Guides to building and marketing indie games with AI
Written by Eduardo Orellana, who makes Flockbay.
Start here
- The indie game publishing guide: every job from Steam page to launchThe Steam page, wishlists, trailers, devlogs, playtests and launch, in the order they matter.
- Claude Code for Godot in 2026: connect it to your game, and what it buildsBuild a Godot game with your own Claude Code: the setups, what each can see, and what each costs.
- Godot 4 answers, verifiedErrors, renamed classes and how-tos, each run on Godot 4.7.2 with its real output.
Try a different word.
Featured post
Summer Engine pricing: a free app, and hosted AI from $20 a month
Summer Engine's desktop app is free, and so is connecting your own AI agent to it over MCP; its hosted AI gives a free account 5 messages a day, up to 30 a month, and then costs $20 (Pro), $60 (Pro+) or $200 (Ultra) a month, or $16, $48 and $160 a month billed yearly. Everything here was read on Summer's own pricing page, terms and docs on 25 October 2026.
Read featured postMost referenced
The essays the other 343 link back to most.
The indie game publishing guide: every job from Steam page to launch
Publishing an indie game is a set of jobs that start long before launch: a Steam page that turns visits into wishlists, a demo and a festival, a trailer and clips, posts, creators and press, a community, playtests, a website, sometimes ads or a publisher, and then the launch itself. This guide links every one, in the order a game usually meets them, with a guide per question.
How to publish a game on Steam, start to finish
To publish a game on Steam: sign up for Steamworks, sign the Steam Direct agreement, complete the identity, tax and bank forms (verification takes 15 to 30 days), and pay the $100 Steam Direct fee for the game, which comes back once the game earns $1,000. For your first few titles there is a 30-day wait between paying the fee and releasing. Build the store page and submit it for review (usually 3 to 5 business days; submit at least seven ahead); once approved it must show as Coming Soon for at least two weeks. Upload a near-final build and pass its review, also usually 3 to 5 business days. When both are approved you press Release App yourself. Valve pays monthly, about 30 days after the month of the sales, once that month passes $100.
How to make a Steam store page, step by step
A Steam store page is built in Steamworks' Store Presence editor, section by section: basic info and links, the short description (plain text, a few hundred characters) and About This Game, at least five tags ordered by weight, the four required capsules (920x430, 462x174, 1232x706, 748x896) and the library assets, at least five 1920x1080 gameplay screenshots, a trailer (Steam cuts its hover microtrailer from your first video), languages, system requirements, and the content survey with its AI section. Every required section must be complete before you press Mark as Ready for Review, at least seven business days before you want the page live; review usually takes 3 to 5 business days, and once approved you press Post as Coming Soon.
How to market an indie game
Marketing an indie game comes down to three things, done early and repeatedly. Know the one-sentence hook and who it is for, through five to ten comparable games. Put up a Steam page that turns visitors into wishlists months before launch. Then keep sending players to it: festivals such as Next Fest (the median respondent to How To Market A Game's February 2026 survey gained 806 wishlists in Next Fest week), creators in your genre, a demo, short clips, devlogs and, once the page converts, ads. Measure everything by wishlists, because launch week sells only a share of them: GameDiscoverCo's median for bigger launches was 0.15× first-week sales per wishlist. Start while you build, not when you finish.
What is Steam Next Fest, and who can enter?
Steam Next Fest is a week-long event Valve runs three times a year, in February, June and October, where unreleased games put up a free playable demo on Steam. Any game can enter once: it needs a public Steam store page, a demo that passes Valve's build review, and no release before that edition ends. The October 2026 edition runs 19 to 26 October; the next one runs 22 February to 1 March 2027, and its registration closes on 10 January 2027.
The best AI tools for Godot in 2026, with a verdict on every one
The best AI for Godot is Flockbay if you want a whole game built and play-tested for free, because it runs the game it builds on the official Godot engine, on free AI to start or your own Claude or ChatGPT. If you already pay for Claude Code or Codex, give it a Godot MCP server such as the free Godot AI; Ziva puts a paid agent inside the editor, Summer Engine is a hosted-AI engine of its own, and Tripo, Meshy or PixelLab make the art. Below is every tool worth knowing, read on its own site on 1 November 2026, with a price and a one-line verdict.
Steam and launch guides
- The indie game publishing guide: every job from Steam page to launch
- How to make a Steam store page, step by step
- When should you make your Steam store page?
- What a Steam Coming Soon page does for your game
- How much does it cost to put a game on Steam?
- How long Steam's store page review takes
- How to write a Steam short description
- How to choose Steam tags for your game
- How many screenshots does a Steam page need, and which ones?
- How to use GIFs in your Steam store description
- Steam image sizes: every capsule, library and event asset, with templates
- Steam capsule art: sizes, rules, and art that reads small
- How to fill in Steam's content survey
- Steam's mature content settings, explained
- How to write Steam system requirements for your game
- How to localize your Steam store page
- Which languages to translate your Steam page into first
- Setting a release date on Steam: Coming Soon, a quarter, or a day
- How to move your Steam release date without losing momentum
- How to set up a Steam page for your demo
- Steam page checklist: before you submit for review
- What the best Steam store pages have in common
- How to update your Steam page as the game changes
- How Steam wishlists work
- How to get more wishlists on Steam
- How many wishlists do you need before launch?
- Steam wishlist conversion rate: what is normal
- How to check how many wishlists a Steam game has
- Wishlist deletions: why players remove your game
- Steam's Popular Upcoming list: what it is and how games reach it
- How many wishlists a day is good?
- How to get to 10,000 wishlists
- Is 7,000 wishlists the magic number?
- When Steam emails your wishlisters
- Wishlist velocity: why the rate matters as much as the total
- What is Steam Next Fest, and who can enter?
- How to sign up for Steam Next Fest
- Steam Next Fest checklist: eight weeks out to the last day
- How many wishlists does Steam Next Fest bring?
- How to livestream your game during Steam Next Fest
- What to do after Steam Next Fest
- Steam's themed festivals: what they are and how to get in
- The Steam sale calendar, and how to plan a launch around it
- How long should a game demo be, and what goes in it?
- A prologue or a demo on Steam: which one?
- How to update a Steam demo, and when to take it down
- How to publish a game on Steam, start to finish
- Steam release checklist: from three months out to launch day
- What day should you release your game on Steam?
- Steam regional pricing, explained
- Should you use a launch discount on Steam?
- Steam's revenue share, explained
- Early Access on Steam: should you use it?
- How to answer Steam's six Early Access questions
- Steam refunds, from the developer side
- How to plan your first Steam sale
- How to get your game Steam Deck Verified
- How the Steam algorithm recommends games
- Steam's Discovery Queue, explained
- How Steam decides "More like this"
- Steam UTM links: where your wishlists come from
- Steam curators: what they are and how to reach them
- Steam events and announcements that get seen
- How to use Steam Broadcasting for your game
- How to make a game trailer, step by step
- How long should a game trailer be?
- Steam trailer requirements: format, resolution and order
- AI game trailer makers: what AI can and cannot do for a trailer
- How to make a teaser trailer for your game
- How to cut a 15-second ad from your game trailer
- How much does a game trailer cost?
- What is a devlog, and is it worth making one?
- How to make a devlog video
- How long should a devlog be?
- Where to post devlogs, and how often
- Devlog titles and thumbnails that get clicked
- How to make TikToks for your indie game
- How to make YouTube Shorts for your game
- What makes a gameplay clip go viral
- How to market your game on Reddit, and on every other channel
- The best subreddits to post your indie game
- Screenshot Saturday: how to use it for your game
- How to market your game on itch.io
- How to schedule social posts for your game
- How to market an indie game
- An indie game marketing plan, with a template
- When should you start marketing your game?
- How much to spend on indie game marketing
- How to find your game's hook
- How to write a one-line pitch for your game
- Indie game marketing tools, by job
- How to get YouTubers and journalists to cover your game
- Key distribution platforms compared: Keymailer and alternatives
- How to make a press kit for your game
- How to write a press release for your game
- How to get your game into newsletters, curated lists and streams
- How to build a community for your game, starting with a Discord server
- Which channels a game's Discord server needs
- How to grow your game's Discord server
- How to run a closed beta for your game
- How to use your game's Steam community hub
- How to run a game giveaway that brings real players
- How to playtest a game
- How to find playtesters for your indie game
- Playtesting questions to ask, and the ones to avoid
- How to run a remote playtest
- Steam Playtest: how it works for developers
- Using itch.io for playtesting
- Blind playtests or guided playtests?
- When should you start playtesting?
- Playtesting services compared
- How to turn playtest feedback into fixes
- What does a game publisher do?
- Do you need a publisher for your indie game?
- How to find a publisher for your indie game
- Indie game publishers on Steam, and what they have published
- How to pitch a game to a publisher
- What to put in a game publisher pitch deck
- What revenue share does a game publisher take?
- How to fund an indie game
- Game development grants: where to find them and how to apply
- Does Kickstarter still work for video games?
- How much does it cost to make an indie game?
- Patreon for game developers: does it work?
- Do you need a website for your indie game?
- How to make a website for your indie game, for free
- What to put on your game's website
- Game landing pages that work: the patterns
- The best website builders for game developers
- How to embed the Steam widget and your trailer
- Should you run ads for your indie game, and how much to spend?
- Cost per wishlist: how to measure it and what is normal
- How to run Meta ads for a game, and how to target players
- How to run TikTok ads for a game
- How to run Reddit ads for a game
- How to run Google and YouTube ads for a game
- Which ad platform works best for indie games?
- How to make an ad creative for a game from gameplay footage
- Boosting a post or running a campaign: which for your game?
- Steamworks reports, explained
- How to read your Steam wishlist and traffic reports
- How to estimate a game's sales and revenue from its Steam reviews
- How many copies do indie games sell on Steam?
- What the median indie game earns on Steam
- How many games release on Steam each year?
- How many sales one Steam review means
- GodotSteam: setting up Steamworks in a Godot 4 game
- Steam achievements in Godot with GodotSteam
- Steam Cloud saves for a Godot game
- Steam lobbies and multiplayer in Godot
- Making a Godot game ready for Steam Deck
- How to put a Unity game on Steam
- Steamworks.NET or Facepunch.Steamworks for Unity?
- Steam achievements in Unity
- How to put an Unreal Engine game on Steam
- Setting up Online Subsystem Steam in Unreal
- How to put a GameMaker game on Steam
- How to put an RPG Maker game on Steam
- How to put a Construct 3 game on Steam
- How to ship a web game on Steam
- How to upload a build to Steam with SteamPipe
- Steam's AI disclosure, explained
- Can you sell a game made with AI on Steam?
- Using AI to write your Steam store page copy
- AI capsule art on Steam: what is allowed, and what works
- An AI game marketing workflow, end to end
- What an AI can do of a game publisher's job
Everything else
Search results
Summer Engine pricing: a free app, and hosted AI from $20 a month
Summer Engine's desktop app is free, and so is connecting your own AI agent to it over MCP; its hosted AI gives a free account 5 messages a day, up to 30 a month, and then costs $20 (Pro), $60 (Pro+) or $200 (Ultra) a month, or $16, $48 and $160 a month billed yearly. Everything here was read on Summer's own pricing page, terms and docs on 25 October 2026.
4 min readFree Unity AI alternatives: your own agent over MCP, Aura, Bezi, or Godot
Unity AI is not free: on the free Unity Personal plan its in-Editor assistant is a 14-day trial, then $10 a month for 1,000 credits, and Unity Pro, at $210 a month, includes 2,000 credits a month; only its CLI, MCP server and plugin for outside agents are free, by Unity's own pages on 1 November 2026. The free Unity AI alternatives are Flockbay, which we make and which builds Godot games with AI for free, on free AI to start or your own Claude or ChatGPT, and the coding agent you may already pay for (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or GitHub Copilot) connected to the Unity Editor over MCP; Aura and Bezi are paid assistants inside the Editor. Unity itself has retired the "Unity AI" name, and every other vendor here was read on its own pages on 25 October 2026.
6 min readCursor vs Claude Code for game dev: an editor or an agent, and what Godot and Unity need
Pick Cursor if you want to work in an editor and review every change as a diff, with models from several vendors; pick Claude Code if you want an agent in your terminal or beside your IDE on a Claude subscription. For Godot both work. For Unity, Claude Code beside Visual Studio or Rider is the smoother pair, because Microsoft's C# Dev Kit and Unity extension are licensed for Visual Studio Code only and are not on Open VSX, where Cursor gets its extensions. Neither one runs or sees your game by itself: both need an MCP server for the engine. Everything here was read on each vendor's own pages on 25 October 2026.
6 min readHow to make a game like Mario: start with the jump
A Mario game is a jump that feels right and levels that teach you how to use it. The jump is four small rules, none of them physics, and each one is a number you can measure. We built them in a Godot 4.7.2 CharacterBody2D and ran them headless, so this post gives the numbers, not adjectives.
4 min readHow to make a game like Wordle
Wordle is two ideas: colours that tell you how close each guess was, and one puzzle a day for everyone. Both fit on one screen, and the whole game is a few hundred lines. The part most clones get wrong is a single rule about repeated letters, so this post runs it on Godot 4.7.2 before it says anything else.
5 min readHow to make a deckbuilder like Slay the Spire
Slay the Spire is a card game where the deck is the character sheet, and every card you take makes every other card rarer. That second idea is arithmetic, so we ran it: a ten-card starter deck in GDScript on Godot 4.7.2, drawn five a turn, and then the same deck with one card added.
4 min readAI game music generators: loops, layers and the licence to check
AI music tools write a track in seconds, and most of them write songs. Games rarely need songs. They need loops that do not tire, layers that change with the action, and a licence that lets you sell the game. Flockbay generates game music and loops into your Godot project as part of building it, from the free usage or your plan's.
5 min readGodot vs GDevelop: code or events, and where each one ships
Godot and GDevelop are both free, open source under the MIT licence, and good at 2D. They differ on one question: do you write your game's logic as code, or as rows of events? Most of the other differences, from 3D to exporting, follow from that. Facts about GDevelop here are from its own site and repository, read on 18 October 2026.
4 min readWhat is Steam Next Fest, and who can enter?
Steam Next Fest is a week-long event Valve runs three times a year, in February, June and October, where unreleased games put up a free playable demo on Steam. Any game can enter once: it needs a public Steam store page, a demo that passes Valve's build review, and no release before that edition ends. The October 2026 edition runs 19 to 26 October; the next one runs 22 February to 1 March 2027, and its registration closes on 10 January 2027.
6 min readHow to sign up for Steam Next Fest
You sign up for Steam Next Fest in Steamworks, from your base game, not from the demo: open that edition's registration, tick the checkbox for the game, pick one or two primary categories, and a green tick on the App Landing Page confirms you are in. It needs a public store page, an unreleased game that has never entered a Next Fest, and no release before the edition ends. The demo does not have to exist yet. For the February 2027 edition, registration closes on 10 January 2027 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific, and the demo must be in Valve's review by 1 February.
7 min readSteam Next Fest checklist: eight weeks out to the last day
A Steam Next Fest checklist, counted back from the day the fest opens, with the February 2027 dates: store page public and registered by 10 January 2027 (about six weeks out); the best trailer on the store page by 18 January, when Valve pulls trailers for its own; demo build and store page in review by 18 January if press should play it; everything in review by 1 February; Press Preview on 11 February; demo released at least 30 minutes before the fest opens on 22 February at 10 a.m. Pacific; then a week of patching, answering players and streaming, and the wrap-up on 1 March. Each item below says whether it is Valve's rule or common practice.
8 min readHow many wishlists does Steam Next Fest bring?
Fewer than most developers hope. In How To Market A Game's survey of the February 2026 Steam Next Fest, the median game gained 806 wishlists during the week, the 30th percentile 382, the 70th 1,839 and the 95th 13,461; one breakout gained 57,074. Survey respondents are the developers who marketed hardest, so the typical entrant does worse: GameDiscoverCo's follower data puts the median demo nearer 200 to 500 wishlists, and a top-10% demo at about 3,000. The strongest predictor is how many wishlists a game already had before the fest, and demos released months before the fest did better than those released in the last month.
6 min readHow to livestream your game during Steam Next Fest
To livestream during Steam Next Fest, stream to your game's own store page through Steam's RTMP upload: create an RTMP token at steamcommunity.com/broadcast/upload against the base game's App ID (not the demo's), paste it into OBS with a 2-second keyframe interval, then create a Live-Stream/Broadcast event in Steamworks and add the streaming account. The account must own the game and have spent at least $5 on Steam. Test with a Friends Only stream days before the fest; Valve expects it to take a few attempts. Streams of participating games get their own section during the fest, and pre-recorded video is allowed if it is labelled as not live.
7 min readWhat to do after Steam Next Fest
After Steam Next Fest ends, read the week's numbers within a few days (wishlists by day and by source, demo players, median play time, reviews), compare them with real benchmarks, leave the demo up unless it gives away most of the game, fix what players hit, and set the launch date. For scale: across six editions to October 2025, GameDiscoverCo found the median Next Fest demo ended with about 18 Steam followers, under 500 wishlists; the top 10% had about 173 followers, roughly 3,000 wishlists. The game cannot enter Next Fest again, so the next visibility comes from your launch, Steam's themed fests and sales, and your own marketing.
7 min readSteam's themed festivals: what they are and how to get in
Steam's themed festivals are week-long events Valve runs around a genre or theme, such as Racing Fest, Rhythm Fest or Couch Co-Op Fest, promoted on the Steam home page with their own sale page. A game can enter every fest it fits, not just one: a discount is not required, though discounted games get the most prominent placement, and Coming Soon games, demos and free-to-play games appear in their own sections. Valve invites eligible games by email based on their store tags; registration is one checkbox, and the deadline for discounts and the trailer opt-in is usually about six weeks before the fest. A game that is not invited can appeal from the event's registration page.
7 min readThe Steam sale calendar, and how to plan a launch around it
Steam's next seasonal sales: Winter Sale 17 December 2026 to 4 January 2027, Spring Sale 18 to 25 March 2027, Summer Sale 24 June to 8 July 2027 (Autumn 2027 not yet announced). Next Fest runs 22 February to 1 March and 14 to 21 June 2027. A game joins a seasonal sale only if it released at least 30 days before the sale starts, and it cannot be discounted for 30 days after release, so the last day to launch and still make the Winter Sale is 17 November 2026. A launch during a sale is not the mistake it looks like: few games launch then, so the launch lists are less crowded.
10 min readWhat does a game publisher do?
A game publisher takes on the jobs between a finished build and a selling game in exchange for a share of revenue: funding (an advance), production help, QA and playtesting, the store page and its art, trailers, marketing and PR, ads, platform relations, localisation, ports and the launch itself. In one study of indie publishing contracts, developers averaged 71% of revenue in deals with no advance and 53 to 55% in deals with one. What matters as much as the split is recoup, who owns the IP, and for how long.
8 min readDo you need a publisher for your indie game?
You need a publisher if you need one of three things you cannot get another way: money to finish the game, console ports and certification, or a marketing and launch team. If the game is funded and you can do or buy the store page, trailers, press, ads and launch yourself, self-publishing on Steam keeps all the revenue after Steam's cut and every decision. The break-even test is simple: a publisher that leaves you 70% of revenue has to grow the game's revenue by at least 43% to leave you better off; one that leaves you 50% has to double it. In Voyer Law's analysis of more than 100 deals from 2017 to 2025, developers kept 67.9% on average without an advance and 58.2% with one (median 50%).
