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Show HN: Former game devs building a platform showcasing game projects

projectgoobii.com

115 pointsGC202058 comments

Good stuff. Some suggestions:

In "hyped for you", remove the name of the company, and expand the game description to another row. Add tags. Remove the lightning bolt icon. What is that even? No, don't explain. Just remove it. If it isn't worth sorting by, it's not worth showing.

Describe what this website does, on the website. What it does exactly. Pretend I'm 5 years old. The title of this HN post ("Former game devs building a platform showcasing game projects") is 100% more descriptive than the explanation on the site, because you don't have an explanation on the site. It's a good start. Use that. Put it at the top. "Former game devs building a platform showcasing game projects".

"Hyped for you" makes no sense because I'm not logged-in. You can't possibly know anything about me. So it should show something else.

Remove the "hype" button from the "explore new games" section. How can I hype a game before I've clicked into it to view what it is?

Add pagination. (Unless you really only have one page of games, and pagination is implemented but not visible.)

Add a title that says "Project Goobii" on the page. Maybe above the "welcome".

Add left/right arrows to the carousel at the top, so users can scroll through instead of waiting for it to move on its own (and users love to interact with carousels!)

Clicking on a game in "hyped for you" shows the game, but doesn't change to a new URL. How can I share this page with my friends? How can I bookmark this game?

Also on the game page, the carousel of screenshots should be clickable and expand to show larger versions of the screenshots. Too-small screenshots are worse than no screenshots.

EDIT: More

Loading the page again, after going to a game page, shows that game page. I guess you're using cookies for navigation. Good guess, but the wrong way to do it.

Your logo is cool, keep that.

Have an "about" page with a contact email at least.

Do you do these critics for hire? Very insightful!

This is called user experience design. There is a good book called "The Design of Everyday Things"[0] where you would learn enough of the approach and fundamentals to do this yourself if you wish.

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/840.The_Design_of_Everyd...

I don't. I want to pay phendrenad2 to do it.

As known as cynicism within the employment realm.

Thank you, but I've made too many inflammatory posts to dox this account now.

I love the spirit but it won't fix the industry.

The money spent is tied in the mega-platforms like Steam, GOG etc. Getting any promo of any kind through these platforms, or being ranked high for a few hours, automatically propels the title in sales, regardless of the quality.

Count me a cynic at this stage but I have done my share of commercially released indie title, and for one man shows, it's a dry lake for dead fish.

The industry doesn't need fixing. It's working perfectly well.

Working hard, very hard, producing something means nothing. As a producer you have no rights. You are making something that exists in an absolute sea of similar hard work. A market where supply stunningly overwhelms demand.

This is to be expected. When I was 11 years old I was playing games, dreaming of being a programmer. I picked up a book and started learning. The next 6 years were mostly spent writing games. For reasons that won't shock you I didn't immediately think of writing a new spreadsheet program. The one exception was a program I wrote for school - and it failed.

People write games because it's fun writing a game. Because it's a good way to learn how to write code. Because one's immediate circle are impressed.

But the market for indie games is tiny. And every wannabee programmer is making them. Somewhere along the way you discover the laws of supply and demand.

You'll also discover that a business is one part product, one part support, three parts marketing. Marketing is waaaay more valuable, and important, than product.

Sure there are exceptions. There are stories of some random game with no marketing going viral. It happens. There are also stories of people winning the lottery. One of those is more likely.

The indie game market works completely as designed. Low startup costs. Accessible to anyone. A fun way to get into programming. A cool way to impress your friends. A fantastic hobby where you can have more fun in the process than the result.

Don't try and "fix it". It's not broken.

I would not say the market is small by any possible stretch of the imagination. Minecraft, a game made by one guy in his spire time, is obviously the definition of an outlier. However, it's relevant to note that it sold over 238 million copies. And that's not even scratching the surface of potential, especially globally. The market for games of all sorts is just crazy huge. For some scale, the PS2 is the best selling console of all time (by a wide margin) at 159 million units shipped, the best selling Call of Duty and Elder Scrolls (Skyrim) games both sold "only" about 30 million units a piece.

