In our game, you get the best of both worlds 🖱️✨ #indiegame

InterfaceX Trailer YouTube video by Cobalt Lane

As makers of weird UI games #InterfaceX is a great new celebration of the genre #FakeOS!

And we'll be taking part...CorpoNation is going to be a part of the Steam event later this month www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7Tm...

hey, thank you so much! we've not played duskers but have only heard good things.

We're going to be at New Game Plus on Thursday & Friday showing REMOTE CONTROL! Come through and say hi.

Severance 🤝 Alien Isolation with a better salary (probably.) #indiegame #indiegame

Adding 400 tiny mushrooms. It's just a very normal day as an indie dev

#indiegame

True to life the company in our game also does not care about people

#horrorgame #indiegame

Our version of trying to give players choices that matter is...

"What if you fall in love with a cute space mushroom 🍄"

#indiegame #horrorgame

Making tik toks made us realise something about our game. Idk if I'm happy about it

#indiegame #horrorgame

We're working on a new tutorial so that means new awful things to command your proxy to do

#indiegame #horrorgame

END/ finally shout out to both events, it's always super fun going along to any event and as indies we're really thankful that great people (@zombiedawgs.bsky.social @itshannahflynn.bsky.social each ran one) are putting the hard work into organising and running events for us all to attend.

18/ Hopefully that gives you a bit of insight into some of the stuff that goes though our minds as indie devs when we're at in person events.

Would be great to hear from other indies how it is for you?!

17/ If you're not sure what you need to tutorialise in your game, sitting down with someone and helping them play the game is a great place to start figuring that out.

16/ At an in-person event we've found it super useful to pay attention to ourselves, and what we have to communicate. Whatever we have to describe is something that we need to make sure the game can do by itself in the future.

15/ Some playtesting advice I often hear is the idea that you should be a silent observer and never interfere with the person playing. While that has it's place it's not the only way to playtest.

14/ It's not just friction, we also look out for common areas that people enjoy and try to do more of the same in the whole game.

13/ One part that's very useful is being able to see lots of people playing the same short sections of our game. We keep an eye our for patterns, things like how they interact with the game, how they move though the space, if they miss key things, what they think the game wants them to do.

12/ Spotting possible friction points in our game.

I really like playtesting at in-person events but it's also a very different context to players being relaxed at home, so we're expecting to get a different style of feedback.

11/ Your Steam page and event submissions are both super important for selling your game, but are you testing or practicing the ways you talk about your game in those places?

10/ Over time doing this at events has really helped us discover what about the fantasy of our games stands out to people. When we get common questions we make sure that we try to answer those whenever we're talking about the game online.

9/ Probably also worth mentioning here that as we're not talking to loads of people it's easy for one grumpy person to make us doubt our ideas (or the opposite). We try not to radically change the game based on one opinion.

8/ Whenever we go along to in-person events we try to improve the way we talk about the game. Though that does not always work out, sometimes we end up with a worse reaction.

7/ When we describe our game to someone in person we get to see how they react. Where do they laugh, do they seem confused, what types of follow-up questions do they ask?

Our last game was "why would you play that?" this game it's "I want to play that".

6/ Practicing talking about our game.

We've found that crushing the full concept of our game into short interesting-sounding sentences is really difficult to do but it's also super important.

5/ At events we're also showcasing alongside other devs. Being able to share wisdom, horror stories, successes and the general joy/pain of daily life as a indie is really valuable. It reminds us that we're not alone and helps inform our views on the current state of the industry.

4/ It's fun to just chat to people and hear what they're up to, often I'll come away inspired and having learned a few things. Having gone to lots of events over the years, we now know lots of people that it's great to catch up with, and sometimes they've even given us opportunities.

3/ Meeting new people.

When it comes to networking we're definitely the type of people that normally hide away in the corner. When we're showcasing at an event we're kind of forced out of this as people come to us.

2/ We've found that in-person events are not good for wishlists. You do get some but what's been much more useful for us is that they're a great chance to meet new people, practice talking about our game and spot possible friction points in the game.

🧵 What's on our mind as indies when we attend events in person

Last week we showcased at two: Indie Dev Night at Epic Games innovation lab and a local dev meetup Love Indies.

I thought it might be nice to go full LinkedIn and do a thread...

#gamedev #indiedev

Companies that are trying to get out of paying their workers? Idk where we even got this idea 👀

#indiegame #horrorgame