[Music] trade here and til we going to be a famous successful gladi everybody I'm checking out a game called are about to die boys 100,000 Fame has earned his let me tell you a tale dear viewer of a guy who made a game without a publisher and without any budget and I'm going to tell you exactly how it blew up Against All Odds that game is called we are about to die it's a gladiator game that I launched about a year ago it has physics-based directional combat it's a Rog light perade death it's hardcore difficult a little bit weird a little bit different and wow I mean making this thing completely changed my life at this point the game is doodo it is buggy has bad game feel it's completely undercooked and worst of all nobody cares but I had some dedicated members in the Discord shout out to all three of you who gave me some amazing feedback and they helped me find bugs to fix and improve the game overall I decided to make a demo so I went into overdrive to finish it in time I also collected over a thousand emails of YouTubers and journalists and I asked them all to play my out Dear everyone please please look at my game thanks no one replied but there there was good news my demo was being played by some people on Steam and my numbers went from abysmal to [Music] bad all this was preparation for a festival on Steam called steam nextfest you get one chance to appear with your demo and show it to the world I was nervous I mean this was make or Breck I started okay the game was not really visible it was many many pages deep but I started to get some wish list on the first day but then this happened look at this I will destroy anyone in my way what's up guys the gals welcome back to the nerd Castle today in the world of Indie Games we're going to be checking out the demo for we who are about to die you have to understand this was the first recognition I had ever gotten in years the next day I woke up to this I had been grinding for literal years to get from here to here here that's 7,000 wish lists and I got 2,100 wish lists in a day in one day I can't even express to you how unbelievable this is before I would make a post and it would get 60 wish lists and I would literally be euphoric 2,100 wow for reference uh today one year after launch the game has 371,000 wish lists over the next few days during the festival the game Rose and it came onto the third page and the second page pretty consistently and on some specific genre filters it was all the way on the first page it just climbed and climbed I came in with no momentum and no publisher boosting me and somehow the game just climbed and climbed and climbed by the end of next test I had gone from 7,000 wish list to 21,000 wish lists my motivation was just like I decided to release the game the next winter but I realized I would need complete full focus in order to be able to get there there was a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it I asked my real job hey is it cool if I take like a 6 month break like it's actually finally happening and it means a lot to me also there's a minuscule tiny tiny chance that it if it goes well I'll probably quit by the way yeah that's fine good luck so I got to work [Music] [Music] one eternity later current situation let's go through the list mentally and physically exhausted but I don't care anxiety levels over 9,000 the game game it's okay wish lists 35,000 it kept going strong after next Fest and there was another Festival that went really well called tiny teams thank you y's cast and in the meantime I had carefully planned the launch week and the launch day let's look at these two though guys when I say I carefully planned launch week what I mean is with the psychotic levels of detail that can only be driven by years of sunk cost fallacy and anxiety over this one day this one chance I mean I went and planned every single hour of launch week with a tight schedule well in advance I mean I went on Steam DB and I carefully systematically mapped out every single release of all other games in order to calculate which day would be most optimal for my game to release and then one Weeks Later unexpectedly a bunch of big games moved their release date on November 15th including a big Rog light I realized I'm like a little Indie de Solo ant and my superpow is flexibility and nobody nobody cared anyway so I was like JK L the gamees coming out November 14th anyway over the past years I had been fine-tuning and learning the ins and outs of steam's inner workings and I used it to form a plan to maximize my chances I had this theory that releasing on a Monday is actually not as bad as everyone says people say it's the worst day and November 14th happened to be a Monday it was perfect but I didn't stop there I actually went through the popular upcoming list and I systematically recreated the November 14th popular upcoming list including my game months in advance using Photoshop why so that I could look at what game is above me below me and so on and maximize my capsule the art that people see on Steam for contrast and color in order for it to stand out the most and I actually pushed my release date by minutes in order to move up and down this list this is just normal stuff status Fallout cool hey smoth skin here it is the final week the one that I had been planning for God knows how long I was adding major changes to the game all the way up to launch dat but other than that most things were carefully planned like I said so I was just executing one by one each of these tasks I made post after post after post everywhere I planned at the exact minute and everything went viral after years of marketing and failure after failure on launch week just when it needed to everything went right things blew up left and right I mean I got more views in a week than I had had in literally years I had one of the largest Indie Game Dev posts on N ever I'd been building a little Community there and around launch it just blew up it just blew up even my Tik Tok post blew up a platform that I wasn't even on by Thursday my game had hit popular up coming here it is on the front page of steam just like planned for real remember when I said that I had a theory on why Mondays aren't so bad after all Let Me Explain Early Access games get to go on popular upcoming but they don't get to go on new releases most devs don't even know this so when you're An Early Access release you really want to be on popular upcoming the longest possible time it's it's literally all you have that's your 15 minutes of fame