6 min readHow to find a publisher for your indie game
The best way to find a publisher is backwards, from the games: list ten to twenty games like yours released on Steam in the last three years, read the Publisher line on each store page, and you have a shortlist of companies that already sell your kind of game to your kind of player. Then read each one's catalogue for fit and capacity, find its submission form or business development contact, and meet the ones you can at events with meeting systems, such as MeetToMatch at gamescom. Keep eight to fifteen that fit, ranked by fit rather than fame. A real publisher never charges you to publish your game.
7 min readHow to pitch a game to a publisher
Pitch a publisher with four things: a short email that names the game, its genre, two or three comparable titles and the ask, one line each; a playable PC build or vertical slice; about a minute of real gameplay video; and a deck of ten to fifteen slides ending in the ask (how much, for what, by when). Send it through the publisher's own submission form or to the business development contact it names, one publisher at a time with a pitch fitted to its catalogue. Pitch when you have a vertical slice and a costed plan for the rest. Expect mostly declines: Raw Fury said in 2021 that it received at least 1,500 pitches a year and signed under 1% of them.
7 min readWhat to put in a game publisher pitch deck
A game publisher pitch deck is ten to fifteen slides that answer three questions: what is the game, why will it sell, and can you finish it. In order: the title and one-line hook; the core loop in real gameplay; what makes it different; three to five comparable games and how they did; your audience evidence (wishlists, followers, demo players, playtests); platforms and scope; the team; the schedule; the budget to finish; and the ask, how much and for what. Raw Fury's own pitch page boils it down to six questions: what you are doing, why, who you are, where you want to go, what you need to get there, and when it will be done. The deck travels with a playable PC build, which matters more than the slides.
7 min readWhat revenue share does a game publisher take?
In Voyer Law's analysis of more than 100 indie publishing agreements signed from 2017 to 2025, developers kept 67.9% of revenue on average in deals without an advance (median 70%) and 58.2% in deals with one (median 50%), where the average advance was about $675,000 and the median $300,000. The split is usually of net revenue, after the store's own cut (on Steam, 30% until a game's revenue passes $10 million). The term that decides what you actually earn is recoup: whether the advance is repaid from the publisher's share, from all revenue, or from yours. On the same game and the same 50/50 split, those three can pay the developer anywhere from nothing to half the revenue.
7 min readHow to publish a game on Steam, start to finish
To publish a game on Steam: sign up for Steamworks, sign the Steam Direct agreement, complete the identity, tax and bank forms (verification takes 15 to 30 days), and pay the $100 Steam Direct fee for the game, which comes back once the game earns $1,000. For your first few titles there is a 30-day wait between paying the fee and releasing. Build the store page and submit it for review (usually 3 to 5 business days; submit at least seven ahead); once approved it must show as Coming Soon for at least two weeks. Upload a near-final build and pass its review, also usually 3 to 5 business days. When both are approved you press Release App yourself. Valve pays monthly, about 30 days after the month of the sales, once that month passes $100.
8 min readSteam release checklist: from three months out to launch day
A Steam release checklist, counted back from launch day: Steamworks paperwork and the $100 Steam Direct fee at least three months out (verification takes 15 to 30 days, and a first title waits 21 days after the fee); the store page reviewed and Coming Soon for months, never less than the two-week minimum; the build uploaded and reviewed (3 to 5 business days, plan for seven); prices submitted; the release date committed before it locks two weeks out; the launch discount set before release; and on the day you press Release App yourself. Each item says whether it is Valve's rule or common practice.
7 min readWhat day should you release your game on Steam?
Valve publishes no data showing a best weekday, but it does advise against weekends: its date picker hides them and the Steam team may not be there to help. Most indie developers release Monday to Thursday, in the morning US Pacific time, so press, creators and the developer's own fixes all land on working days and the game has several days of sales before the weekend. The week matters more than the day: launch more than 30 days before a seasonal sale if you want it as a second wave, stay clear of Next Fest weeks and big releases in your genre, and remember that the date locks two weeks before release.
6 min readSteam regional pricing, explained
Steam sells in 37 currencies across four region groups. You set a base price in US dollars, and Steam's pricing tool suggests the rest using one of three methods: exchange rate only, purchasing power only, or a multi-variable method that combines purchasing power, the local cost of comparable entertainment and the exchange rate. You can accept the suggestions or set any currency yourself; a currency left without a price makes the game unavailable in its countries. Valve reviews prices in one or two business days, prices cannot change for 30 days after release, and a price increase in any currency blocks discounts for 30 days. In practice a $19.99 game typically costs £16.75, €19.99, R$59.99 and ₹915, and $10.99 in Argentina and Turkey, which Steam has priced in US dollars since November 2023.
6 min readShould you use a launch discount on Steam?
A Steam launch discount can be 10% to 40% off, must run 7 to 14 days, ends at 10 a.m. Pacific, and can only be set up before the game releases, on the app's landing page; Valve suggests about 10% to 15%. Most new games use one: in one week of September 2026, 41 of the 47 paid games on Steam's seven-day top-seller chart launched discounted. It gives wishlisters a deadline in the week Steam emails them about the release. The cost: no other discount is allowed for 30 days after release or after the launch discount ends, a price increase in the 30 days before blocks it, and a deep one teaches players to wait.
6 min readSteam's revenue share, explained
Valve keeps 30% of a game's Steam revenue up to $10 million, 25% of revenue between $10 million and $50 million, and 20% above $50 million, so almost every indie game pays 30%. The share is taken after sales taxes such as VAT, refunds and chargebacks, and most copies sell below the US list price because of discounts and regional pricing, so a developer typically keeps something like a third of the list price per copy, not 70%. Valve pays monthly, about 30 days after the month of the sales, once that month passes $100. Steam keys you sell on other stores carry no revenue share to Valve.
6 min readEarly Access on Steam: should you use it?
Use Steam Early Access when the game is already fun to play, will get better with players' feedback, and you can keep updating it for a year or more: roguelikes, sandboxes, survival, management and strategy games are the classic fits. Skip it for story-driven games, which players finish once, and never launch in Early Access without a playable game, which is Valve's own rule. Early Access is a release, not a pre-order or crowdfunding: Steam emails your wishlisters and reviews count from day one, though the 1.0 release gets the full launch visibility and a second wishlist email. Of 10,141 Early Access games with ten or more reviews that entered from 2013 to 2023, 61% had reached 1.0 by September 2026, after a median of about a year.
6 min readHow to answer Steam's six Early Access questions
Steam asks every Early Access game to answer six questions on its store page, word for word: Why Early Access? Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access? How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version? What is the current state of the Early Access version? Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access? How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process? Answer each with what is true today, in plain numbers (hours of content, an update cadence, an estimated range), because Valve's rules forbid specific promises about the future and ask you to be detailed and transparent. For scale, Early Access games that reached 1.0 spent a median of about 11 to 12 months there.
7 min readSteam refunds, from the developer side
Steam refunds nearly any purchase requested within 14 days of buying with under two hours played, and the refunded sale comes out of your revenue in the monthly report. A typical game loses about one copy in ten: in GameDiscoverCo's late-2024 survey of almost 150 developers, the median lifetime unit refund rate was 9.5% (8% for games launched straight to 1.0, 12.4% in Early Access), with most games between 5% and 25%. In Steamworks' Sales & Activations reports, Refund Data shows your rate and players' reasons by category with their written notes. Short games, bugs, a page that oversells and deep discounts push the rate up; a long playtime and a Very Positive score keep it down.
6 min readHow to plan your first Steam sale
Your first Steam sale can start 30 days after release at the earliest, and 30 days after a launch discount ends. The best first sale is usually the next seasonal sale you are eligible for (the game must have released at least 30 days before it starts), because seasonal sales bring the most shoppers and are exempt from the between-discounts cooldown; a weeklong deal or a themed fest that fits is the alternative. Go at least 20%, which is the depth that makes Steam email your wishlisters, and a little deeper than your launch discount. Have ten Steam reviews by then so the score shows, and pair the sale with an update. It matters because most wishlisters do not buy at launch: GameDiscoverCo's median for games with 25,000+ wishlists was first-week sales of 0.15 times the wishlist count.
6 min readHow to get your game Steam Deck Verified
A game is Steam Deck Verified when Valve's testers find it works with no setup: the default controller configuration reaches everything, on-screen glyphs match the controller in use, text entry works from the controller, the smallest text is at least 9 pixels tall at 1280x800 (Valve recommends 12), it holds 30 fps at 800p in its default settings, and no launcher or unsupported-hardware warning gets in the way. Valve tests games itself; you can request a review from Technical Tools on the app's landing page once the build has passed its standard review, choose the branch, and expect results in about a week, published automatically a week later. Since 2026 Valve rates the Steam Machine separately, at 30 fps at 1080p.
7 min readSteam's AI disclosure, explained
Steam's content survey asks every game how generative AI was used, in two kinds: pre-generated content made with AI during development and shipped in the game (art, sound, voice, music, writing, localisation, and also store page and marketing material), and live-generated content an AI makes while the game runs, which also needs a description of the guardrails against illegal output; live-generated adult-only sexual content is not allowed. Since Valve's January 2026 rewrite, AI tools used only for efficiency, such as coding assistants, need no disclosure as long as no generated content reaches the game. Your answer appears on the store page under AI Generated Content Disclosure, and 35.04% of games released from January to August 2026 carried one in Flockbay's measured sample.
6 min readCan you sell a game made with AI on Steam?
Yes. Since January 2024 Steam accepts games made with generative AI, as long as the developer discloses the AI content players see, hear or read (in the game, on the store page and in marketing) and puts guardrails on anything generated while the game runs. Since January 2026, AI used only for efficiency, such as a coding assistant, needs no disclosure if no generated content ships. Disclosure is now common: in Flockbay's measured sample, 35.04% of Steam games released from January to August 2026 carried an AI disclosure, up from 12.44% in 2024, most often for visual assets. Players are wary: in Circana's December 2025 study about a quarter of US players said AI use made them less likely to buy, so how you use it, and how plainly you say so, matters.
6 min readUsing AI to write your Steam store page copy
An AI can draft your Steam short description and About This Game section in minutes, but the draft is only as good as what you give it: the game's hook, what the player does every minute, what is actually in the build, and three to five comparable games. Left alone it writes generic hype and invents features. Hold it to Valve's rules: the short description is plain text of a few hundred characters with nothing time-bound such as "Now Available"; About This Game may use bold and images but no links to other sites and nothing promoting other Steam products; the store page may describe only what is in the game at launch. Cut every feature you cannot point to in the build, and include AI-written store text in your AI disclosure, because Valve's AI section covers store page material.
6 min readAI capsule art on Steam: what is allowed, and what works
Steam allows AI-generated capsule art, as long as you disclose it: store page and marketing material count as content players see in Valve's AI section of the content survey. The capsule itself follows the same rules as any other since 1 September 2022: game artwork, the game's name and an official subtitle, readable; no review scores, awards, discount text, calls to action or other text. A non-compliant capsule can lose store visibility and is ineligible for featuring in Steam's sales and events. The risk with generated key art is not Valve but players: a generic generated image reads as low effort to the quarter of players most wary of AI, and can promise a look the game does not have. A capsule cut from a real frame of the game, with the title set cleanly, shows what players will actually play.
6 min readAn AI game marketing workflow, end to end
Flockbay is an AI tool for marketing an indie game while you build it: from the game itself it drafts the Steam page, cuts trailers and devlogs, drafts posts and ad campaigns for your own ad accounts, and builds a website. AI is useful for the repetitive half of game marketing: researching comparable games, drafting store copy, cutting clips from gameplay, drafting posts and ad variations, and summarising playtest reports. It is bad at the half players notice: the hook, the key art, the voice of the studio. A workflow that works feeds the AI facts (a one-page fact sheet of the hook, the loop, what is in the build and comparable games), checks every claim against the build, keeps the art real or discloses it (Steam's AI disclosure covers store page and marketing material), and leaves the decisions on price, launch dates and ad spend to you.
6 min readWhat an AI can do of a game publisher's job
Some of them, and Flockbay does much of that production work in one app, from the game itself: draft the store page, cut trailers and devlogs from real gameplay, draft and queue posts, draft ad campaigns for you to launch, build a game website, and read playtest reports. It cannot do the parts that are money and relationships: fund development, negotiate with platform holders, get a game into a showcase, port it to consoles or put a reputation behind it. For a self-publishing developer, the production half is usually the half they were missing; for a developer who needs money or consoles, a publisher still earns its share, which in Voyer Law's 2017–2025 sample of deals with an advance averaged 41.8% of revenue.
6 min readHow to make a Steam store page, step by step
A Steam store page is built in Steamworks' Store Presence editor, section by section: basic info and links, the short description (plain text, a few hundred characters) and About This Game, at least five tags ordered by weight, the four required capsules (920x430, 462x174, 1232x706, 748x896) and the library assets, at least five 1920x1080 gameplay screenshots, a trailer (Steam cuts its hover microtrailer from your first video), languages, system requirements, and the content survey with its AI section. Every required section must be complete before you press Mark as Ready for Review, at least seven business days before you want the page live; review usually takes 3 to 5 business days, and once approved you press Post as Coming Soon.
6 min readWhen should you make your Steam store page?
Put your Steam page up as soon as you are ready to talk about the game publicly and its art direction and core loop are settled: that is Valve's own advice. The hard minimum is two weeks as Coming Soon before release, but many indies post the page six to twelve months ahead or more, because every day it is up collects wishlists, and Valve says a player who wishlists two years ahead is about as likely to buy as one who wishlists two weeks ahead. Next Fest also needs a public page about six weeks before the fest. The caution: GameDiscoverCo found launch underperformers had spent 411 days on Steam before release on average, against 214 for games that did well, so an early page has to be kept alive, not just posted.
5 min readWhat a Steam Coming Soon page does for your game
A Steam Coming Soon page is your store page before release. It lets players wishlist and follow the game, and Steam emails every wishlister when it releases; it opens your Community Hub for announcements, events and discussion; and the release date you show places the game on upcoming lists such as Popular Upcoming. Valve requires it to be up for at least two weeks before release, reviews it first (submit at least seven business days ahead), and publishes it only when you press Post as Coming Soon. Valve's own view is that wishlists collected two years ahead are about as likely to buy as those collected two weeks ahead, so post it as soon as the game's look and core features are settled.
6 min readHow much does it cost to put a game on Steam?
Putting a game on Steam costs $100: the Steam Direct fee, paid once per game. It is not refundable, but Valve pays it back in a later payment once that game reaches $1,000 in adjusted gross revenue from store and in-app purchases. Paying it creates an app credit on the payer's Steam account; DLC and demos are added from the game's own landing page. For your first few titles there is a 30-day wait between paying and being able to release, and the identity, tax and bank paperwork takes 15 to 30 days to verify. There is no other fee to Valve: after launch Valve keeps 30% of revenue up to $10 million. Everything else (art, a trailer, translation, ads) is optional and up to you.
6 min readHow long Steam's store page review takes
Valve's store page review usually takes 3 to 5 business days, and Valve asks you to submit at least seven business days before you want the page live. The build review is separate, also typically 3 to 5 business days, and Valve says to plan for seven; the store page must be submitted before the build. Price review usually takes one or two business days, and an optional Steam Deck compatibility review about a week. Pages with adult content need both the page and the build submitted first and can take longer. Approval does not publish the page: you press Post as Coming Soon, and the page must then be up two weeks before release.
5 min readHow to write a Steam short description
The Steam short description is the plain-text paragraph beside your header capsule and trailer, limited to a few hundred characters: no line breaks, no formatting, nothing time-bound such as "Now Available". It is also the text Steam uses as the store page's meta description, so it is often what Google shows under your game. Valve's advice is to lead with what sets the game apart and its genre. A formula that works: genre, what the player does, and the twist, in one or two sentences of about 150 to 270 characters, the range Hades, Balatro, Hollow Knight, Stardew Valley and Vampire Survivors use. Save features and story for About This Game.
6 min readHow to choose Steam tags for your game
Steam requires at least five tags before launch, recommends up to twenty, and uses the top 20 for tag pages, browse views, search filters and recommendations. Order them in the Tag Wizard (Store Presence, Edit Store Page, Basic Info, Tags): order sets weight, your top five also describe the game on its store page, and some filters use the first fifteen. In Steam's recommendations, overlap across several tags matters more than their order and rare tags carry more weight than common ones, so a specific sub-genre such as "Precision Platformer" or "Party-Based RPG" does more than "Action" or "Indie". Players can add tags too, and you can remove inaccurate ones.
6 min readHow many screenshots does a Steam page need, and which ones?
Steam requires at least five screenshots, 1920x1080 or larger in 16:9, showing gameplay only: no concept art, pre-rendered cinematic stills, awards or marketing text. Well-known indie pages carry more: on 18 October 2026, Vampire Survivors had 7, Hades 11, Balatro 12, Hollow Knight 15 and Stardew Valley 16. Eight to twelve suits most games. The first four or five matter most, because they show beside the trailer and in Steam's hover previews, so lead with the core loop at its clearest. Mark at least four as suitable for all ages, or the game may not appear in some areas of Steam.
5 min readHow to use GIFs in your Steam store description
Steam lets you embed images and looping GIFs in the About This Game section. Valve's limits: each image under 5 MB, and all screenshots and GIFs together under 15 MB, so the page loads fast. Use one short GIF per feature, under a bold header, showing that feature in two to five seconds of real play at around 600 pixels wide, and keep text out of the image: baked-in text has to be remade and re-uploaded for every language. Images may not contain links, QR codes, imitations of Steam's buttons or capsules, or other Steam products. A clip cut with ffmpeg's palette filters at 12 to 15 frames per second usually lands well under the 5 MB limit.
5 min readSteam capsule art: sizes, rules, and art that reads small
Steam needs four store capsules: the header capsule (920x430, top of the store page and recommendations), the small capsule (462x174, which Steam also draws at 184x69 and 120x45 in search and lists), the main capsule (1232x706, the home page carousel) and the vertical capsule (748x896, seasonal sale pages). Since 1 September 2022 the only text allowed is the game's name and an official subtitle: no review scores, awards, discount copy or calls to action, or the game can lose visibility and featuring. The art should give a sense of the gameplay, and on the small capsule the logo should nearly fill the space. Design the 120x45 version first: if the name and the subject read there, they read everywhere.
6 min readHow to fill in Steam's content survey
Steam's content survey has three sections, all required before your store page and build can go to review. General Content asks about themes such as violence, language and gambling-like mechanics, and its answers generate ratings for several regional rating boards, shown on the store page at release. Mature Content decides how the game appears against each player's content preferences, and must disclose all adult content in the build, even content players cannot reach. Generative AI Content covers AI-made content that ships (pre-generated) and content an AI makes while the game runs (live-generated, with its guardrails). Valve compares the answers with the build and page in review, and some answers cannot be changed after approval without Steam Support.
5 min readSteam's mature content settings, explained
In Steam's content survey, the Mature Content section asks you to disclose the mature content players may meet, and your answers place the game in the categories players filter by in their store preferences: General Mature Content, Frequent Violence or Gore, Some Nudity or Sexual Content, Frequent Nudity or Sexual Content, and Adult Only Sexual Content (hidden by default). Valve's rules: disclose all adult content in your builds, even content players cannot reach; answer honestly; the content rules apply whether or not you disclose; some answers cannot be edited after approval without Steam Support; and live-generated adult-only sexual content from AI is not allowed. Over-declaring narrows your audience a little; under-declaring can cost you the page.
