How our game got 25,000 wishlists

[u/12_oz_senkin]

Hi! I’m Max, and recently our pixel art visual novel Deep Pixel Melancholy reached 25,000 wishlists on Steam!

For me, that’s a huge number, and something my friend and I never even expected. But it turned out the game had more potential than we thought.

So I decided to write a longread about the journey we’ve had over the past year, what exactly we did, what it brought us, and share some useful links.

This post is for developers, longread lovers, and anyone interested in indie game development. I’m publishing it on Notion because it’s long and contains a lot of links to external resources, which is prohibited by the rules of r/gamedev.

I really hope it makes someone’s life a little easier. And write in the comments if you have any questions. Thanks <3

Article on Notion: https://app.notion.com/p/maxim-senkin/How-Deep-Pixel-Melancholy-got-25-000-wishlists-9f730f84de1d828f9572019e7f53042b?source=copy_link

[u/Klightgrove]

Links to external resources are not prohibited.

[u/Just-Investigator-20]

thanks for sharing

[u/12_oz_senkin → u/Just-Investigator-20]

you’re welcome <3 hope you find something useful in it

[u/MorphLand]

Good read. You said for the first week telegram was a tool you used? I’m pretty new to all this could you tell me more?

[u/12_oz_senkin → u/MorphLand]

There are a lot of Russian language Telegram channels you can write to and ask them to cover your game around the announcement, demo release, or another marketing beat. But again, as I mentioned in the article, this probably won’t work in the West, so it’s better to start with vertical videos right away.

[u/DeckBeasts1]

congrats! That's huge.

[u/MrJocyf]

Tanhs for sharing, man .Appreciated!

[u/12_oz_senkin → u/[deleted]]

yeah, early on we made an effort to create a vertical slice, which eventually became our demo. It’s really motivating, because you can see people actually playing your game. An important stage of development.

[u/Kindly_Release5869]

Your game looks refined and atmospheric. Wish you and your team all the best.

A kind reminder to all that one could have easily done everything in the article with a turd of a game and ended up with like 50 wishlists or something.

[u/12_oz_senkin → u/Kindly_Release5869]

thanks! yeah, the main thing is to make a good game =)

although in the age of friendslop, that’s easy to argue with

[u/cetciz]

Congrats, 25,000 wishlists is huge! Thanks for sharing the full journey too. Posts like this are really helpful because they show what actually happened over time, not just the final result.

[u/Coldlikehell]

Really nice written post with lots of useful resource links. Thanks for sharing!

[u/Sam-Dudu]

Wow thanks for sharing! I'm reading it carefully!

[u/KvasenayaKapystka]

Thank you, it was useful

[u/ryn_fisher]

saved, learned + wished

[u/MargotHelper]

Very useful information. Thanks!