A Complete Timeline of my First Indie Game (2 Years of Work)

Описание: 📩 I share more info like this, tips and behind-the-scenes in my newsletter: https://blobfish.dev

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🐱‍👤 Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/dev/bl...
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🎮 Space Gladiators: https://store.steampowered.com/app/11...
🥔 Lost Potato: https://store.steampowered.com/app/13...

Special thanks to all of the following creators for their involvement with the game (and everyone else who played or contributed to the game in some way!):
Olexa:    / olexakid64  
2 Left Thumbs:    / @graemegames  
Northernlion:    / northernlion  
TheTurtleMelon:    / @theturtlemelon  
Rogue Justice:    / @roguejustice  
Sensei Bean:    / @senseisenzubean  
2 Lainz:    • Sleeper Hit Roguelite? - Space Gladiators ...  

Music by Aron '0uter' Ahlam

I started working on my first indie game on November 11th, 2018. I had just followed a few tutorials to learn my engine but I already knew how to code from being a web developer for 2 years prior to that.

During the first ~100 days, I was basically by myself. I worked alone on my game without getting much feedback nor interacting with anyone online.

I was just trying to learn as much as possible on the art of being a gamedev by watching conferences & videos and by reading articles.

After 163 days of work, I had a working vertical slice / demo that I was able to post on itch.io. The game is a rogue-lite which means every time you die you start over from the beginning. My plan was to have 3 zones in total that could be completed in around 45mn. So for this demo I made only the first zone which represented around 10-15mn of gameplay if you didn't die (but in reality most people kept dying so it took them 1-2 hours to complete).

I basically started treating it as an early access build by updating it regularly and publishing patch notes on the itch.io page.

The game got played by a few early YouTubers which gave me a lot of motivation to keep working on it. Some of them have been following the project ever since! The demo got downloaded 1,013 times in total.

I learned the importance of gathering player feedback to improve the game because there are tons of things that you can't see anymore when you've been working on your game for so long by yourself (especially the difficulty). This has solidified my idea of doing early access.

After that I started working on creating the full content for my game by myself again. I worked the whole summer of 2019 to create content and setup the steam page on August 16th, 2019.

On October 21th, 2019 or 344 days after I started working on the game, I launched it into Early Access.

I had no idea what I was doing and I wasn't too confident in my game so I sold only 12 copies on the first day and 20 copies in the month of October.

I was afraid it might just not work and crash or that people would hate it so I wanted as little people as possible to see it at first. And I knew I would want to improve it more before a lot of people saw it.

So I went back into the cycle of publishing updates and getting feedback. I saw a lot of improvements that could be made to the game so I still didn't contact a lot of content creators.

At some point I noticed that what was keeping the game back was the lack of diversity in the runs. So I spent 2 months working on a big update that would add 371 new rooms and 21 new enemies.

At this point I became confident that the game was in a good state and that I could start showing it to more people. So I decided to use this big update as a "second launch" and I timed it with the first ever discount of the game (10%) and I contacted a lot of creators with bigger audiences.

Before April 21th 2020, I had sold less than 100 copies total. (in 183 days of early access)

On April 27th, 2020, Northernlion (a big YouTuber with 815k subscribers) made a video about the game. This resulted in the highest spike for the game ever and 173 copies sold in 1 day. I basically considered this the real launch of the game.

Before that I was only focused on improving the game as much as I could and I spent no time on marketing it at all. After that point I started taking it more seriously and took part in sales, contacted more creators, worked more with the community etc.

Since then, I've sold about 1200 copies and I'm still regularly updating the game. It's been around 670 days since I started working on the game and 320 days since the early access launch and I estimate we still have a few months to go before the actual 1.0 launch.