Game Dev

Dev makes another SUCCESSFUL small game!

The developer behind the recently successful Kabuto Park wrote an excellent, super detailed, blog post talking about their journey. This is actually the second time this developer has found quite a lot of success, the first time was with Minami Lane which has likely sold over 200k copies!

The important thing is how both games are the definition of Small Games. This game took about 6 months full-time to develop, with 1 primary developer and 3 others helping out. Thanks to being the second game from this studio (this is another very important tip, make MORE games!) and by doing some marketing with a game that looks visually very appealing AND and excellent demo, because of that it had 27k wishlists at launch. Those in turn lead to 35k copies sold on the first month with 99% positive reviews on a $5 game leading to about $150,000 in gross revenue (just the first month!). Considering how the cost for this small game was $70k, that's a huge win!

One year ago the developer posted on Reddit about their love for small games and all the benefits that come with it. I highly recommend you read this full post, I definitely agree with everything here. Small games equals less financial risk, faster learning, testing more ideas, doable without as much stress.

I definitely encourage you to read through both of these posts, the developer wrote a really detailed report on everything that went right and wrong so you can learn and hopefully also make some small successful games like this one yourself!

Affiliate

Summer Sales Abound!

It’s that time of the year, there’s a Summer Sale on the Unity Asset Store!

All top rated assets are 50% OFF, and there are FLASH DEALS that change every day up to 98% OFF!

I made a video talking about some of my favorites here, and another video building a quick and fun Fantasy RPG using some assets here.

Browse the entire sale HERE to see everything that is currently discounted and all the upcoming Flash Deals.

The Publisher of the Week this time is Amazing Assets, publisher with nice shaders and tools.

Get the FREE Resize Pro which is a nice tool for helping you easily edit textures like making them seamless.

Get it HERE and use coupon AMAZINGASSETS2025 at checkout to get it for FREE!

If you want to find SUCCESS with your games nowadays then Marketing is absolutely ESSENTIAL.

I've learned a lot of what I know about marketing from Steam Marketing Expert Chris Zukowski, I've been reading his newsletter/blog since 2018 and it has helped me a lot in learning how Steam works and how to put it into action to help my games find success.

Learn how to get more wishlists and sell more copies to find SUCCESS so you can keep making games!

Watch the FREE videos that I did with Chris, and he is starting a Summer Sale on his courses soon! So don’t buy anything just yet but check this link in the coming days!

Game Dev

Another simulator game hits it big!

If you follow the state of Steam and indie game marketing then you probably already know how the Simulator genre is a hot genre. You've got games like Supermarket Simulator making $30 million, TCG Card Shop Simulator $25 million, House Flipper 2 $30 million, Schedule 1 $50 million, and so on.

This month there's another hit on this genre, this time it's Parcel Simulator and this is actually a quite interesting one. I've mentioned before on how this is a pretty hot genre and it's relatively easy to build in the sense that all you need is an interaction system (like the one in my Toolkit) and an interesting theme on top. But this game actually attempts to move the genre forward, in this case by adding Automation elements onto the same formula.

Personally I love Automation games and I love Simulator games so I'm immediately interested in this combo. And clearly I'm not the only one, considering how it launched with 30k wishlists and in the first month alone already sold 55,000 copies for around $800,000 in gross revenue! And for the people that think these games are all just "slop", then I would point you to the review score with almost 900 reviews at 94% positive, clearly players love it!

The excellent newsletter GameDiscoverCo talked to the developer to get some more insights into the development.

It was solo-developed by a dev while also working a dayjob in just over 2 years of free time and weekends, the mix of genres was a great idea, paid marketing didn't work so it was mostly just emailing content creators and the Steam algorithm, and just like many other games in this genre the wishlist count wasn't moving much (asset like visuals) until the demo came out, and when players played the game and really enjoyed it that's when wishlists blew up.

If you want to make a financially successful game then this genre is still hot. There are already many games in this genre but every month there's another new one that hits it big. If you do go for this genre then I hope you find tons of success!

If you want to learn more about Steam Marketing, Hooks, and everything to make your game get more wishlists and sell more copies then check out the videos I did with Chris Zukowski. He's also doing a Summer Sale on his courses starting very soon!

Tech

Is AI making devs faster or slower?

One fascinating study that has just been published tries to quantify just how much does AI actually speed up or slow down development. The results are pretty interesting!

There is a big gap between what developers and experts expected the AI to help, and what the actual results were. They expected ~30% speedups, and in reality got ~20% SLOWDOWNS.

This study was conducted with 16 developers with moderate AI experience and tasked to complete 246 tasks in large and complex projects on which they had 5 years of experience. So these were not newbies but rather people who were already skilled, and already had experience with AI development. Those developers came up with a list of real tasks (bug fixes, new features, refactoring) and then randomly they were either allowed or disallowed from using AI. But despite their experience it appears the result is they think AI makes them more productive when in reality it does the exact opposite.

Without using AI, their forecasts were pretty close to the actual time required to complete the task. But with AI they expected to finish the task much faster and ended up being much slower.

The HackerNews post has a lot of very interesting comments on this. There's mentions on how the relatively low sample size (16) means you can't extrapolate too much, or how actual skill with using the AI tools is very important, or how the nature of work is quite different with the AI developers spending more time just waiting for output rather than actually writing code.

This is a fascinating paper with very interesting results, I look forward to seeing more studies like this as AI tools and developers improve and learn how to work together.

Fun

Tentacle friend!

Lately there have been tons of advances in terms of utility robots, you can already find some very capable robots that can do some genuine work at a factory or restaurant, it's all very impressive.

But what about just fun robots? One dev did just that!

The Shoggoth Mini is a really fun robot companion with a nice tentacle. The dev actually followed an Apple paper that talks about how to make Pixar-lamp-like animations!

By using a really fascinating robotic tentacle (it has so much freedom of movement!) combined with an AI LLM it created a really fun companion that can see, understand and wiggle around! Fun!