I think the real issue is that most games are mostly just uninspired knock offs of other games. And this includes AAA games. And here marketing is absolutely critical, because your game may be fun but it doesn't really stand out on its own in any meaningful way. By contrast games that have distinct identities (and, critically, are also fun!) tend to have extremely long tailed success where word of mouth is vastly more important than marketing. An amusing example is Kenshi [1]. The guy went from tens of people playing his game while working as a security guard to make ends meet, to making millions from the game.

And I don't think those examples are particularly rare either, certainly nothing like winning the lottery. But coming up with an idea that's both unique and fun isn't easy.

[1] - https://steamcharts.com/app/233860

You don’t think there is anything broken when 3/5 parts of the project budget should be marketing and only 1/5 in creating the product?

I’ve worked in advertising and I think that sounds broken.

When you are in an over-supplied environment, then marketing becomes more crucial.

Indie games are massively over supplied. Thus to get traction you need to be out-marketing (not necessarily out-spending) the other guy.

In one sense building the game is the easy part. Selling it is the hard part. It's a crowded market, and most games are, well, not great. It takes time, effort, and yes money, to market well, and get any kind of traction.

Arguably OS/2 was better than Windows 95, but MS spent a billion $ marketing it, and today OS/2 is a history footnote, if you've heard of it at all.

The more compeditive the market, the more marketing matters.

Yeah, I don't disagree on why the marketing is needed. I still think it shows something broken about our system when the majority of the time is spent marketing and not producing the product and supporting the customers. In the same way that it is usually a bad sign when the financial markets starts to become too big in comparison to the rest of the economy.

Who said that games should only spend 1/5 creating the product?

The parent "You'll also discover that a business is one part product, one part support, three parts marketing."

The thing is it's super easy for indie to get the other parts of the business today.

There's loads publisher that focus on some indie niche, and they will do the things that indie dev don't like / don't know how to do.

But indie dev don't like to hear their game sucks, because an indie dev put his heart and soul into production. So they stay well away from the well established publishing pathways

Blaming public taste is so much more comfortable.

If you have a field of dreams mentality it certainly is.

If you are ready to hustle for marketing your game I disagree.

I have launched more small and medium games on Steam than most people, and if you are using the right strategy for the game you're launching you can make decent revenue even if the game sucks.

for example: https://store.steampowered.com/app/96100/Defy_Gravity_Extend...

Indie dev here. Any chance you could share what the right strategy was for you?

Assuming your game is coming out on switch there is almost certainly tons of money to be made by constantly deal discounting a game to 50 cents or less. When this used to be allowed on Steam we made over a million dollars a year deep discounting tiny games.

The market size of gamers with almost no money is endless.

Prior to "Buy, Try, Return" the sub-dollar games were pure joy. I didn't care that some were shit; most were more than enjoyable enough to satisfy spending a few quarters on them for a brief period.

What I didn't like is that they stuck around my steam library. What I wanted was to throw some quarters at a short-lived arcade experience. I didn't want my library polluted with shovelware.

This seems like a molehill made into a mountain. Just make a collection in your Steam library, dump them all in there, and keep it hidden.

Can’t you just right click and hide it

It really depends on your price point and the game. But assuming very small with little prelaunch marketing you really need to focus on getting on the new & trending list at launch. How do you do that?

You want a lot of people to buy the game quickly at launch. The best way to do that is building up wishlists prelaunch. That has organic second order effects that are helpful, but there are other ways to get lots of sales at launch...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2020/12/04/report-...

A bit offtopic, but considering your approach, do you use a game engine ala Unity to create your games as fast as possible or do you create your own little engine?

I don't make tiny games really. Defy gravity is the only small game I ever made. I make bigger games.

But the answer is use an engine.

I used to both buy the rights and lease the rights to tons of small games though and then release them on steam. They were all made in an engine(unity, rpgmaker, xna, etc)

It is never faster to rebuild the wheel.

