In January, I published Icewords on Steam. Icewords is an adaptation of Spelling Brawl in which the player moves around on a hexagonal grid, spelling words and pushing winter-themed enemies into the water. Commercially, the game wasn’t much of a success, but I learned a lot from putting it up for sale.
Content is King
Icewords relies on randomly generated word-search puzzles to be engaging. There are only five enemy types, so replayability is limited. Score attack is not enough to guarantee replayability by itself and cannot be the main feature of the game; you need to provide content for players.
“Content” doesn’t necessarily mean handcrafted levels, though those would probably help. It just means you need to give players things to discover. The most common method uses unlockable game features, like new enemies, abilities, or characters. However, these require more art and music, so a campaign with non-randomized maps might be a more economical solution.
You don’t necessarily need to gate content off from players at the start of the game. I’ve been playing a lot of Rift Wizard lately, and it has no unlocks. However, the game has so many spells and skills and ways to combine them that it is endlessly replayable. If you are confident in your replayability, you don’t need content. Giving the player everything at the start also leaves no indication of when they have seen everything there is to see, which may enhance replayability. Rift Wizard demonstrates well how to leverage your content to keep players coming back for more.
Don’t Rely on “Influencers”
When I published Icewords, I was unaware of the Steam “Influencer” subculture. People cold-email you to ask for keys, with the promise that they can promote you on their twitch channels. After reading up on the subject, I learned that most of these are actually “collectors” wanting to get Steam games for free, not scammers reselling keys.
The astounding thing to me was how much effort some of them will put in. The retail price of Icewords is $2.99. Some of the “influencers” exchanged multiple emails with me begging for a key; do they not value their time? Or maybe there are bragging rights associated with hoodwinking a game dev?
Ultimately, to the extent that Influencers can help you, you might as well wait for them to find your game organically. Anybody begging for a key is either not successful enough to be worth your time or has no intention of actually streaming your game; the real influencers will buy your game themselves. Of course, collectors would probably not buy your game anyway, so giving them a copy doesn’t cost you sales, but it does cost valuable time. My new policy is to ignore all requests for a free game.
Build for Multiplayer from the Start
After publishing Icewords, I decided to implement a multiplayer feature to enhance the game’s limited replayability. I did not make Icewords with multiplayer in mind, and the changes I had to make felt very kludgy. I would have set up the game very differently from the start if I had to make it again.
It is much harder to add features you never planned for, which isn’t news to any programmer. I don’t feel too bad about it because I would change much of what I did if I were to do it again.
Recruit your playtesters
Steam has a “Playtest” feature that lets you release an early version of the game to random playtesters that sign up. I tried this and got zero feedback. In retrospect, it isn’t surprising. Self-selected playtesters have no obligation to give you advice and probably won’t. After trying the early version, they might even form a negative opinion, losing you potential customers.
Cut your losses
I spent a lot more time than I should have working on multiplayer for a game with so few users. I think it makes sense to spend time post-release on very successful games. If nobody is buying, it is better to focus on the next project. I don’t regret adding the multiplayer feature because it taught me how to use Steam’s multiplayer API. If it weren’t for that, I would have been better off just leaving the game as it was.
While Icewords hasn’t been a success so far, I feel more confident about my next computer game and can hopefully avoid making the same mistakes.
Icewords is available for purchase here: