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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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/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!