I'm more interested in making a game so good that millions of gamers will willingly crawl through proverbial broken glass to participate in the experience. Think of games like PUBG - which was a horrific performance/laggy mess at launch but the gameplay was so novel that everyone put up with it and it went viral overnight.

I don't need some 3rd party platform to sugar coat my creative experience. If it's good, it will ship of its own accord.

The gameplay wasn't novel in PUBG. Battle Royale games (mostly from the same Brendan Greene) were a thing for years before that, and they were massively popular, enough to set the hype train running. The only relatively novel thing compared to the previous games was their solution to the teaming issue, as they separated solo and team modes.

What made the game go viral was their marketing strategy - they were one of the first who bought Twitch streamers en masse, and paid a lot of money for that. In fact they triggered a gold rush of a sort with everyone doing it. This isn't to say that the gameplay wasn't good - it absolutely was. But the viral growth wasn't due to that, without marketing it would have been just like the other Greene's games, maybe a bit more popular, but surely not 3 million simultaneous players popular.

And before PUBG, he proved his design viable in the original ArmA Battle Royale mod, in the H1Z1 Battle Royale game mode, and in a myriad other games in which the devs suddenly added battle royale modes - in other words, on another platforms.

PUBG was iterative, it didn't happen overnight.

You’ve very much got some survivorship bias and distorted facts here. It’s easy to look at PUBG, Minecraft, and Stardew Valley then assume that a one-man show that’s good enough will naturally sell a million copies. The reality is that those are exceptions with their own unique stories, lots of embedded marketing/existing following, and “right time right place” luck. You don’t see the mountain of great, but failed indie games that creators worked just as hard on.

The world is not the field of dreams. Don't move forward with a plan like this.

Pubg was made by an extremely well known modder with a huge following.

So many people have the mistaken impression that marketing doesn't matter. There is a reason companies like Google can make billions of dollars a year selling ads. It is because marketing is actually incredibly important.

Extremely well known and experienced modder, PLUS a highly competent Korean game development studio.

So essentially, AA production values and a highly talented game designer who'd perfected the gameplay formula.

> The world is not the field of dreams. Don't move forward with a plan like this.

This is like rocket fuel for me. Thank you.

Making the best game you can is table stakes. To get those gamers crawling through glass you need them to know it exists.

Yes you and every other game dev want that.

Indie games HAVE made it on those platforms though?

If they were actively sabotaging games, then sure, that's true. But most platforms have a vested interest in good recommendation systems. Think steam for you.

It's more the cruel and brutal reality of creative fields, only a very small number ever make it.

Recently I spoke with a dev that was about to launch a game in steam and itch I asked her where She would prefer people to buy it, although She said itch was better for them but they preferred Steam that way they would get a better numbers and a bigger promotion.

Interesting enough idea, some suggestions:

* functional routing with persistent/shareable URLs

* working back button (see above)

* click-to-enlarge screenshots

* the logo (lightning bolt I guess) needs to navigate back to the home/root url

* the advertisement in the navigation menu makes it hard to notice the "Home" link which is sandwiched between the ad and the logo.

* more options for discovery (all games, most hyped, new submissions, just released (could feel like a celebration), browse-by-category, etc)

* this UI feels fully custom. it seems like it might be an uphill battle for ya'll to have pleasant UX without using some kind of design framework/component library

suggestions that i'm slightly less sure about:

* clicking any part of the game list item rows on the home page should navigate to the game (not just clicking on the title of the game itself)

things I like in particular:

* the direct link to the game's official site itself is really nice. I appreciate that it doesn't link to some in-house wiki listing for the game or whatever.

* game development-cycle status indicator is nice

As someone gearing up to market a PC game in a couple months, I have a few thoughts. The site looks nice so far but I wouldn't proactively submit a game to it; here's why:

I already need to consider my marketing (and presentation) on Steam, Discord, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, online festivals, and minor platforms such as itch.io (for devlogs or betas) or Twitter (for networking). I'm actually quite interested in some sort of showcase site, so this isn't a "this idea sucks" feedback, but rather... how would this tiny new platform support my overall goals of getting millions of views on all those major platforms?

