#indie game

[twoandahalfstudios]

Here's a first look (listen?) at the English voice acting that will be added to A Date with Death, all thanks to everyone supporting our Kickstarter!

We're happy to have the wonderful @ImMrTransistor on board again to bring Casper to life.

Voice acting may release after Beyond the Bet is complete - we're still seeing how long each will take to record, edit and implement (it's a lot of lines!!!)

You'll be able to choose between English and Japanese voice acting, or neither if you prefer to voice him yourself.

Don't forget to check out our Kickstarter if you haven't already, too!

[devsgames]

Bombing!! 2: A Graffiti Paradise Available Now!

Bombing!! 2: A Graffiti Paradise is a game I made by myself where you can paint on anything! 8 Levels to paint and explore, a wide selection of paint tools, and plenty of things to paint on!

You can buy or wishlist the game on Steam here!

[nightmargin]

You can now wishlist Margin of the Strange on Steam

[nickolashx]

Crow Country (2024)

Crow Country is a 2024 indie survival horror game developed and published by SFB Games.

The year is 1990. It’s been two years since the mysterious disappearance of Edward Crow and the abrupt closure of his theme park, Crow Country. But your arrival has broken the silence, Mara Forest. If you want answers, you’ll have to venture deep into the darkness of Crow Country to find them…

[serv0z]

GO SUPPORT THE INDIGO PARK KICKSTARTER !!

[pizzapranks]

Indiepocalypse is a monthly anthology of indie games curated and delivered straight to you!

Each release features games from 10 developers (including a newly commissioned game!) and a companion zine. Focusing on smaller-scale/no-budget indie games, Indiepocalypse highlights games that are shorter, personal, experimental, and otherwise an alternative to AAA and mainstream indie space.

My goal is the help bring more attention to the indie game scene I love and support them however I can. Did you know that all contributors to Indiepocalypse are paid upon acceptance and are paid royalties? Because they are!

If you're looking to explore the exciting world of underground indie games, Indiepocalypse is a great entry point to this world and it's exciting creators! (also a great way to find creators you may have missed if you already explore said world)

You can buy it or check out the games here!

I also sell Indiepocalypse physically in a cool USB sticks inside cassette cases format! (tower of which is pictured below)

Lastly, (I promise) if you're an indie dev, submissions for Indiepocalypse are always open!

[indiegamesoutofcontext]

[pixel-maytch]

Almost everyday for 10 weeks I've been working towards a mini playable build. Now it's got equipment, stats, skills, quests, questlog, vendors, warping, levels, hotbars, shortcuts, bgm, day/night ambience, shields, dynamic smalltalk, char creation, 2 new maps, and fishing!

[loumoonz]

Gosh i've just played Indigo Park and i might become obsessed... I LOVE RAMBLEY argsh

[bestlaidplansproductions]

Hi! I'm Tanya, a Desi-American indie game dev, and I'm creating a fully animated visual novel where you:

🦋Fall into a bad romance novel.

🦋Become the best villainess you can be.

🦋Try not to get murdered.

🦋Solve mysteries to discover which of your 5 gorgeous love interests wants you dead.

Want to learn more about our game, Save the Villainess?

🦋Join Save the Villainess' Kickstarter & Demo Pre-Launch.

🦋Wishlist Save the Villainess on Steam.

🦋Follow Save the Villainess on Itch.

🦋Sign up to the Mailing List for exclusive character cards every month.

Credits: Somate Studio for splash art; @arodude for item art and backgrounds; Karel Kok and Son Huynh for additional backgrounds.

[twoandahalfstudios]

In A Date with Death's new DLC, we'll be seeing a little more of our favorite edgy Grim Reaper in person... so, obviously, that means time for another sprite! 🌻

Back Beyond the Bet on Kickstarter now to help us make the DLC as amazing as possible!

[devsgames]

"Is Tumblr Blaze Worth It For Promoting My Indie Game?" - a Postmortem

Lately I've been thinking about marketing and promotion of my games and wanting to explore new avenues. Tumblr Blaze was one of those things I wanted to dip my toes into a bit to understand how it works and if it has potential for advertising my sort of stuff. Like as not, there's no point in making games if nobody actually plays them after all!

