762 karma · joined February 21, 2013
Danger World (https://linktr.ee/playdangerworld) is well underway and should be coming out later this year! Danger World is a 2D narrative adventure written using Flutter's open source game engine, Flame. I am the solo developer. I've been working with a very talented art team to do the art and animations in Spine. The composer has just finished the soundtrack!
Danger World is running on iOS, Android, MacOS and Windows. Last week, we got Danger World compiling on my Steamdeck for SteamOS instead of having to use the Windows .exe + Proton. I'll be getting the Linux depot setup in Steam soon.
In the spirit of doing things that won't scale to get some interest bootstrapped, I've been doing a sticker giveaway. I have a bunch of stickers featuring the cast of the game and the Danger World logo and I have been mailing them out to anyone who wants them. I've sent out 40 envelopes or so with about 10 stickers in them each.
So far, in experimenting with the various social media platforms, Bsky seems to be where my potential users are. I posted a boxart concept that I was using for IndieDB and got 100 followers from that single post of who all appear to be real actual users. Certain engagement metrics like impressions are non-existent in Bsky, but in exchange for real actual engagement from people who seem interested in my game's art, who cares?
X feels extremely P2W, except you buy their checkmark and they still don't show your content to anyone. I'm still experimenting heavily in social media land. Meta and Tiktok seem to show more promise, but since I've been scoping out and planning a visual novel mode I have also been considering taking Reddit up on their free ad credit.
I'd love to talk with anyone more experienced in marketing games like mine.
People who don't understand that HN and PH are really not a good places to find real gamers are a dime a dozen. Don't worry, I have done this myself as well.
Games take a while to make if you care about the details. If you want to create an engaging and interesting world that players want to engage with, that polish takes time. But AI is saving the entire industry time and effort. But sure, dump a game out incrementally. I just don't see a new opportunity, just the opportunity that has always been there.
No Man's Sky was there to tell us that you can generate a whole universe but if you forget to put anything your players want to interact with, you'll only get so far.
I mean, good luck. I don't mean to be pessimistic, I just spend enough time every day watching indie devs pitch their half-baked game ideas that this is unoriginal.
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We gave up something real. But it has not been proven whether we got anything. Maybe we got nothing, maybe we stopped a few of the laziest cheaters, but we still see tons of cheaters. The number of possible cheaters is based off the quality of the software. No amount of aftermarket software will magically improve the quality of your game in a way that 100% deters cheaters. I’m positive that their marketing claims they reduce cheaters by an order of magnitude, but I have not observed them successfully catching cheaters with these tools.
No microtransactions, no advertisements. No networking! The game is meant to function completely off line. The game will start with a mobile release in probably October and should be available on Steam shortly after.
I’ve been using Flame, Flutter’s game engine to develop my app. My artists are amazing and have been providing fully animated sprites using Spine. I’ve used Flutter before but this is my first time getting into Flame.
If you’re curious how it’s going, hop on the mailing list at https://danger.world to learn more. I’ll be looking for my initial playtesters here in the next few weeks.
"License
The code and all associated assets of the flame_spine package is distributed under the MIT License (see the LICENSE file). HOWEVER, as flame_spine includes Spine Runtime libraries, your use of flame_spine in your games or other products is also subject to the terms and conditions of the Spine Runtime License Agreement (see the LICENSE file).
In particular, in order to use flame_spine you are required to obtain a valid Spine Editor License."