I imagine it fitting on a Linktree somewhere, but for what purpose? I can't tell so far. If it's going to be a pure showcase it needs to be somehow better than Steam, which is already quite competent (and is where I need people to end up, since it has the Wishlist; I would absolutely never send someone to a site that has similar functionality to Steam rather than Steam itself).

I do like that there's a "Comment" section at the bottom and I can see that being a direction: asynchronous interaction with true fans, who aren't gibbering nonsense like YouTube or TikTok comments. That's something I can't reliably get on Steam (discussions are available pre-launch, but a bit hidden). But then again, Discord can also accomplish that.

One more random idea comes to mind: all the content I'll be posting to those various social sites is largely one-shot. A YouTube video won't work on TikTok, for instance. It would be nice if I had somewhere to repost all that various content (perhaps for the purpose of showing it off?).

I immediately thought of itch.io. There's certainly room for competition but that's the site I go to for independent and demo games. They have a pretty good discovery system and can take payments or tips for creators.

URL navigation has been mentioned before, but I want to go in to a bit more detail.

This application needs client-side navigation. That is a two-way system. When a different object has been opened, the URL needs to be changed. For example we open game 1, the URL becomes /#/game/1/overview. Then when someone links to that URL directly the client-side router determines that they want to load that specific data and show it in the correct component, and hide the others.

I also think that every element that loads a different component should be a hyperlink, that way it becomes possible to open multiple interesting games from a list, each in a new tab.

Initial impression, looks great. The browser's back button doesn't seem to go back to the home page after going into a game. The game's thumbnail images don't pop up to full size when clicked.

The carousel in general was pretty frustrating to use, couldn't move back and forth between images, couldn't enlarge images or video.

Page history and back button not implemented correctly. Looks pretty slick but some basic usability stuff overlooked.

I can’t link an individual page. Why is this an SPA?

I think this is what happens when game developers make websites. They don't realize that people want a link that they can share.

It's unfortunate, but you can use real url routing with SPAs now... that could provide deep linking... can't speak to the original devs.

Went through this recently at work on an SPA app when I started making more pages separately and more atomically routable. It may be an "SPA" but that doesn't preclude proper urls/routes.

Seems like they whipped this together using some no code tool or something just to test the idea.

It's on wordpress, so it's even more of a total wtf

Umm, a little information please? Seems to be curated since it looks like you submit your email and they contact you. So I'd like to hear guidelines. E.g. free games included?

Is it intentional that you can't click on screenshots to zoom them?

yep, it was pretty frustrating to not be able to click on the screenshot to view them larger, especially when right-click -> open the image in a new tabs shows that the images actually are a larger size

Is there a filter for device function somewhere that I just missed?

I don't care about games that aren't available on any device that I already own.

Seems like a cool idea - I guess like a product hunt for games?

A nit though - fix the back / forward browser buttons as it's tedious to navigate around right now. I guess these aren't working because it's an SPA?

It seems awesome! But could I write some tips? The OS tags could be good that they are clickable to filter by OS. And are there the tags for open source or free software?

I miss 3dfiles.com . I wish there were people churning out cool stuff like back in the late 90s/early 2000s that would support goofy stuff like that. :)

Looks like a solid POC or test project. Would love to see what solutions they can implement around specific or personalized discovery and even better engagement with devs or studio that make me want to support the project throughout the early process. Can they also incentivize the feedback loop?

It bothered me that I can't swipe the image slideshow on my phone. Having to wait to see the next one show up.

You have to fix the back button :)

Looks pretty nice

The space of specialised directories has more room to grow. Finding a game or app through Google alone is not possible.

Is this going to be like indieDB, or more focused on commercial games?

ProductHunt for indie games?

Count me in :)

What's the point of this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com