Downloads: 245 (estimation)

Feedback: Mixed-Positive

Budget: £0

Team: Me (excluding royalty free music and tiny bits of royalty free art)

Click “Games Development” for information about this game or visit:

https://borrego6165.itch.io/the-great-beyond

What is The Great Beyond?

The Great Beyond is a Management, Tower Defence, Real-Time Strategy game!

Build Quarters for your units to sleep, manage food production, hire soldiers to run your towers, and build defences to stop aliens from attacking your rocket!

Mine the terrain with simple digging tools for gold and gems. No need to gather building material, everything is spent with gold.

Do I consider it a success?

Kinda. Let’s break it down.

Commercial success?

Not at all, but that wasn’t the point. The university own this project because I used it as part of my final year project. I can’t sell it anyway!

Self-Development success?

Absolutely. Firstly, it reduced my final year project workload by about 40%. The amount of code I have to do is so ridiculously small, it has given me a huge amount of time to spend on writing the report. It did mean spending an entire 4 months over the summer to get this far!

I’ve also noticed a huge improvement in my programming skills since starting the project. For example, my borreGO engine (my own game engine built on top of MonoGame) vastly changed during the four months, and I then went on to completely remake the engine at the end of the four months. It’s a much better engine. I couldn’t have built the new engine without making such a messy engine in the first place. To clarify, the old engine seemed good enough at the start, but the only way to truly test an engine is to build a big game with it!

Popularity success?

Not really. 200 downloads is very disappointing, however, I blame this on my poor marketing rather than the game itself.

My biggest problem was that I struggled to find places to post the game. Reddit has given both the most downloads for my game, and the most views for my blogs in general. This includes r/indiegaming, r/indiedev, r/tycoon, and r/basebuildinggames. The most popular have been the latter two subreddits, where there are very passionate people.

GameJolt and Itch.io were very disappointing, despite the fact that Itch lets you tweet about your game on their page and their subreddit, and both sites have decent search systems for players to find games to download. For whatever reason I didn’t even hit 50 views on either site. I felt that my tags were appropriate, and the categories picked should have been popular enough.

Views on Itch started to progress once I linked my blog to it. So people who visited my blog were now also visiting the Itch site. I did this so that people could download the game from there rather than from my GDrive. This is what probably put a lot of people off from downloading it at the beginning!

The initial trailer was also a bit mediocre, and when the game first launched I had no screenshots!

I sent the game to several YouTubers, and thankfully, two created videos for them. I wish to thank them very much for taking the time to do so, and it was an absolute joy to watch them both play my game!

Despite both videos recieving about 350-400 views each, because I asked them to play the game before its release, this did not generate any extra views or downloads (possibly a couple?). However, the positive feedback from both, plus the friendly YouTube comments, did give me motivation to further improve the game.

HanniballShow

Nyphty

My Advice

Setup Itch (or custom) home page for game as early as possible.

Use blog site only for blog posts, not for distributing the game (and don’t ask people to download it from your GDrive!).

Have clear screenshots with some text to explain what is going on.

Gifs are even better!

Have a much better trailer.

Share in even more places.

Don’t be afraid to send reminder emails to potential YouTubers; the worst they can do is have you arrested for stalking them.

If your game is small, wait for full release before asking YouTubers to play it.

Get feedback from friends, it was very useful for me during testing!