Devlog 2 - This one goes to eleven!

I’m running a series of developer logs where I just write down everything I’ve tried to do over the past week, and share a little progress. Largely I’m doing these for my own self-reflection but I hope there’s a little humour and maybe even something useful in there too.

If you haven’t already seen it - Indev 11 is out! Full changelog in the linked post but the key focus was content and customisation. I've attached it to this post as well if you would like to check it out.

I’m a little slow at releasing and this 2-3 week lag (from finishing all content to pushing the release out) was actually faster than normal. Indev 10 took me over a month to go from ‘this is done’ to ‘hey here it is’. I’ve always had this problem, the last 5% takes me as much time as the first 95%, but in the case of making releases it has to be because the busywork (bug fixing, playtesting, preparing devlogs, changelogs, sharing it online) is a lot less fun than making new stuff.

The ‘busywork’ is, of course, very important. There’s a saying amongst novelists which goes something like ‘once you’ve written the novel, you’re actually about 10% done with writing the novel’ (heavy paraphrasing) and it applies to game development as well. Probably any creative endeavour. Making the thing isn’t enough if it doesn’t garner enough interest to actually get people to check it out. This, unfortunately, is where I’m falling flat at the moment.

Getting people to playtest is becoming a chore. The game is at least some kind of fun (I like it anyway), but few people I share with even get to the point of downloading it. Those special few that are getting that far have given me great feedback, but I have to assume I’m doing something wrong if I can’t even get people to download it.

The key is probably grabbing attention quickly. Honing the elevator pitch, jazzing up the itch page, getting some decent screenshots or videos of gameplay and making sure that gameplay pops when it is shown. I might even go as far as hiring someone to do a nice cover picture for the game, once I settle on the art style. Whatever it takes to get someone to download, because after that the game can (hopefully) speak for itself.

Marketing is probably going to be a slow burn, I’m learning as I go. To be honest I don’t want too many eyes on it whilst the game is in an early-ish state, but I’m getting to the point where how to do this is at least becoming a concern. If you are a game developer and you’re reading this, share your strategies or thoughts below!

Sorry this has been more about the pains of release, and less about the actual work done this week (the week went very well, I did actually learn to prioritise tasks a little better), but here’s another UI preview in the meantime!

The Great Train Defence is a tower defence game where you’re often on the move, and it often feels like that’s my life too! Drop a comment below or chat to me on discord, and save me from just having to talk to myself!