Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!
August is here! Feels like only yesterday 2026 started and now it's already on the back half, are you on track for your 2026 goals? For me, last year I decided that this year was going to be the year I would finally publish Total World Liberation... and... yeah... it's hard to stick to deadlines when there's so many projects competing for the same 24 hours heh.
One of my goals for this month is to livestream more, I've long wanted to have a sort of schedule, something like twice per week, and this month that's going to be a focus of mine. It's a nice format to discuss various topics, I did one on Thursday where we talked about "Did AI Slop ruin Next Fest?" and "Is the Incremental/Simulator genre oversaturated?" and also did a bunch of Steam page reviews from viewers, it was fun. I'll also be cutting those livestreams into standalone videos for my second channel Code Monkey Decompiled.
Game Dev: Perfectly Executed Plan ; Godot overtakes Unity
Fun: Paralives Ugly babies
Game Dev
Following the perfect plan made $350,000 in 24 hours!
I love seeing indies succeed, and here we have a post from a developer that succeeded massively earning $361,657 in gross revenue in just 24 hours, and importantly how they achieved that by following the PERFECT indie game plan.
This really is basically the advice that I (and other pro devs) give being followed 100%! The game is Sir, We Have an Orc Problem which is an Incremental Tower Defense game with a massive scale.
The whole article is excellent and I really recommend you read it, but here are my main super important takeaways on everything they did right:
Tech Exploration into Game: Experimented with technology, then realized they could make a game out of it.
Solid 80%, unique 20%: Started from a solid base, another game that was an incremental tower defense game, and they added a 20% twist by using the previous technology which allowed them to boost the unit count by 100x.
Validated their Idea: They made some shorts/reels/TikToks to test the idea even without any visuals, and instantly found success with 100k views per video and people begging them for a Steam page. This was a VERY STRONG signal that they should pursue this idea.
Public Steam page: As soon as they published a Steam page they instantly got 1000 wishlists, this was another signal they had something extremely strong on their hands.
Daily social media posts: They kept posting every day to keep up momentum. 50-150 wishlists per day, that's a huge amount!
Open Playtest to solidify the gameplay: They did a playtest and since they validated the idea they had a ton of players right away, over 200 concurrents (which is huge). Since it was an open playtest some content creators picked it up and made 100k+ views videos, boosting wishlists further.
Published Demo a month before Next Fest: Continued momentum from playtest with a demo, already very solid thanks to the playtest and got even more players and even MORE wishlists.
Joined Next Fest: Went into Next Fest with an insane amount of wishlists and a really polished demo, got great results, 18k wishlists added.
Published 1 month after Next Fest: Launched the game on the perfect timing after Next Fest, and thanks to all how the entire plan was executed perfectly they found MASSIVE success! Making $350k in one day likely means $1-2mil first month and likely $10mil lifetime.
So yup this really is a MASTERCLASS in "How to Find Success on Steam in 2026." I definitely recommend you follow this path. Of course just following the path won't guarantee this level of insane success (this game is an outlier) but following this path of idea selection, idea validation, playtest, demo, next fest, etc; will greatly increase your odds of success.
Also a super important note at the end of the post, this is NOT the developers first game! Like I always advise you, make more games! Most developer's success are not their first game, so don't quit after you first one! Make 2-3-4 games (like I covered in this video) which will give you experience and greatly increase your odds of success!
I LOVE this story! Really I was amazed at how much they did well, they really perfectly followed the blueprint for success on Steam in 2026. Validate your ideas, start from a solid base and twist 20%, do an open playtest, then a demo (before next fest) then next fest and finally launch. This really is a textbook example of the perfect plan in 2026.
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Game Dev
Godot finally overtakes Unity!
The GMTK Game Jam is the biggest Jam of the year, over 10k games were made in just a few days!
This year the theme was "Count Down", and by looking at the jam page it seems that (as usual) people interpreted that theme in so many unique ways. The results are out, except for Mark's Favorites which will be coming out when his video is done.
One interesting stat from this game jam is how this was the very first time that Godot overtook Unity! In total Godot was used in 47% of games (4910) while Unity was used in 34% of games (3602). This is a trend that has been pretty constant over the past few years, and now finally Godot has taken over.
Does this mean anything? I'm always of the belief that more competition is just flat out good for all developers. We all win when Unity has to compete with Godot or Unreal, so I see this as a very positive thing for Unity devs. I hope Godot keeps growing and basically keeps Unity on its toes.
I covered this topic in a recent Livestream and I was asked if I was switching to Godot (just like I'm always asked when I mention it at all) and my answer is no, I'm not quitting Unity for Godot even if Godot is definitely improving year by year.
For me the choice of engine is a simple one: Can I build every game I can imagine in my engine of choice? If the answer is yes (which right now with Unity is yes) then I will just keep using the engine I'm already using. If one day I come across some game idea that I really want to build but simply cannot build in my current engine, that's what will get me to move over to something else. Similar to how I only quit Flash when I wanted to make PC games and Flash was not capable of doing that.
I love seeing the Jam recap video every year, seeing Mark's picks (with his signature awesome editing style that always makes me jealous) and seeing all the creativity on display is always impressive. I'm guessing he's currently working on this years video, I'm looking forward to it!
Fun
Ugly babies no more!
I'm a huge fan of stylized artstyles, personally I prefer it over something hyper realistic, usually I think it looks better.
But it can sometimes look quite off, as was the case of babies in the game Paralives. Players though they looked very weird and was actually off-putting in a game where it's meant to be cozy and chill.
So as a result they redesigned them and made them look more human. This is a great reminder of how sometimes as a developer you might be blind to something. One part of your game might look awesome to you, but very weird to your players to the point where it puts them off the game.
I laugh when I think about these game devs receiving feedback reports saying "babies are ugly!" that's definitely not something you usually see in a feedback form lol
The Italian Man Who went to Malta.
I just rediscovered this 20+ year old masterpiece, still hilarious as when I first saw it as a kid
How Video Game Publishers Actually Work
Excellent explainer on how AAA Publishers work
Get Rewards by Sending the Game Dev Report to a friend!
(please don’t try to cheat the system with temp emails, it won’t work, just makes it annoying for me to validate)
Thanks for reading!
Code Monkey
