Is game releasing supposed to be this bad? ;-;

I'm kind of new here, although I've been designing and developing for my 9th year. I had to self learn everything from Music directing, writing, scripting, art and design between working full time some of the most difficult jobs just to earn a living and have a bit of money to spend on making my projects. Living from pay check to pay check and to support my family I didn't have much of a plan other than to try and learn game developing in my spare time and it became a passion project.

I didn't use Unity for my first game, the last engine I used was polar opposite, 2D only and the engine itself was 10 years old. I knew it wouldn't be enough and I needed a new way to make games, and so my 2nd official game I began the difficult task of using Unity. I was so depressed that my head felt like it wanted to explode at times, my first game flopped and barely made any money back considering I spent almost £1000 over 8 years in development, It took a while to accept and move on with the energy to use another engine. In the 2 months learning how to use Unity and studying YouTube and Unity guides I made a second game as a test run at an expense of around £400 give or take Unity wouldn't refund some items which didn't work. I was able to open a Kickstarter and working my nads off on it at the moment and it's looking like it will bomb. I released the demo which is about 2 hours long, it's as professional as I could take it. Nothing seems to be working out.

I'm not here to promote, you guys seem to have allot of experience. I guess I need to know this is just how it is. I just hope someone with experience can offer some help. It's like I'm being drowned with no reason behind it. I think I make some good quality games, they just don't seem to be enough to go anywhere other than the trash bin.

I also understand if this post is deleted. I just needed to reach out and ask for help. Thanks to anyone who replies.

 

What exactly do you mean by „bad“? How long it takes? How difficult it is to find an audience? How hard it can be to find the strength of cutting features or starting over a feature? How little money you made? How terribly bad and backwards Unity is and that you‘ll be starting over with Unreal, only to find like-minded posts on the Unreal forum saying essentially the same, in reverse?

I suppose all of this is the experience for 99.9% of the devs. Including those that are successful indies - they just made those experiences in the years before. 0.01% are lucky that their hard work paid off. Notch, for instance (though I recall he wasn‘t the happiest despite or because of all the fame and financial success).

But don‘t make it harder on yourself as it need be. I‘d like to have a look at the game you made just so I can see where you are on the road to fame and fortune, I mean, game and fun.

 

Everyone and their dog makes a game nowadays because it has become way easier...
So you do not only have the AAA titles as competition like the previous generation but also lots of other indies.

So yes it is "supposed" to be this bad/hard because that's the result of the ratio between potential customers and products

Are you a marketing talent? Because that is necessary nowadays. Even the successful indies don't really play the long con. They cause ton of hype and then sell the majority in a couple days.
If you are not a marketing talent, try to find one. Managing a community does take time. Hence why publisher companies demand a large percentage of the revenue or charge upfront.

 

Yeah it's really hard. I've found unless you make something people want then it's very hard to convince them to buy it.

 

there are too many games and many of them are fine quality. So, the consumers are extremely spoiled.

If you make something similar to their taste, chances are there is 10 games in their library that are better because they were made by a team. You can't compete with a team.

If you make something different, good luck getting anybody to spend 5 dollars outside their comfort zone.

Perhaps you can discover an unserved niche. Or maybe you are a rockstar and can do something similar to what's worked before, but you can do it better (better meaning the same but slightly different enough to feel fresh).

No matter what though, 8 years to make a game isn't going to work for anybody unless you are like, Rockstar. I think 2 games per year might be a better goal.

 

Did you market your game at all? Like, you don't even have WIP threads here, and running a Kickstarter is not a substitute for marketing. It's easy to scoff at the idea of it, but ain't nobody gonna buy a game or give to a Kickstarter they don't know exists.

 

Did you build a community around your game yet? Twitter? Discord? You might be able to get precious feedback so your time wouldn't be spent badly.

What's the name of your first and second game? We might be able to know more about it if you post up some name and links. Let us support each other wherever possible, devs together strong!