Conversely I have also heard bad things about Tumblr Blaze; that it's not very targeted, the reach is fairly limited, and people on this site generally hate anything that is Blazed to them.

I wanted to test all these waters a bit to see if it's something worth investing in, and share what I found for my own benefit and the benefit of others. Finding various info on topics like this for indie dev can be a pain, so why not share my findings?

The Plan and Goal

While Centauri Dark is still in development and is the thing I actually want to advertise more of right now, Bombing!! 2 is already out and is much more marketable with some cool art made by community members. I think as a first impression it tends to show well, so I decided to make my test post with that to get exposure to it and see how it goes.

My goal was mostly to see what a Blaze post does for advertising a launched indie game and how much "eyes on" it actually gets in terms of actual engagement.

Posting

From the outset I knew I wanted to make a post that 1) wasn't annoying to people just looking at the webbed site 2) featured a call to action of some kind I could measure 3) wouldn't break the bank.

Here's what I came up with:

The intention was to flash some cool looking art to grab their attention, explain what they're looking at, and then link the game a couple of times while mentioning "Buy or Wishlist" for good measure as a call to action.

Since Bombing!! 2 is such an art-forward game, I found the coolest art pieces made by community members that felt the most "Tumblr" to match the audience, and would also show off the range of art you could make in the game. I also wanted to make it personal, like me writing a message to whoever would read it instead of something that sounded like a standard ad. Generally I think it was a fairly reasonable little post that catches some interest and doesn't overstay too much of a welcome. What I think also helps is it's explicitly a "hey this might interest you" sort of framing (as opposed to a more "why am I even seeing this" sort of post you tend to get from Blaze sometimes).

I also think it's worth emphasizing that writing a posted explicitly intending to be Blazed was a much stronger approach than just Blazing some random post I had made for my own followers months ago, because I could align it to my promotional goals. It also assumed that random people on the Internet would be the ones seeing my post, and not the followers and friends who already know me and my work.

Blazing

As I looked into Blaze early on there was actually a few key things I wasn't fully aware of about the system.

It guarantees a minimum amount of views

It guarantees it will be Blazed for a minimum of 24 hours no matter how many views

You pay a single base rate for the whole campaign (great compared to some ads which tend to price based on views/engagement).

You can define an audience explicitly (some info that was floating around lead me to believe this wasn't the case).

Campaigns come in a few amounts:

I paid for the 2nd tier; $17 USD for a campaign, which amounts to $25 CDN. I wanted to go a little more into it than the lowest tier offered, since I figured the lowest wouldn't give me as much data as I would've liked and I wanted to know what to reasonably expect should I decide to do it again in the future.

Since Bombing!! 2 sells for ~$20USDI also figure if the Blaze campaign prompts at least two people to buy the game then the Blaze would have paid for itself.

Blaze lets you use tags to define which audiences you want to reach. Unfortunately it doesn't let you view that data after you've applied it, but the tags I chose were generally anyone who spoke English and has an interest in Digital Artist or Video Game circles.

The campaign ran for 24 Hours, starting yesterday and ending today.

The Results

I definitely noticed a sharp uptick in engagement during the campaign! It hit the target audience of ~7k around one hour into the campaign, after which point I noticed engagement take a sharp decline.

Here's the Blaze campaign analytics provided by Tumblr (which was also very helpful to have):

So it seems ~12.5k views from Blaze, ~370 likes, ~80 reblogs, 5 shares elsewhere. The post itself has ~520 notes, so I assume there's some reblogging and liking happening from beyond the Blaze campaign that isn't pictured here. The good thing is that despite having reached its 7k target after only 1 hour, it continued to circulate and be Blazed until 24 hours later. Eventually the post made it to ~12k views overall, which was nearly double the amount promised by the campaign - I attribute this mostly to a strong post/target audience/subject matter and I'm sure it's not standard.

