Releasing my First Steam Game!

I was

first

introduced to

game

development in high school and started using all my free time to make really bad

game

s. There is something so satisfying about creating a character or idea and seeing it come to life on screen in a very interactive way. I released a game on Steam and that game was Bunny Hill. This isn't meant to be a post-mortem because I'm still working on Bunny Hill and at the end of the video there's a little more information about that, but I wanted to do a sort of recap video to not only introduce the game to people and show some of the work. made that could be eye-opening for you, but also to show a real case study of what launching a game on Steam could be like and what I believe in. influenced the reception and lifespan of Bunny Hill.

I've been working on the game freely for the past four years and the reception of the game has generally exceeded my expectations. I am very happy with how the game turned out and I am glad that people will be able to enjoy it and play it with their friends in 2020. I left university to return home due to a notable world event and decided that I would make a serious attempt at developing a game, something I'd only really played with before I was in school. art, so I had a little experience in modeling and conceptual and game ideas, but I never put any of them into action.

I had the idea for Bunny Hill in a writing class for a small assignment and decided it was realistic to take it further. I didn't really know what I was doing, so the game had to be simple and polished and my ultimate goal is to release the game on Steam. Here's a rough development timeline I worked on the game for about seven months before

releasing

it. This kind of Steam put me in a minimum viable product state where it had enough features and gameplay that I felt comfortable

releasing

it on Steam. It was the

first

big project I did, so I wanted it to feel polished and complete.

For seven months I estimated I worked 20 to 30 hours a week. There were times when I didn't work at all, sometimes I overworked doing 10 or 12 hours a day. I always tried to have time for it, even if I had something else on my plate. I ended up releasing the game on October 23, 2020. The game was initially well received, but I didn't really do much marketing. I had been working with music artist guppy to make all the music, this really helped increase awareness of the game. I'll talk about marketing. In a later section of this video I'll try to give a good overview of what I thought was successful and what wasn't after launch.

I fixed bugs and took some time off to work on the game and then finally spent one to two months on a new map called Moat. I released the Moat update on January 28, 2021 and left the game for a while. I decided that the game was really lacking content, a lot of reviews kept saying that it's a fun game but it's very small so I wanted to change that 1.1 update version, it was a big boost for the game and ended up taking me from January 28, 2021 to March 16, 2022. Working hard from time to time, I ended up making two more maps, the lush jungle and the lava pass, as well as including a time trial mode so people could race on the same generated map repeatedly to get a good race time. some achievements and I made some of the characters already in the game unlockable and a lot of people seem to like the game but they didn't play it for a long time so I tried to include more single player content like time trial unlockable characters stuff what could you do on your own well you didn't have any friends to play with at this point it still only supports local multiplayer.

This was my first game and the online multiplayer is a big challenge to take on, so I just finished it. Going local growing up, I enjoyed many local multiplayer games for the GameCube, and since many games didn't support it, I thought it would be appropriate to try making one myself after college. I got a full-time job developing games as a programmer. I've always been self-taught when it comes to programming, so in my work I focused on learning basic concepts and new things that I could apply to my own games. I've also been working on a couple more characters for Bunny Hill that I wanted. release, so I posted a small update including four new characters.

A lot of these characters were influenced by the feedback I got saying it would be cool if we saw this type of character or this type of character and I think they really contribute to the game I'm currently working online for the game so I want to add rooms where you can host and play with your friends. It's still a big challenge, but I'm working on it and I think it will be a big thank you. people who stuck around and enjoyed it for so long that they can finally play online with their friends introduce the game to new people and hopefully make it more accessible now that you have a timeline of the game's development let's talk marketing and what a job originally I started doing YouTube development blogs for fun, they were nothing serious, I had no audience and of course there was no monetization.

I really wanted to make them to help myself keep track. The work he was doing is really fun to look back on. It definitely shows me how far I've come. It's also quite humbling to look back and see myself dealing with the problems I face today. All old development logs are uploaded to this. channel so if you want to see them they are there for you to review, the dev logs would get 60-100 views and wouldn't really get any following once the game is more polished and has had a trailer and goodies to show it to the people.

I would post them on Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, and eventually Twitter. I got most of my traffic from Instagram because that's what a lot of my friends use and I'm relatively active there, which really ended up helping the game. working with musician guppy guppy if you don't know he is an electronic music artist and I discovered them in 2020 when I first heard 100 gecks and a lot of Roblox Gore on Soundcloud. I really like guppy music, I think they are very versatile and have a really unique sound, plus they like to make very fast music, which I appreciate and fits the game very well.

Cubby would post the trailer on Twitter and it would get about 15,000 views, a couple of people would retweet it, and I would make some nice comments. It's great to see people interacting with the game and supporting the musician. These tweets are really the only reason it got any reception, besides word of mouth from my friends. I submitted the game to the student category for Indie Games. festival and ended up getting an honorable mention, what really helped was after the 1.1 update. I was watching a podcast on YouTube about how to market games by YouTuber Mrs and they recommend using tiktok.

