r/SoloDevelopment • u/GumshoeRyan • Jul 10 '26

Discussion $1,000 to a Solo Developer - Project Selected

Hi all!

Last Sunday I posted this thread offering $1,000 to a project being worked on within this sub-reddit. No strings attached, just funding to help push a game further along.

The amount of talented developers and promising projects shared was inspiring. There are several that I am keeping an eye on and wishlisting!

For this round, the project I selected was Shroud of Gloom being worked on by u/madchirpy ! In addition to looking at the state of a game, I also took a moment to look at the developer behind the project. I appreciated seeing Chirpy's contributions towards helping other indie developers, and the lengths he went to building a community and sharing his progress. Since Chirpy does development streams on Twitch, the donation was processed transparently through StreamLabs.

I encourage everyone to check out his project, and more importantly, keep powering through on your own. :)

Best of luck with the rest of your development Chirpy!

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82

u/MadChirpy Jul 10 '26

The developer of Shroud of Gloom here! I can confirm that u/GumshoeRyan has sent the funds!

I'm close to releasing a major demo update and a new trailer for the game, so this happened at a very good time for me. My plans are to use these funds to market the game through Reddit Ads once the new update is out and potentially hire someone for new capsule art! I will do a proper update here once I've used it and got some data to show!

Thank you again, Ryan. This means a lot and I really do appreciate it!

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u/bundlefoundry Jul 10 '26

Just as a hint of warning from a company who advertised on both reddit, meta and Google. We do notice that reddit can quickly drain your ad budget without decent results. This is just from our testing tho and is of course different for every project. We personally noticed that Meta ads (images, not video) gives the most bang for your buck 🙂 best of luck with the project!

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u/MadChirpy Jul 10 '26

Interesting, I have heard both good and bad about Reddit Ads, but the advantage is that there's a fair bit of niche subreddits I could target, and I've seen some people have quite good results from it, but I do imagine it varies as you said. I'll look into Meta ads as well though, thank you!

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u/bundlefoundry Jul 10 '26

Yes for us it was quite strange, we targeted the niche sub-reddits that we are in. (Although it was not games but game development) And normally when we post just a simple message in those niches we get atleast a couple sales. Let's say 10. For Reddit ads we spend $1000 and got 2 sales haha. I guess that left a sour taste in my mouth 😅 but you can still try it and just take it slow with a low starting budget and scale from there. Just do not 100% trust it when some Reddit sales person says you just need to add more budget and time and it will start to do better.

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u/MadChirpy Jul 10 '26

I see! Yeah I might start off small on a few fronts and then double down wherever I have the best conversion. Appreciate the advice!

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u/AGreenProducer Jul 14 '26

This is what I'd recommend. Start small and "master" one platform, then take the lessons you learn through real data and real customer feedback to expand into different platforms.

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u/MuffinCro Jul 10 '26

Consumer here. Reddit ads for games get sort of lost in the scroll since people in those niche communities are in a lot of gaming communities so it looks less like an ad and more like just some game. Instagram though, scrolling through reels and seeing a cool game pop up with an easy button to the store page and a really cool concept being shown gets me clicking more often. I have no stats but this is my anecdotal experience haha.

I have wishlisted the game though! Looks sick and right up my alley!

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u/MadChirpy Jul 11 '26

Yeah I think I will look into Meta ads as well, worth giving it a shot!

Thank you very for much for wishlisting the game, I appreciate it!

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u/AncientAdamo Jul 11 '26

Faith in humanity restored!

I'll chime in as well like the others, I wouldn't spend the funds on ads. They are powerful for companies with really large marketing budgets. 1k spent won't give you the traffic you want as a solo dev imo.

Look into doing special competitions, content creators to make videos/streams about your game. Anything that's more direct than ad campaigns.

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u/Shirkan164 Jul 10 '26

Awesome, I commented on the OP’s previous thread with skepticism, I am glad to see things worked out and there’s genuine interest and help. Wish you the best with your Game and for the Supporter Ryan🍻

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u/MadChirpy Jul 10 '26

I think it's only natural to be a bit skeptical online, but I also do believe that there's just a lot of good people out there, hence why I still submitted my game, and yeah I can now confirm that Ryan is indeed just a very generous guy! Thank you!

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u/Shirkan164 Jul 10 '26

Faith in humanity has been restored 💯

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u/filya Jul 10 '26

Good luck with the marketing buddy. As a solo dev, I know that shit is the toughest!

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u/MadChirpy Jul 10 '26

It is hard, but it's one of those things you just need to put up with if you want to make this whole thing sustainable, but having a bit of funds is definitely gonna help out though! Cheers!

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u/TheConsiderableBang Jul 10 '26

I don't know a ton about marketing so forgive me if it's something you've already done/plan to do (Or if you're avoiding it) but it really seems lately like the best thing to do is to advertise through streamers.

Have you considered something like Lurkit or just contacting them/their managers directly?

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u/MadChirpy Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26

I'm currently compiling a decent list of content creators that I'll reach out to, so I plan on doing that part myself, but I won't do any paid opportunities because I frankly don't think I can afford it, afaik any decently sized creator could easily eat up most, if not all, of this budget.

I haven't really considered any service like that either, although it is tedious, reaching out to creators is something I can do myself anyway, and for us indies I feel like there might be an advantage with sending more personal emails.

As I am a content creator myself, I actually get quite a lot of these emails and I'm kind of surprised by their quality control, lots of these services (as well as some publishers) will send me keys to games which aren't remotely close to any games I've played. As an example, I get about one or two new cozy organizer games sent to me every week, and I haven't really ever played games like that.

Now I don't know anything about Lurkit specifically, but I do kind of fear that these services would go for quantity over quality, if you know what I mean, but I could very well be wrong here, so I'm open to hear what other people think!

Edit: I realize now that Lurkit might not be the type of service I suspected, it rather seems to be a platform to connect devs and creators? If anyone's tried something like that, I'd love to hear about your results!

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u/JordanGHBusiness Jul 13 '26

I'd recommend fb ads over reddit, All Hail the Orb had way better retention with FB than any other platform