the front page of steam is visited by millions of people so it's just about being there the longest that you possibly can so so to maximize my time what I did is I looked for a period of time where there were very few games that had gone beyond the steam filter meaning that they get to go on popular upcoming on the front page I was looking especially for Thursdays and Fridays that were really calm but also Mondays in general and that's how I landed on the fmer 14th you see the Thursday before almost no games came out and Friday was very very calm compared to a normal Friday that meant that my game crept up on the list and actually entered the top 10 of popular upcoming Thursday evening after the bulk of Thursday's games released so all night and evening Thursday the game was on front page all of Friday it climbed slowly in the list until it sort of sat where I expected it to for the weekend why for the weekend cuz no games come out on the weekend at all on Steam it's not allowed again something that a lot of devs surprisingly don't know so Saturday Sunday it's locked right I get two complete free days of exposure and then Monday it just slowly gets up to its final position where it sits all day until I hit release which was 600 p.m. my time with this plan and all the virality in the last week before launch the game went from 35,000 wish lists to 58,000 wish lists it almost doubled I couldn't believe my eyes I'm not even feeling emotions at this point I'm just on autopilot I'm a machine overworked tired and I have one goal in mind and that is to do everything as carefully and as correct as I had planned that's it launch day is here zero sleep I mean there was no chance I was sleeping even a minute I get up in the middle of the night and I start my schedule minute by minute hour by hour my plan was to contact everyone I've ever known basically and try to get them to look at the game to visit to buy the game and to potentially even review it and I just spend all day pulling every string that I can until 600 p.m. the release build is online and ready and all this virality in the last week had brought a ton of people to Discord there was already a little community that was very dedicated and active and the excitement was humbling it was time we you were about to die salute you today so that's [Music] it after I hit release I just continue I purposefully didn't look at my sales because if I don't look can't be a flop shiringer sales but 5 hours pass and curiosity gets the better of me I decide to just have a glance I refresh my page and I see it's not a flop it is not a flop in fact it's better than my best case scenario for the first year in five hours I'm getting Goosebumps just just you know reminiscing here my dream the whole time I was making this game was to get 10,000 sales in its lifetime that was the number that I was focused on the whole time that's just what I wanted to get uh while I was developing it and 24 hours after the I hit the launch button uh 12,000 people had bought the game a tsunami of attention hit me I started getting emails from journalists people were messaging me through every profile that I've ever made and I was pretty on point here I followed the traffic on the steam page real time and then I if I saw a big spike I knew that there was either a stream or a YouTube video that just came out and I would go to that YouTube video and then put a comment there and thank people for uh playing my game and having a look and this just continues and it doesn't slow down not for a while and uh I quit my job it took days for any of this to hit me at all uh and then would go away again and then it would come back a few days later in waves took weeks until I finally had a moment where I cried of happiness for the first time ever over the next weeks and months I had a few more of those moments and honestly even a year later now I'm still very much processing all this stuff I mean it's I can't express to you the craziness that I've experienced uh in the last year I'm trying though all this was like wildly beyond anything that I was dreaming of and I was dreaming big I know 10,000 sales doesn't sound like a lot but in back of my head I was always like maybe this will blow up even more and so I had some scenarios in mind where it would go like really crazy and the game did 20x those craziest scenarios making a commercial Successful video game had been on my mind since I was like 15 years old and it took everything to get here it took dozens of skills it took years and I planned my whole life around this thing we who were about to die was a global top seller it's a 1% solo Dev game and it's also one of the most successful Belgian video games of all time it still feels like a dream it's uh there's no way for me to par that something that you know it's an experience that very few people on this planet have experienced and there hasn't been a a day that has gone by in the last year where I didn't wake up and just you know realize that I'm now finally a real game developer uh full-time and I probably will be for the rest of my life in fact I actually have a game studio now I'm not alone anymore which is amazing so much has happened in the last year it's felt like a week long and it's felt like 10 years at the same time I took a really long break got to take care of yourselves people I made several updates um I went to GDC and and then later to Gamescom and there I met dozens of amazing developers and some of which had very similar stories which was really really nice we even released our first major update just a few months ago the game is in Early Access and we have some really awesome plans with it there's too much to tell right now about the last year let alone the rest of development but if you'd like to see more videos just like this one let me know put a comment Down Below on what kind of video You' like to see most And subscribe to the channel but most of all go check out the game there's a discount going on to celebrate the anniversary and we also put up an update to go with it listen I couldn't have done any of this with without some very important people in my life standing by my side and thank you you know who you are I also couldn't have done this without the community you for your support for your feedback for your reviews your bug reports everything thank you from the bottom of my heart my name is Jordy we who are about to die salute you thank you for watching peace out it's 3:00 a.m. I'm 32 years old what am I doing it was [Music] fun