Here's the general velocity of engagement around when the post was Blazed:

It jumped much more than I honestly expected, but you can tell Blaze seemed to put it in front of people's faces more than my regular posts do. You can see it drops off sharply as I hit the quoted amount as well, back down to the normal amount of engagement I get on Tumblr.

But this stuff isn't really what I was looking for; I was looking for sales and keeping an eye on 'conversions' - or how many users followed my call to action because of the post. Likes and stuff are fine and cool, but how many people bought or wishlisted the game on Steam as a result of seeing the post on Tumblr?

Tumblr and Blaze obviously have no way of telling me this, so I'm looking to Steam to show me changes there.

Here's what Steam shows me happened to the Bombing!! 2 views yesterday:

That's not nothing! This shows the last month's worth of traffic to the Bombing!! 2 page, and that number was at least double yesterday as it was regularly. It's very cool to know a number of people did actually click through to the game page in order to view the game from the Blaze post.

But the real REAL question is how many bought or wishlisted the game because of this post?

I'll start with Sales, on a graph of 1 month of data:

Flat line :( Which is fine though, as the game wasn't on Sale and was just reaching people for the first time. I didn't honestly expect any immediate sales from this, and was more focused on other engagement anyways. Honestly I would be surprised if someone saw the game on a Blaze post and bought it immediately. I mean it's good but it's probably not THAT good!

Now to Wishlists, which can be a good indicator of who might likely buy your game in the future. Basically if someone has added a game to their wishlist, there's reason to believe they might buy it in the future, which is good for your game.

Here's the Wishlists for Bombing!! 2 from the last month:

That's 23 Wishlists in one day! That's roughly ~18 Wishlists more than an average day!

It's hard to know if some of these are because of the post or just a statistical fluke. However, when compared to previous trends on the game page that's quite a noticeable difference. It means even if no one bought it now, they were interested enough to add it to their shortlist. Looking at it another way, if two people who Wishlisted decided to buy the game in the future the campaign will have paid for itself.

Conclusions

I think like any advertising if you go into it with a plan in mind and try to build something around a specific action, Blaze seems pretty worth it to me especially if I just want to get eyes on something. On top of the obvious data telling me people were interested in the game, there was a few folks who just plain complemented the game or acknowledged it 'was the first Blaze post they were actually interested in', which felt worth it in it's own qualitative sort of way.

I think having an idea of the message I wanted to send really helped, and I'm sure I'd happily do this again with a larger audience and another plan (and probably will do it for when Centauri Dark releases).

[morbethgames]

Text Box Investigation On/Off Option is Coming!

I’ve heard everyone loud and clear, and since I needed a little break from writing the extra scene I’m on, I went ahead and figured out how to work a toggle option for Text Box Investigations. Starting next update, you will be able to toggle seamlessly between TBI’s and regular choicescript choices for the investigation portions of the game! Obviously I want the game to be accessible to as many people as possible, so this will help serve that end. The Text Box Investigations will be on by default from the beginning of the game, so if you want to play without them, simply turn them off whenever you wish while you’re playing. You can also toggle them back on if you ever wanted to try playing with them on as well!

🛡️Patreon | Forum Page | Demo Link🛡️

[alex-frostwalker]

If there's a Rambley AI, wouldn't there be an AI for the others maybe?

Also a Rambley Mascot? An evil one perhaps?

[molegato]

You gotta go on an adventure with these two little weirdos, what do you use as a grappling hook? 🐸🐍❓

(You can totally go on an adventure with them soon when Frogun Encore launches!)

[deadvnstudios]

would you guys consider making drew romanceable at any point, like a dlc or kickstarter? sorry if this/smth similar has been asked already haha

We are planning additional love interest routes as stretch goals for our Kickstarter! The process would go something like this:

We reach the goal. HOORAY!

After some preparation behind the scenes, we will hold a vote (to backers and/or players in general). All side characters will be available in this poll.

Bloodshed will ensue, and many will not survive.

Once the full release of the game is out, we will implement the character route as a dlc expansion.