5 min readHow to write Steam system requirements for your game
Steam's store page asks, for each operating system you sell on, for minimum and recommended system requirements: OS, processor, memory, graphics, the DirectX or graphics API version, storage, and additional notes. Measure them rather than guess: the minimum is the weakest machine on which the game holds a playable frame rate at its lowest settings, the recommended is the machine that hits your target at default settings. For scale, Steam's September 2026 hardware survey found 71% of players on Windows 11, about 89% with 16 GB of RAM or more, and 48% at 1920x1080. A Godot 4 game exported with the Compatibility renderer runs on OpenGL 3.3 or Direct3D 11 integrated graphics; Forward+ needs Vulkan 1.0 or Direct3D 12. Wrong requirements cost you twice: players with weaker PCs refund, and players with fine PCs pass on a game whose requirements look heavier than it is.
6 min readHow to localize your Steam store page
Valve says over 60% of Steam users use it in a language other than English; in its September 2026 hardware survey, English was 34.20% and Simplified Chinese 31.39%. You can localize the store page's short description, About This Game, images and trailers, the game's name (in Steamworks settings), package names and announcements, entering each language from the language dropdown at the top right of every text editor in Steamworks. Keep text out of images so one set serves every language. The store page can be translated before the game is: list each language honestly as Interface, Full Audio or Subtitles, because language support is set by the game, not the page, and use regional wishlists to see which translations to do next.
6 min readWhich languages to translate your Steam page into first
Choose languages from data, not habit. Steam's September 2026 hardware survey shows English at 34.20% of users, Simplified Chinese at 31.39%, Russian 9.05%, Spanish (Spain) 4.08%, Brazilian Portuguese 3.70%, German 2.48%, Japanese 2.41% and French 2.08%. Your own store page traffic and wishlists by region show where your game is already finding players, and your genre's comparable games show which languages their audience expects. Valve's guidance adds that the less a language looks like English, the higher the expected return. For most indie games that means Simplified Chinese first, then the next two or three your data points to, store page before game.
5 min readSetting a release date on Steam: Coming Soon, a quarter, or a day
Steam lets you display your release date five ways: an exact day, a month and year, a quarter, a year, or simply Coming Soon with no date. Behind any of them you set a specific intended date players cannot see, which Valve uses to plan reminders and event invitations such as Next Fest. Upcoming lists place a game at the last day of whatever range it shows, so "Q2 2027" files the game at 30 June and Coming Soon sits behind every game with a date. You can switch the display before release and change the date up to two weeks before it; inside those two weeks it locks and the game starts appearing more in upcoming lists.
6 min readHow to move your Steam release date without losing momentum
You can change a Steam release date in Steamworks up to two weeks before it; inside those two weeks it is locked, so decide early. Moving the date moves the game on upcoming lists (a vague date is filed at the last day of its range), and wishlists stay, though players who lose interest can remove the game. If the new day is not certain, switch the display back to a month or quarter while keeping an exact intended date behind it. Announce a delay once, on the store page, with the new window, one concrete reason and something new to show. A delay rarely hurts as much as a launch that was not ready.
5 min readHow to set up a Steam page for your demo
A Steam demo is its own app in Steamworks: on the base game's landing page open All associated packages, DLC, demos and tools and press Add Demo, set the type to Demo with the base game's App ID, upload builds to the demo's own depots, and pass its own review. It can show on the base game's page as a Download Demo button (a sidebar link or a prominent green box), or get a separate store page that must describe only the demo, with its own trailer and at least five demo screenshots. After approval press Release Demo, then republish the base game so its button appears. Demos are free, inherit the base game's tags, can appear wherever free games appear, and unlock one email to your wishlisters within two weeks of the demo's first release.
5 min readSteam page checklist: before you submit for review
Before you submit your Steam page for review: the short description is plain text with nothing time-bound; About This Game has no links, QR codes or other Steam products, and images under 5 MB each; the page describes only what is in the game at launch; at least five tags, ordered by weight; four capsules at Steam's sizes (920x430, 462x174, 1232x706, 748x896) with only the game's name and an official subtitle as text; at least five 1920x1080 gameplay screenshots, four marked suitable for all ages; a trailer that opens on gameplay; honest languages; measured system requirements; and all three parts of the content survey. Submit at least seven business days before you want it live; review usually takes 3 to 5 business days.
6 min readWhat the best Steam store pages have in common
The Steam pages that turn visitors into wishlists share a pattern you can check on any page: a capsule that reads at thumbnail size and shows the genre; a trailer that shows play in its first seconds; a first screenshot that answers "what do I do?"; a short description of under about 270 characters with the genre and one hook; About This Game built to skim; and specific top tags such as Roguelike Deckbuilder or Metroidvania rather than Indie or Action. Five of Steam's best-known indie pages, Balatro, Hades, Hollow Knight, Stardew Valley and Vampire Survivors, carry 7 to 16 screenshots, 1 to 5 videos and 11 to 14 languages, and lead their tags with a specific genre. None of it needs a big budget.
5 min readHow to update your Steam page as the game changes
Edit your store page in Steamworks and press Save: saved changes stay private, and a red bar at the top of the editor marks unpublished edits. Preview them with Preview changes in store, then publish from the Publish tab (Prepare for Publishing); after release, published changes appear on the store page immediately. Refresh screenshots and the trailer whenever the game looks noticeably better, update the description when features land or are cut, and post an announcement each time. After a major update, an Update Visibility Round puts the game on the Steam front page for up to 30 days or a million impressions; each game starts with five, shared between Early Access and full release. The one thing you cannot change after pre-release review is the game's name.
6 min readGodotSteam: setting up Steamworks in a Godot 4 game
GodotSteam is the open-source Steamworks integration for Godot: a GDExtension plug-in from the Asset Library or a pre-compiled editor with matching export templates, both giving GDScript a global Steam singleton. Set your App ID (480, Valve's Spacewar, while testing) in Project Settings under Steam > Initialization, call Steam.steamInitEx() from an autoload's _ready(), and call Steam.run_callbacks() every frame from a node that never pauses. A status of 0 means Steam is ready; most failures are the Steam client not running, an unset App ID or a missing steam_api library. Ship steam_api64.dll (and godotsteam.dll for the plug-in) beside a Windows .exe, and never ship steam_appid.txt. The current release is GodotSteam 4.23 on Steamworks SDK 1.65.
5 min readSteam achievements in Godot with GodotSteam
To add Steam achievements to a Godot 4 game: create them (and any stats) in Steamworks and publish the change (the game does not need to be released), then in GDScript call Steam.setAchievement("API_NAME") followed by Steam.storeStats(). storeStats() is what uploads it and triggers Steam's pop-up. Read one with Steam.getAchievement(), clear it with Steam.clearAchievement(), and show progress with Steam.indicateAchievementProgress(). GodotSteam 4.14 and later sync stats and achievements at boot, so no request call is needed. Valve limits a game to 100 achievements at first, raised once the game reaches its Profile Features threshold.
5 min readSteam Cloud saves for a Godot game
A Godot game can use Steam Cloud two ways. Steam Auto-Cloud needs no code: in Steamworks you set a quota and tell Steam which folder and file pattern to sync, such as the folder Godot's user:// resolves to (on Windows, the WinAppDataRoaming root plus Godot/app_userdata/<project name>, unless you set a custom user directory), and Steam uploads at exit and restores at launch. Or use the Remote Storage API through GodotSteam (Steam.fileWrite, Steam.fileRead) to write and read cloud files yourself. Auto-Cloud suits most indie games. On Steam Deck, Steam also syncs when the device suspends, which works safest when writes are wrapped in Steam's file write batches.
5 min readSteam lobbies and multiplayer in Godot
To put a Godot game online through Steam: create a lobby with Steam.createLobby(type, max_members) and wait for lobby_created; let friends join through the overlay with Steam.activateGameOverlayInviteDialog(lobby_id) and handle join_requested; find public lobbies with Steam.requestLobbyList() and lobby_match_list; then run Godot's high-level multiplayer over Steam with GodotSteam's SteamMultiplayerPeer: create_host(0) on the lobby owner, create_client(owner_steam_id, 0) on everyone else, and multiplayer.set_multiplayer_peer(peer). Players need no port forwarding, connections use Steam IDs rather than IP addresses, and setting server_relay routes client traffic through the host.
5 min readMaking a Godot game ready for Steam Deck
Godot games run well on Steam Deck. Ship a native Linux export (Godot exports Linux x86_64, and Valve tests it before falling back to Proton) or let the Windows build run through Proton; then meet Valve's Verified checks: every screen reachable with the gamepad, button glyphs that match the controller, controller text entry (GodotSteam's showFloatingGamepadTextInput), text at least 9 pixels tall at 1280x800 (use the canvas_items stretch mode so the UI scales), and 30 fps at 800p in default settings. Godot 4's Forward+ renderer runs on the Deck's Vulkan driver; detect the Deck with GodotSteam's isRunningOnSteamHardware() (4.21 and later) and take lighter defaults from getSteamHardwareDefaultConfig() if you are near the limit.
5 min readHow to put a Unity game on Steam
To put a Unity game on Steam: make a Windows x86_64 standalone build (and a Linux one for the Steam Deck if you can) with IL2CPP or Mono; add a Steamworks wrapper only if you want achievements, the overlay, cloud saves or lobbies (Steamworks.NET mirrors Valve's API, Facepunch.Steamworks offers a higher-level C# API); test the built player with Steam running under your App ID, or 480 before you have one; leave the folders Unity marks DoNotShip and ButDontShipItWithYourGame out of the upload; then upload with SteamPipe and set the build live on the default branch by hand. Unity Personal is free up to $200,000 in revenue and funding, and a Unity game without any Steam features ships fine: Steam just launches the .exe.
7 min readSteamworks.NET or Facepunch.Steamworks for Unity?
Both are free, MIT-licensed, actively maintained C# wrappers for Valve's Steamworks API, and on 18 October 2026 they had similar followings on GitHub (about 3,600 and 3,800 stars). Steamworks.NET maps the C++ API almost one to one, so Valve's documentation and examples translate directly, at the cost of verbose callback code; its latest release, 2025.164.1, came out in August 2026. Facepunch.Steamworks, from the studio behind Rust and Garry's Mod, wraps it in an idiomatic C# API with properties, events and async methods, so common tasks take fewer lines but you follow its docs rather than Valve's; its latest release, 2.5.2, came out in April 2026. Pick Steamworks.NET for full coverage and Valve-documented behaviour, Facepunch for speed of writing.
5 min readSteam achievements in Unity
For Steam achievements in Unity: create and publish them in Steamworks, then from C# set one and store stats. With Steamworks.NET that is SteamUserStats.SetAchievement("API_NAME") followed by SteamUserStats.StoreStats(); with Facepunch.Steamworks it is new Achievement("API_NAME").Trigger(), which sets and stores. The overlay pop-up appears only once the stats are stored, and only while the game runs under Steam with your App ID. Valve limits a game to 100 achievements at first; reset them while testing with SteamUserStats.ResetAllStats(true) or the Steam console's reset_all_stats.
5 min readHow to put an Unreal Engine game on Steam
To put an Unreal Engine game on Steam: package a Shipping build for Windows (and Linux for Steam Deck if you can); if you want Steam features, enable Online Subsystem Steam and set DefaultPlatformService=Steam and your App ID in DefaultEngine.ini (480 while testing); run it with the Steam client open; then upload the packaged folder with SteamPipe and set it live. In Shipping builds with Steam enabled, Unreal checks the signed-in user owns the game and quits if not, so test Shipping through Steam. Budget for Epic's royalty: 5% of gross revenue above the first $1 million per product, or 3.5% under Launch Everywhere with Epic if the game also launches on the Epic Games Store no later than elsewhere.
5 min readSetting up Online Subsystem Steam in Unreal
To set up Online Subsystem Steam in Unreal: load the OnlineSubsystemSteam module (DynamicallyLoadedModuleNames.Add("OnlineSubsystemSteam") in your build file), then in DefaultEngine.ini set [OnlineSubsystem] DefaultPlatformService=Steam, [OnlineSubsystemSteam] bEnabled=true and SteamDevAppId=480 for testing, point GameNetDriver at OnlineSubsystemSteam.SteamNetDriver with the IP driver as fallback, and add the SteamAuth packet handler. If you use Sessions, set bInitServerOnClient=true, or Create and Join Session will not work; lobbies do not need it. Run with the Steam client open, test multiplayer on two machines with two Steam accounts, and never upload the steam_appid.txt Unreal writes beside the executable.
5 min readHow to put a GameMaker game on Steam
GameMaker uses YoYo Games' official, open-source Steamworks extension (GMEXT-Steamworks). Import it (the Marketplace build is the recommended one; GitHub has newer, less tested releases), download the Steamworks SDK from Valve's partner site and extract it to a short path, then in the extension's options set the SDK path and your App ID. The extension calls steam_init itself; call steam_update every step from a persistent object and steam_shutdown when the game ends. Run with the Steam client open and signed in, build for Windows (and Ubuntu for a native Linux build), and upload with SteamPipe. Selling commercially needs GameMaker's Professional licence, a one-time purchase; the free tier is for non-commercial use.
5 min readHow to put an RPG Maker game on Steam
RPG Maker MZ and MV games ship on Steam as a desktop deployment: use the editor's Deployment for Windows (and macOS if you want it), optionally excluding unused files and encrypting images and audio, test the exported folder on a machine without RPG Maker, then upload it with SteamPipe with a launch option pointing at Game.exe. The game runs on Steam as it is. Steam features such as achievements are not built in: they come from community Steamworks plugins built on Greenworks, which only work with specific NW.js versions, so follow the plugin's own version table exactly. Steam Deck players get the Windows build through Proton.
5 min readHow to put a Construct 3 game on Steam
Construct 3 games reach Steam through its desktop exports, which wrap the game as an app: Windows WebView2, and with Scirra's official Steamworks plugin also Linux CEF (for Steam Deck, from Construct r412) and macOS WKWebView (from r417). The plugin gives access to user details, the Steam overlay, achievements and DLC; its 1.4 releases use Steamworks SDK 1.62, need Construct r444 or later and drop 32-bit Windows. The overlay works on Windows and on Steam hardware such as the Deck, not on macOS or desktop Linux. During development set your App ID in the plugin (480 if you have none yet) and tick Development mode, test the exported build with Steam running, then upload it with SteamPipe.
5 min readHow to ship a web game on Steam
Steam installs and launches desktop programs, so an HTML5 game ships wrapped in one. Electron and NW.js bundle Chromium (large downloads but the same engine on every machine), with Steamworks bridges such as steamworks.js for Electron and Greenworks for NW.js. Tauri and WebView2-based wrappers use the system's web view (small builds, but the engine varies by machine), with Steamworks through a native bridge such as the steamworks Rust crate. Engines with their own export, such as Construct, ship their own Steam plugin. Pick a wrapper with a maintained Steamworks bridge if you need achievements or the overlay, test offline play, saves and fullscreen, and ship a Linux build or test under Proton for the Steam Deck.
5 min readHow to upload a build to Steam with SteamPipe
SteamPipe is how every build reaches Steam. In Steamworks, define a launch option and depots, publish, and add the depots to a package. Put your game files in the SDK's tools\ContentBuilder\content folder, write an app_build_<AppID>.vdf script mapping them to a depot, and run steamcmd with +login and +run_app_build. SteamPipe splits files into roughly 1 MB chunks and uploads only what changed. The build then appears under Your Builds; a beta branch can go live from the script's SetLive field, but the default branch is set live by hand in Steamworks. Use a dedicated build account with only the Edit App Metadata and Publish App Changes To Steam permissions.
5 min readWhat is a devlog, and is it worth making one?
A devlog (development log) is a running, public record of a game being made: usually a narrated video of a few minutes showing what changed, why, and what went wrong, sometimes a written post with GIFs on itch.io, Steam or a blog. Developers make them to build an audience before launch, to stay accountable, and to collect feedback. Do they sell games? As a baseline, yes; as the main engine, rarely. Jonas Tyroller, with about 200,000 YouTube subscribers, thought most of Will You Snail?'s wishlists came from his four years of devlogs, yet for the bigger hit Thronefall his own videos "don't even make a noticeable dent" in a wishlist count that big. Devlogs work best when each tells the story of one problem, shows the game playing, and points to a Steam wishlist.
6 min readHow to make a devlog video
To make a devlog video: pick one problem you solved since the last one; write a short script (a hook that shows the problem, the context, what you tried, what worked, what is next); capture clean gameplay of before and after, with OBS or, for a Godot game, the engine's Movie Maker mode, which records at a fixed frame rate however slow the machine; record narration separately in a quiet room; edit so the game is on screen the whole time, with chapters if it runs long; then title it by the problem, use a real frame as the thumbnail, put your Steam link in the first line of the description, and cut the best moment into a vertical clip. Free tools cover all of it: OBS, DaVinci Resolve and Audacity.
6 min readHow long should a devlog be?
As long as one problem takes to tell, and no longer. Most video devlogs land between three and ten minutes; the ones that run much longer are usually several devlogs glued together. A vertical cut for YouTube Shorts, TikTok or Reels is best under a minute, built around the single best moment, even though Shorts now allow up to three minutes. A written devlog is a few hundred words with a GIF per point. Viewers leave when the story stalls, not at a particular minute, and YouTube Studio's audience retention graph shows you exactly where that is. Monetized channels note that mid-roll ads need a video of eight minutes or more, which is a reason to keep a good video long, never to pad a short one.
6 min readWhere to post devlogs, and how often
Post a devlog every two to four weeks, a cadence you can keep for a year. Post the full video devlog on YouTube, where people search and subscribe; post it, or a written version, as an announcement on your Steam page, which reaches every follower's activity feed and shows on the store page; post on itch.io's Devlog tab if your game has a page there, and on your game's website; cut vertical clips of the best moment for TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Reels; and share in the Reddit and Discord communities where your genre's players gather, by their rules. How often: a cadence you can keep for a year beats a burst. Every two to four weeks for videos is common for solo developers, with clips and GIF posts in between from the same footage.
6 min readDevlog titles and thumbnails that get clicked
A devlog's title and thumbnail decide whether anyone outside your subscribers watches. Titles that work name one specific problem or result ("I rebuilt my enemy AI and it got worse"), not an episode number. Thumbnails that work show a real frame of the game, cropped close on one readable subject, with at most three large words and high contrast so it reads at phone size. YouTube takes custom thumbnails from verified channels as 16:9 JPG or PNG images, at least 640 pixels wide (it now suggests 3840x2160), and its Test & compare tool tries up to three thumbnails on real viewers and picks the one with the highest share of watch time. "Devlog #14" over a busy screenshot looks like every other devlog in the feed.
6 min readHow to make TikToks for your indie game
A TikTok for an indie game is one moment of real gameplay with the hook in the first two seconds and captions for people watching muted, delivered at 1080x1920 (9:16). Do not crop 16:9 footage to fill the screen, which throws away about two-thirds of the width: put the whole clip on a 9:16 canvas over a blurred copy of the footage, with the hook above and the game's name below, or capture vertically in the game. Post a few clips a week from the same footage, keep the game's name in your profile and a Steam link in your bio, use your game's own music or TikTok's commercial library, and judge clips by the wishlists that follow, not the views. The same deliverable works on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.