 

Kickstarting a game these days is very hard. You need to have been marketing it for months in advance and even then you either need an established audience that can sing your praises to people that don't know you or a game that is most of the way to completion.

Are they games people want to play though? Some genres (eg zombie survival) have had so many releases that people have grown tired of them and will only consider games that are high quality or have unique mechanics.

Then there are genres like the space combat and exploration genre where the only games available are both high quality and high budget ones like Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, and Starfield. Indies here need a good hook to lure in players or they have virtually no chance.

Yes, I noticed you have almost no presence here and that's a bad thing. One of the best ways to learn a subject is to teach it to someone else. Most of my knowledge of Unity came from trying to answer questions on the forums.

That's just one of the two benefits of these forums though. The second benefit is that your signature is basically a billboard like you would see on a road. The more you post on the forums the more that billboard is placed in front of others to see what you're advertising in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_by_teaching

 

You now have freelance skills. Not everyone can be a rock star but you can play rhythm guitar in a cover band and put bacon on the table.

 

Thanks everyone. I just need to work harder, I'll surely share some work sometime. I have allot more to do.

 

Probably if you try to get more help from as many people as you can, it will multiply your efforts 1,000x.

Just because you are solo-dev doesn't mean there isn't plenty of people who can help you.

 

I'd say you probably need to work smarter, not harder.

You spent 8 years in one project and still took it to completion. You've clearly got the dedication needed. I believe you need to better identify where to put your efforts to have the most effect.

 

If your game is just "good", that's not good enough. Nobody cares anymore about 7/10 games when they can buy thousands of amazing ones for under $10 each. What talented developers work on for years, players will refer to as "something that might be okay as a high school project". Maybe a B- at best. Because in their minds it takes like 2 months to make a good game. How else would there be so many great ones?

I know it's demotivating, but there's also another aspect. I'm sorry to say this, but making a succesful game is like 40% the game itself and 60% marketing. Maybe even more. If you make a PC game, you absolutely need to get it out to Twitch streamers or be incredibly lucky in some other way. If you make a mobile game, you need to advertise the crap out of it. And if you have a game that is not Twitch material, then there's a 99% chance nobody will care about it. That's just the world we live in now.

 

If you share your game, maybe people can give you feedback on it. If the game happens to be brilliant, then it's just a marketing/getting it seen problem.

 

Make sure you look after yourself. Working harder is great, up to a point. After that it hurts more than it helps.

So it's just as important to work smart as it is to work hard. Put your effort where it's most valuable, use tools to do what a human isn't needed for, and invest in learning stuff which will increase the value of your future effort.

 

You got something here. But it is barely capturing. In fact it is really boring. You need to show more of game play. Something fun, capturing and engaging. Look in the net for various trailers. Learn how they were made. Make trailer for your game.

Mind, showcasing halve of decade to make such game, with what you got so far, will definatelly not win you kickstarter. Not alone.

No one will invest $ on he game, which few features will be added in next halve of decade. And that besides the points other already made.

Checkout kickstarter won and failed projects. Learn what it takes. Investing few hrs will save you days and weeks of preparation and disappointment.

Your best bet is to sell in steam for few $. If you lucky, you may get few sells.

But again, as already pointed out by others, start damm marketing. You can spend 0$, but put some effort and time, to get an audience.

 

I feel as if 'like Pokemon' is kind of fighting a losing battle. There are a lot of Pokemon clones (not saying yours is), and very few stack up to the titanic franchise despite it's meandering in recent years (though some of the new games are pretty popular I hear).

In 99% of cases when someone wants Pokemon or similar, they'll go with Pokemon. I say this as a Pokemon enthusiast who's looked at a lot of clones.

It takes a bit to get yourself out from under the shadow cast by the Pokemon franchise. Digimon does so by aiming itself more towards teens/young adults these days, what with their Cybersleuth games (good games, by the way).

 

Honestly since ever I played Zanzarah, I was lounging for a pokemon inspired game that is has no turn based mechanics but allows you to properly control your powerful little beast.

