Game Dev

Balatro Timeline, from Nothing to Millions

Balatro is one of the most successful indie games of all time. It came suddenly from an almost-first-time indie dev and just sold millions.

The dev wrote an interesting blog post talking about the timeline of development.

It started off in December 2021 in a folder titled "Learning/Lua/" which is insane how a learning project became such a huge hit. And it's made with Lua!

Then the dev built a prototype very quickly in just a few weeks and, despite working on it alongside a normal job, he made pretty big, constant progress in a few months. After about one year of working on it part time, he quit his job for 3-6 months to work on it full time.

The wishlist count started off very slow, just under 200. Then a big creator played the demo on stream, and then other mid-sized creators played the demo, and the wishlist count climbed up to tens of thousands. Next Fest comes and goes, more work on the game, quite a bit of crunch on the last month, and it finally released with 208,401 wishlists.

After that it just broke all records, after a few hours the game had made $600,000 and at the end of the first day sold 119,000 copies, insane!

It's a very interesting story of starting with a solid prototype, slowly building upon it, constant playtesting with friends and family, getting a publisher once the idea was validated, and constant iterative improvement on the demo month after month.

By the time the game released it was extremely well built, extremely polished, and went on to become one of the most successful indie games of all time.

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MegaBundles 95% OFF

Unity currently has 3 MEGA BUNDLES at 95% OFF!

There’s one with a Realistic theme, one for Sci-Fi and one Fantasy.

It’s such a deep discount that the bundles are worth if just one asset looks interesting, so check them all out, there’s lots of interesting Assets and Tools. The Realistic one has a great Global Illumination tool.

Check out all the bundles HERE! (It’s ending SOON!)

The Publisher of the Week this time is Léo Chaumartin, independent developer with lots of great tools, mostly for technical art.

Get the FREE Seamless - Shader Graph Extension which extends Shader Graph with new nodes to create tileable visuals or export them to PNG.

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

Do you want AWESOME Low Poly assets? There’s a HumbleBundle with a bunch of packs at 97% OFF!

Includes thousands of assets to make all kinds of games, including some that have never been bundled before! Use the Interface pack to make a Sci Fi shooter, add a companion to your game with the Dog pack, make a survival game with the Biomes pack, or make lots of interesting games with their Simple packs.

As usual it’s a super deep discount so if just one asset looks interesting then the whole bundle is worth it. If you don’t have any general animation packs I highly recommend you get this just for the Base Locomotion pack.

Check out the bundle HERE! 

Game Dev

Every Daily Deal of 2024

On Steam, getting a Daily Deal can be a massive boost, you can sell more copies in a single day than in months.

Steam Marketing Expert, Chris Zukowski, has just analyzed all the Daily Deals of 2024 to see what results you can get and, importantly, how hard it is to get one. Surprisingly, it's much easier than you think.

In terms of money, the estimate is around $20,000 to $30,000 on a single 24 hour deal, that's great! Not only that but getting a Daily Deal also boosts your wishlists which increases your sales in the long term.

Currently Steam has 4 Daily Deal slots, meaning in one year there are 1460 slots. The next obvious question is how do you get one of those slots?

There is one thing that Chris calls "real Steam" which is basically Steam for professional games (rather than hobbyists) and his rough threshold for getting to that level is selling around $120,000 per year.

As always you can guesstimate revenue from review count, so depending on the game price that would imply around 400 reviews to reach "real Steam."

However, by analyzing the data Chris found that there were 211 games with fewer than 400 reviews that did manage to get a Daily Deal, and some even with under 100 reviews.

So even though the more you sell the better the odds of getting a Daily Deal, it's technically possible even if your game is not a huge hit. If your game has at least 100 reviews, then perhaps try contacting Steam support to see if it's possible to get a Daily Deal, the odds might be low but you might get lucky!

If you want to learn more about Steam Game Marketing then definitely check out the Videos I did with Chris, lots of awesome marketing knowledge and his courses are excellent for condensing all that knowledge into a single place.

Tech

Weird Gadgets at MWC

This week had the Mobile World Congress (MWC) where a bunch of companies unveiled a bunch of products, including some very strange ones.

Ars Technica has a nice roundup of some interesting gadgets.

Samsung made a display inside a briefcase.

Lenovo made a Laptop that bends over backwards. There's a normal screen and a second one you can bend the other way or stretch to make a super tall display.

Lenovo also made a Solar Powered Laptop, this is always pretty fun to see despite being pretty unpractical, although apparently in 20 minutes it can charge enough to playback a 1080p one hour video which sounds pretty decent!

Samsung made something that looks like a Switch, but has a fold in the middle of the screen. And another one that folds upwards for a taller screen.

Perhaps the most interesting ones, Magnetic PC accessories! Snap some gadgets to the side of your screen to add some modular pieces onto your laptop, interesting!

Gaming

"I tried making a cozy game. I was terrible at it, so I made this 😇"

The title for this post is pretty funny, "I tried making a cozy game. I was terrible at it, so I made this 😇"

The game the dev ended up making looks super awesome! (and definitely not cozy!)

I love the look and importantly I love all the polish. In a recent video I talked about an exercise I think you should do, analyze a game that looks super satisfying to learn WHY it is so satisfying, and I think this game is another excellent candidate for that exercise. The shooting and explosions feel great, lots of particles, debris, fire, tracers; lots of tiny details to make simple actions look super cool!