Hello from the new issue of GameDev’s Journey! Thank you for those who have subscribed the newsletter since the last issue. I hope you enjoy and find these things useful as much as I do. In today’s issue:
How to Market Your Game on Steam in 2023?
Recently released assets
Asset bundles, tips, and more
LET’S GO.
Marketing
How to Market Your Game on Steam in 2023
Chris Zukowski’s talk from last year about how to market your game on Steam is full of great insights, and it’s still valid today. Here are some takeaways from the talk:
Choosing your genre is one of the biggest marketing decisions you will make**.** Some genres sell well (roguelike deckbuilder, sandbox, simulator) while some doesn’t (puzzle, platformer). By defining your game’s genre, you are also defining your audience and the potential customers. Thousands of platformers are being uploaded to Steam every year and the Steam audience can buy only so many.
Shoot for at least 7000 wishlists so that you have a chance of appearing in Popular Upcoming tab on Steam. That will immensely help you get visibility and get more wishlist. The important thing to remember is that this is a long-run game and it might take some time to get to your desired amount of wishlists. (The quality of your Steam page comes into play at this stage. The potential customer will look at the capsule image of your game, skim the tags, check the trailer and images and will decide if they want to wishlist within 10 seconds.)
Online festivals can get you great visibility. Twitter doesn’t work very well if your game isn’t “Twitter-friendly”, but festivals, streamers and TikTok seem to be working. (Every videogame marketing expert is yelling TikTok. And boy, do I hate TikTok).
Put up a demo as soon as possible so that you can submit it to festivals and streamers. This becomes even more important if your game isn’t visually appealing.
For more, please watch the video and visit Chris Zukowski’s website.
Assets
Dialogue System Addon for OpenAI
🎮Game Engine: Unity
💵Price: 45 USD
Dialogue system by Pixel Crushers might be my single favorite asset in Unity Asset Store. And now it has a addon for AI to help you generate dialogue and barks, fix grammar & spelling, translate to other languages, and more.
Nature Worlds Bundle
🎮Game Engine: Unity
💵Price: 145 USD
A collection of 3D environment packs including almost 900 prefabs for different biomes: interior, continental, coast, islands, winter scenes, mediterranean or even caverns.
FlexBuilder 2023 (Flexbox/CSS-3 UI)
🎮Game Engine: Unity
💵Price: 80 USD
A tool that enables you to design UI easier and quicker. Comes with a 300 page manual and a Discord server for support, which is always great to have for these kind of assets.
Other
Unity introduced its AI tool.
Unreal Essentials. Asset bundle for Unreal Engine, including versatile environments, characters, and other key assets.
How much math do you need to know to be a game developer? I don’t know! But here is a great video list, math for game devs by Freya Holmer.
Not really related to game dev, but I’ve come across this YouTube channel named Monstergarden. A dark fantasy worldbuilding project. Each video talks about the different aspect of the weorld and it’s pretty intresting.
Me
Reading: Sandman by Neil Gaiman. I’ve started reading this years ago but couldn’t make it to the end. This time I will.
Watching: McGregor Forever.
Playing: Pathfinder: The Wrath of the Righteous.
Listening:
And that’s it from today’s issue of GameDev’s Journey. I hope you enjoyed it and find it useful. If you did, please like and leave a comment. Let me know your thoughts, suggestions, objections, etc.
But regardless, thank you so much for reading, and have a great game dev journey.