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Have you sent out review copies to youtubers and journalists. Have you been using twitter, facebook, etc to network and grow an interested audience.
The feedback you gert from these early marketing efforts will clue you in on anything you need to refine, change or outright rework before you launch proper.
That you didn't even bother to drop the Name of the game leads me to believe you've done none of these things. and if you haven't, then you're not ready for release anywhere. You'll be buried by the games whose developers actually did those things.
pointless. you do not get access there unless you have permissions to control an appid.
Does the OP not have that yet?
Yeah thats how many indie games are. Offer a free copy to some streamers in exchange for them advertising, making videos, etc.
You need a way to generate hype and get the word out. It's marketing 101
Back in the old days, every game would get in house (and sometimes on occasion, outside) testing. Literally people employed to play a game by running around testing environments by pushing up and jumping against EVERY tiny area of the maps boundaries, or racing the wrong way round a track, and so on. Mindless, repetitive testing.
It was often the "tea boy" entry level job along with assistant who'd spend their whole day scanning in artist work for textures.
Nowadays that's still there, but it's more streamlined and most definitely in house in the majority of cases.
Here's the point - if you haven't had ANY Of this done, then let's assume you just released the game.
Can you imagine the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of backlash you'd face because would be riddled with bugs, let alone whether it was good or not. I really want you to avoid that, asit's something you don't want.
And no, self testing CANNOT work, as you are going to miss stuff because YOU designed it.
So you need to get your game out there to first test properly, THEN improve and bugfix, THEN get it out again for yet more testing. And so on.
You CANNOT know your game is even remotely finished unless you get at least some outside persepctive, even if unexperienced.
I'd offer to do it for you, but I don't have the time.
Making the game is just the start of your work as a game developer.
THis, indeed.
I've said this before, but back in the days of the Official PS1 magazine, I was a freelancer writing guides and tips.
I would normally get a choice of one or two games to pick from (I often would get the racing games reserved for me as nobody else much liked doing them). I'd choose, and then I'd get about a month to 5 weeks to play the game and write up about 1200 words with associated maps and graphics, which would stretch to about 4 or 5 pages or so. It was about £65 per 600 words back in the late 1990s.
We would have that deadline and we would have to physically send it in on actual paper (the horror!). SO, minus a couple of days for post. The editors would then have the rest of that week to get the mag finalised and off for printing.
One months later than that, the printing came back and they'd get to finally check before a few weeks later the actual publication hit the shelves.
So, all told this meant often at least 3 months before release I'd have the game in my hands. Sometimes they weren't even finished in rare cases, but the point is this is how it works in detail with print media.
Sp yeah, you very much have to get your stuff out there and in PLENTY of time before release. It's about getting all your ducks lined up too. You want to land the game about the point when people are finding out about it, which means you will need to make sure there are people working on it BEFOREHAND. Never make the mistake that other people have done in the past by having people interested in a game you can't get, or having the game out there and nobody knowing about it.
What is the worst that could happen - you spend $100 and you get nothing back. And?
If you spend your life worrying about what may/may not work you won't ever do anything.
I do things that I am not sure will work all the time, some don't, a lot do.
Trouble is that is generally as well, a new game on Steam in the millions already on here?
Unlikely you will even be noticed BUT you might have the next Fortnite (sadly).
If you have $100 to spare do it and see what happens, I sell collectible popular culture items on ebay for fun that are so niche it is a challenge to sell them and yet I still do.
If I don't, doesn't really matter and I can wait years to see if I do. All I do is wait for that one person somewhere who will eventually find it.
Better to try and fail than sit and 'what if' your whole life and do nothing.
This is an excellent idea.
If I were you, OP, I'd stick yiour current build up on Itch.io, with the description saying that you're a single dev starting out and this is the current build, so not finished and you're looking for feedback.
That should get you some valuable feedback, as the people using it will be the least biased.
And best off, you get it for free.
Yup. It worked for theMeatly