2 weeks after launch, Upbound’s journey comes to an end. After nearly 5 months of dreaming, developing, and delivering on our first game, we feel that we’re on the right path of making video games that are whimsical, heartfelt and sharing those emotions with others!
“Upbound Paint thing”, fanart by shokomilk
Summary
- We made our first video game, Upbound, and it got Front-paged on Newgrounds.
- Our duo developed, published, and marketed Upbound ourselves with $0 spent.
- The process took nearly 5 months.
Goal
To learn the process of shipping video games and to see if we enjoy it.
Results
We published Upbound on two platforms: Itch and Newgrounds. We spent $0 on marketing, opting instead to spend most of our time making a trailer to post on TikTok and Youtube and interacting with folks on Twitter and Reddit. Here are the stats:
Itch:
Newgrounds:
These don’t capture the details, yet since our initial goal’s a short game played by >10 strangers for >60 seconds, I’m content to conclude that we’ve made mostly mistakes of underestimation–our ability to learn, our gaming taste, and the digital infrastructures to organically promote newcomers!
Summing up our development and marketing processes for Upbound, I’d say it’s doing something (e.g., draw a pixel), testing it out (e.g., “hey, can you play my game?”), evaluating the results (i.e., being surprised most of the time), and repeating. The repetition is the most interesting part, as the game you experienced is the collection of all these individual activities put together.
However, the largest surprise for us was Newgrounds. Initially, we only had our sights on Itch and spent most of our efforts to put our game on and direct all traffic there. When reception was underwhelming, we scrambled on Newgrounds to see whether it’s our game or the platform that’s responsible for the results.
On Newgrounds, Upbound was an instant hit. We feel that the systems that make up Newgrounds result in giving newcomers a straight, fair shot at showing their games to folks. Furthermore, Tom Fulp, Newgrounds’ patriarch, encouraged us privately and gave us valuable feedback to improve Upbound! If you want to read what other people had to say about Upbound, here’s the link. FutureCopLGF, a fellow developer, even made a Let’s Play video!
What’s next?
Overall, we have a strong feeling that given our circumstances, we’re willing and able to make fun, appealing games. And in this industry, it seems that this is most of the battle. Of course, there are the marketing and distribution sides, yet it’s clear to me that a fun and appealing game is much easier to market and distribute than one that’s not. Here’s what’s next for us:
- Continue to enjoy making games!
- Grow our mailing list to 100 subscribers
- Announce our second game, Project Unpong, in the next 6 months!
If you want to get notified when we about our future games, join our mailing list here! Our next article, planned for end of the month, is titled “How to Make Your First Game”! This will be a partial post-mortem, partial blueprint we drew that we think anyone (including you) can use to make a game. Stay tuned!
Thank you for your support! It is fuel in the fire in our pursuit of making games you enjoy! See you soon :)
With love,
Chris & Judy