Releasing my First Steam Game!

I was first introduced to game development in high school and I started using all my free time to make really bad games there's something so satisfying about creating a character or an idea and watching it come to life on the screen in a very interactive way I eventually released a game on Steam and that game was Bunny Hill [Music] this isn't meant to be a postmortem because I'm still working on Bunny Hill and at the end of the video there's a little bit more information about that but I wanted to make a sort of recap video not only to introduce people to the game and showcase some of the work that went into it that could be insightful for you but also to show a real case study of what releasing a game on Steam could look like and what I believe influenced bunny Hill's reception and lifespan I've worked on the game Loosely over the past four years and the game's reception has been way beyond my expectations overall I'm very happy with how the game did and I'm glad people can enjoy it and play it with their friends in 2020 I left College to return home because of a notable world event and decided that I would make a serious attempt at developing a game something that I had only really toyed around with previously I'd been at school for game art so I had a bit of experience modeling and concept and game ideas but never really put any of them into motion I had the idea for Bunny Hill in a writing class for a small assignment and I decided it was realistic to take it further I still didn't really know what I was doing so the game needed to be simple and Polished and my end goal is to release the game on Steam here's a rough timeline of the development I worked on the game for about seven months before I released it on Steam this kind of put me at a minimum viable product state where it had enough features and enough playability that I felt comfortable releasing it on Steam it was the first big project I'd ever made so I wanted it to feel polished and whole over those seven months I estimated that I worked about 20 to 30 hours a week there were some times when I would not work on it at all sometimes where I would work in excess doing 10 or 12 hour days I tried to always make time for it even if I had something else going on I ended up releasing the game on October 23 2020. the game initially had a fair amount of reception but I really didn't do that much marketing I'd been working with the musical artist guppy to make all the music this really helped boost awareness for the game I'll talk about the marketing uh in a later section of this video I'll try to give a good overview of what I thought was successful and what wasn't after the release I pushed small bug fixes and took some time off from working on the game and then eventually I spent about a month to two months on a new map called the moat I released the moat update on January 28 2021 and I set the game down for a while I decided that the game really just lacked content a lot of the reviews kept saying this is a fun game but it's super small so I wanted to change that update version 1.1 was a big push for the game and it ended up taking me from January 28 2021 to March 16 2022. working very on and off I ended up making two more maps the lush jungle and the lava pass as well as including a time trial mode so people could race on the same generated map repeatedly to get a good speed run time I added a few achievements and I made a few of the characters who are already in the game unlockable as well a lot of people seem to like the game but they weren't playing it for very long so I tried to include more single player content being the time trials unlockable characters things that you could do on your own well you didn't have friends to play with at this time it still only supports local multiplayer this was my first game and online multiplayer is a big challenge to tackle so I ended up just opting for local growing up I enjoyed a lot of local multiplayer games for the GameCube and with many games not supporting it I thought it fitting to try to make one myself after college I got a full-time job doing game development as a programmer I had always been self-taught when it came to programming so at my job I focused on learning Core Concepts and new things that I could apply to my own games as well I've been working on a couple more characters for Bunny Hill that I wanted to release so I put out a small update including four new characters a lot of these characters were influenced by comments I had gotten saying it would be really cool if we saw this kind of character or this kind of character and I think they really add to the game currently I'm working on online for the game so I want to add lobbies where you can host and play with your friends it's still a big challenge but I'm working through it and I think this will be a really good thank you to the people who have stuck around and played the game and enjoyed it for so long they can finally play online with their friends introduce new people to the game and hopefully it'll just make it more accessible now that you sort of have a timeline of the development of the game let's talk about marketing and what work originally I just started making YouTube devlogs for fun they weren't serious at all I had no audience and of course there was no monetization I wanted to make them really to help myself keep track of the work I was doing they're really funny to look back on it definitely shows me how far I've gone it's also pretty humbling to look back and see myself dealing with problems that I deal with today all the old devlogs are uploaded on this channel so if you want to go watch them they're there for you to check out the devlogs would get anywhere from 60 to 100 views and I wouldn't really Garner any following from it once the game is more polished up and I had a trailer and gifts to show people I would post them on Reddit Tumblr Instagram and eventually Twitter I got most of my traffic from Instagram because that's what a lot of my friends use and I'm relatively active on there what ended up really helping the game was working with the musician guppy guppy if you don't know is a electronic music artist and I found out about them in 2020 when I was first listening to 100 gecks and a lot of Roblox Gore on Soundcloud I really like guppy's music I think they're very versatile and they have a really unique sound plus they like to make really fast music uh which I appreciate and that fit the game very well cubby would post the trailer on Twitter and it would Garner about 15 000 views a couple people retweeted it and made some nice comments it's very cool to see people interacting with the game and supporting the musician these tweets really are the only reason it got any reception at all besides Word of Mouth from my friends I submitted the game to the student category