Indie Game Devs Losing Motivation Overnight
18 posts across 4 communities in the last 30 days; 56% from r/IndieDev.
“i get hyped from screenshots and trailers and then the actual playtime starts feeling like admin if there's a menu, a build, a keybind screen, a map i should learn... my brain goes nope. then i close it and start another one i probably wont finish either. pc or steam deck, same…”
“I've been developing my game for the past eight or nine months but I still can't bring myself to post any footage or screenshots of my game anywhere. Whenever I open up OBS or play through the game I always find something I feel like I need to fix first before I can post. I plan…”
“I just want to share this because i am a new indie dev and i wonder if others have the same issue and how do they solve it. I am someone who gets bored with games/genres quite quickly. I usually pick up a game, enjoy it for a few months and then move on to a brand new game…”
Several posts express frustration and discouragement within the indie game development community. Developers are struggling with technical issues, feeling overwhelmed by marketing demands, and questioning their progress towards launch. The overall sentiment is one of burnout and a fear of failing to achieve their goals.
SOURCES (50)
“For the past few months, I've been hard at work at getting my game finished. I released my demo before the Next Fest in June, and it did alright. Not quite as well as I'd expected, but at least good enough to validate that I'm…”
“Who else thinks like this? I wanted to talk about things we don't discuss enough in indie game dev. Factors out of our control like luck, then there's having serious amount of patience, not all of us have equal access to resources like Kickstarter for example, AI games entering the market (actually thats spoken about enough), but the hardships nobody rarely mentions. I feel like we're often told there's some kind of "formula" to succeeding as an indie developer. And if”
“How much did you have to pay for dev kits? And did you have to pay for age ratings yourself? submitted by /u/Jagames12 [link] [comments]”
“If you are scrolling and you came up to this post i need to tell you something Listen, if you are in doubt or about to give up please reconsider A while ago i posted here asking why people make indie games when like 10k games get published on steam every year. i thought i would get a few answers. i got so many i couldn't even answer all of them. people doing it because they love it, because a game helped them through something hard, because they want to make the game they wish existed. some”
“After 2 months of prototyping and over 6 months of real hobby development, I had my first mental breakdown on my current project, out of nowhere and with no specific reason but recollecting what I've done and what still needs to be done. For a game that will probably be played by 10 people, buried in the steam algo, when it comes out in YEARS. While the scope for my game is somewhat reasonable (procedual level generation, but with alot of handmade skills and monsters), its far away from what”
“Good Afternoon! Long time listener, first time caller. About slightly over a week ago, there was a post about indie game development being a developer's mid-life crisis. Actually, there was tons of useful information about his journey there. Anyway, after talks in the comments, we've ended up forming a club of middle-aged indie developers. I was the one who reached out to the guys on the original thread and I suppose I got carried away, and got myself temporary timed out for like reachin”
“I'm opening and closing my game all day. Test This Test That Test Something else. I think I've opened my game well over 1000 times in the last 2 months and wracked up 100s of hours of game time 😄 submitted by /u/Spacelordsinspace [link] [comments]”
“I love character action games. Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden, MGRR, Bayonetta, stuff like that. And 15 months ago I started working on one of my own. I knew the genre was fairly niche and difficult in development, but I had a lot of ambition when I started working on that project, Ember Fracture. I should have chosen another genre back then, lol. And a way, way more minimalistic visual style. Personally, I mostly care about gameplay in games, and that's why I love Ember Fracture, because the c”
“I love character action games. Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden, MGRR, Bayonetta, stuff like that. And 15 months ago I started working on one of my own. I knew the genre was fairly niche and difficult in development, but I had a lot of ambition when I started working on that project, Ember Fracture. I should have chosen another genre back then, lol. And a way, way more minimalistic visual style. Personally, I mostly care about gameplay in games, and that's why I love Ember Fracture, because the c”
“Part 1: We knew how to build the game. We didn’t know how to launch it. When I started making my own games, I’d spend days or even weeks turning an idea over in my head before doing anything else. What would the game look like? What would the player actually do? For the first project I started with a programmer, we never wrote a proper design document. We talked through the concept, shared our ideas, and got on the same page pretty quickly. Instead of a vision doc, we made two task lists: mine f”