 

Your competing with a constant stream of about 29 new games a day from steam.

Itch.io has had over 265 new games in the last day.

YouTube has 500 hours of new content uploaded every minute.

Or your content has to be the in the top 1% to make an impact on it's first day 0.1% to last a week, 0.03% to last a month, 0.0027397% to last a year.

Imagine if your business model was to hire the top 0.001% game dev team, game designer, programmer, artists, musicians and make a game what budget would you need?

 

You have to make a game that a large amount of people want to play. It has to be in some way better than similar games so that they will want to play yours instead. Then you have to make sure you effectively tell people about your game and why it is better than other similar games. On top of all that you have to (as Arowx pointed out) do those things while tens of thousands of other developers are trying to do the exact same thing.

Yes this requires a lot of time and effort. But no amount of time and effort guarantees you any results. I am sure you know, like we all do, someone who sing/plays music/paints/etc who has been doing it all their life and isn't successful. It is difficult to be objective about our own work. And there simply is no simple solution to success. Even if there was, everyone would have it and we would be back in the same boat.

The only positive advice I can give you is to make sure you love making games for the sake of making games. That way if something doesn't work, at least the experience is worth it and fun.

 

Here's the trick that I think a lot of people don't get.

If you do even the most cursory amount of marketing and tiniest bit of seeking out relevant communities that might mesh with your game?

You have already done more work than 99% of developers.

The thing about this whole "everyone is putting out games" thing is that that's absolutely true! And nobody buys them! Not necessarily because they're bad games, but because a lot of indie devs have bought into the lie of "a good game always finds an audience."

A good game doesn't find an audience, but a good marketer finds an audience for their game.

 

Then won't your marketing have to be in the top 1% of marketing* to attract gamers to your game and you would still need a very good to great game to keep them and spread the word.

*How many adverts are your potential audience shown every day?

 

At this level it comes way less down to the skill of the individual contributors but more at how well they manage to work together as a team and all find the same vision for the project.

Think he didn't mean plain marketing in form of ads thrown around (which are only by chance finding the right people), but contributing in forums about the specific genre, using twitter, reddit and facebook efficiently, sharing material ahead of time, having a solid early-access campaign (with a short demo mode, not "here's the whole game but very unpolished and buggy") and so on.

Yes, top 1% marketing if we talk about Undertale-level of success, makes sense but that's way more feasible than having the "top 0.001% game dev team".

 

Not really, no. You're just making up numbers entirely because you're treating this like a zero sum game. People tend to buy multiple things, and there's actually next to no marketing done even when people do do it. Marketing isn't just ads. Marketing is also...

It's not just putting money into ads, but putting in the legwork to find and build communities. It's about running Discord servers and subreddits; it's about regular preview posts before release, either full or early access; it's about making sure your game is actually known to exist.

You really don't.

 

In addition to all that, its also about that any adspend is spent in exactly the right place. Sticking ads on FB or some random ad service is almost pointless. You have find who your players are and where your players are and then get your game in front of them.

Several years back, targeted marketing, community building/management was "extra". Now it is pretty much required to get any level of success.

 

This guy used FB ads successfully. $30/day for sale events resulted in 10% of his traffic, which is significant and apparently better than most social networks for their game traffic wise: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/vdkwp8/retrospective_3_years_early_access_384000_net/

Conversion is another matter though, but at the very least it helps with Steam's algorithm.

 

I think you just need to know what platform your audience exist on.

For me Twitter is a zero response zone. Reddit and IMGUR is always productive, but that is because i can go straight to subreddits for my specific niche. Facebook has a few communities for my niche be my god do I hate going on facebook.

I suppose it is easier if you have a super niche title where you can directly search your audience. For the OP with a pokemon style game, I think that's gonna be super tough because you are going head to head with the biggest competitors.

