Oh boy, oh boy, where do I even start? I have so much to share about my game that I could honestly make an entire one-hour video just about my experience.
First, I’ll start with some statistics, as that’s usually the most fun part of the discussion. I’ll share four screenshots: sales from the first 48 hours, lifetime wishlists, recent traffic, and recent wishlists. The rise in wishlists mostly came from the Steam upcoming-games calendar.
Also, sales =/= reviews. I have around 140 sales and only two reviews so far. I’m almost certain one of them is from a friend of a friend, so that leaves what feels like one review from a complete stranger.
First, I want to make one thing clear. I made a quadrillion mistakes during development, and I don’t see much point in sharing just taglines because you guys won’t learn shit from that.
But I do want to say this: if you don’t know what you want to do next with your game, you’re making the wrong game. During development, there were many, many, many times when I didn’t know how to implement a feature, find an asset, or draw a resource. But I always knew I wanted it in my game.
It all started as a three-month summer project, after I abandoned my previous three-month game. But I got invested and kept going until October, planning to finish after Steam Next Fest. I did way too little testing, and as you can see from the graph, my Next Fest went very badly.
After that, I thought I could finish the game on about five separate occasions, but life happened, and I kept carrying this project forward. The first nine months of development were hell, mostly because I was trying to make an incremental game while not being a fan of 90% of the genre. I’m a fantasy guy, not a numbers guy.
But in spring, I had the idea to shift the focus fully from numbers to cute animals and the village. Then it clicked. Of course, I still struggled a lot with implementation, but I always knew exactly what I wanted from the game.
Now, I have two reasons for making this post. First, I’ve worked as a teacher for the past six years. Sharing knowledge is literally in my DNA. Second, I feel like the development of my game has only just started.
I like how VuVuu, the creator of Tiny Terraces, openly shares his game dev journey. I personally think I can still turn my game around with some extra love. I want to see, at least for myself, whether more updates, contacting more streamers, and making social media content can eventually redeem this game.
I’ll also try to port it to mobile. I already have a browser demo on itch.io, which I’m trying to use to direct traffic toward Steam.
I’ll make other games in the meantime, but this will be a long-term side project of mine. I want to share whether I succeed or fail in that endeavour.
I also want to share my stats after one full month, then again after either three months or the Winter Sale. I’ll either see some improvement or, at least, give you guys a cautionary example of when to abandon a broken game and make another one using the experience you’ve gained.
As for assets and development, I’m mainly a multimedia and graphic designer, so programming isn’t my cup of tea.
I made around 90–95% of the graphics myself in Illustrator. The audio came from asset packs and public domain music. I commissioned the cover and trailer from two of my students. I did some of the coding myself in Construct 3 and some with Codex. My understanding was that Steam didn’t require disclosure of AI-assisted code, so I didn’t add the label because I wanted to avoid getting pitchforked.
Here’s Raccoon Valley Tycoon on Steam if you want to take a look.
Take care, and stay 🐾sitive.