I went to Tick Tock and saw its success, so I thought. I'd give it a chance, I'm not very good at using any social media and I really like making games, but marketing is at least 50% of the battle, especially if I want to do this full time as a career which I ended up doing. five tick tocks and hoping to publish them, I made a tick tock account and then over the course of a week I published all five. The week I launched them. I traveled to California for the game developers conference. I had done some Gorilla Marketing there which I'm sure helped but my Tick Tock started to explode, most would get 10-30k views but one hit 230k views this was a real game changer , tons of people interacting with it, a lot.

Steam sales and I definitely got a lot of suggestions. It can be a little overwhelming for so many people to see your gameplay in a short video, but I'm glad I listened to people's comments at face value. Most people wanted to see the game support. online multiplayer and being ported to consoles, a lot of people also asked for mobile, these are all pretty big tasks for one person, but they are definitely great suggestions. I want to do console ports in the future and maybe mobile as well. of people waited to buy the game or lost interest because the game didn't really support these features, which is totally fair.

Bunny Hill is actually just a console game that you can play on PC. I think the last notable marketing thing was because the tock brand got so many views that the game ended up in a polygon article. Someone reached out and sent me this. I didn't even know if they were putting the article up, but I'm glad they did. I'm sure it helped me a lot. A little bit, I would say that if you really want to market your indie game well, it helps a lot if you work with someone who has an audience. What helped me gain a small audience was creating a new tick tock account.

The tick tock algorithm actually promotes new accounts, so it can be a decent option if you don't have a lot of content online, social media is really the cheapest way to do this. I ended up running some paid ads on Instagram and other platforms, but they never got me anywhere. I think that with a larger advertising budget and more dedicated videos it is also feasible to market that way. I'm not going to get into concrete numbers when it comes to sales, but I think it's a good idea to take a look at the sales graph. Over the course of my life, the amount of money I made is really insignificant when it comes to surviving on these kinds of things, but it was a lot more than I expected.

I have a long way to go if I want to make this work full time, I guess what is it? The interesting thing about the sales graph is that it shows that you can have a game and it just hasn't found its audience and once you find the audience you'll get a lot more engagement updates and all of that really makes the game snowball, so so there will be more people. I'll check. I found that the better the game, the better the reception. I think it's a bit obvious, but it's really benefited me to take care of the games I've made over the last few years and not let them fall to the side.

I can see a visible spike on the graph when I drop the ticks. I think when I launched the game I had around 300 wishlists and now the game has 2000 wishlists. The game usually has between 5-10 daily active users which surprises me and the average play time is about 30 minutes which I still think is a bit low. I think online play will help improve this. Players will not be able to end with a loss or a victory, so I have to play my game forever. The game currently has 61 reviews on Steam and is in the very positive category, for which I am very grateful.

Many of the reviews are pretty fair in terms of the scope of the game. Even so, they admit that it is small. Or it could have more features, but they like what's there and are willing to give it a positive review. Most of the negative reviews say that the lack of content is too unpleasant and that they cannot recommend the game. Think it is so. Fair opinion, also, I have been working on Bunny Hill online, it will be the next major update to the game and I will be happy to offer it to players for free.

I'll probably end up increasing the cost. of the game itself I think I've worked a lot on it over the last four years and I'll probably increase the price a dollar or two. I have a lot of ideas for new modes or maps that could be cool, but I don't really want to spend a lot of time on an old project either. I would like to do a console port and maybe contact a publisher to make that happen and in the very distant future I definitely want to do that. Bunny Hill too. I think if it was the game that got me started and I was able to make a living making games for a while, I'd like to pay tribute to it and I'd really like to give players the features they want in a fully realized way and not just cram them into the first one. .

I hope this is helpful to anyone interested in game development as a hobby or trying to do it full time. I've been all over the spectrum since I made it. from having fun to developing games for a company or doing it for myself, but trying to make real profits. I hope to continue making games and giving people fun experiences. I have many game ideas. I would like to address them and will be working on them for a long time, so if you want updates on them, feel free to subscribe. If you have any ideas for Bunny Hill online, I'm about to do it, so leave me a comment on things you think I should add.

I have a Discord if you want to join. It's pretty quiet, so I won't be pinging you constantly. I'd love to talk about game design, art code, music, whatever. I also have another game on Steam, you can find all my games through the Dogma dot Quest website and alsoI have a couple more casual projects on itch, thanks for looking. I hope this was an insightful look at the life cycle of an indie game hello and welcome to this year's new Nature Valley Crunchy Maple Brown Sugar Granola Bar review. I'm thrilled to have you join us for the sweet, savory experience that is Nature Valley's Crunchy Maple Brown Sugar Granola Bar, feel free to drop us by. like or comment and subscribe for next week's granola bar variation or other sweet and savory treat, okay, get out of here.