 

Yeah marketing is not a magic bullet, even if 8 billions see the game, but not want OR can buy it, that's not going to help. You have to compromise toward an audience, how much you compromise is all arts dilemma. Apparently you are making a pokemon clone? Character appeal is huge in these games, if you can have a community on the characters you might have a chance, also it's easier to test before commiting, sharing art is cheaper than making a full game. If the game system are already here, you can probably use art to probe various audience gathering points, and then refine until it appeal to them, then probably reskin the game with the lessons learned.

 

I'd say "several" downplays just how long this has been almost critically important for indies. If I was to put a year on it, I'd go with 2014. Around then you had to deal with the fact that Steam Greenlight was no longer good enough on its own as a promotional tool (that ended in early 2013) but you also had to deal with how games on Kickstarter had exploded and changed the way people viewed the development and release process. Add to that with how Steam launched its dedicated Early Access section in 2013 and you've basically hit a point where you had to do your legwork.

 

Discussing ime is a little weird now. 2014 is probably a good point for steam era of PC type games, figure 2012-2016 for mobile and and maybe 2010-2012 for social. Also figure 2002-2008 for early PC/Mac games for indies. (though at that point a fair amount of skill was required just make a game and best result was making just a living, not getting rich or anything). Early days of most platform give devs a chance to ride marketing of the platform (and scarcity).

 

You do realise you can target Facebook ads right down to the age, hobbies etc of the target audience? I develop a pretty successful fishing game (for a solo dev) and I target males who are interested in fishing and video games. Simple.

 

There's a lot of interesting advice here, but not sure how much is from actual experience.

My 1st game was made in a month (was learning to develop games too) and was a Quadcopter Simulator, made because I couldn't find one at the time, all I found were people asking for one so i made one. This sold pretty well.

My 2nd game was a fishing sim, made because people (myself included) wanted a more realistic fishing sim based on the UK fishing, most were American arcade bass fishing game. Released 8 years ago and still sells and is my main source of income, over 200,000 copies sold across mobile and PC. I'm still working on it, updating it and releasing it on all consoles this year.

I've made around 8 other failed games that were released.

So here's my own personal notes of the past 10 years being a full time solo game dev, make of them what you will.

1. Be careful announcing your game too soon, you might think it's wise to "get in early" with the community building, but it's hard for people to get excited for something years away. It's far easier to start building hype and interest when you have a lot of content to show and even have a demo or early access available.

2. Try to give people what they want. It's not easy but you need to look to existing games that are similar to what you're making and see what people do/don't like and try to keep that in mind. You can't just make another puzzle platformer for example and expect people to get exited if it has nothing new.

3. Be careful of taking people's money early. Too many people think the answer to success is early access or kickstarter. If you're a solo dev, chances are you work to your own pace and that can be good for mental health. Once you start accepting money from people, the pressure builds. I had my fishing game in early access for years. I had a playbase with pitchforks demanding updates, leaving negative reviews and it cause me a lot of stress and depression. I've had many games I started on over the years get shelved for one reason or another, if I'd taken peoples money for those, imagine how stressful that would be?

So to sum it up, and these are my own thoughts, based on my own experiences:

Find something that's different from other games, or a subject that's not had a game made of it.
Get plenty of work done on your game before you start to show it off, it makes people easier to get hyped for it.
Don't take money too early unless you can't complete the game without it as it causes a lot of stress.

Good luck!

 

What's the current breakdown of the ages of the people most likely to be brought in by the ads? The thing about Facebook as a platform is that it's increasingly skewing towards higher age ranges and that can have a significant impact on ad effectiveness. I've seen that, targeted or not, that ads are becoming decreasingly effective on ages 17-24.

 

On the opposite side, you can get the dev of the game as "content" rather than the game, a lot of devlogger advise the exact oppose due to that, if you are good you can monetize the dev of the game under the guise of tutorial or essay on game dev, which attract early adopter.

 

True but that's even more work to your workload. I guess it depends on the scope of the game and the dev

 

I think that's a big improvement from before.

But who is the audience? It's pretty young right?

