T minus Zero, or releasing a game on Steam
Well, a few minutes ago I finally pushed the button, the game is released. So I wanted to write a short write up of some things that I had to do to release the game. I won't really talk about making the game itself too much, more about the part of actually releasing the game, if you are interested in more of that you can see my posts from Timasomo (1, 2, 3, 4, showcase).
Steam
I have already created many games in the past, I've been making games for more than 5 years, but always as a hobbyist. So I never experienced releasing a game on a platform like Steam. I have to say working with Steam and Steamworks is very pleasant and streamlined, but it is still much more complex than for example releasing a game on itch.io, which is what I did before for all my other games. I'll try to summarize how the process looks like.
First, before you can even get on Steam, you have to register, fill out a ton of paperwork, wait some time for it to be manually approved. Afterwards, you have to pay the 100 dollars for Steam Direct. At this point you finally get a Steam app id, which you can use to start integrating Steam features into your game. For example, having achievements, Steam cloud integration (so the saves get synced between devices), leaderboards and potentially more, especially if you are making a multiplayer game. To make my game I am using Godot, and I found a C# library called Facepunch.Steamworks which made this all quite easy, I'd definitely recommend it if you are using Unity or Godot with C# and want to release your game on Steam.
Before releasing a game on Steam you also have to finish everything on a gigantic checklist, including things like: uploading 10 various header, capsule and other images which are used on the store page and Steam library. An icon for the game. What are the minimum requirements required to run the game, whether the game has adult content, whether it supports controllers, how much the game will cost, screenshots, a trailer, there are just so many things to do! And when you complete parts of this checklist you have to have your game go through manual reviews. Each review could take about 3 days to get done. I failed one review first so I had to resubmit it too and wait again. Let me tell you, if you plan to release a game on Steam, reserve at least a month to do it, and start going through the reviews as soon as possible -- actually I think there even is a minimum of a month before you can release the game from the day you get an app id.
Trailer
Creating a good trailer is super hard. I am not a video creator/editor at all, but luckily I at least own a solid program for creating videos -- Vegas 14 pro, that I got for super cheap in some Humble bundle about 8 or something years ago, so I at least had a good start there. I ended up with not that complex of a project and Vegas still kept crashing when rendering, so I am not sure if I'd recommend it though.
The hardest thing for a trailer is deciding what to put in it for me. I know that a trailer should be super short, should showcase how the gameplay looks, what are the features and so on, but when I got to actually making it, it was still super hard to decide what to put there. How do I even start? I watched a ton of other indie game trailers to get some inspiration and that also didn't help that much. There are some trailers which are really just gameplay, some trailers which are actually just incredible with editing I could never do as a pleb... So I started with something that I know a bit more. I created a very short music track, and decided that I will just edit the trailer to fit the music.
The music track basically splits the trailer into 4/5 very short sections:
- Basic gameplay, how the game looks when you start playing it
- Explaining the roguelite part of the game, selecting spells and items
- More complex gameplay, how some combinations of spells and items can look later in a run
- List of features
- Special bonus ending section showing a "Legendary" spell, which should show how insane spells can get, followed by the logo of the game
I think the trailer ended up being not too bad, but I still had some feedback that it isn't flashy enough. And it's true, but I am not really sure how to improve it easily. When watching the Vampire Survivors trailer for example I can see that they did a much better job: it's so much more dynamic, the music really pumps you up, it's overall better edited, it has cool transitions, camera movement and so on.
End
Releasing a game on Steam was a great experience. I learned so much! I basically made this game over weekends and evenings, since I also have a job. To try maintain my productivity I tried to do at least some work on the game every single day. I have to say that towards the end I started losing some steam (haha), some days scrambling to do at least something late in the evening before I went to sleep. But, if at least someone plays the game I think I want to keep updating it more, I still do really like the game!
Thanks for reading! Feel free to ask me anything about the game, or the game dev process, or about anything basically haha.
Here's the Steam store page, the game costs 5 dollars, I'd love it if you checked it out. If you want to play the game but can't afford it PM me and I'll send you a key for the game (at least once I get the keys I requested -- did you know that Steam has to approve the creation of keys manually? Edit: the keys are now ready)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2682910/The_Spellswapper/
AAAAAHHHHH CONGRATULATIONS HOORAY YAY AWESOME WOOOOOOOOO!!!
Seeing a Steam page with your game, and especially seeing your name in the Developer and Publisher slots, made me very happy and filled me with a feeling similar to pride, but on your behalf. I’ve played and loved your games for years now, so having one on Steam is really freaking cool.
I promised I’d buy the game and I’m thrilled I get to keep that promise!
I also hope other people here buy it too. The game is fun! And in getting a copy you’re supporting a talented solo game developer and valued member of our community! Also, Tygrak is undoubtedly the kind of good person who deserves your $5. 😁
Some more good news for you, @Tygrak: your game runs on the Steam Deck!
A heads up though: something is up with the controller support. It feels like the game is possibly trying to average the inputs of both joysticks once you’re in a run (or something like that? I don’t know game dev stuff).
When I first started it up, I tried aiming with the left joystick, and it was weirdly non-responsive. It was slow and erratic.
