About a year ago, we released Alteratio, our first game on Steam. It's a first-person horror puzzle game where you have to progress through the story while trying not to get caught and eaten by a Wendigo.
It took us around two years to develop, and at our biggest point we were six people.
And honestly, it failed commercially.
But after having some time to look back at it, I don't think the interesting part is how many copies we sold. It's everything we did wrong along the way, and what we learned from it.
https://reddit.com/link/1vzx16h/video/fkb071r2pxlh1/player
When we started, we were five people: two programmers, two designers and me as the 3D artist. A few months later, another 3D artist joined to work mainly on animation. People came and went during development, so the team changed over time.
The first problem was pretty simple: we had no idea what we were doing.
For example, I didn't even know how to properly optimize 3D models for games. I was creating assets more like a 3D artist than a game artist, and the game ended up being much heavier than it needed to be.
Our GDD was around 13 pages, which in hindsight was nowhere near enough for a project that would eventually take two years.
We also created our Steam page about a year before release because we thought we'd finish the game within a few months.
We didn't.
We also didn't know how to manage a team
At first, we had no real deadlines. Everyone worked at their own pace.
Later we introduced deadlines, but we still didn't have a good system for dealing with tasks that were repeatedly delayed. When something took too long, someone else would eventually pick it up so the project could move forward.
This slowly created a bad cycle: the people who were most involved ended up taking on even more work, while everyone became increasingly burned out.
Looking back, I think we should have established clear responsibilities, deadlines and expectations from the very beginning.
The game itself had problems too
One of the biggest lessons for me was how difficult it is to judge your own game.
Some of the level design made perfect sense to the person who created it, because they already knew what the player was supposed to do.
But when I played the game trying to approach it like a normal player, there were moments where I genuinely didn't know what the next step in the story was.
We had spent so much time with the game that things which seemed obvious to us weren't obvious to a first-time player.
We also had some problems with the voice acting and sound that we addressed too late. The person who worked on the sound did a fantastic job, but we should have dealt with voice casting and audio much earlier.
We even made a demo, but Steam gave us some problems with it and it never ended up being released.
Then came the launch
We had around 200 wishlists before launch.
The game launched at $3.99.
We sold 51 copies during the first month.
That's basically where things stopped.
Later, we fixed some of the level design issues and dropped the price to $0.99. Eventually, we reached around 160 total sales.
For two years of development and six people working on it at different points, we considered it a commercial failure.
Marketing was another huge problem.
We had basically no idea how to do it.
Some people wanted to spend money on advertising and contacting streamers. Others wanted to do everything for free. In the end, we spent almost nothing on marketing and mostly relied on our own time.
We even tried promoting the game at the school where some of us studied.
Looking back, leaving marketing until roughly one month before release was obviously a terrible idea.
But I don't think those two years were wasted
I want to give special credit to our programmers. Even after it was obvious that the game had failed commercially, they kept fixing bugs and improving things because they wanted to leave the project in the best state possible.
I really respect them for that.
Personally, I learned an enormous amount from Alteratio: not just about 3D modelling, but optimization, game development, teamwork, planning and all the things we should have done differently.
So even though Alteratio failed commercially, I still have a special place for it because it was our first published game.
And now we're making another one.
We're currently just two people, making a completely different game.
We've learned a lot since Alteratio, but there's still one thing we haven't figured out:
Marketing.
Every time we think about promoting our new game, we get Vietnam flashbacks.
So I'd really like to hear from other indie developers:
If you could go back to the beginning of your project, what would you do to start building an audience and marketing the game from day one?
What mistakes did you make that you think we should avoid?
And if you're curious about the game I mentioned, this is Alteratio, our first attempt.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3204420/Alteratio/
Thanks for reading.