Just my speculations but I'd think shorter, faster, say less specific stuff (character by character intros), focus more on a few broad themes (collect! battle! train!, etc), use more custom made art and less in-game footage, will make for a more stand-out and high-quality seeming trailer.

I think someone else mentioned the appeal of these games is in characters - you have some cute designed monsters so maybe if you are intro'ing characters you can have an explosive splash of custom art for the character that focuses on silhouette and color, just show off like one quick dynamic attack they do, and keep it at faster pace.

Anyway, that will be a mountain of work and to do it well you probably want somebody with great video editing experience. But just thought I'd offer some C&C in case its useful. Even if the game were a broken mess, I think it looks good enough to sell some copies, but I think you'll have to refine your marketing material until its good enough to get people pumped up for the game.

IN general I think you got to focus not so much on explaining but more just on suggesting an experience. And the broader you suggest, the more people can write their own fantasies into it.

edit:

Oh, and maybe more important, what is the hook? Whats unique about the game? Why is it different from competitor? Probably should focus on communicating that in a quick, clever way.

 

Didn't even realize till now that the kickstarter is already running! You gotta make MUCH more fuss around such a thing!
Splash screens at the end of the video ("ON KICKSTARTER - NOW!"), put it clearly in the title etc. (not just mention that there's a "kickstarter reward feature" at some point).
Also add a pinned comment on every video that links there. Instead none of your videos even link it in the description. I had to google it...
So YT is essentially inexistent for you when it comes to bringing people to the campaign.

Do you have any friend who was popular in school or college? Those people usually are good at basic marketing\community building even without dedicated education in that field

 

I think if we're being fair about people's expectations vs the reality we need to look at the marketing epic and unity put out. It's all roses and dreams, platforms and big money talk with some amazing success stories.

Can't blame those poor deers in headlights.

 

Thanks so much, I'm learning allot about to bring out the main points which I find the most difficult. I actually might need to delete the trailer though as one of the Models I purchased isn't available and the developer has left the store after 10 days of purchasing, I'm seeking some advice from Unity support, but I could get in trouble if I continue to use it based on what I've been told, so I've got to look at deleting the demo and anything else I put out in digital format with the model. I just have to await support to find out what I should do. It's going to be a rough week. That's my Kickstarter buried. Now going back in to Unity to sort out the demo content.

 

No problem.

You'll never make it perfect so just make reasonable effort with time you have but get the stinking thing published.

Biggest improvements will come from sequel once you have time to focus on lessons learned.

 

The biggest lesson people learn when shipping, is that you learn what is a waste of time and what is not. You can't find that in books, and I doubt people articulate it well even if they know it. So that's the main reason the next are generally better, because you put your time into more useful actions and don't waste it on useless actions. We're still human so we do still stumble, it just gets less over time.

Almost as if it's like learning from experience, hehe.

 

I don't want to be mean, as I can see you put a lot of work into this. And I'm sure the game is fun and all... but the thing is that it looks like most of the assets just don't fit together and were randomly downloaded from various asset packs. It feels like VRChat, where people put in their own models and everything's all over the place. The game just doesn't have any cohesive artstyle and therefore does not look appealing to me.

The graphics are the first thing people see. Although in my opinion graphical fidelity absolutely does not matter, artstyle and art direction do. The game has to feel cohesive, because otherwise people will just glance over it without even looking at the gameplay.

Just ask yourself this - if you scrolled through Steam and saw screenshots of your game, would you want to buy it? If not, why not? If yes, why do you think other people might not?

 

Obviously. But you need solid analytical data to determine that target. And FB is literally one the lowest returns on ad spend on any platform. The data is "dirty". (for a variety of reasons) and even with well targeted ads, the acquired users from that source are very low to convert. Good for testing cpi and such, but not great for actually monetizing.

 

NOTE: while discussing marketing/development is valid here, promoting your game is not. Please do not post links to your game or related marketing in General Discussion. Links/videos have been removed.

 

To be fair we were asking for them to better inform our opinions.

