I recently released a game, went through the process of announcing it by contacting review sites and announcing its release on forums, its only been a week though and I know I shouldn't feel disappointed in the whole process as yet! However I am

What do you do to keep going? For me its that fact I like to code, others liking or even downloading the game is almost, but not entirely irrelevant

It won't stop me doing what I like, but I am disappointed

I know I shouldn't be more impatient, its just hard to put yourself out there and just wait and see. This is my first try at indie games. I wasn't really expecting much.

You just seem to get people asking for cash to review your game, Though I will try patience and perseverance

Fingers crossed and good luck to all indies

Tried downloading CAVEMAN, got a 404 error

in my experience, a game which is of high enough quality AND sufficiently unique to be a "category leader" will require at least three months of intensive marketing and maximum exposure, before it begins to hit, if it will hit at all.

and i'm talking about a game that was thoroughly vetted for sale-ability. IE before the game was started, it was determined that (A) its colud be completed in a reasonable amount of time by the team, and (B) there's sufficient market, and (c) you can also beat any competing titles in the category when it comes to value to the consumer.

so somebody has to want to buy it, your game has to be the best choice (or only choice) available, and it has to be something your team can actually accomplish.

anything less, and you can expect less results.

and this approach: "others liking or even downloading the game is almost, but not entirely irrelevant"

will get just about the results you'd expect and are now seeing: none.

here's what i would do:

vet the game now. if its not worth marketing, stop and write something that is, or simply stop making games to sell and make them just for fun, if you can't or don't want to write something that has a good chance of selling.

if you design for success (sales), success (sales) is more likely.

if you do not design for success (sales), then success (sales) is much less likely, and largely due to random chance and dumb luck, which is not a reproduce-able business practice.

nice in theory but how many studios can successfully churn out a variety of different games and be successful most of the time. Not many.

When you say "a game that was thoroughly vetted for sale-ability" what you really mean is "a game that is similar enough to other very successful games that you don't have to do the research to see if people like it"

Most games studies either:

A) Get lucky as you described

B) Look at other's lucky success and repeat the same concept while trying to market it better and hype it better. Everyone is doing this.

When I worked for Halfbrick Studios, nobody knew if Fruit Ninja would be successful, so that shows that luck is definitely an aspect

However when it was successful, the copies came flooding out

People do like more of the same. Some studios exist on just making copies. It is a viable business model

My games are not unique, but they are what I like, and they also show progress as I learn Unity. I am used to C++ based game engines. UE4, Unity, etc are as different from the Halfbrick game engine as its possible to be. The Halfbrick game engine is very low level, for example, sprites are controlled via texture coordinates. This also makes the game engine very portable. It supports far more platforms that UE4 and Unity combined and then some

And I know UE4 is C++, but C++ is used more like a scripting language in UE4

The game studios I've worked for never used UE4 or Unity. They've always had custom engines

So originally my post was that I am disappointed in the process of putting games out as an indie, probably more so as I used to be a professional developer. It is so slow and I feel you get ignored, also people ask for large cash sums just for a review. Not good

Redcliffe:

I found the link to your game through your old posts and noticed you're on the android market. That's part of the problem there.

I've told this story a few times here, but here it goes again:

Several years ago I made a game for android which was of decent quality. 3d. Nice graphics, decent music. Fell neatly into the "visually interesting and amusing, but not groundbreaking" category. I put it on the android store, paid a small bit for advertising, hit review sites, free DL codes, etc. Totally bombed. Disappointed, feeling a failure, I continued to trudge on and ported it to IPhone. I was in a "fuck it" mood and didn't even bother promoting it.

Hit the top 20 on day 3 (my free version anyway) - and stayed for about a week, which helped net it a couple $K in not-free version sales.

Meanwhile, my android free version was only at a couple 100 free version downloads and the paid version had maybe 5-6 sales.

The android market (and google) work on a paradigm of "advertising first", which means YOU need to advertise too to be successfull on their market. About 2-3 weeks before I released my game the main android market at the time dropped the "new games" category. The mere existance of that category on the iPhone market is what propelled my game to the top-20 - because I did absolutely nothing else to promote it.

An attractive Icon and the words "free" can get you several 1000 downloads of "fart noises 60" if enough people see it. On your google store page it says (1-5 downloads). That means no-one has even seen it. The ones that have just happened upon it due to a lucky search phrase. As soon as you released it, it was dumped to the total bottom of the android store and people have to scroll through 100s of pages of garbage with no reviews/downloads or negative reviews to even see your app.

Anyway, my point is - don't be too down on yourself. It's your first entry into a stacked market where you have no visibility.

Thanks... you made several interesting points which I'll need to ponder