5 min readHow to make YouTube Shorts for your game
YouTube Shorts are square or vertical videos up to three minutes long (for uploads since 15 October 2024), shown in YouTube's Shorts feed; a 16:9 video is a regular video, not a Short. For a game, a Short is one moment of real gameplay with the hook in the first seconds, captions for muted viewers, and the game's name on screen. Do not crop a 16:9 clip to fill the vertical frame, which keeps only about a third of its width: place the whole clip on a 9:16 canvas over a blurred copy of the footage, or capture vertically in the game. Keep game Shorts under a minute: YouTube blocks Shorts over a minute that carry an active copyright claim. Link each Short to the devlog it came from so viewers who like the moment can find the full story and your Steam page.
5 min readWhat makes a gameplay clip go viral
Gameplay clips that spread almost always show one thing: a moment that is surprising, satisfying or funny, visible in the first two seconds, understandable with the sound off, and short enough to loop, usually 10 to 30 seconds. The moments that travel are a mechanic players have not seen, a chain reaction, a satisfying loop, a spectacular fail, or a before-and-after. Record clean footage at 60 fps, start on the moment, put a line of text over it, keep the whole frame (a 16:9 clip goes on a 9:16 canvas over a blurred fill, never cropped), use your game's own sound, and post several a week. You cannot make a clip go viral, but you can make every clip the kind that could.
5 min readSteam curators: what they are and how to reach them
Steam curators are players and groups who recommend games to their followers with short reviews. Valve's Curator Connect lets you send them review copies inside Steam, with no keys or emails: offers to up to 100 curators, up to 5 copies each, from a released game or a live Coming Soon page with an uploaded build and the Generate CD Keys permission. Curators see a preview, your first three store screenshots and your message. Filter by the tags they cover, language and platform; Valve's default list favours tag overlap and follower count, and hides curators inactive for six months. Curators owe you nothing: Valve says there is no obligation to accept, play or review. Send copies through Curator Connect rather than emailing keys, since emailed key requests from "curators" are a common scam.
6 min readHow the Steam algorithm recommends games
In Valve's own words, the strongest signal to Steam is whether people are buying and playing your game; tags decide which players it is a candidate for, and supported languages widen who sees it. Valve also says what does not matter: store page traffic alone, your conversion rate, wishlists (except on the Popular Upcoming list) and a review score of Mixed or better (40% and up). Below 40%, a game is less likely to be featured. Visibility cannot be bought. Every full release gets baseline exposure in the New Releases queue, which favours the titles with the fewest views since release, and after launch each game gets update visibility rounds: up to 30 days or 1 million home page impressions to owners and wishlisters, five to start.
6 min readSteam's Discovery Queue, explained
The Discovery Queue is a personal run of games Steam shows each player one at a time, picked from that player's tastes. You cannot apply for it: Valve's visibility documentation names it as one place a game may be recommended, and says the strongest signal is people buying and playing a game, with tags and supported languages deciding which players it suits. Valve does not publish how the queue picks games. Developers' data suggests unreleased games enter queues after a burst of outside interest: in Chris Zukowski's 2023 survey of 14 games, the median game had about 11,200 page visits and 3,600 wishlists in the week before its queue peak, and the exposure lasted around two weeks. What you control is accurate, specific tags, a capsule that earns the click, and outside traffic that gives Steam something to learn from.
6 min readHow Steam decides "More like this"
Steam's "More like this" section, and the similar games it shows on store pages, draw on each game's top 20 tags. Valve's tag documentation says overlap across several tags matters more than their order, rarer tags carry more weight than common ones ("Action" does little), and a tag's weight rises as more players apply it. Tags come from you in the tagging wizard (at least 5 before launch, up to 20 recommended), from players and from Steam moderators, and you can remove inaccurate ones. To appear beside the games your players love, share their specific tags, then watch your page's More like this row: if it shows the wrong games, your tags are telling Steam the wrong story.
6 min readSteam UTM links: where your wishlists come from
Steam's UTM Analytics, under Marketing & Visibility in Steamworks, counts visits to your store page from links carrying UTM parameters, and the wishlists, purchases and activations of that same game within 72 hours of the click. A link needs utm_source or utm_campaign; utm_medium, utm_content and utm_term are optional; it must point at the game's app page, a sale page, or a store widget. Visits update hourly and conversions are final four days after the visit. Only tracked visits, by logged-in users who allow Steam's UTM cookies, can convert, and no personal data is shown, so read the report as a comparison between your links, not a complete count. Viewing it needs the View Marketing Traffic Data permission.
6 min readSteam events and announcements that get seen
A Steam event or announcement appears in several places at once: the activity feed of everyone who follows your game, your Community Hub's feed and News tab, the last two under your store page's DLC section, the game's Library page and the Library home's What's New for players who own it, and the store home page when paired with an update visibility round. The category you pick decides where it shows: small updates and patch notes skip the store page and Library home, sale events skip the Library, and cross-promotion stays in the hub and feeds. Body images (JPG, PNG or animated GIF) display up to 800 pixels wide, every field can be localized, and an event can take about an hour to reach the Library while Valve moderates it.
5 min readHow to use Steam Broadcasting for your game
Steam Broadcasting (Valve now calls it livestreaming) puts a live or pre-recorded stream on your game's store page and the Broadcast hub, free for every Steamworks partner; popular streams can be featured on Steam's home page. To set it up: use a non-limited Steam account that owns the game, create an RTMP token at steamcommunity.com/broadcast/upload with your base game's App ID, point OBS at the upload server with a 2-second keyframe interval (H.264 High 4.1, 30 or 60 fps, up to 7,000 kbps), create a Live-Stream/Broadcast event in Steamworks that whitelists the streaming account, set the stream to Public, and go live in the event window. Only public streams show on the store page, Steam does not save them, and a replay needs a banner saying it is not live.
6 min readDoes Kickstarter still work for video games?
Yes, for games that arrive with an audience and a demo. Narwhal's analysis puts the success rate of Kickstarter's Video Games category around 32% over its history. ICO Partners counted 443 funded video games in 2025, paying out about $26 million (around $58,000 each on average), roughly level with 2024, the best years since 2015, with 11 campaigns above $500,000. Kickstarter said in May 2026 that video games had their strongest first quarter in 13 years. Campaigns that succeed usually launch with a playable demo, thousands of followers on the campaign's pre-launch page, a Steam page and a modest goal; a campaign rarely builds the audience itself. Budget about 5% for Kickstarter's fee plus payment processing, and reward costs on top.
6 min readHow to fund an indie game
Indie games are funded in roughly seven ways: your own savings or part-time work, with a scope small enough to fit them; public and platform grants; crowdfunding such as Kickstarter (443 video games funded there in 2025, about $58,000 each on average); Early Access sales; memberships such as Patreon (a 10% fee for creators who joined after 4 August 2025); a publisher's advance (in Voyer Law's sample of 100+ deals, developers kept a median 50% of revenue with an advance, 70% without); or private investment in the studio. Without a publisher, the realistic path is savings plus a small scope, then grants and crowdfunding once you have a demo and an audience. Each costs something different: time, equity, a revenue share or the pressure of backers.
6 min readGame development grants: where to find them and how to apply
Game development grants come from three kinds of funder: engine makers (Epic MegaGrants, now two windows a year; the second 2026 window closed on 4 September with decisions due 7 to 11 December), platform holders (such as Supercell's and Google Play's 2026 funds for African studios), and public screen, arts and economic agencies, which are where most indies start: for example the EU's Creative Europe MEDIA video games call (€10 million in the 2026 call, which closed 11 February), the UK Games Fund, and Creative Saskatchewan's Digital Game Development Grant (open until 18 November 2026). Most ask for a prototype, a budget and a release plan, many require matching funds, and nearly all are tied to where your company is based. Windows open and close; check each programme's own page.
5 min readHow much does it cost to make an indie game?
An indie game costs mostly time: the people who make it, for as long as it takes. Estimate it as team size × months × monthly cost per person (including your own living costs, even unpaid), plus outsourced art, audio and translation, software and assets, the $100 Steam Direct fee (recoupable once the game earns $1,000), marketing, and a contingency of 20% or more. Engines can be free: Godot has no fees or royalties, Unreal charges 5% only above a game's first $1 million in lifetime gross revenue, and Unity Personal is free up to $200,000 in revenue and funding. In the worked examples below, a solo developer's 18 months comes to about $65,000 and a team of four for two years to about $575,000, most of it people's time. There is no reliable public median, so build your own number.
5 min readPatreon for game developers: does it work?
Patreon works for game developers who already have an audience, usually from devlogs, a YouTube channel or a community, and want steady monthly support while they build. Patrons pay for closeness to the work: early builds, devlogs before anyone else, a say in real decisions, credits. Creators whose page went live after 4 August 2025 pay a flat 10% platform fee, plus payment processing of 2.9% plus $0.30 per payment for cards, Apple Pay and US PayPal, according to Patreon's help center. For most indies it covers part of the costs, not all of them, and its other value is accountability: patrons expect regular posts.
5 min readSteam Playtest: how it works for developers
Steam Playtest is a free, separate "child" app attached to your game, with its own App ID but no store page: players request access from a sign-up section on your main store page. You let them in in random batches as you have capacity, optionally limited by country, or switch to open sign-ups so everyone gets in, and you can let testers invite one to three friends. It does not touch your main game's wishlists, reviews, refunds, playtime or achievements, playtest-only players cannot review the main game, it is not confidential, and it must be free. Set it up from Associated Packages & DLC, turn on sign-ups in Special Settings, upload a build, grant access; end it by turning off sign-ups and setting it to Not Playable.
5 min readHow to playtest a game
To playtest a game: decide the one question this round must answer, put a build in front of someone who has never played it, give them one goal and nothing else, and watch without helping. Note with timestamps where they hesitate, get lost, laugh or quit, and ask a few open questions only afterwards. About five testers per round find most of the big problems, per Jakob Nielsen's usability research, though any one group of five can miss a lot; so run several small rounds, fixing between them, rather than one big one. Friends are kind and family guesses; strangers in your target audience tell you the truth.
5 min readHow to find playtesters for your indie game
Find playtesters where players of your genre already gather: genre subreddits and Discords, following their self-promotion rules; feedback communities such as r/playtesters, r/playmygame (which wants a free, playable build) and r/DestroyMyGame (blunt video critique); local game-dev meetups and events; playtest swaps with other developers; your own followers, Discord and mailing list; Steam Playtest's sign-up on your store page; and Restricted itch.io pages with a password or download keys. For recorded sessions with recruited strangers, paid services such as PlaytestCloud and Antidote exist. Ask for the players you are making the game for, say how long the test takes and what they get, and make joining one click.
5 min readPlaytesting questions to ask, and the ones to avoid
Ask about what happened, not about what the player thinks you want to hear. Good playtesting questions: What were you trying to do? What was confusing? When did you want to stop, and why? What was the best moment? What did you expect to happen that did not? How would you describe this game to a friend? Would you keep playing? Avoid leading questions ("Did you like the jump?"), hypotheticals ("Would you buy it?"), design requests ("What should I add?") and double questions. Ask after the session, not during it, keep the form to two or three minutes, and use a few 1-to-5 ratings only alongside the open questions that explain them.
5 min readHow to run a remote playtest
A remote playtest needs four things: a build testers can get and run easily (a link, a Steam Playtest, a Restricted itch.io page); a way to see what they did, either screen and voice recording with their consent or in-game telemetry such as crashes, deaths, quits and play time; a short feedback form; and, for a few sessions, a video call where they share their screen and you watch silently. Unmoderated tests, where testers play alone, scale and tell you how many players hit a problem; moderated ones, watched live, tell you why. Use a few watched sessions to understand and a wider unmoderated round to measure.
5 min readUsing itch.io for playtesting
itch.io works well for small playtests. Set the project's visibility to Restricted, which lets in only people you approve and hides the page from browse pages, search results, your profile and external search engines. Then let testers in with a page password, which can go directly in the link, or with individual download keys from the Distribute tab, which you can label, track and revoke. Leave Draft mode for your own checks, since itch.io advises against distributing drafts. An HTML5 build plays in the browser with nothing to install (up to 1,000 files and 500 MB extracted). itch.io has no built-in crash reporting, so add your own or ask for logs. For a large open test on a game with a Steam page, Steam Playtest suits better.
5 min readBlind playtests or guided playtests?
In a blind playtest, a player who has never seen the game gets it with no explanation, as a buyer would, and you watch what they do. In a guided playtest, you ask them to try specific things: reach a level, use a feature, fight a boss, often from a save that starts there. Blind tests show the first-time experience and every place players get lost or quit; guided tests check whether a particular part works, including content a new player would only reach after hours. Each blind tester can only be blind once, so spend them on onboarding, the first hour, the store page and the trailer, and use guided tests, returning testers and saves for systems later in the game.
5 min readWhen should you start playtesting?
Start as soon as the core loop is playable, even in grey boxes with no art: that is when a test can still change the game cheaply. Each stage asks a different question. A prototype test asks whether the loop is fun, with two or three testers in ten minutes; a vertical slice test asks whether a new player understands it, with blind testers; an alpha test asks about balance, pacing and the difficulty curve over hours of content; a beta or demo test asks about bugs, performance on other machines and the first hour; and after launch, updates get tested with players who already know the game. Waiting until it looks finished means testing what is now expensive to change.
5 min readPlaytesting services compared
Playtesting tools fall into two groups. Some distribute your build to testers you find yourself: Steam Playtest (free; a sign-up on your store page, batches you control, no reports of its own), Restricted itch.io pages (free; a password or download keys, no reports), and Flockbay's playtest links (a paid feature; errors, crashes, frame times, play time, hardware and bug reports come back). Recruiting services find players for you and record their sessions: PlaytestCloud lists annual plans from about €1,025 a month, paid in tokens per player, plus an Indie Pass for studios under $1 million in revenue and a free trial; Antidote offers self-serve studies and a managed service with a 14-day trial. Paid suits specific questions once you have something worth recording.
5 min readHow to turn playtest feedback into fixes
Turn playtest feedback into fixes in five steps: list every problem you saw or were told about, phrased as what the player did ("missed the door", "quit at the second boss"); count how many testers hit each; rate how badly it hurt, from blocks progress to cosmetic; rank by count × severity; then fix the top three to five and test again with new players. Treat suggestions as clues to a problem, not as the fix, and trust what players did over what they said. A short feedback form, given below, keeps answers comparable between rounds.
5 min readSteam's Popular Upcoming list: what it is and how games reach it
Popular Upcoming is the list of unreleased games about to launch on Steam's front page, and the one place Valve says wishlists directly affect visibility. In June 2026 Valve changed it "to better capture the most anticipated releases of the coming month": Chris Zukowski of How To Market A Game estimates the bar rose from about 7,000 wishlists to around 100,000 (other reports say 80,000+), so most indie games no longer reach it. At the same time Steam's Personal Calendar became the bigger launch window for smaller games: a per-player list of upcoming and recent releases drawn from each player's play history and the wishlists of players with similar tastes, showing games with a set release date from about two months before launch to a month after. Zukowski's estimate is that games on it range from about 8,000 to 66,000 wishlists, and developers report 300 to 3,000 wishlists a day from it.
5 min readHow Steam wishlists work
A Steam wishlist is a player asking to be told about a game. Steam emails or pushes every wishlister when the game releases (and again when it leaves Early Access) and when it is discounted by 20% or more for over 8 hours on its cheapest package, with a two-week cooldown per game, and you can trigger one notification about a demo within 14 days of the demo's first release. Wishlists are private to you, reported daily in Steamworks with additions, deletions and purchases. Per Valve, they are not a factor in algorithmic visibility except for the Popular Upcoming list, which since June 2026 only the most anticipated games reach; Steam's Personal Calendar now draws on players' own wishlists instead. Put up the page early: Valve says players who wishlist two years out can be just as likely to buy as those two weeks out.
5 min readHow to get more wishlists on Steam
Get more Steam wishlists in two steps: make the store page convert (a capsule that reads small, gameplay in the trailer's first seconds, a clear one-line hook, specific tags), then send players to it again and again. Festivals such as Next Fest (the median respondent to How To Market A Game's February 2026 survey gained 806 wishlists in the week), creators covering your game, a demo with Steam's one-time wishlist notification, short clips on TikTok and Shorts, devlogs, and ads on your own accounts once the page converts. Set a firm release date two to three months ahead, so Steam's Personal Calendar can show the game in its launch window. Tag every link, measure by wishlists, and favour players of your genre: Chris Zukowski's October 2026 data shows casual and festival wishlists convert less than they used to.
5 min readHow many wishlists do you need before launch?
Work it back from the sales you need. GameDiscoverCo found the median game launching with over 25,000 wishlists sold about 0.15 copies per wishlist in its first week (September 2024 to September 2025 launches), or 0.10 for games above $10; Chris Zukowski's data on 2023 to 2025 launches shows about 0.22 over the first month. So 10,000 wishlists suggests roughly 1,000 to 1,500 first-week sales, with an order of magnitude of spread either way. Valve itself says no formula accurately predicts sales from wishlists. The old 7,000 figure was a rule of thumb for Steam's Popular Upcoming list, not a sales target, and since June 2026 Zukowski estimates that list takes around 100,000; the Personal Calendar, where he estimates games range from about 8,000 wishlists upward, is the launch window most indies plan around now.
5 min readSteam wishlist conversion rate: what is normal
In GameDiscoverCo's analysis of Steam launches in the year to August 2025 with over 25,000 wishlists, the median game sold about 0.15 copies per wishlist in its first week, and about 0.10 for games priced above $10; rates spread across an order of magnitude. Underperformers had lower first-week review scores (about 67% positive against 91%) and had sat on Steam longer before launch. Over longer periods the ratio rises: in Chris Zukowski's October 2026 data from developer-submitted Steamworks figures, games released in 2023 to 2025 sold 0.22 copies per wishlist in their first month, 0.43 by six months and 0.70 by a year, about half the first-month rate of 2020 to 2022 launches. Valve itself says no formula accurately predicts sales from wishlists.
5 min readHow to check how many wishlists a Steam game has
Steam does not publish a game's wishlist count; only its developer sees it in Steamworks. You can estimate it from public data: a game's Steam followers (the member count of its community group) multiplied by about 12, the median in GameDiscoverCo's June 2023 survey of 125-plus Steam games, with most games between 7 and 20 wishlists per follower, and Next Fest gains nearer 17 to 18 in GameDiscoverCo's October 2025 data. So a game with 5,000 followers probably has somewhere around 35,000 to 100,000 wishlists, most likely near 60,000. SteamDB also lists followers and ranks upcoming games by wishlist activity. Treat every estimate as a range, and compare games in the same genre and stage.
5 min readWishlist deletions: why players remove your game
Every game loses wishlists. Steamworks' wishlist report tracks deletions beside additions and purchases, updated daily. In Chris Zukowski's benchmark of 58 developers' 2021 data, the average game had deleted about 9.8% of its wishlists (median 7.75%); deletes rose slowly the longer a game was on Steam, were lower for games with fewer wishlists, and spiked during Steam's seasonal sales, when players prune their lists. Players remove games because they lost interest over a long wait, bought it elsewhere, or were put off by a change: a delay, a new direction, a price, Early Access, a controversy. A steady trickle is normal; a sudden spike almost always lines up with something you did or announced, or a sale.