 

Well, don't do that.
If anyone wants feedback on a game (released or in progress), or marketing of that game. Point them to posting their project in either:
https://forum.unity.com/categories/works-in-progress.673/
or
https://forum.unity.com/forums/made-with-unity.11/

(or if an asset, one of those forums).

While I don't see this as the case with the OP, people will take any chance they can to drive traffic. So no promotion outside those places. This is general discussion, not specific discussion.

 

Yes, I apologise, I wasn't sure about posting any graphics or videos. I added the trailer just for a demonstration of the game I've been working on. There are no links on the video or anything leading to game pages. Sorry about this.

I understand that the graphics aren't so good. I'm keeping options open for mobile and so I've learned about lighting and optimizing the graphics without using Post Processing or URP at all. It's an uphill climb to make the graphics look good, I'll surely keep trying to blend everything together.

The monsters surely were mostly free ones, made a few purchases so I could just test the waters. I have spent money on the project, most expensive would be the engine and extra editing tools. I just needed to paint a picture and see how it turned out.

It's a growing process and thanks again for the help and comments here. I think most important is to make sure the game is understandable. I've had some feedback and seen a video of someone play and there's still that gap between playing and understanding how to play. It's vital and I'm hoping to get through that barrier.



I've learned about how to use a canvas and that has really helped and I made some sweeping changes that I hope will help the player. I just want to do a good job.

 

Which is completely fine if by mobile you mean a platform like Nintendo's Switch. PC gamers have very different expectations from those who play games on Android and iOS. I don't think the graphics look bad but they look dated and part of that is the lack of post processing. Just adding some of it can make a huge difference.

On the topic of performance it's easy to write a script to swap between different post processing profiles, or if you want more fine-tuned control you can manipulate the profile itself. So don't feel like you need to avoid it completely to support as many platforms as possible.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.postprocessing@3.2/manual/Manipulating-the-Stack.html

 

Add shadows, and you might experiment with multiple directional lights from different directions (I forgot the name of such a setup) but only sun cast the shadows.

 

Some notes of things OP could improve from what I have seen:

- There appears to be no shadows in the picture and videos. This already would turn away many people on PC from ever playing this.

- A lot of the UI clashes against each other as if made for different games.

- Appears to be no post processing at all. At the very least some color correction could make things pop a little, by why stop there, why not a bit of AO etc?

- A lot of assets seem to come from the store especially monsters, which in a pokemon-like game is a big no-no, at the very least have someone make the monsters or at least retexture them, so they appear slightly more unique (and so that they all fit together style wise)

- A lot of the art assets in general clash, as if made for different games. Having a unified modelling and texturing style (an art style) for your game would really help here. You can really see the difference in style in textures for example.

- From what I saw in the video, the animation quality is seriously varied - some look good some look really bad and the style of animation clashes between many shown.

In general nothing in the pictures or video (now removed) shown looks ready to do a kickstarter or anything like that, this definitely looks like pre-alpha or alpha material at best in current form.

I recommend spending some time polishing, and to be smarter with how you spend your money in the future if you want to get funding or sales. Spending a bunch of money on art assets that come from a generic store and are not unique and combining them all together, is not a good path to success on a kickstarter. Can you make a good game with bought 3d assets? Yes! But will it likely get funded? Unfortunately thats a resounding no in almost all cases.

You would have been better off spending that money on upwork or similar website by hiring a freelancer to make some models, than buy many of the conflicting assets you have bought. Its actually surprising how cheap you can get freelancers on upwork, due to many talented individuals living in low income countries working remotely.

Also I saw absolutely no promotion prior to hearing about this kickstarter. You dont just launch a kickstarter or funding campaign, you build up to it and build an audience before you launch it. You also should look at successful kickstarter pages and compare to your own, as yours is lacking a lot of graphics and formatting etc that you see on "winning" entries.

Good luck With the right changes and mindset, you could save this and turn it around, but yeah its going to take a lot more work and time to get this to a point where it will do as successfully as you are hoping.