for the Indie Games festival and ended up getting an honorable mention what really helped was after update 1.1 I was watching a podcast on YouTube about how to Market games by the YouTuber Mrs and they recommend using tiktok I'd gone on Tick Tock and seen his success so I figured I'd give it a shot not really good at using any social media and I really just like to make the games but marketing is at least 50 of the battle especially if I want to do this full-time as a career I ended up making five tick tocks and waiting to release them I made a tick tock account and then over the course of a week put out all five of them the week I released them I traveled to California for the game developers conference I had done some Gorilla Marketing there which I'm sure helped but my Tick Tock started to blow up most of them would get 10 to 30 000 views but one got all the way up to 230 000 views this made a real change for the game tons of people interacting with it lots of steam sales and I definitely got a lot of suggestions it can be a little overwhelming for that many people to see your game in a short video but I'm glad I got to hear people's feedback at face value most people wanted to see the game support online multiplayer and be ported to consoles a lot of people also asked for mobile as well these are all pretty big tasks for one person but they're all definitely great suggestions I do want to do console ports in the future and maybe mobile too A lot of people waited to buy the game or lost interest because the game didn't really support these features which is totally fair Bunny Hill really is just a console game that you can play on PC I think the last notable marketing thing was that because the tick tock garnered so many views the game ended up in a polygon article someone actually reached out and sent this to me I didn't even know if they were putting in the article but I'm happy they did I'm sure it helped out a little bit I would say if you really want to Market your indie game well it helps a lot if you work with someone who has an audience what helped me gain a small audience was making a new tick tock account tick tock's algorithm really promotes new accounts so it can be a decent option if you don't have a ton of content online already the social media really is the cheapest way to go I did end up running a few paid ads on Instagram and other platforms but they never really got me anywhere I think with a bigger advertising budget more dedicated videos it's feasible to do marketing that way as well I'm not going to get into the hard numbers when it comes to sales but I think it's a good idea to take a look at the sales graph over the lifetime the amount of money I made really is negligible when it comes to surviving off of this kind of stuff but it was a lot more than I expected I have a long way to go if I want to make this work full time I think what's interesting about the sales graph is that it shows you can have a game and it just hasn't really found its audience and once you find the audience you'll get a lot more interaction updates and all that stuff really snowballs the game so more people will check it out I found that the better the game gets the better the reception I think that one's a little obvious but really caring for the games I've made over the past years not letting them just fall to the side has really benefited me you can see a visible Spike on the graph for when I drop the tick tocks I believe when I released the game I had about 300 or so wish lists and now the game has 2 000 wishlists the game usually has about 5 to 10 daily active users which is surprising to me and the average play time is about 30 minutes which I still think is a little bit low I think the online will help get this up the players won't be able to end on a loss or a win so they'll have to play my game forever the game currently has 61 reviews on Steam and is in the very positive category which I'm very grateful for a lot of the reviews are pretty fair in terms of the scope of the game they still acknowledge that it's small or could have more features but they like what's there and they're willing to give it a positive review most of the negative reviews say that the lack of content is too much of a turn off that they can't recommend the game I think that's a fair take as well moving forward I've been working on Bunny Hill online it'll be the next major update for the game and I'll be happy to bring it to the players for free I'll probably end up increasing the cost of the game itself I think I've put a lot of work into it over the past four years and I'll probably increase the price one or two dollars I have a lot of ideas for new modes or maps that could be great but I don't really want to commit a ton of time to an older project as well I would like to do a console port and maybe I'll reach out to a publisher to make that happen and in the very far future I definitely want to make a bunny Hill too I think if it's the game that got me started and I was able to make a living off of making games for a while I'd like to pay homage to that I'd like to really bring the players the features that they want in a full realized way and not just cram them into the first one I hope this is helpful to anyone out there interested in game development as a hobby or trying to make it full time I've been everywhere in the Spectrum from doing it for fun to doing game development for a company to doing it for myself but trying to really make a profit I'm hoping that I'll be able to keep making games and providing people with fun experiences I have a lot of game ideas I'd like to tackle and I'll be chipping away at them for a long time so if you want updates on those feel free to subscribe if you have any ideas for Bunny Hill online I'm in the midst of making it so leave me a comment on things you think I should add I have a Discord if you'd like to join it's pretty quiet so I won't be constantly pinging you I'd love to talk about game design stuff art code music whatever really and I've got another game on Steam as well you can find all my games through the Dogma dot Quest website and I've got a couple more casual projects on itch as well thank you for watching I hope this has been an insightful look into the life cycle of an indie game hello and welcome to this year's new Nature Valley crunchy Maple brown sugar granola bar review I'm delighted to have you with us to enjoy in the sweet Savory experience that is Nature Valley crunchy Maple brown sugar granola bar please feel free to drop a like or a comment and subscribe for next week's granola bar variation or other sweet tasty treat all right all right get out of here

Channel: dogma.questlog

Views: 21,787

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Id: BV9QuDIF5uE

Length: 12min 46sec (766 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 19 2023