5 min readHow many wishlists a day is good?
There is no universal good number; there is the rate that reaches your target in the time you have. 10,000 wishlists in twelve months is about 27 a day; 20,000 in eighteen months about 37. But wishlists arrive in spikes around events (a page launch, a trailer, a demo, Next Fest, a creator's video, the launch window) with quiet days in between, so a low baseline is normal. For scale: in Chris Zukowski's 2021 data on 60 games, a new Coming Soon page on Steam's natural visibility gained about 150 to 270 wishlists in its first two weeks, roughly 11 to 19 a day, and pages with a great hook or marketing 270 to 965; in 2026, developers report Steam's Personal Calendar bringing 300 to 3,000 a day in the launch window.
5 min readHow to get to 10,000 wishlists
10,000 wishlists is a common indie target because, at GameDiscoverCo's medians of 0.10 to 0.15 first-week sales per wishlist, it suggests roughly 1,000 to 1,500 first-week sales, and because it sits inside the range Chris Zukowski estimates for games shown on Steam's Personal Calendar (about 8,000 at the bottom). It no longer reaches Popular Upcoming, which since June 2026 he estimates at around 100,000. Most games that get to 10,000 do it with a converting store page up for many months, a demo, one or two festivals (Next Fest above all, where the median survey respondent gained 806 in February 2026), creator coverage, and steady clips and devlogs between them. At about 27 a day, it takes a year; in practice most of it arrives in a few spikes.
5 min readIs 7,000 wishlists the magic number?
Not any more. 7,000 was Chris Zukowski's rule of thumb at How To Market A Game: with about that many wishlists, a game would probably reach Steam's Popular Upcoming list before release, and his January 2026 scrape found games entering at about 5,000 to 7,000. In June 2026 Valve changed the list to capture "the most anticipated releases of the coming month", and Zukowski now estimates entry at around 100,000. It was never a Valve threshold or a sales target: at GameDiscoverCo's median of 0.10 to 0.15 first-week sales per wishlist, 7,000 wishlists is very roughly 700 to 1,050 first-week sales. What matters for most indie launches now is Steam's Personal Calendar, where Zukowski's estimate of the games appearing runs from about 8,000 wishlists upward, and where wishlists from players of your genre count most.
5 min readWhen Steam emails your wishlisters
Steam emails or pushes your wishlisters at four moments: when the game releases (Early Access or full); when an Early Access game fully releases; when it is discounted by at least 20% for more than 8 hours on at least its lowest-priced package, whether a featured deal, a weeklong deal or a custom discount; and once, triggered by you from the demo's landing page, within two weeks of a demo's first release. Any email about the same app puts players on a two-week cooldown, extended during busy periods such as seasonal sales. Only players with verified emails who have not opted out receive them; discount emails usually send within a few hours, and Steam stops trying if one is held up for over a week.
5 min readWishlist velocity: why the rate matters as much as the total
Wishlist velocity is the rate at which a game gains wishlists, usually per day or week, especially in the 30 days before launch. It tells you whether players want the game now, and pace near release has long been seen as part of how Steam's pre-release lists rank games, though Valve publishes no formula. Recent data puts it in proportion: in Chris Zukowski's October 2026 analysis of 126 games released in 2023 to 2025, the total wishlists at launch explained first-month sales slightly better than velocity in the last 30 days (an R² of 0.72 against 0.70), and across all 160 games in his survey, combining both only raised it from 0.73 to 0.75. So build the total over months, and shape the pace in the final weeks, when Steam's Personal Calendar, since June 2026, shows games with a set release date to players whose tastes match.
5 min readThe best website builders for game developers
Most indie games need one page: the name and hook, store buttons with a Steam wishlist link, a trailer, screenshots, an email sign-up and a press kit link. One-page builders such as Carrd do that quickly; full builders such as Wix, Squarespace and WordPress suit a studio site with news and several games; free static hosting such as GitHub Pages (sites up to 1 GB, a 100 GB monthly bandwidth soft limit) or Cloudflare Pages (500 builds a month and 20,000 files per site on the free plan) suits developers comfortable with HTML; and an itch.io page can stand in for a site. In Flockbay, any AI builds a static site from the game's own material, and you publish it on the game's flockbay.app address. Pick the option you will actually keep up to date.
5 min readHow to make a website for your indie game, for free
Make your game's website as one page: the game's name and one-line hook with a Steam wishlist button above the fold, the trailer, three to six gameplay screenshots, three short feature lines, an email sign-up with a clear line on what you will send, and a footer with your press kit, socials, contact, platforms and release window. Build it for free with a one-page builder's free tier, free static hosting such as GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages, or an itch.io page; a domain of your own costs a small yearly fee. Write the copy from your Steam page, compress the images, test it on a phone, and link it everywhere. It takes an afternoon, and you update it whenever the trailer, date or price changes.
5 min readWhat to put on your game's website
Put on your game's website, in this order: the name and one-line hook with a Wishlist on Steam button (or Buy, after launch); the trailer, gameplay first; three to six gameplay screenshots or GIFs; three short lines on what the player does; store buttons for every platform; an email sign-up that says what you will send; and a footer with the press kit, socials, contact, platforms and release window. Leave off long lore, weekly dev diaries that belong on a devlog page, auto-playing sound, and anything that pushes the store button below the first screen on a phone. Real examples: Celeste's single page leads with the title and one line, then store buttons and twelve screenshots; Stardew Valley's adds six feature lines and age ratings.
5 min readDo you need a website for your indie game?
Your Steam page does the selling, so a website is not strictly required. It earns its place by doing what Steam cannot: collecting email addresses you own (Steam emails your wishlisters only at release, when leaving Early Access, on discounts of 20% or more and, once, when a demo goes live, on its own schedule), giving press and creators one link with everything, ranking in search and being read by AI assistants for your game's name, linking every store you sell on, and surviving if you change stores or publishers. For most indies, one page is enough: the hook, store buttons, a trailer, screenshots, an email sign-up with clear consent and a press kit. Add a domain once the name is settled, and a separate studio site only once you have several games.
5 min readGame landing pages that work: the patterns
Game landing pages that work share a pattern: the name and a one-line hook at the top, the store buttons right after, gameplay in screenshots or video, and a press kit one click away. Celeste's site is a single page of title, one-line description, store buttons, twelve screenshots, credits and a press kit link; Balatro's is a landing page of logo, tagline, store links for every platform, merch and awards; Stardew Valley's has the hook, seven screenshots, six feature lines and store buttons; Hades II's page adds reviews, four videos, a media download and a newsletter sign-up. Released hits can lean on their names; an unreleased indie game should put a gameplay trailer and a Wishlist on Steam button above the fold, one call to action repeated, and an email sign-up, and load fast on a phone.
5 min readHow to embed the Steam widget and your trailer
Steam serves a store widget for every game at store.steampowered.com/widget/<your app ID>/. Create it from your store page's Embed button, pick the purchase option, edit the description and copy the HTML: one iframe. For an unreleased game it shows an Add to Wishlist button; for a released game, the price and a Buy on Steam button that puts the game in the visitor's cart. It updates itself when you change the price, a discount, platforms or the branding image, and its links carry utm_source=steamwidget by default, which you can override with your own UTM parameters to see its wishlists in Steam's UTM Analytics. For the trailer, use YouTube's embed code or your own muted, looping MP4. On phones, add a plain Wishlist on Steam button too, since the widget is wide.
5 min readHow to market an indie game
Marketing an indie game comes down to three things, done early and repeatedly. Know the one-sentence hook and who it is for, through five to ten comparable games. Put up a Steam page that turns visitors into wishlists months before launch. Then keep sending players to it: festivals such as Next Fest (the median respondent to How To Market A Game's February 2026 survey gained 806 wishlists in Next Fest week), creators in your genre, a demo, short clips, devlogs and, once the page converts, ads. Measure everything by wishlists, because launch week sells only a share of them: GameDiscoverCo's median for bigger launches was 0.15× first-week sales per wishlist. Start while you build, not when you finish.
6 min readAn indie game marketing plan, with a template
An indie game marketing plan fits on one page: the hook in one sentence; the audience, named by five to ten comparable games; a goal in wishlists by a date, worked back from the sales you need (GameDiscoverCo's median for bigger launches was 0.15× first-week sales per wishlist); two or three channels you will keep up every week; the beats on a calendar (Steam page, demo, festivals, trailer, launch); the budget in money and hours; and the numbers you check weekly. Copy the template below, fill it in in one sitting, put the beats in a calendar, and revisit it monthly, keeping the channels that moved wishlists and dropping one that did not.
5 min readWhen should you start marketing your game?
Start as soon as there is something to show, often within the first weeks: short clips of the prototype find out whether the idea gets a reaction, which is itself useful design data. Put up the Steam page once the art direction and core loop are settled: Valve's Coming Soon documentation says players who wishlist two years out can be just as likely to buy as those who wishlist two weeks out, sees no strong downside to a long lead unless the game changes significantly, and requires the page to be up at least two weeks before release. The cost of starting early is small; the cost of starting at launch is every wishlist you did not collect, at a time when launch week sells a median of only about 0.15× of a bigger game's wishlists.
5 min readHow much to spend on indie game marketing
There is no right percentage. Set a marketing budget from what a wishlist is worth to you: GameDiscoverCo's median for bigger launches was 0.15× first-week sales per wishlist (0.10× above $10), and after Steam's 30% and an allowance for refunds and taxes a $10 game nets roughly $6.30 a sale, so a wishlist is worth about $0.95 of first-week revenue, more over the game's life. A paid wishlist costing well above that rarely pays back in launch week. Money buys quality (capsule art, a trailer, store page translation), reach (ads, measured per wishlist) and access (events, PR); quality usually comes first because it improves every free channel. With no budget, time buys the rest: festivals, creators, clips, devlogs and community.
5 min readHow to find your game's hook
A game's hook is the one thing about it that makes a player say "wait, what?", and then repeat it to a friend. It is usually a familiar genre with one surprising twist that shows in seconds of play: Balatro is a roguelike deckbuilder built on poker hands, Vampire Survivors is an action game where you only move and your weapons fire themselves. Find yours by listing what your game does that its five closest comparables do not, writing each as one sentence (familiar thing + twist), and keeping the ones you can show in a few seconds of gameplay. Test them as short clips on different days; the one that gets comments and shares goes on the capsule, the trailer's first seconds and the short description.
5 min readHow to write a one-line pitch for your game
A one-line pitch tells someone what your game is in under twenty-five words: the genre, what the player does, and the twist that makes it different. A formula that works: "A [genre] where you [verb] [twist]", as in "A roguelike deckbuilder where you score poker hands". Avoid adjectives any game could claim (immersive, epic, unique), story setup without play, and comparisons to blockbusters. Write ten versions, cut each to its strongest, and test them aloud on players of your genre. Use the winner as the first line of your Steam short description, in every pitch email and bio, and as the line a creator can repeat; then expand it into a 30-second and a two-minute version for meetings and publishers.
5 min readIndie game marketing tools, by job
The tools indie developers use to market games fall into jobs. For data: Steamworks' own wishlist, traffic and UTM reports, plus SteamDB and estimate sites such as Gamalytic and VG Insights for comparable games. For video: OBS to capture and an editor such as DaVinci Resolve. For creators and press: key distribution platforms such as Keymailer, IMPRESS and Lurkit, Steam's Curator Connect, and a press kit page such as presskit(). For playtests: Steam Playtest and itch.io. Plus a social scheduler, a newsletter tool and a site builder. AI tools now draft copy, art, video and ads; check every claim they write, and disclose AI-generated content in Steam's AI disclosure. Pick one tool per job your plan needs this month.
5 min readHow long should a game demo be, and what goes in it?
Long enough for a player to understand the game and want more, short enough that they stop wanting it: for many indie games, 15 to 60 minutes of content, and a first five minutes that would sell the game on their own, because many players give a demo only a few minutes. Valve sets no length rule, even for Next Fest. Put in the core loop at its best, one memorable moment and a clear ending that points to the full game, with a wishlist prompt on the last screen. Leave out long tutorials, the twist, and anything unfinished. Valve recommends turning achievements off and sharing Steam Cloud saves with the full game. Judge it by demo players who wishlist: Chris Zukowski's June 2026 Next Fest survey found a median of 19.3%.
6 min readA prologue or a demo on Steam: which one?
A demo is a Steam demo-type app attached to your game: a button on its page, or since Valve's July 2024 demo update its own page with user reviews, shown in the same places as free games. It has no community hub, can notify your wishlisters once within 14 days of launch, and is what Next Fest asks for. A prologue is a separate free game, usually a self-contained opening chapter, with its own store page, reviews and community hub, its own $100 Steam Direct fee, and wishlists and followers that stay with it rather than the main game. Prologues worked for some games before 2024: Ship Graveyard Simulator's passed 100,000 players in under a week. Since demos gained pages and reviews, most indies are better served by a demo.
6 min readHow to update a Steam demo, and when to take it down
A Steam demo is its own app with its own App ID, depots and builds, so you update it like any app: upload a new build to the demo's depots with SteamPipe and set it live on the default branch. Valve's review process says that once a product has been reviewed and approved there is no need to go through review again. A demo with its own store page keeps its user reviews across updates, and demos have no community hub, so announce changes on the base game. The demo's wishlist notification is one-time and cannot be re-sent, and each game gets one Next Fest. Deactivating a demo stops downloads and launches, and can be undone; Valve encourages keeping demos up after Next Fest.
6 min readHow to make a game trailer, step by step
Open on your best gameplay in the first few seconds: Valve says viewers may give a trailer under ten seconds, and many watch with the sound off. Then: pick the one thing the trailer must sell (the hook), capture clean footage at 60 fps with a debug camera and the HUD on, choose a licensed track and cut to its beats, build from the core loop to one memorable escalation, and end on the title, the platform and "Wishlist now". Use short on-screen text for anything sound would carry, keep a lead gameplay trailer around a minute, and export H.264 at 1920x1080 for Steam. Valve highly recommends your first Steam trailer be primarily gameplay; trailer editor Derek Lieu's advice is gameplay first, story in a second trailer.
5 min readHow long should a game trailer be?
For a Steam store page, 60 to 90 seconds is the common length for an indie gameplay trailer; teasers run 15 to 30 seconds, ads 6 to 15, vertical clips under a minute, and launch trailers rarely need more than two minutes. Valve sets no length limit, but notes that viewers may give a trailer under ten seconds and that some watch without sound, and Steam turns the first seconds of your first trailer into a 6-second looping microtrailer. So length matters less than how fast the trailer gets to gameplay: GameDiscoverCo reported in 2022 that when gameplay appears only 15 to 30 seconds in, many viewers do not wait. Cut until every shot shows something new.
5 min readSteam trailer requirements: format, resolution and order
Steam accepts .mov, .wmv or .mp4, preferring H.264 video and AAC audio. Upload the highest resolution you have up to 1920x1080, at 30 or 60 fps (or 29.97/59.94), at 5,000 Kbps or more, in 16:9 (4:3 is accepted), with 44.1 or 48 kHz audio, which Steam mixes to stereo. The first two trailers show before the screenshots, and Valve highly recommends the first be primarily gameplay from the player's view, with the HUD often worth showing, readable with the sound off, since viewers may give it under 10 seconds. Steam generates the poster, the thumbnail and a 6-second microtrailer from your first visible trailer; a custom thumbnail must be a 1920x1080 frame from the video, without text. You cannot release while a trailer is still converting.
5 min readAI game trailer makers: what AI can and cannot do for a trailer
Flockbay's Video studio is an AI trailer maker that works from your game's own gameplay: it films the game, cuts to the music and makes the vertical versions. An AI trailer tool is useful when it works from your real gameplay: finding the best moments in hours of footage, cutting to a track's beats, writing short title cards, making vertical versions without cropping, and making several versions with different openings to test. It is a liability when it generates footage of a game that does not exist: Valve highly recommends the first Steam trailer be primarily gameplay from the player's view, players who buy on footage the game cannot deliver refund and say so in reviews, and AI-generated content belongs in Steam's AI disclosure. Use AI for the edit, keep the footage real, open on gameplay in the first seconds, and judge the final cut yourself.
5 min readHow to make a teaser trailer for your game
A teaser is a short trailer, usually 15 to 30 seconds and rarely more than 45, that announces a game by showing its hook and its look and nothing else. Release it when the Steam page goes up or for a festival or showcase announcement, with a "Wishlist on Steam" end card. Show one clear moment of the core mechanic in the first seconds, enough of the art direction to set the mood, and the title; leave out features and dates you are not sure of. Steam has a Teaser category for it, but once you have a gameplay trailer, put that first: Valve highly recommends the first trailer be primarily gameplay, and the first two trailers are the ones shown before the screenshots.
5 min readHow to cut a 15-second ad from your game trailer
A trailer builds over a minute; an ad has about one second before the thumb scrolls, and on YouTube a skippable ad can be skipped after five. So cut the ad from the trailer's best moment, not its opening: start mid-action, keep it 6 to 15 seconds (YouTube bumper ads are 6), make it readable with the sound off, and end on one call to action such as "Wishlist on Steam". Export 9:16 for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, 4:5 or 1:1 for feeds, and 16:9 for YouTube in-stream. Make three versions that differ only in the first two seconds, tag each with UTM parameters, and let the results, cost per wishlist, decide which to keep.
5 min readHow much does a game trailer cost?
Cutting your own trailer costs only time and a music licence: OBS Studio and DaVinci Resolve's free version cover capture and editing. Hiring is a wide range. Freelance and marketplace editors range from small fixed-price edits to hourly rates for experienced trailer editors; animation studios publish higher figures: Prolific Studio says a one-minute trailer often starts around $5,000 for simpler 2D edits and can exceed $20,000 for fully animated 3D cinematics, and Pixune puts professional trailer production at $5,000 to $60,000. Those are vendors' own published estimates, not a market survey. What the money buys is judgement about structure and pacing; what it cannot buy is footage your game does not have yet.
5 min readHow to market your game on Reddit, and on every other channel
On Reddit, post as a developer showing work, not an advertiser: read each subreddit's rules (most game subreddits restrict self-promotion: r/indiegames requires game footage in any promotion, r/Unity3D wants posts that are more than store links, r/roguelikes limits it), lead with a native GIF or short clip of gameplay, title it with what is interesting rather than the game's name, say you are the developer, put the Steam link in a comment, and stay in the comments for the first hours. Accounts that only post their own game get removed. The same idea holds on every channel: show the game moving, talk to people, and pick the two or three channels where your genre's players already are. Measure each by wishlists, with UTM-tagged links.
5 min readThe best subreddits to post your indie game
Post where your players are, not only where other developers are. The general indie subreddits are r/IndieGaming (about 529,000 members, a self-promotion rule), r/indiegames (about 340,000; promotion must show game footage) and r/IndieDev (about 454,000, aimed at developers). Developer and engine communities such as r/gamedev (about 2.07 million, posts must be relevant content, not ads), r/godot (about 376,000) and r/Unity3D (about 482,000; posts must be more than store links) suit techniques, and progress where the community allows showcasing. Feedback subreddits such as r/DestroyMyGame and r/playmygame (a direct link to a playable game) suit honest critique. The best wishlists usually come from genre subreddits, where many rules limit promotion, for example once every three months in r/roguelikes. Read each sidebar first: rules change, and the subreddit's own rules always win.
