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Indie game publishing

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4 comments, last by m_waddams 3 years, 2 months ago

Hello!

I am a full-time web developer and free-time hobby indie game developer.I spent around one year developing my adventure game “A Night Before the Deadline”.
It is made with Unity. All assets (like models, music, effects etc) were taken from the Unity assets store.
It tells a story about the developer who stayed till late night at the office to finish his work and faces different mysteries.

To get quick idea what is this game you can check the trailer:

Game is finished at 90+%, I am only fixing bugs, polishing sound effects and want to add controller support.
It was designed to be ready for Android devices and PC. I want to publish it on Play market and on Steam.

But here is the tricky part: I was concentrating on developing and story itself and now I have no idea which is the best way to release it.
I am not interested (at least dramatically) in money earning from this game at this point, I consider it as the starting point for future projects. But anyway:

  1. Should I publish it under my name or should I find a publisher (and if “yes” then how?))
  2. Should it be free or should it have some symbolic price like 3or3 or 3or5?
  3. How I should promote an indie game? I am ready to spend some money but not much (not much at all).
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That's an original theme for a video game! The ambiance is cool with the soundtrack that adds to the mystery / tension.

3. The best way imo to promote it if you don't have much money is to spend some time on different platforms (social media, forums, reddit, etc.) and try to share the word about your game. There are many places on the web where indie developers regroup to talk about their projects.

None

Hi, just wanted to say this looks really nice, great job!

Making the game very cheap is not a good idea, as this will imply the game is of bad quality / yet another asset flip / etc.

Making the game free is a better idea imho - potentially more people will play it and give you some feedback, which is probably more valuable than earning a few bucks (to earn more will be rather difficult, especially on mobile platforms, if you don't have yet any successful games on your account).

Finding a publisher is also a better idea than making the game cheap, but with that I can't really help as I don't have any experience ?

Thank you!

I throwed out my ambitions to publish the game for the Android and concentrated on Steam only. It will be released in a month.

Decided to have symbolic price ($4)

So far I offered keys to some influencers and people who desired to be beta testers.

I fixind things and adding small features according to their feadback.

But there is one thing which I will not fix. Many people and some influencers told me, that game is way too short. It is story driven game and in average it is beaten in 35 minutes.

In other hand, most people say that it's story feels like something “complete”.

Anyway it is a good experience. Not sure if I continue with gamedev, but that was fun.

Change the title ?

All nights before the deadline are ‘a’ night.
‘Last night’, ‘The night’, etc…

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