“When I started developing the demo for the game (23 Days), I didn't think I'd run into a billion bugs, some of which turned out to be critical. For example, in the main menu, after 3 minutes all navigation would disappear, and only alt+f4 would help. It turned out that when starting the level with the main menu, Unreal Engine would spawn my character on the level, and without any physical surface underneath, he'd start falling into unknown emptiness. After 3 minutes, the character wo”
“Two years of development ended in failure. Our game flopped. The reviews were brutal. The launch went badly. And eventually, we had to face the hardest part: They were right. The game wasn't good enough. We had two choices: abandon it and move on, or tear apart two years of work and rebuild it into something that actually deserved players' time. We chose to rebuild. So we went back and remade almost the entire game. What changed Completely new traversal system Instead of the old upwards”
“I'm out of words. With recent improvements in tools and my own skills, I was able to create a great cinematic trailer, including music, story and, sound effects and animations. This used to be completely out of my reach even just a year ago. Anybody experience similar speed gains? I'm not even talking about marketing, even the speed of coding got so much faster for me. What I am now creating in 3 days used to take me 100s of dollars in programmer wages and weeks of work. submitted”
“i get hyped from screenshots and trailers and then the actual playtime starts feeling like admin if there's a menu, a build, a keybind screen, a map i should learn... my brain goes nope. then i close it and start another one i probably wont finish either. pc or steam deck, same thing. idk if i want games or just the feeling of having a game ready to go anyone else do this? submitted by /u/yelkamel [link] [comments]”
“I think I lost my mind developing this game submitted by /u/Fantoome [link] [comments]”
“Hi! For the past 14 months I've been developing my first horror game into something I'm super proud of. I’ve been a touring musician during most of my twenties, and just kinda slowly found myself falling out of love with music. Then one night I found a tutorial and my whole world changed. Throughout all of development I felt so inspired, and worked 8-10 hour days, but lately I’ve been seeing a lot of these “how to market your game” and “my game failed” videos/posts pop up everywhere. My”
“After almost 1.5 years of development, I wanted to share something a little personal about Cult Trials: Incarnation It’s been a hard battle, especially with funding. I’m mainly a character artist, not a programmer, but I’ve been learning Unreal Engine along the way and doing as much as I can myself—level design, small systems, setup, and other things—to save development costs. I’ve tried hiring coders and building a proper team, but without stable funding, keeping a permanent team together has b”
“Even before AI era, 95% of games didn't make any decent money - or in most cases - any money at all, while one had to work hard for months, or even years, to be able to ship something playable, let alone a polished game. However, with the recent AI takeover, everybody can build a competent game - 10x faster with 100x less knowledge required. It's already too easy and AI era had only begun. How will this affect the (indie) gaming market? Will this decrease financial success rate of (indie”
“idk if this is an indie thing or just my brain, but i swear i hit the “cool” part of a game and then my motivation drops like it got unplugged. i’ll get past the tutorial-ish stuff, feel all hyped, and then i start doing this weird mental math like “ok, i already got the vibe, dont make me commit to the next 5 hours.” tbh i dont even think the games are bad. some of them are genuinely good. i just bounce. i’ll boot it back up later, play for 10 minutes, and still feel that same wall. it happens”
“Man...honestly I think the gaming niche is oversaturated and hard to break into. Might want to try something unique if that's the space you want in on. My brother and I started around the same time (him a few months before me) and he stagnated around 250 subs and is having a hard time getting past that. I have a completely different type of content and am close to monetization. Its just a rough road.”
“So about five months ago I started building a horror game called Last Ride – Taxi Horror, honestly I just wanted to learn Unity, that was the whole plan lol but somewhere around week three something shifted, I wasn't just messing around anymore I actually wanted to finish this thing. Wrote a full story for it too (yeah it's story driven, not just random jumpscares) and from there I just couldn't stop working on it should probably mention, I'm unemployed right now, and at some poi”
“https://preview.redd.it/spz85qcd35jh1.png?width=786&format=png&auto=webp&s=53e935358ad7e755b9a7a54c8704ac73ef2ebba8 i have been 15 years in gamedev and gamedev company decided to not even speak to me because being laid off is now like a stigma like syph or something. i really want to leave this field now. it has become that stupid. submitted by /u/DaveAstator2020 [link] [comments]”
“After almost 1.5 years of development , I wanted to share something a little personal about Cult Trials: Incarnation It’s been a hard battle, especially with funding. I’m mainly a character artist , not a programmer, but I’ve been learning Unreal Engine along the way and doing as much as I can myself—level design, small systems, setup, and other things—to save development costs. I’ve tried hiring coders and building a proper team, but without stable funding, keeping a permanent team together has”
