Hello,

I've made this postmortem in video form originally, which is attached to this post. In case you don't want to bother watching the video or are unable to, I'll post the script the video was made out of below this post.

Transcript:

I’m RapidKebab of OKSoft and a game I made in two nights became the number one most popular game of its genre on itch.io. It was also number 22 across all games, but that sounds less cool. Anyways, in this video I’ll talk about why I made it and what we can learn from the game and its overnight success. I will also go over the pure view and download numbers so you can see the full picture.

First, we need to set a timeline. Last friday, Elon Musk reveals the new Tesla Cybertruck. It gets memed on for it’s angular, polarizing looks and the glass shattering incident. By saturday, many indie devs are joking around by making lowpoly cybertruck models and putting them in various places.

So that night I go “wait, we’re already developing a racer and have a solid technology base for it. There is also quite some demand for more small demos for the racer on our discord”(which you should totally join). I’m also terrible at 3d modelling so that’d work well with the lowpoly joke. There was no better excuse to develop the racer further while adding new functionality, that being EV’s, with their unique engines and gearboxes.

Two nights of hard work and some help from our artist Alex later, I released it around midday for my timezone after some bug fixing, aaaand boom. Smash hit. We were expecting it to garner a decent bit of attention, but not this much. It took only about 12 or so hours and the game was the #1 racer on itch and in the top 25 of all games.

How did this happen and why should you care about getting some small free game popular? I’ll have to break it down into steps. First, why? Motivation and attention. You want attention. This sounds condescending but is true. We, for example are making two big and one medium project right now. We don’t want them to release with no one even knowing about them. By making a small, free game, the stakes are lower and you’re more motivated to work on it, and the attention it gives you will make your bigger projects more successful and you more motivated to work on them.

Now to the how, how did it get popular and how can you replicate this?

Step 1: Pick a good genre and topic. The racing genre is one of our favorite genres here at OKSoft and is not saturated. There simply are not that many racers being made, especially in the indie sphere. Furthermore, The Cybertruck was popular. So we have a popular topic and a genre for which not a lot of games are made.

Step 2: Make a good game. This step is optional to be honest, you can make something like “putin vs ISIS”, sell it for a minimal amount of money and still get downloads and a bunch of money from all those joke buys. But we are in this business because it’s our passion and want every game we release to be something we can be proud of. Make a small but good game and make it free. You also aren’t gonna transfer the short term attention you get into long terms fans with a bad game and you DEFINITELY don’t want the “shovelware merchant” tag. Even when making a game based off internet memes, make it good.

Step 3: Timing. Attention spans are limited. If we released our game a week later than we did, it’d probably get like five downloads because no one would care about the cybertruck by then. Furthermore, the west is where you’ll get most of your audience from generally, so if you are in Australia and release an English indie game during your daytime, you’re hampering yourself because all the europeans and americans are asleep. We were lucky to have pre-existing code for a bunch of the game too, so prototyping plenty is also a smart idea, you get to have a pretty large codebase to patch together to speed up development.

Step 4: Promotion. You need an initial push to get the snowball of attention rolling. Do the obligatory twitter post with all the hashtags, post on Reddit, preferably not like “play my game” but “look at this cool thing I made”. Post on the discords you attend etc. If you don’t already have a massive devoted audience, you HAVE to be loud about your game. Games don’t sell themselves if you aren’t Hideo Kojima.

Finally, the numbers. We got to the top of racing and top 25 in all games initially with only 84 downloads, pretty goddamn low for a free game, but the thing is, due to the previously mentioned steps we had taken, we got to those 84 downloads fast. We got many followers, one of which was iwanplays, who has 32k subscribers. We got most of our views from itch.io itself, but that’s due to how high we charted, if we had not gotten that snowball rolling on Reddit and twitter and discord, this wouldn’t have been the case. We are currently up to almost 300 downloads. Only one person decided to donate to us while getting the game, which is one more than what we expected.