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So your game has been out for a month
Its been slightly more than a month since release, so it might be useful to look at how The Signal State has done. Our reviews stand at 92% positive right now. This ratio stayed pretty stable after 2 weeks or so from release. Our refund rate is at about 5.6%, a slight increase from the…
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So you’ve sold your game
STATS STATS STATS It’s been a week since launch, typically the most crucial period that decides whether a game is a ‘success’ or not, so it’s an interesting point at which to review how we’ve done. Overall, the game has performed better than I, or even our publisher, had expected! We recouped our development budget…
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So you wanna release your game on Mac
In one of my older posts I made a joke about the tiny amount of hipsters who still play games on mac, so now that we have *some* sales data from our release, it might be worth asking, how accurate is the joke? Mind you, this is only the launch day’s worth of sales data…
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So you want people to wishlist your game
If you’re a smaller-scale indie dev, “the algorithm” can be very important to your game’s success. The Signal State made it to the ‘Popular Upcoming’ list on Steam’s frontpage (don’t ask me how), and this is what our daily wishlist graph looks like now: For comparison, the first spike was from the playable demo during…
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So you wanna export your game
Ok brosquito! you’ve finished localizing your game and now its time to release it. You gotta make the builds. Simple right? You gotta make a pc build and a mac build. WAIT. new mac os x versions wont run apps unless you notarize them, so after you make the mac build you gotta notarize them,…
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So you wanna localize your game
petition to ban all languages except english you wanna localize your game? sure send your text for localization get the text back, hope you didnt make any last minute changes which would mean another round of translations import the other languages in game. oh no your text layouts are all messed up because german takes…
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On Doom Eternal
Doom Eternal is really good. You should play it you like shooters. It’s not without its flaws though. They tried to alter the main gameplay loop in this one. In Doom 2016 players, myself included, often stuck to the same gun (usually the super shotgun) and in Eternal they clearly want you to switch weapons…
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Secret Hitler
Secret Hitler is a hidden role multiplayer card/board game which attempts to simulate the complex political dynamics that can facilitate the rise of fascism. Players are randomly and secretly assigned one of three roles: a liberal, a fascist or Hitler. Only one player is Hitler for each game. The fascist’s aim is to either enact…
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Techniques of Thought: Cognition, Identity and Ideology in Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium begins in blackness. Words fade in against the emptiness. It is your ‘Ancient Reptilian Brain’ speaking to you. Soon enough your ‘Limbic System’ pipes up. They inform you “there is nothing” (ZA/UM, 2019). As your character (who we later learn is called Harry) awakens from his drunken stupor, we come to realize that…
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Stadia
https://www.businessinsider.sg/why-are-so-few-games-on-google-stadia-2020-2 “This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service… was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece.” Notably the only real media distribution platform Google has successfully sustained is YouTube, which A) wasn’t started by Google and B) was…