5 min readScreenshot Saturday: how to use it for your game
Screenshot Saturday is a weekly habit: every Saturday developers post a screenshot, GIF or short clip of their game's progress with the #ScreenshotSaturday tag on X, Bluesky and Mastodon, and in weekly threads such as r/gamedev's recurring Screenshot Saturday thread. It reaches other developers, journalists who follow them and some players, so it builds a following, feedback and press attention slowly rather than wishlists at once. Post something that moves, a looping GIF or a short clip, with one line on what changed, add your engine's and genre's tags, reply to other developers' posts, and pin a post with your Steam link to your profile. Its biggest value is the deadline: a year of Saturdays is a record of the game, a devlog's raw material and a library of footage.
5 min readHow to market your game on itch.io
On itch.io, plays come from browser builds (people try what runs in the tab; itch.io takes HTML5 games as a ZIP up to 1,000 files and 500 MB), game jams (each has its own audience, ratings and comments), accurate genre and tags, a cover image that reads small, screenshots and a GIF on the page, and devlogs posted to the game's page. It is a good place for prototypes, demos, jam games and feedback, and usually a modest one for revenue on its own, though its open revenue sharing lets you choose itch.io's cut, 10% by default and anything from 0 to 100%. Link your Steam page from the itch.io page and the end of the demo, so players who like the prototype can wishlist the full game.
5 min readHow to schedule social posts for your game
Batch the work: one session a week to capture footage, cut three to five clips and write their captions, then schedule them through each platform's own scheduler or a scheduling tool. Plan around a calendar: steady progress clips during development, then bursts around the Steam page going up, a demo, Next Fest and launch, with Steam announcements scheduled in Steamworks for the same beats. Post natively, without another platform's watermark, and tag every link with UTM parameters so Steam shows which posts bring wishlists. Scheduling saves the posting, not the conversation: set aside time when each post goes live to reply to comments, because that is where a post grows.
5 min readHow to get YouTubers and journalists to cover your game
Target creators who already play games like yours, at a size that answers email: mid-sized channels cover indie games far more often than the biggest. Find them by searching YouTube and Twitch for your comparable games and noting who covered them in the last year. Write a short, personal email: one line on why their audience would like it, the hook, a trailer link, a Steam key and a press kit link, under about 100 words, sent a week or two before a demo, festival or launch, and follow up once. Use key platforms or Steam's Curator Connect for breadth and to avoid key scams. Journalists cover news, so send them a press release on the day of an announcement, demo or launch. Creator coverage can move a game: Thronefall's 2022 Next Fest demo took off when YouTubers picked it up.
5 min readKey distribution platforms compared: Keymailer and alternatives
Key distribution platforms list your game for creators and press who sign up and are verified, then hand out keys on request, so keys go to real channels instead of the resellers behind most cold key emails. The common ones, as each described itself on 18 October 2026: Keymailer, with a free start and paid promotions now priced through Partnier; IMPRESS, whose Launchpad has a free tier and paid plans from $69 a month, plus a hosted press kit tool; Lurkit, which says it manually verifies every creator and also runs paid campaigns; and Terminals.io, which claims 29,000+ verified media, streamers and YouTubers. Steam's own Curator Connect sends copies to up to 100 curators with no keys at all. Check whether you approve each request, how creators are verified, how many cover your genre, and whether you see the coverage that followed.
5 min readHow to make a press kit for your game
A press kit is one public page, usually on your website, that gives a writer or creator everything they need without emailing you: a fact sheet (title, developer, platforms, release date, price, links), a one-line, one-paragraph and longer description, the trailer embedded and downloadable, high-resolution screenshots and GIFs, the logo with a transparent background and key art, a short note about the developer, a press contact, a line on whether creators may stream and monetise the game, and a .zip of everything. Free tools exist: presskit() is a long-standing free template, and IMPRESS's Press Kitty has a free tier for up to three hosted kits. Send keys only to verified people, state any embargo, and keep the kit current at every beat.
5 min readHow to write a press release for your game
Send a press release when there is news: an announcement, a release date, a demo, a festival slot, a launch, a major update. Put the news in the headline and first sentence (what, when, where, price), then the hook in two lines, three to five key facts, one short quote from the developer that says something only you could, and links to the trailer, Steam page and press kit, with a contact and any embargo stated plainly. Keep it to about 300 to 400 words. Paste it into the email body rather than attaching it, personalise the first line for each writer, include a key or a way to request one, and send it to writers who cover your genre rather than general news inboxes.
5 min readHow to get your game into newsletters, curated lists and streams
Many indie game newsletters, curated lists, YouTube roundups, digital showcases and Steam curators take submissions, usually through a form or an email address on their site. Find the ones that covered games like yours in the last year, keep a sheet of names, submission methods and deadlines, and send a short pitch: the hook in one line, a trailer, a key or a demo, the Steam link and a date. Time it before a demo, a festival such as Steam Next Fest, or launch, and follow each one's submission rules exactly. For Steam curators, use Curator Connect, which sends copies to up to 100 curators inside Steam. Small, genre-specific lists often beat big sites: their readers open them because they want exactly your kind of game.
5 min readHow to build a community for your game, starting with a Discord server
A Discord server does not find players; it keeps the ones you found elsewhere and turns them into testers and advocates. Open it once people ask where to follow the game. Turn on Community in Server Settings, which requires verified-email verification, the explicit media filter on for all members, a rules channel and a channel for Discord's moderator updates, and unlocks announcement channels, Onboarding and Server Insights. Start with about six channels, post updates there first, invite members into playtests, and answer every message you can. Beside it, keep an email list, which reaches people Discord's feed buries. Treat feedback as data: thank people, look for patterns, and say what you changed.
5 min readWhich channels a game's Discord server needs
Start with about six: welcome and rules, announcements (an announcement channel, read-only, with an opt-in ping role), general chat, feedback and suggestions (a forum channel, one post per idea), bug reports (a forum channel with a template and tags), and media for clips and screenshots. A Community server also needs a private channel for Discord's moderator updates. Add a playtesters channel behind a role when you run tests, a devlog or behind-the-scenes channel when you post them, a voice or Stage channel for events, and language channels only when a language has enough members to fill one. Fewer, busier channels beat many empty ones.
5 min readHow to grow your game's Discord server
Members come from outside Discord: a permanent invite link (Discord's default links expire after seven days) in the game's main menu and the demo's last screen, on the Steam page's external links and your website, and at the end of every clip, devlog and post. They stay for things they cannot get elsewhere: early builds and playtests, the developer answering questions, a say in real decisions, and events such as developer Q&As and launch countdowns. Paid growth services and server-listing sites bring members who never talk. Measure active members and messages per week in Server Insights, not the total, and expect most growth to arrive in bursts around a demo, a festival or a launch.
5 min readHow to run a closed beta for your game
A closed beta puts a nearly complete build in front of a limited group to find bugs, balance problems and confusing moments before launch. Write down the question it must answer, pick testers from your Discord, wishlisters and past playtesters, set start and end dates, and hand out the build one of three ways: Steam Playtest (a free child app with a Join the Playtest sign-up on your store page, access granted in random batches, separate from your reviews and wishlists, not confidential), release-override keys on your main game (limited to 2,500, for a confidential test under your own NDA), or a direct build link. Collect bugs in one structured place, ship fixes during the beta, post what changed, and close it cleanly.
5 min readHow to use your game's Steam community hub
Every game on Steam gets a community hub, live from the moment the store page is set to Coming Soon, with tabs for discussions, screenshots, artwork, broadcasts, videos, the Workshop, news, guides and reviews. Discussions start with three forums (General Discussions, Trading and a hidden Reported Posts); you can add subforums such as bug reports and suggestions with the Edit App Metadata permission, pin a FAQ and known issues, mark answers, merge repeats into megathreads, and warn or temporarily ban rule-breakers. Valve's moderators handle reported content by default. Post your events and announcements so they appear in the hub, answer in the discussions, especially at launch, and respond to reviews sparingly: Valve's own advice is that not every review needs a reply, and deletion is never for criticism.
5 min readHow to run a game giveaway that brings real players
A giveaway that asks only for a follow brings people who want free things, not your game. Run it where your genre's players are (your Discord, a genre community that allows it, a creator who plays your genre), ask for something that shows interest, such as a comment on what they would build or play first, give a modest number of keys, and send them personally. Never make a review a condition: Valve's rules say not to solicit reviews in exchange for games or other rewards, and reviews from activated keys do not count toward your Steam score anyway. Valve also says keys should not be given away free unless Steam customers get the same deal, with an exception for very small promotional giveaways of under 100 keys. Contest law varies by country: state eligibility, dates and odds, and that no purchase is needed.
5 min readShould you run ads for your indie game, and how much to spend?
Run ads only once your clips already get reactions organically and your Steam page converts visitors into wishlists: ads amplify a hook, they do not create one. Start with a test budget you can afford to lose, often a few hundred dollars over a week or two, on one ad platform where your genre's players are, split across three to five creatives that differ in their first seconds, and judge it on cost per wishlist measured in Steam, not on clicks or views. Set the ceiling from what a wishlist is worth: about $0.95 of first-week revenue for a $10 game at GameDiscoverCo's median conversion, more over the game's life. Mind each platform's minimums (TikTok requires a campaign budget above $50 a day and an ad group above $20). Scale what works in steps, stop what does not after a fair test, and concentrate spend around moments that convert: a demo, a festival, the launch and sales.
5 min readCost per wishlist: how to measure it and what is normal
Cost per wishlist is ad spend divided by the wishlists the ads added. Measure it two ways and compare: the wishlists Steam's UTM Analytics attributes to your tagged ad links within 72 hours (an undercount, since only signed-in players who allow tracking are counted and in-app browsers often break the trail), and the rise in daily wishlists over your usual baseline while the ads run, from Steamworks. Developers report anything from well under a dollar to several dollars a wishlist, depending on genre, ad platform, creative and country; one developer who published a Reddit campaign from December 2025 to April 2026 reported about $7,000 spent for roughly 3,000 UTM-attributed wishlists, about $2.33 each, or $1.79 to $1.94 by their own fuller estimate. Whether a figure is good depends on what a wishlist is worth to you: for a $10 game, about $0.95 of first-week revenue at the median conversion.
5 min readHow to run Meta ads for a game, and how to target players
On Meta (Facebook and Instagram), send traffic to your Steam page with a traffic campaign optimised for landing page views, because Meta cannot see a Steam wishlist. Use vertical video for Reels and Stories and 4:5 or 1:1 for feeds, run three to five creatives in one ad set so Meta shifts spend to the best, and target by interests in your genre and in the games yours resembles, moving to broad targeting once a creative is proven. Give each ad set about a week: Meta's learning phase needs around 50 optimisation events before delivery settles. Tag every link with UTM parameters and judge the campaign by the wishlists Steam's UTM Analytics attributes and the lift over your daily baseline, not by Meta's own numbers.
5 min readHow to run TikTok ads for a game
TikTok ads work for games when they look like ordinary TikToks: vertical, gameplay in the first second, captions on screen, sound that suits the app. The simplest start is promoting a post that already did well organically, through Promote in the app or as a Spark Ad in TikTok Ads Manager, which runs the organic post as an ad and keeps its likes and comments. In Ads Manager, a campaign's daily budget must exceed $50 and an ad group's $20, per TikTok's help center, so plan tests around those minimums. Send traffic to your Steam page with UTM-tagged links, and measure wishlists in Steam's UTM Analytics, because TikTok cannot see Steam and its in-app browser often lacks a Steam login.
5 min readHow to run Reddit ads for a game
Reddit's strength for games is targeting by community: you can show ads to people active in the subreddits of your genre and of the games yours resembles. Promoted posts look like posts and can take comments, so use a native GIF or short clip with an honest title that sounds like a developer, leave comments on and reply to them. Send traffic to the Steam page with a UTM-tagged link and measure wishlists in Steam's UTM Analytics, since Reddit cannot see Steam. Reddit says an ad group may overspend its budget by up to 20%. One developer who published their numbers spent about $7,000 on Reddit from December 2025 to April 2026 for roughly 3,000 UTM-attributed wishlists, about $2.33 each, or $1.79 to $1.94 by their own fuller estimate.
5 min readHow to run Google and YouTube ads for a game
In Google Ads, a video campaign shows your trailer before or during YouTube videos, your vertical clips between Shorts, or a thumbnail in YouTube search and recommendations. Target by topics and channels in your genre, and by custom segments built from searches for games like yours. Make the first five seconds count: skippable in-stream ads can be skipped after five seconds, and with cost-per-view bidding you pay when a viewer watches 30 seconds (or the whole ad if shorter) or clicks. Six-second bumper ads cannot be skipped. You set the daily budget yourself and can change it at any time. Send viewers to your Steam page with UTM-tagged links, and measure wishlists in Steam, since Google cannot see Steam. Search ads on your game's name and genre can catch players already looking.
6 min readWhich ad platform works best for indie games?
No ad platform is best for every game; the one where your genre's players spend time, and where your clips already travel organically, is the one to test first. Meta (Facebook and Instagram) has the widest reach and mature interest targeting, with Reels for vertical gameplay. TikTok rewards native-looking gameplay clips and lets you promote posts that already did well as Spark Ads, with minimums of more than $50 a day per campaign and $20 per ad group. Reddit targets by community, which suits niche genres whose players gather in specific subreddits. YouTube, through Google Ads, puts trailers and Shorts in front of people watching your genre, with skippable ads viewers can skip after five seconds. None of them can see Steam wishlists, so measure every test in Steam with UTM links, and compare cost per wishlist on your own game.
5 min readHow to make an ad creative for a game from gameplay footage
The best game ad creatives are real gameplay: start inside the most interesting moment, make it readable with the sound off using short on-screen text, keep it 6 to 30 seconds, and end on the capsule art and one call to action such as "Wishlist on Steam". Export the shapes each placement uses, 9:16 for Reels, TikTok and Shorts (the whole 16:9 clip on a 9:16 canvas over a blurred fill, never cropped), 4:5 or 1:1 for feeds, 16:9 for YouTube, where viewers can skip after five seconds and bumpers last six. Test hooks, not whole ads: the same footage with different first seconds, such as a question, a challenge, the satisfying moment or a fail. The creative decides who sees the ad more than the targeting does, so show exactly the game you are selling.
5 min readBoosting a post or running a campaign: which for your game?
Boosting a post (Promote on TikTok, Boost on Instagram and Facebook) pays to show a post that already exists to more people: minutes to set up, cheap to try, and it keeps the post's likes and comments, which act as social proof. A campaign in the ad platform's ads manager gives control over the objective, the destination (your Steam page), targeting, placements, budgets and testing several creatives against each other, and can still use existing posts (Spark Ads on TikTok, existing posts on Meta). Boost small amounts to learn which clips travel; when one does, put it in a campaign aimed at your Steam page with a landing-page-view objective, and measure the wishlists it brings in Steam with UTM links. Neither can see Steam wishlists on its own.
5 min readSteamworks reports, explained
Steamworks gives every developer a set of reports. The Sales & Activations Reports portal shows near real-time revenue, units, player counts and geographic breakdowns, in gross figures before refunds, chargebacks and taxes; the monthly sales report adds those deductions and matches what you are paid, 30 days after each month ends, once the month's revenue passes $100. Each app's Wishlists section tracks additions, deletions and purchases daily. Refund Data shows refund rates and players' written reasons. Under Marketing & Visibility, the Store & Steam Platform Traffic Breakdown shows impressions and visits by source, and UTM Analytics counts wishlists and purchases from links you tag. Broadcast and event statistics cover streams and announcements. Read wishlists and traffic weekly before launch, sales, players and refunds daily in launch week, and everything monthly after.
5 min readHow to read your Steam wishlist and traffic reports
The wishlist report, in Steamworks' Sales & Activations Reports, shows per day how many people added your game to their wishlist, deleted it, and bought it from their wishlist, updated daily through the previous day, with a regional breakdown in the regional sales report. Watch net adds (adds minus deletions) and what caused each spike. The Store & Steam Platform Traffic Breakdown, under Marketing & Visibility, shows impressions (your capsule shown on screen) and visits (unique loads of your store page) by source. A low visit-to-impression rate points at the capsule; a low wishlist-to-visit rate at the page itself. UTM Analytics adds wishlists and purchases from links you tag yourself. SteamDB, Gamalytic and VG Insights estimate other games' numbers; for your own, Steamworks is exact.
5 min readHow many sales one Steam review means
The review-to-sales ratio, often called the Boxleiter number, estimates a game's sales by multiplying its Steam review count, since Valve publishes no sales figures and only players who have launched the game can review it. Published estimates have fallen over time as Steam prompts more players to review. Jake Birkett's 2018 dataset of over 50 games found a median of 77 sales per review (65 for 2017 launches); Simon Carless's 2020 GameDiscoverCo study of 237 games found a lifetime median of 58 but 38 for games launched in 2020, and suggested 20 to 60 for a new game; a 2022 follow-up put the median for all 2022 releases near 29, with about 20 for games under 1,000 units. So for a recent game, estimate a range, reviews × 20 to reviews × 60, and treat ×30 to ×50 as the middle. It is a rough guide for comparing games, never a measurement.
5 min readHow to estimate a game's sales and revenue from its Steam reviews
Take the game's total Steam review count, multiply by a range of roughly 20 to 60 to estimate copies sold (GameDiscoverCo's 2020 study suggested 20 to 60 for a new game; its 2022 follow-up put the median for 2022 releases near 29), then multiply by an average price paid well below the full price, because discounts and regional pricing pull it down (a common assumption is 50 to 70% of full price), for gross revenue. Subtract Steam's 30% share (25% above $10 million and 20% above $50 million), then refunds, VAT and sales taxes, and any publisher's share for net. A $15 game with 1,000 reviews comes out at roughly 20,000 to 60,000 copies and $126,000 to $378,000 after Steam's share. Use it to size a genre across ten comparables, not to judge one game.
5 min readHow many copies do indie games sell on Steam?
Most sell very few. Of about 19,100 games released on Steam in 2025, SteamDB found almost half with fewer than ten reviews by year-end, which at GameDiscoverCo's estimate of about 20 sales per review for small games means a couple of hundred copies or fewer. About 6% passed 500 reviews, and Chris Zukowski counted 608 of 20,282 releases, about 3%, past 1,000 reviews, which at 20 to 60 sales per review is roughly 20,000 to 60,000 copies or more. VG Insights' 2024 report describes the typical scale by team: about 2,000 to 20,000 copies for a one- or two-person game that finds an audience, 20,000 to 200,000 for small teams. The games that sell tend to share a genre with proven demand, a clear hook, thousands of wishlists before launch and a price of $10 or more.
5 min readWhat the median indie game earns on Steam
The median game on Steam earns very little, and the average misleads. Gamalytic reported in September 2023 that half of the paid games released in the previous three years had grossed under $700 lifetime; excluding games priced under $5 the median rose to about $4,000, and excluding those under $10 to about $17,000. Of those 41,000-plus releases, 76.5% had earned under $5,000 and 5.6% over $200,000. Chris Zukowski's analysis of 2019 releases on VG Insights data put that cohort's lifetime median near $1,136, with 68% under $10,000. And in 2025, 608 of 20,282 releases, about 3%, passed 1,000 reviews, which Zukowski ties to roughly $150,000 or more. All of these are gross estimates, before Steam's 30% share, refunds and taxes.
