Dude I love your game. Been playing it on steam deck, thanks for putting good controller support in!
Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam
301–310 of 379 posts
Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam
#302We should thank Meta for laying off a talented engineer.
Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
RE: "Make sure your hook is glowingly radioactively good. Don't overbalance. Leave in some jank. Scope down and finish quickly. And avoid tropes. Stand out." For games with a limited run time is it possible to balance this against Steam's 2 hour return policy? Feel like we're now trapped in a position where you can make short little proof of concepts on itch but when it comes to trying to make something professional…
This is very much personal opinion but if you can blast through all of a games content within 2 hours of purchase it wasn't finished / big enough to justify a financial transaction in the first place.
Two hours is about movie or novella worth of content. Both are priced at about the same rate. Not all games have to have 10s or 100s of hours of content. Today, I expect a big(ger) part of gamers are like me: older people who like games, but can only game a few hours a week. Last non-4X game I fully played was CoD2. That was 2005.
Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
RE: "Make sure your hook is glowingly radioactively good. Don't overbalance. Leave in some jank. Scope down and finish quickly. And avoid tropes. Stand out." For games with a limited run time is it possible to balance this against Steam's 2 hour return policy? Feel like we're now trapped in a position where you can make short little proof of concepts on itch but when it comes to trying to make something professional…
This is very much personal opinion but if you can blast through all of a games content within 2 hours of purchase it wasn't finished / big enough to justify a financial transaction in the first place.
Honestly, that could go both ways. Like I'll happily pay cost-of-small-game to watch a movie that will be over in two hours, and there's a whole category now of single-sitting games like Journey, Minit, A Short Hike, etc, that are easily able to be completed in that timeframe but are obviously worth their modest purchase price.
To some of us adult gamers with actual lives and commitments, having something that can be completed in 1-4 sittings is a huge boon, like okay this is a thing I can do without abandoning my family for the next two weeks.
Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam
#305I'm helping an enthusiastic young adult family member write an indie game in a similar space. I'm a professional software engineer in the full stack/security space but I don't have much experience in graphics or games. We would be thrilled just to get it implemented, and we're close, on steam, and get a couple real players. Currently it's running in the browser and on android.
I think he has very good taste in games, and is learning to code very quickly, so I'm acting in a supporting technical role.
-- What are the crucial skills, technical or otherwise, that I should learn to be effective in this space?
-- We're currently using the Godot environment, which feels a bit limiting to me (easy to start but: IDE is just ok, config feels GUI dependent/doesn't facilitate committing atomic deployment or other project changes...) Is there a different stack, or other complimentary tools I could learn that might be a better fit for a more professional dev workflow?
Thank you for the inspiration. :)
Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam
#306Incredible work, Brian! I'm in awe of what you've done in such a short amount of time. I started an indie game company (still working on our first title) and had a few related questions if that's OK? 1) If you didn't need a salary or marketing help, would you still have signed a publishing deal? My sense is most of the publisher value lies in getting paid before the game launches, and with marketing around launch, bu…
Thanks Rand! 1) It obviously varies w/ each dev's situation, but I think your sense of the value prop is a fair default one w/o context. In my case, there were four reasons: 1) having a partner to help with (to me) "the unknown unknowns" (i'm only a dev and a novice designer, literally anything else would be my first time doing it, so i figured having an experienced partner there would be wise) 2) the advance was nic…
In your case, what do you think your glowing hook was?
Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam
#307Good trick is also sell steam keys in bulk. But you need a reason for steam support :)
Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
even with a publisher, 200k copies at launch for a very small indie team is easily on pace for the 1%. https://intoindiegames.com/features/how-much-money-do-steam-... TBH I forgot the 1% was so high, even for an indie. But network effects are crazy, so getting to 700k will eventually be a thing.
That article is 5 years old. Sadly the article lacks a date, but you can tell because it claims Steam is 15 years old, when it had its 22 anniversary last year. Next that 7M number is for self-published games. Aka, games where the dev is listed as the publisher. OP has Raw Fury as his publisher. Next Raw Fury posted their contract publically a while ago: it is a pretty harsh contract. 50/50 split, but there is a prof…
He mentioned the publisher got him the artist, which is a very big component in the games success.
Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam
#309I love the animated stickman! building myself html games myself[1] with my own game engine. Getting players is really hard. I was betting on SEO, but results will take a long time. do you think getting a publisher worth it? I was reluctant putting the game on steam too since I think the target players wont be there Happy to hear recommendations! https://pixelbrawlgames.com/game/blast
1v1.lol is fun! The mouse movement gets janky at times but I had a blast
Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam
#310Have you considered porting to mobile? Looks like it could do well, either independent or part of something like Apple Arcade or Netflix Games.