Entry #14 - Going full time, playtest, outreach

Life update

Pretty big life update: Im going full time indie. In May I've made a decision to quit my well payed job and focus only on Shitlings.

It wasn't an easy decision, especially understanding current game dev industry situation. I don't know how hard it'll be to land a new position if the project fails completely or just enough to not support my further work. But I feel that if I don't go full time, chances of the project succeeding drop dramatically. Right now I'm on my notice period, until the end of August. It feels both exciting and scary but I will have to completely rearrange the way I work and live. I have enough savings to survive until the release but once I have no stable income, there is no way out, no excuses but to finish the game in the best possible state.

To make it a bit easier, I took a part time gig, making a course and lecturing about UE. It will give me a few more months to finish the project. It's also interesting to get a broader picture of my knowledge and experience in game dev.

Playtest

In June I run another playtest, trying to figure out some missing pieces before publishing an early demo. A friend of mine helped me with some outreach to different groups and communities. Unfortunately, the response was pretty weak. I had a few people playing the game but much less than I expected. These few people were great, they've found a lot of problems a provided promising feedback. But the whole situation highlights the struggles of marketing indie games and how hard it is to get any attention. We've posted on our SM, different groups, reddit and Discord servers. In total probably around 40 different places with repeated posts. Still very little reaction.

Plans

Issues found during the playtest delayed a bit the public early demo but I've figured that it's worth to actually rework and improve it as much as possible before releasing it. Right now, the timeline looks like this: end of July - demo candidate published on our Discord for a few people to test and catch some last moment issues. Beginning of August - release on itch.io. If it goes well, we will contact a first batch of influencers to try to finaly get some momentum with wishlists. Then I will work on late game content and preparing for a release of a proper Steam demo late autumn, early winter. I've already started ordering some content work from freelancers on Fiverr, so it will be ready when I need it.

Still the biggest issue that remains is marketing. Not only outreach itself, but also preparing trailers, screenshots, shorts etc. Right now, having a few hours a week after work to focus on Shitlings, I'd much rather improve the game and focus on bugs than create content. But as soon as I go full time, I need to figure out how to best integrate it into my workflow.