“> Name a game whose settings screen added to the gameplay in any meaningful wayMost of these are going to be smaller indie games that already don't have many settings to set. Off the top of my head, I'd probably say Ultrakill takes the cake with its opening screen. Based on the description of the expectations, my guess is you're mostly basing your expectations off of large AAA games with multiple pages of settings? Fair enough that they should mostly be implementing "standards" correctly, and th”
“So, I’m 19, and right now I have 6 rejected games on CrazyGames, 2 rejected games on GameDistribution (basically every game I submitted there), and those same 2 games were also rejected by Coolmath Games. Poki completely ignored my application, and GameMonetize rejected me as well. The game you can see above is currently in CrazyGames Basic Launch. But before that, listen to this: This game was rejected 8 F*CKING TIMES before I finally managed to get it into Basic Launch. Eight times. I spent ar”
“I saw an ad for a roguelike recently that was partially a driving game where you had to drive and shoot simultaneously.. it didn't look fun. It looked like a chore. And I feel like a lot of indie games do this, having unnecessary mechanics that slow the game down and make it unfun. I heard about another where you have to time your attacks to music and I just thought "..Why? Why would I want to limit my attack speed?" There was a survival game where you have to build your base on a”
“I've been developing my game for the past eight or nine months but I still can't bring myself to post any footage or screenshots of my game anywhere. Whenever I open up OBS or play through the game I always find something I feel like I need to fix first before I can post. I plan to launch in November so is there any advice you can give me on what I should do? submitted by /u/Erradicus666 [link] [comments]”
“This is a screenshot from a prototype I worked on today. I've been playing a lot of Cry of Fear lately, and it made me want to create something with a similar vibe. I think I even found a name already: Dusk's Ache . It's just a prototype for now, but I'd really like to know what you think about it! submitted by /u/FineEchidna8545 [link] [comments]”
“Hello everyone. I've been working 4 years on my survival horror game and I am very close to finishing it. However, I released a demo around 6 months ago. My feeling is that the demo was good, as i barely received any bad critics, just a few advices about the controls. These are the stats so far: 3600 wishlists (Main source was a summer showcase. I barely have time for marketing) 1800+ users downloaded or added the demo to their libraries (when the demo was released I had around 800 wishlists”
After months of work my horror game is now released on steam! I can't believe I made it this far. Feel free to check it out here! https://store.steampowered.com/app/4745440/Blackwood\_Lodge\_The\_Siblings/ I am honestly, so…
“We're developing Platform 13, a psychological horror game set in an abandoned railway station. We'd love to hear your honest feedback on this screenshot. Every comment helps us improve. submitted by /u/RoyalRetriver [link] [comments]”
“My first game Slopecrashers took me 6 years to initially release it, and 1 more year to port it to consoles and post launch updates. Even though ratings were quite great for the game across the platforms, and I am quite happy with the sales, I feel like it didn't really fullfill its potential (especially when looking at the 40k+ outstanding wishlists on steam). I then did a lot of thinking about it and read a lot of the discourse online, and I kinda came to the conclusion that the game is ju”
“I just want to share this because i am a new indie dev and i wonder if others have the same issue and how do they solve it. I am someone who gets bored with games/genres quite quickly. I usually pick up a game, enjoy it for a few months and then move on to a brand new game sometime of a different genre. Like a few months ago i was super into Age of Empires and the RTS genre but now i just switched to Slay the Spire and the roguelike deckbuilder genre. My fav genre just cycle between different ga”
“My first game dev journey starts here 🎮 After 9 months of developing my indie game, I'll be sharing the bugs, progress, and behind-the-scenes moments. My first bug? Customers doing infinite squats instead of sitting at tables 😂 Demo coming this August! Wishlist the game on Steam and follow the journey 🚀 https://store.steampowered.com/app/4917940/Panic\_Pub #gamedev #indiedev #unity #gamedevlog submitted by /u/EmineErdogan2 [link] [comments]”
“Around the six month mark everything felt wrong. The art style I had locked in felt amateur, the core loop was boring to playtest, and I kept seeing other indie games that looked like they were doing exactly what I was doing but better. I genuinely had a folder called finalfinalrealv2 sitting on my desktop for like three weeks untouched. What got me through it was something pretty mundane. I went back and played the very first build, which was barely even a game, just a moving character on a fla”
“Two months ago, Cloudflare laid off 20% of us. A year ago, I started this game, so now it's taking all my time, lol! Launching demo next month and get feedback from you all! I spent over a year on it and I honestly really think it's got something to it's mechanics to standout in the genre as "4X-lite". Sooo... here it is... Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4593190/Elemental_Lands/ Elemental Lands is a blend of "4X-lite" meets turn-based tactical card batt”