5 min readHow many games release on Steam each year?
SteamDB counted about 19,000 to 19,100 games released on Steam in 2025 by mid-December, a record, up from about 18,500 in 2024; later tallies for 2025 run higher as late releases and re-dated apps are added. That is more than 50 a day, and 2026 is running faster, at roughly 66 a day by mid-year counts. The more telling number is what happens to them: of 2025's releases, about 9,300, almost half, had fewer than ten reviews by mid-December, in SteamDB's data as reported by PC Gamer. So the number of games is not the competition you face: most never reach the players who would buy a game like yours, and a game with a clear hook, a page that converts and wishlists before launch competes with a far smaller field.
5 min readThe indie game publishing guide: every job from Steam page to launch
Publishing an indie game is a set of jobs that start long before launch: a Steam page that turns visits into wishlists, a demo and a festival, a trailer and clips, posts, creators and press, a community, playtests, a website, sometimes ads or a publisher, and then the launch itself. This guide links every one, in the order a game usually meets them, with a guide per question.
23 min readSteam image sizes: every capsule, library and event asset, with templates
Steam's required store images are the header capsule (920 x 430), small capsule (462 x 174), main capsule (1232 x 706), vertical capsule (748 x 896) and at least five screenshots (1920 x 1080 or larger, 16:9); the page background (1438 x 810) is optional. The library needs a capsule (600 x 900), header (920 x 430), hero (3840 x 1240, safe area 860 x 380) and logo (1280 wide or 720 tall, transparent PNG). Events use an 800 x 450 cover and a 1920 x 622 header.
6 min readIndie game publishers on Steam, and what they have published
30 of the 48 publishers behind Steam's top-selling indie games of the last three years take pitches through their own sites, by a form, a portal or an email address, as of 25 October 2026. All 48 are listed below, alphabetically, with the games Steam credits them with and how each one takes pitches, and every pitch page is linked. It is not a ranking and says nothing about deal terms.
11 min readThe best games like Stardew Valley to play in 2026
A decade after Stardew Valley, the farming game is its own genre with its own crowded shelf. The newer ones are not trying to replace it. Each picks one thing Stardew did lightly and makes it the whole point.
3 min readCan AI Build a 500-Enemy Horde in Godot?
Five hundred enemies, two rooms, a narrow doorway, a wide gap and a dead end. One prompt to Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code: build the horde, and nothing may get stuck. No second model: a scorecard written before the first pass, eight things a shipped horde does. Then a bug report and a look brief.
1 min readCan AI Solve Godot's Stairs Problem?
Can an AI model build a first-person character controller that walks stairs and slopes the way a shipped game does? Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code got a small Godot test course, twelve lanes of slopes, steps, two flights of stairs, a kerb, a low ceiling, bumps and a drop, and the character script Godot starts you with, which stops dead at a 20 centimetre kerb. One rule made it hard: no invisible ramps over the stairs.
2 min readOpus 5.5 vs GPT-6.1 Sol: Can AI Build a Save System?
Can an AI model add saving and loading to a game that already exists, and get it right? Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code and GPT-6.1 Sol in Codex got the same finished Godot game, a small house with four doors, a key, a padlock, a crate and a guard on his round, and one job: F6 saves, F7 loads, and after a load the game carries on exactly as if it had never stopped.
2 min readOpus 5.5 vs GPT-6.1 Sol in Blender: One Cost 7x More
Last time, four AI models built this dwarf miner with no Blender, written out as text. This time the two best, Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code and GPT-6.1 Sol in Codex, get Blender, and they have to animate the walk themselves. Same prompt, same reference picture. Each ran Blender from scripts it wrote, exported the character, and made a small Godot game where he walks back and forth with his feet planted.
2 min readClaude Haiku 5.5: Can the Cheapest Claude Build Celeste's Jump?
Claude Haiku 5.5 just came out, and it's the cheapest Claude there is. Can it build a platformer jump that feels like Celeste's? One room in Godot, six things to get right: variable jump height, coyote time, jump buffering, a hang at the top, corner correction and a fast fall, each with a pass mark set before the first run and no stricter than Celeste.
1 min read4 AI Models Build the Same Walking 3D Character in Godot
Can an AI model build a game character that holds together when it walks? Claude Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 4.5 in Claude Code, and GPT-6.1 Sol in Codex, got the same prompt and the same reference picture: a stocky dwarf miner with a braided beard, a helmet lamp, an apron and a pickaxe, built only with Flockbay's modeler, rigged so he can idle, walk and jog. No Tripo, no Meshy, no Blender. Each worked directly in the Flockbay app, on the Godot engine, looked at its own builds, and decided when it was done.
1 min readOpus 5.5 vs GPT-6.1 Sol: The Door Problem in Godot
Can an AI agent build doors that work the way doors work in a well-made game? Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code and GPT-6.1 Sol in Codex got the same prompt and the same reference picture: four doors in a small first-person house in Godot (a hinged door you open from either side, a locked door and its key, a door that closes itself, and a front door), solid while they swing, a crate you can push into a doorway, and a guard who walks a loop through the house opening the doors in his way. Both worked directly in the Flockbay app, on the Godot engine, pressed Play themselves, and decided when they were done.
2 min readSonnet 5.5 vs GPT-6.1 Sol Six-Legged Walker Game
Can an AI agent build a six-legged walker that never slides a foot? Claude Sonnet 5.5 in Claude Code and GPT-6.1 Sol in Codex got the same prompt and the same three reference pictures: a walker in Godot whose legs find the ground with raycasts, stay planted, step in a tripod gait and bend at the knee with inverse kinematics, over boulders, a trench and a flight of rock ledges. No keyframed walk, no downloaded or generated 3D models. Both worked directly in the Flockbay app, on the Godot engine, pressed Play themselves, and decided when they were done. Then each got one more message: make it look as realistic as possible.
2 min readGPT-6.1 Sol vs Opus 5.5 Physics Truck Game
Can an AI agent build a real physics vehicle? Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code and GPT-6.1 Sol in Codex got the same prompt and the same reference picture: an off-road hill climb in Godot, with a truck that has to be a real physics body on working suspension. No downloaded or generated 3D models. Both worked inside Flockbay over MCP, pressed Play themselves, and decided when they were done.
1 min readThe best game engine for beginners depends on one question
Every list of beginner engines ranks the same names in a different order. The order matters less than one question: do you want to learn to program, or do you want to make a game without learning to? The answer splits the list in two.
2 min readThe best free 2D game engines, and what "free" means for each
"Free" means different things in different engines. Some are free forever, for anything. Some are free until you sell. Some are free with limits you hit at the worst moment. Here are the best free 2D engines, and the catch in each.
2 min readThe best free 3D game engines, and what they cost when you succeed
Most 3D engines are free to start. The difference shows up later, if your game does well: some take nothing, some take a royalty, some ask you to upgrade. That later cost is the one to check before you begin.
2 min readThe best AI tools for making mobile games
A mobile game has to reach Google Play or Apple's store, so the first question about any AI tool is whether it exports there. Several engines now have AI built in and do. The rest of the toolkit, art and sound, works the same as for any game.
2 min readThe best AI tools for game development, by job
The best AI tools for game development depend on the job: Flockbay builds and play-tests a whole Godot game for free, coding agents such as Claude Code or Codex write code in your project, and generators make the art and sound. Here is which tool does each job well, and what it charges.
3 min readFlockbay vs Ziva: Godot inside a free AI app, or an AI agent inside your Godot
Pick Flockbay if you want a whole Godot game built and play-tested for free; pick Ziva if you want an AI agent inside the Godot editor you already run, on your own Claude Code or Codex subscription or on its hosted models from $20 a month. Flockbay's AI is free to start or runs on your own Claude or ChatGPT, on the official Godot engine.
9 min readFlockbay vs Orca Engine, what happened to Orca, and a free alternative
If you were looking at Orca Engine, Flockbay is a free alternative on Godot. Orca Engine was an AI game engine built on Godot, with an agent that edited scenes and code. Today its web address leads to Orca, a tool that makes Minecraft mods.
2 min readFlockbay vs Moonlake: interactive worlds, where Moonlake went, and a free alternative
If you came to Moonlake to make a game, Flockbay is a free alternative. Moonlake AI came out of stealth in 2025 promising interactive worlds from a prompt, and it was widely described as an AI game maker. On 26 September 2026 its homepage described a world model for robots instead.
2 min readSeele AI alternatives in 2026: free options, and when to stay
Yes, there are free Seele AI alternatives, and the best one depends on why you are leaving Seele. To own and sell the game with no paid tier, Flockbay builds a native Godot game for free, on free AI to start or your own Claude or ChatGPT; for a hosted browser game, Rosebud, with commercial rights from $30 a month; for no code at all, GDevelop; for the art and video alone, Ludo.ai. Here is each one with a checked price and a one-line verdict, as of 1 November 2026, and the cases where Seele is still the right answer.
6 min readWhat is Godot MCP?
Godot MCP means connecting an AI agent to the Godot engine through the Model Context Protocol. It turns Godot actions into tools an agent can call, so the agent can run your game, read errors and change scenes on its own.
2 min readMaking games with Kilo Code and Flockbay
Kilo Code is an open-source coding agent for VS Code that supports MCP servers, including local ones. That lets it drive Flockbay, the Godot editor, the running game and the scene tools, alongside the code it already writes. Here is the setup, step by step.
2 min readA guide to Godot MCP servers: install, connect, and use one well
A Godot MCP server takes about two minutes to install and changes how an agent works with your game: it can run the project and read the errors itself. Here is the install, the first tasks to try, and the habits that avoid lost work.
3 min readPrompt templates for your own agent in Flockbay
When you connect your own agent to Flockbay, it gets the open Godot editor with undo, the running game to playtest, the scene tools for scenes and nodes, and the object library. These prompts give it the right context and one job at a time. Copy them and change the details.
2 min readThe best AI coding assistant for Godot is the one that knows Godot 4
Most AI coding assistants were trained on years of Godot 3 code, and Godot 4 changed a lot of it. The best assistant for Godot is the one that writes Godot 4 without being reminded. Here is how to test for that in ten minutes.
3 min readThe best AI for GDScript: what good output looks like
The best AI for GDScript writes Godot 4 code, not Godot 3: on Flockbay's 15 checked Godot 4 tasks, Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol got every one right on the first try. You do not need to write GDScript to judge it; a handful of patterns tell you whether a model knows modern Godot or is guessing from old tutorials.
3 min readThe best AI for Godot: we ran 28 models on 15 Godot 4 tasks
Twelve of 28 models passed all 15 Godot 4 tasks on the first try, every file run headless on Godot 4.7.2: Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol among them, and three of the five cheapest hosted models we measured. "AI for Godot" is also a second question, which kind of tool puts that model to work, and this page answers both.
5 min readThe best AI tools for Godot in 2026, with a verdict on every one
The best AI for Godot is Flockbay if you want a whole game built and play-tested for free, because it runs the game it builds on the official Godot engine, on free AI to start or your own Claude or ChatGPT. If you already pay for Claude Code or Codex, give it a Godot MCP server such as the free Godot AI; Ziva puts a paid agent inside the editor, Summer Engine is a hosted-AI engine of its own, and Tripo, Meshy or PixelLab make the art. Below is every tool worth knowing, read on its own site on 1 November 2026, with a price and a one-line verdict.
11 min readThe best Godot MCP server in 2026: Flockbay's for a whole game, godot-ai for your own editor
The best Godot MCP server for building and play-testing a whole game is Flockbay's, because it is free with no sign-up and hands your agent all four things that matter: the open Godot editor, the running game, viewport captures and input events. For your own Godot 4.7 editor, godot-ai is the best free, open server; GDAI MCP is the polished one at $19 once; and Coding-Solo's godot-mcp is the simplest start. On 25 October 2026 we ran the same three tasks through Flockbay, Coding-Solo's godot-mcp, GoPeak and satelliteoflove's godot-mcp, and all four passed every one, so pick on what you want the agent to touch. We make Flockbay; every other server here is read from its own pages, with one verdict each and the case where it beats ours.
9 min readThe best LLM for Godot
Twelve of 28 AI models passed all 15 of Flockbay's checked Godot 4 coding tasks on the first try, every file run headless on the official Godot 4.7.2: Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol as coding agents on 6 October 2026, and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Ember-1, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, Muse Wonder, Kimi K3, GPT-5.6 Luna, GPT-6 Luna, Hy4 preview and Pareto 26.10 through their APIs on 18 October. In game builds, Opus 5.5 finished ahead of GPT-6.1 Sol in three of five and cost 3 to 11.5 times as much at API prices: Opus for the hardest systems, Sol for everyday Godot work. Flockbay is free and runs them on your own Claude or ChatGPT, with free hosted AI to start if you have neither.
18 min readClaude Code for Godot in 2026: connect it to your game, and what it builds
To use Claude Code with Godot, give it a way to run the game it edits: Flockbay runs Claude Code on your own Claude plan inside its app, or your own Claude Code connects to Flockbay's MCP server, free either way, and Claude builds in the Godot editor and playtests the game. Without Flockbay, Claude Code still edits your project's files from a terminal, and a Godot MCP server such as Coding-Solo's godot-mcp lets it run the game and read the errors. This guide covers every way to connect Claude Code to Godot, with the exact steps, what Claude can and cannot do in each, and what each costs, as of 24 Oct 2026. Flockbay is free, AI included: free hosted AI to start, or your own Claude, ChatGPT, agent or API key. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, on the official Godot engine.
13 min readCursor plus Godot vs Flockbay: two ways to make a Godot game with AI
Both routes end in a Godot project on your disk. The difference is who is doing the engineering. With Cursor, you are a programmer with a very fast assistant. With Flockbay, you are a designer and the AI is the programmer.
3 min readThe 2026 Cursor Vibe Jam: what the rules asked, what won, and how to prepare for the next
The 2026 Vibe Jam ran through April and closed on 1 May. Its rules were short and strict: most of the code written by AI, playable in a browser with no login and no loading screen. Those two rules decide which tools can enter the next one.
3 min readDoes Godot have AI? Two different answers
"Does Godot have AI" means two different things. Godot has plenty of game AI built in: navigation, pathfinding and animation state machines. What its editor does not ship is a generative AI assistant. For that, you add a plugin or a tool.
2 min readFree Summer Engine alternatives in 2026: seven real options, and when to stay
Yes, there are free Summer Engine alternatives, and the best one depends on why you are leaving. To stay on Godot, Flockbay builds and play-tests the whole game for free on the official engine, on free AI to start or your own Claude or ChatGPT; Ziva puts a paid agent inside Godot's own editor; or connect the Claude Code or Codex you already pay for through a Godot MCP server. For a hosted web game, Rosebud; for Unity, Unity AI; for no code at all, GDevelop. Here is each one with a checked price and a one-line verdict, as of 24 October 2026, and the cases where Summer Engine is still the right answer.
8 min readThe best AI game maker, according to Reddit: what people actually say
In April someone on r/aigamedev asked for something like Rosebud, but without the credit meter, and with a clean path to Steam. Every reply either named a different tool or explained why the thing they wanted does not exist. That thread is Reddit on AI game makers in miniature.
5 min readWhat an AI 2D Game Asset Generator Actually Gives You
Generating a picture and producing a game asset are two different jobs. The gap between them is alpha edges, exact sizes, pivots, palette agreement, and whether the thing still reads at the size players see it.
10 min readAI 3D Game Asset Generators and the Topology Problem
A generated 3D model is a shape. A game asset is a shape plus a wireframe, a UV layout, a material, a scale, an origin, a collision hull and, if it moves, a skeleton. Only the first of those comes out of the box.
12 min readWhy generated game dialogue falls apart as a conversation
Generated dialogue reads fine line by line and collapses as a conversation. The missing pieces are state, stakes and memory. Barks are the honest sweet spot.
9 min readAn AI enemy generator gives you a silhouette, not a fight
An enemy is not a model plus a stat block. It is a behaviour the player can read and plan around. Generation gives you the silhouette; the fight is still yours to design.
8 min readCheap to generate a thousand game concepts, expensive to pick one
Concept generators are excellent at novel combinations and useless at judging which combination deserves months of work. The selection test is the whole job.
8 min readQuestions that separate one ai game maker from another
Every tool in this category advertises the same four things. Here are the questions that actually distinguish them, what each shape of tool is genuinely good at, and a test you can run in an afternoon.
10 min readWhat an ai game maker is worth in a 48 hour jam
A hackathon is a scope problem with a clock attached. Generation genuinely buys you hours in some places and quietly spends them in others, and knowing which is which decides whether you submit.
9 min readAI level generators versus classic procedural generation
Procedural generation is a rule system you tune and can trust to stay consistent. A model producing a level is a one-shot draft you must inspect. Both are useful, for different jobs.
9 min readProcedural Generation Only Works When Something Checks It
A generator that can produce an unplayable level will produce one, on someone else, on launch day. The rules that reject bad output are not plumbing. They are the design, written down.
8 min readWhat an AI quest generator actually gives you
A generated quest is an objective, a trigger and a reward hook. A memorable quest is a reason to care, a place it takes you, and a consequence you can see afterwards.
9 min readAI Sound Effect Generators and the Repetition Problem
Text-to-sound gives you one short clip at a time, and short clips are genuinely useful. The thing that determines whether your game sounds good is not the clip. It is what happens the fortieth time it plays.
9 min readWhy AI Sprite Generators Struggle With Animation
One generated sprite can be excellent. Eight generated frames of the same character walking will not be the same character. Animation is a coherence problem, and coherence is exactly what per-image generation does not have.
10 min readHow to judge a game you did not code
Knowing whether a game is any good is a player skill, not a programming one. Here is a method for reviewing your own project and turning the verdict into changes.
8 min readThe smallest plan that is actually useful
Most game plans are either too vague to act on or too long to read. The useful version is four short answers you can write in an afternoon and change on Friday.
9 min readThe honest state of ai game making in 2026
A survey with the hype removed: what ai game making genuinely does well in 2026, what it still cannot do, and what only looks like it changed.
12 min readWhat to build first in an open world
The instinct is to build the map. The right first thing is a hundred metres of ground you enjoy crossing, because everything else in an open world is built on top of the crossing.
10 min readWhen to stop prompting and start building
Asking for a change is so cheap that it is easy to keep asking long past the point where it helps. Here are the signals that the next useful move is to go and place things by hand.
9 min readWhy browser ai game makers hit a ceiling
A tab is the best on-ramp in software and a constrained place to finish a project. What browser tools genuinely do better, where the limit actually comes from, and how to decide which side of it you are on.
10 min readWhy your first AI-generated game is bad, and what to do about it
The first thing you build with AI usually works and is dull. That is not a tooling failure, and a better model will not fix it. It is a description problem, an averaging problem, and a judgement problem, and all three have concrete fixes.
10 min read
Earlier essays
Her Story is a search box
Sam Barlow, 2015. The whole case is already on the machine. The play is which word you type next, and the game never tells you the right one.
8 min readThe first dungeon was a maze
Nintendo, 1986 and 1987. The Legend of Zelda hands you an underground you are not taught. Zelda II turns the dungeon into a side-on fight. Both habits stuck.
10 min readCuphead bosses teach, then cheat
Studio MDHR, 2017. A Cuphead boss is a pattern you are allowed to learn, and then a second pattern that uses the first one against you.
