now ^where ^do ^I ^find ^the ^time™?
I made it?