If you're a fan of numbers and costs, then this post is excellent. It's a post mortem from a developer detailing how they spent $38,000 making a Visual Novel (which then netted $3,279) and importantly defining which costs were worth it or not.

This is also a curious example because the developer/post writer seems like it was mostly the “ideas guy” with money and spent that money hiring people to make a game rather than doing it all themselves. This is very different from the usual “I made the game all by myself” and also very different from “I have lots of game ideas, I just need someone to make them but I have no money to pay you”, so let’s see where those $38k went.

Some spending was clearly worth it, like the writer and artist, but the dev found out that a lot of it was not.

In terms of hiring developers, this was the biggest cost at $9800 where the dev thinks the big mistake was using Agile instead of Waterfall. Agile works great when working by yourself or with a fully owned team, but with freelancers that you're paying by the hour going for Agile means lots of revisions which means lots of extra cost.

The composer was also described as basically unnecessary since original music doesn't necessarily add much to this type of game as opposed to stock music which would be a lot cheaper (or free).

Translations is an interesting one, the developer said it's mostly wasted since it was expensive and even ended up with some errors. They think the proper approach for the future is AI translation + native speaker proofreading. I guess this one depends if the game has a lot of context or nuance. If not, if the text is mostly normal talking, then I can see AI + proofreading work.

In terms of the hired marketer, the analysis is how it was expensive for the results. $2300 for 700 wishlists. Reddit ads were also slightly expensive, costing about $1.48 per wishlist.

The things that did work were the free things: Steam festivals and manually reaching out to streamers ended up being way more valuable than a lot of the paid promotion, especially because the streams also functioned as real playtesting. Watching players get bored, confused, or engaged gave the developer a ton of insight into how to improve the game.

There's a ton of detailed information in the post so I recommend you read through the whole thing, and the conclusion on the post is filled with great takeaways:

And I love the very last line: "One publisher later told me about a dev who spent 4 years on a 10k-wishlist game, then made a massive hit in 6 months using everything he'd learned. You need the first game to make the second one.", so make your first game!

The Unity Asset Store is currently running their Spring Sale!

As always you can get most of the top assets at 50% OFF, and along with Flash Deals up to 95% OFF!

My own Code Monkey Toolkit is on sale! And I just recently updated it adding a bunch more tools, now it’s over 50!

Oh wow this might be the biggest HumbleBundle in ages!

It includes a Tools, VFX, Meshes, Textures, UI, 2D, 3D, a bit of everything! Thousands and thousands of objects. And it’s all with an insane discount, worth €2,332 and you can get it for just €15!

Get it HERE!

One of the long-standing institutions in indie game dev has been Ludum Dare. The twice-yearly game jam that has been running for almost 25 years!

But there's some sad news. In the post talking about Ludum Dare 59 the caretaker behind it, Mike Kasprzak, has announced that Ludum Dare 64 on October 2028 will the the final one. Meaning there are six more events left, so this is not an immediate shutdown, but it is very much the beginning of the end.

I think this is an interesting reminder of something important: communities and events like this do not just exist automatically forever. They survive because someone is carrying a massive amount of work behind the scenes, and eventually that catches up with people. So if you have ever benefited from a game jam, or a community, or any kind of shared dev space, remember there is usually someone holding that thing together with a ton of invisible effort.

It will be interesting to see what fills that gap. Maybe nothing replaces Ludum Dare exactly and maybe the community simply splinters into smaller jams. Based on the Itch page there is no lack of scheduled game jams so they will continue to happen as a concept, but it really does feel like the end of an era to see the main one go.

Here is an ingenious project!

When it comes to AI, pricing is usually based on tokens/words, both input and output. If you manage to ask the AI to do the same thing using fewer tokens then it's cheaper, same thing for output.

This awesome project takes a cue from the famous The Office Kevin scene "Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?" and teaches AI to speak like a caveman drastically cutting down output token usage by 75%!

A simple output like:

Becomes

This isn't just fun, it's genuine cost savings!