9 min readThe JRPG starts at a table
Dungeons and Dragons, the mid-1970s, is the template. Dragon Quest, Enix, 1986, is what happened when that tabletop loop was forced through a menu.
9 min readAges and Seasons disagree
Capcom and Nintendo, 2001. The Oracle games shipped the same day. One is about time puzzles. The other is about action. They are not editions.
9 min readThe dotted line ate the trip
Fallout 4, Bethesda, 2015, will walk you from marker to marker. Turn the quest off and what remains is the trip the marker replaced.
8 min readRoguelike vs roguelite: permadeath names two rules
A roguelike keeps nothing when you die; a roguelite lets something survive the run, such as upgrades, unlocks or currency. That one rule decides whether a failed run is wasted time or a payment toward the next, and it changes how the whole difficulty curve has to be tuned.
9 min readAether is several worlds, not one
Retro Studios, 2004. Echoes is not one continuous planet. It is distinct places, each meant to be finished, and a hub that admits the cut.
10 min readCatalyst chopped up its own city
DICE, 2016, fixed a lot about Mirror Edge and still lost the run. Burnout Paradise, Criterion, 2008, kept every event on the same streets. Catalyst did not.
8 min readThe desert arrived after the moves
Ori and the Will of the Wisps, 2020. The Windswept Wastes began as a list of movement problems. The sand was hired later to hold them.
11 min readMario hides a second difficulty
Mario has to work for a first-time child and for someone who has played since 1985. The two difficulties share a level and do not share a route.
13 min readA manual cannot stop a reload
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, Bethesda, 1996, asked players not to replay the save. They did. A habit survives any paragraph that scolds it.
8 min readBuilt to Scale was a trap
A 2024 jam gave everyone the phrase Built to Scale. The words stretch in a dozen directions, which is why so many games could be about size and still disagree.
13 min readJusant makes you place each hand
Dont Nod, 2023. Most game climbing is a stick held forward. Jusant is immersive because the grip is a resource you place, not a cutscene you ride.
10 min readBreath of the Wild retired the key
Nintendo, 2017. The Divine Beasts are puzzles you can see whole, and the shrines are the old dungeon chopped into single ideas. The key hunt is what left.
12 min readTeach the system after it matters
Strategy and city builders lose people in the tutorial, before anyone has a reason to learn. Spread the lessons, and make each one a problem.
12 min readSpelunky was two failures glued
Derek Yu, around 2008, did not set out to invent a genre. A platformer and a roguelike each failed alone. Together they produced Spelunky.
9 min readDownwell gives every part two jobs
Ojiro Fumoto's Downwell, 2015, stays deep because almost nothing has a single purpose. The gun is the jump. The gems are the health.
6 min readA badge is not a deduction
Plenty of games hand you a badge and a witness. The ones that are actually detective games make you hold a theory the interface did not write for you.
11 min readDOOM fits inside one arena
Doom, id Software, 2016. One room holds the loop: push in, swap weapons, finish a demon, take what it drops. The campaign is that room again.
7 min readVanquish is a brawler with a gun
PlatinumGames, 2010. Vanquish belongs with Bayonetta, not with cover shooters, because the family trait is depth of action, not melee.
9 min readAccess options are the design
Accessibility is not a checklist added after the fun. It is the work of removing the obstacles between a person and that fun.
12 min readThe save was the design choice
Alien: Isolation, Creative Assembly, 2014, nearly saved the ordinary way. Changing that one assumption changed the fear. Design is noticing which assumption.
9 min readDifficulty is a place you choose
Hollow Knight: Silksong, Team Cherry, 2025, is not hard because Metroidvanias are hard. The strain sits in the bosses, on purpose. Fairness is the condition.
8 min readThe overworld writes the dungeon
Nintendo, 2013. A Link Between Worlds lets you rent the items and choose a dungeon. The temples have to be fair in any order, which the map decides.
12 min readRayman spends one trick for a world
Rayman Legends, Ubisoft Montpellier, 2013, does not retire a mechanic after one level. 20,000 Lums keeps the sneak until the world is fluent in it.
8 min readDead Space 3 spent the audience
Visceral Games, 2013. The action sequel had sold. The third game pushed further, into co-op and a wider net, and the original promise got thinner.
9 min readOne unfair puzzle convicts a genre
Broken Age, Double Fine, 2014, is charming, and a few puzzles were enough to make players decide the whole genre was broken. Fairness is the repair.
8 min readThe plateau teaches the whole map
Breath of the Wild, Nintendo, 2017, does not solve an open world with a trail of markers. It solves it with a first hour that contains every verb.
6 min readSuper Mario 3D World's level design teaches in four beats
Super Mario 3D World gives each stage one mechanic and a four-step arc: introduce it safely, develop it with real danger, twist it into something new, then end with a final test. Director Koichi Hayashida has linked the pattern to kishōtenketsu, a four-part structure from East Asian storytelling.
7 min readThe stylus redrew the dungeon
Nintendo, 2007 and 2009. Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks were built for a touchscreen, so the dungeon became something you draw on, not just walk through.
9 min readThe swing is a skill you earn
Insomniac's Spider-Man, 2018, does not hand you the fantasy at the title screen. The web becomes Spider-Man only after the physics start answering you.
8 min readWind Waker temples are too straight
Nintendo, 2002. The Wind Waker gets the sea, the art, and the tone right. Its dungeons are the awkward part: short, guided, and over before they become places.
9 min readLock the game, then polish
Content lock is the day you agree the game will gain no new mechanics. Every hour after that is for the build you already have.
6 min readRandomness has two jobs
A shuffled deck and a missed shot are both random, and they are not doing the same work. One is a generator of situations. The other is a fog on execution.
10 min readMario levels teach by changing one tile
Super Mario Maker, Nintendo, 2015, is a design school. The classic levels work because each one mutates a single idea instead of announcing it.
10 min readEchoes of Wisdom hides in a list
Nintendo, 2024. Zelda copies objects into the world, then buries that power in a menu. The fix is fewer steps between the idea and the copy.
12 min read2015 hid its best ideas in sequels
Bloodborne, Metal Gear Solid V, Splatoon, Ori and Life is Strange each staked a year on one sharp rule, not on being new.
7 min readLiberty City arrives in slices
Grand Theft Auto III, Rockstar North, 2001. Liberty City could not fit in memory. It was streamed in around the player, which is what made the city possible.
10 min readTen years of games, one real lesson
A decade of pulling games apart keeps returning to the same correction: the verb decides the feeling, and the feature list does not.
8 min readThe Swindle charges you for failure
Size Five Games, 2015. A heist is decoration if getting caught reloads a checkpoint. The Swindle makes the loss stick, which is why the job feels real.
5 min readThe companion spoke too soon
God of War, Santa Monica Studio, 2018. A hint that names the solution before you have looked is not accessibility. It is the puzzle being skipped.
6 min readUntil Dawn is not a flowchart
Supermassive Games, 2015. Counting branches is the wrong test. Until Dawn makes you complicit in the next scene, whether or not the plot forks.
8 min readIco cut until the walk remained
Team Ico, 2001. Ico shaped later games by removing the interface, the combat, and the chatter until a held hand was the whole action.
7 min readMusic can be a rule the player hears
Battle music is the dull version of an adaptive score. The useful version tells you where you are, what you risk, and when a system just changed.
8 min readCapcom keeps the sensation
Capcom remakes, Resident Evil 2 in 2019 among them, do not copy the feature list. They protect the feeling and let the old buttons go.
9 min readKaizen is a puzzle that answers
Event[0], Ocelot Society, 2016. You type at a shipboard intelligence named Kaizen. The puzzle is what it understands, not how human it sounds.
9 min readShepard was written before you
BioWare's Shepard, 2007, has to be yours and already someone. Push either side too far and the performance, or the choice, goes hollow.
17 min readLocator withholds the answer
Geoguessr scores a pin at once. Locator, a mystery about a missing archaeologist, confirms nothing until three pins are right together.
5 min readEach temple has a character
Nintendo, 2006. Twilight Princess dungeons are remembered as places with a personality and one moment you describe later, not as a checklist of keys.
9 min readCampaigns forgot to argue with the gun
By the mid-2010s many shooter campaigns felt interchangeable. The gun was fine. The levels had stopped asking it to do a new job.
10 min readLives are a second checkpoint
A life counter is not an antique. It is a harsher checkpoint sitting on top of the ordinary one, and it only earns that harshness in a short run.
9 min readOvercooked fails if you stay quiet
Ghost Town Games, 2016. The cooking is easy. The kitchen is built so two players must talk, or the orders pile up on purpose.
9 min readJuice is how a hit explains itself
Two games can share a move and feel nothing alike. The difference is the instant of feedback that tells your hands the move happened.
8 min readNintendo starts with the hands
Nintendo tends to settle how a game is played before it settles what the game is about. Story, technology, and theme come after the verb.
7 min readBlow uncovers a puzzle, then builds it
Jonathan Blow has said Braid, 2008, felt discovered rather than invented. The feeling is not an excuse to skip the room that teaches the rule.
7 min readMosa Lina has no intended answer
Stuffed Wombat built Mosa Lina so a room has tools, not a solution. The designer cannot have meant the route you found, and that is the point.
7 min readBanjo-Kazooie's world design: small and full
Banjo-Kazooie's worlds are small on purpose. Each of its nine worlds is compact enough to hold in your head, built around landmarks you can see from most of it, with 100 notes and 10 Jiggies packed in, so you always know where you are. Banjo-Tooie grew every world and linked them, and paid for it in backtracking.
9 min readHyrule score stays out of the way
Nintendo, 2017. Breath of the Wild is quiet on purpose. A heroic theme would tell you how to feel about a ruin you were meant to interpret yourself.
6 min readODST fired the power fantasy
Bungie, 2009. Halo meant Master Chief, armored and nearly unkillable. ODST removes him. The city is interesting. The absence is the design.
8 min readThe HUD is part of the design
Treat the interface as trim and you waste it. A health number, a marker, a dimmed ability: each one is an instruction about what matters right now.
8 min readA trailer owes one difference
A trailer exists to show the one thing your game does that the others do not. Mood, logos, and a montage are how that job gets avoided.
8 min readThe warning has to be visible
A footstep, a reload, a monster off screen: if the only version of that information is sound, some players are playing a harder game than you designed.
9 min readSnake Pass deleted the jump
Sumo Digital, 2017. Snake Pass is a platformer that refuses the jump, and the whole genre has to be rebuilt around a coil instead.
9 min readMiami is a place with two jobs
IO Interactive, 2018. The Miami level in Hitman 2 works because the racetrack and the building were already busy before you arrived with a target.
10 min readPsychonauts is the mind levels
Double Fine, 2005. Psychonauts is not the tidiest platformer of its year. The levels are minds, and the platforming is how you walk through them.
7 min readHitman's Sapienza expects the first run to fail
Hitman is designed around replaying the same level. Your first run through Sapienza usually goes wrong, and that is the point: each attempt teaches a guard's route, a target's schedule or a disguise, and by the fifth run you are planning the hit like an expert instead of improvising it.
8 min readMetroid Dread steers you and calls it freedom
You rarely get lost in Metroid Dread because the game closes doors behind you. One-way passages, collapsing floors and abilities placed a few rooms from the locks they open keep the search area small, so a world that looks like a maze plays like a route.
10 min readA choice can skip the menu
A dialogue list is the obvious choice. The stronger ones are actions the story remembers: a door you forced, a person you spared, with no menu in sight.
10 min readOcarina gave the dungeon a height
Nintendo, 1998. Moving Zelda into 3D did not just add a camera. It turned a flat lock-and-key maze into a volume you can get lost in upward.
9 min readA meter is not a moral choice
A good-and-evil bar with two power sets is a costume change. Morality lands when it is a consequence of rules you were already using.
8 min readDeath is still a rewind
Most games still resolve failure the way they did decades ago: fade, reload, play the minute again. The costume changes. The rewind often does not.
8 min readMario jump grew extra results
In Donkey Kong, 1981, the jump is one result. Later Mario jumps steer, stomp, and reach. A verb gets interesting when it stops meaning only one thing.
10 min readRain in Hyrule is the argument
Breath of the Wild, Nintendo, 2017. Rain is not weather. It touches climbing, fire, and stealth. That reach is what systemic means.
10 min readBaba Is You fences one sentence
Hempuli, 2019. The game looks like it will let you rewrite anything. The stages that work are built backward from one sentence you are not meant to find first.
10 min readOne verb carries Shovel Knight
Yacht Club Games, 2014. Mario has a jump, Madeline a dash. Shovel Knight has a downward dig that is attack, bounce, and personality at once.
11 min readWhy Metro Exodus is immersive: menus become objects
Metro Exodus feels immersive because almost nothing lives on a menu screen. The map is paper in Artyom's hands, time and your filter supply are on a watch, weapons are modded on a workbench in your backpack, and a cracked gas mask is a problem you can see. The world keeps running while you use them.
12 min readBuild the question, not the game
Final art is the expensive part, which is why it is the wrong place to learn the idea is dull. A prototype answers one question, and it should look ugly.
11 min readOne rule holds the Roman city
Modern Storyteller, 2021. The Forgotten City kills everyone the moment one person sins. The mystery works because that single rule never bends.
11 min readTwo Metroid 2s, two arguments
Metroid II, 1991, got two remakes that do not agree. AM2R in 2016 and Samus Returns in 2017 each picked a different half of the hunt to protect.
13 min readMelee is not one combat system
Golden Axe and Dark Souls are both close-range fights. They do not share a decision. Combat is the choice you make every second, and the seconds differ.
13 min readThe Sims cannot be fully piloted
Maxis, 2000. A household is too much to steer by hand, so the people have to want things on their own. That want is the design, not a gadget on top.
14 min readBlue Prince drafts against its clues
Dogubomb's Blue Prince, 2025, stacks a clue hunt on a house that redrafts every day. The randomness is the puzzle's enemy unless the notes can outlast a run.
11 min readOne theme, thousands of games
A 2021 jam theme, Joined Together, drew more than 21,000 sign-ups and over 5,800 finished games. The interesting part is what the phrase forced.
14 min readPlaytesters invented GLaDOS
Valve, around 2007. A year into Portal, testers kept saying the tutorial was over and the game had not started. The personality is what answered them.
13 min readOne castle replaced the stages
Konami, 1997. Castlevania had been a parade of stages. Symphony of the Night turns the parade into one castle you learn, and the map is the reward.
12 min readDead Space 2 was given an order
Visceral Games, 2011. The first Dead Space had not sold the way EA hoped. The sequel was steered toward action, and the horror had to survive the steer.
12 min readLink Awakening hid the template
Nintendo, 1993. Link Awakening is remembered for the dream. Under it is the dungeon shape the series kept: a tool, a lesson, a lock that needs the tool.
10 min readCohen owns every room in it
Irrational Games, 2007. Fort Frolic works because one man owns the exits, the radio, and the taste of the place. The level is his performance.
10 min readThe Gloo Cannon is a verb
Arkane, 2017. Prey is full of systems. The Gloo Cannon matters because it talks to all of them: a bridge, a freeze, a ladder, a stop.
10 min readA fighter starts as one sentence
A Super Smash Bros. newcomer is chosen long before the punches. The sentence of who they are has to survive contact with the rest of the roster.
15 min readTough is not the same as smart
Bungie, on the first Halo, kept the AI identical and raised the damage. Players calling the aliens very intelligent jumped from 8 percent to 43.
11 min readA puzzle is two rules in conflict
Every puzzle starts as rules the game will not bend. The puzzle is the moment those rules contradict the obvious plan.
16 min readA guard must show what he knows
Stealth starts from concealment. It falls apart when the player cannot tell what a guard saw, heard, or is about to do about it.
9 min readThe camera serves two masters
A game camera owes the gameplay a readable space and owes the picture a composition. Those debts are often collected at the same moment.
10 min readPlayers will take the dull win
Give people a slow, safe, repeatable way to win and many of them will take it. Protecting them means closing that path, not scolding them.
12 min readDoom can be brilliant and still lose you
Doom, id Software, 2016, has some of the best fights in the genre, and a player can still drift off before the end. Attention is a design problem.
19 min readApe Out kept the accident
Gabe Cuzzillo set out to make a stealth game. The grab was fun, the stealth was not, and Ape Out, 2019, is the grab with a gorilla attached.
8 min readRapture explains itself in the props
Irrational Games, 2007. Strip BioShock of its radios and diaries and the city still tells you what happened. The rooms were built to do that job.
15 min readThe jump is the whole contract
Celeste, Maddy Makes Games, 2018. Nothing else in the mountain matters until the jump is short, steerable, and willing to assume you meant the ledge.
15 min readMake the player show the work
A good detective story is the work: interviews, a scene, a theory. A game that only lets you pick a name from a list has done the work already.
11 min readMystery is a distance you set
Breath of the Wild, Nintendo, 2017. A dragon crosses the sky and is not explained. Mystery is how long you can stand to withhold the answer.
17 min readA win that feeds the next win
A feedback loop turns the result of the last action into the odds on the next one. The design question is when success should compound, and when it should stop.
15 min readHealth systems in games tell you where to stand
A game's health system decides where players stand. Regenerating health lets them take a hit and hide, health packs make them manage a resource and explore for it, and hybrids such as Halo's recharging shield over a health bar sit in between. Pick the rule for the behaviour you want, not out of habit.
10 min readHollow Knight trusts you to be lost
Team Cherry, 2017. After a thin decade for the genre, Hallownest is a map you are allowed to misread. The benches and the stag are kindness, not a guided tour.
17 min readA speech check skips the scene
Charisma as a dice roll deletes the conversation. Talking becomes play when a read, a fact, or a favour is something you can spend.
10 min readThe pad decides which games exist
A controller is not a neutral pipe. The buttons you can reach decide which games are cheap to build, quick to explain, and comfortable to play.
10 min readA decorative clock is not a system
Most day-night cycles wait for the player. A time loop only works when the schedule runs without you and you can learn it.
13 min readOne reload broke Gears of War
Epic, 2006. Active reload was a small timing trick that warped the whole gunfight. Most design problems are that size, and they are solved one at a time.
13 min readCeleste's Assist Mode is a tone of voice
Celeste's Assist Mode lets you lower the game speed to as little as 50%, turn on infinite stamina, extra or infinite air dashes and invincibility, and skip chapters. What sets it apart is how it is offered: the game says plainly that it is meant to be hard and that taking help is fine, then gets out of the way.
16 min readThe spark is the easy half
Every game starts as an idea. The hard part is whether that idea is a verb you can play tomorrow, not a premise you can describe.
16 min readSequence breaking in Toki Tori 2: the lock is knowledge
Toki Tori 2 has no keys, no new abilities and no upgrades. You get two actions, whistle and stomp, and the next area opens once you understand a creature you have already met. Because the lock is knowledge, sequence breaking is not a bug here; it is a legitimate way to play.
10 min readSkyward Sword leads you through
Nintendo, 2011. Early Zelda dungeons were mazes. Skyward Sword dungeons are routes, with a warden and a door that opens when the route is understood.
13 min readA prize can spoil the play
A 1970s drawing study paid some children in advance. They drew less afterward. A reward can move attention off the thing you wanted them to enjoy.
10 min readNova-111 kept a bug on purpose
Nova-111 was a turn-based crawler until a bug let enemies move between turns. The hybrid is only good when that accident stays the point.
7 min read