I tried the right joystick, and it was the same.
Then I tried both together, and it was a lot more fluid, which is what makes me think that it’s doing something unintended by trying to take input from both sticks in tandem or something.
I then went into Steam Input and simply deactivated the right joystick, and now it works perfectly with the left one. No issues at all.
Oooh! Thanks for the report! That is strange, I'll take a look if I can figure out a way to automatically disable the right joystick on steam deck. I have an idea what could be causing it, when I was implementing the controller support I made it work with both joysticks since they aren't used for anything else anyway... but they both seem to work at full power there. I am not really sure how that would make it average it out on Steam Deck, so maybe it's something else though.
My previous (amateur) experience video editing was making boring software demos using Camtasia, which, while not free, I would characterize as adequate.
I recently needed to do some video editing and tried Davinci Resolve. I found it to be extremely powerful and effective. The base version is free, and I was able to do everything I wanted in it. It seems like the main limitation of the free version is that it will only work with one GPU. This is great because it doesn't look small creators out of advanced features, but if you get serious about video production, it's a no-trainer o pay to upgrade.
I watched a couple of youtube tutorials and was off to the races pretty quickly. I've definitely only scratched the surface. I would recommend it if you need to do more video work.
Congrats on the launch! I also released a game yesterday, but mine on Playdate Catalog. The store page, graphics and promo stuff took as long as it did for me to make the game.
ThreeCheersGoogTest
@talklittle based on this previous post I think this may be for you?
Hello fellow game dev!
Very nice write up. I actually just signed up for a steam page for my game and I’m in the process of waiting for approval. I have a few questions if you don’t mind:
When did you create the steam page in relation to when you released the game? I’ve heard that it is important to create the steam page early in order to get as many wish lists as possible.
How have you been marketing your game? I regularly post on /r/Godot but that is about it.
How did you determine your price point?
How did you determine required specs?
How are sales going? So far I’ve made -$160 (yep that is a negative sign) on my game so I’m curious how I compare to other indie devs.
Feel free to skip any questions you don’t want to answer. Thanks for your input and good luck!
Hi! It's great to see more indie game devs here :).
My Steam store page has been public for a bit over a week before release. I didn't really promote it or even talk about it anywhere, so I didn't even get any wishlists before release AFAIK.
Before launch I did basically nothing, I guess you could count me posting about my game for Timasomo, talking about it with my friends and on some Discord servers as marketing, but it wasn't really meant to be marketing. Today, after release I started sending codes for the game to some Youtubers/streamers who play roguelites that I know, I am trying to mainly choose people that like similar games to mine. I also sent out the game to 26 Steam curators, through Steam Connect (a thingy on Steamworks that allows you to send keys directly to curators), again trying to find ones that enjoy roguelites and indie games -- currently 2 seem to have accepted the code. I also tried to post about the game on the Godot Discord and on the Ludum Dare site (as it's originally a LD game). I'll be trying to spend more of today finding more Youtubers and other "influencers" who might be a good fit.
Posting about the game on r/Godot is a good idea! I should do that too!
This is a pretty good, but hard question which I don't really have a good answer to. I felt like my game isn't that visually "impressive" compared to even other Indie games, it is also only ~3 months of work. I tried to look around at other indie games for inspiration. One of my overall inspirations for the game was "SNKRX", which the solo developer created in 1 month, and is sold for 3 dollars on Steam, and was a big success I'd say (has 4000 reviews on steam), so I somehow tried to make the pricing similar. I hope it's easier for people to decide to try out a small indie game by a no name developer if it costs just 5 dollars.
Another thing to consider is regional pricing. Steam has some automatic regional pricing built in (basically the price is changed for people who are in other countries/use different currencies than the USD), that I left turned on. So for example in Russia the price is the equivalent of 2 dollars instead of 5 dollars. I think this could have some problems, but in the end I mostly just want people to play the game and I am not really expecting to make any real money from it, so I think it's a good choice to leave it enabled. Otherwise I also would also have to keep checking the prices in other currencies every once in a while to make sure the prices don't get too strange due to currency exchange rates.
I tried playing the game on the worst machines I could find, and it ran on all of them. There's a field where you can put additional comments, so I wrote there that I found the game to work on every modern machine, including on a 5+ year old notebook with only a integrated graphics card. I found that the renderer that I am using in Godot (compatibility) requires OpenGL 3.3, so I wrote that the game requires a GPU that supports minimum OpenGL 3.3. I left the recommended specs empty and filled in only the minimum specs as I saw many other indie games to do it the same way.
Currently I sold 4 copies which is the equivalent of 20 dollars (not counting the Steam fees, also to actually get any money I will have to sell enough to get under the minimum threshold :D).
When your store page is up feel free to ping me with it, I'll definitely wishlist it!
When reading all the paperwork somewhere in there I saw that the payments for the sales get sent with a minimum of some amount -- I think it was 100 dollars(?), so to actually get any money I'll have to earn more than that. But I am now not fully sure where it is now, so I am not fully sure about the specifics.
Oohh congratulations and thanks so much for sharing your experience!! I really want to release a game on Steam too and reading about what you had to prepare is helpful.