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At the beginning of the month I released my small roguelike project, WINNUKE into the world.
I've been a game development tinkerer for a couple of years now, but I've never really finished anything due to scope creep, my lack of art skills or just sometimes getting bored and moving on to something else. THe goal of WINNUKE was to be an exercise in aggressively scoping a game and sticking to it. The majority of hte game was written in a month during my commute to and from work on the bus.
I settled on a pretty abstract art style which is pretty easy to create assets for and I feel doesn't look half bad.
I initially demoed the game to some IRL friends and an IRC channel I frequently hang out in. After a few weeks of additional work fixing bugs and finishing things off, I felt that the game was stable enough that it could be released for public consumption. Having never released a game before, I was pretty anxious about the whole thing. What if people hated it? What if it just didn't work? Ultimately I ripped off the bandaid and hit publish.
It turns out if you have a game on Itch.io set as "Restricted" and then change it to public, you miss out on being on the "new games" feeds as you get crowded out by everybody else. So that wasn't great for visibility!
I shared the link around on Mastodon, Reddit and Tildes.net (also I made a new account on Reddit for it and have only posted one link in a couple of subs so I'm pretty sure that account is shadowbanned now) and received generally favourable reviews!
At the time of writing, around 30 people have downloaded the game. Honestly I'm pretty happy with that uptake given that the game is pretty niche and I did virtually no marketing in the leadup to releasing it.
The lessons I've learned for next time are to market early and often if I want to actually get eyeballs on this thing, and don't be afraid of simple art styles. I'm not an artist, I'm a software engineer!
I've largely finished this game, I'll continue to support it as bug reports come in but I'm starting to think about the next project.
Watch this space.