I spent 2.5 years coding this game.
I’ve spent 6 months just trying to tell people it exists.
Marketing is a different kind of hard. Coding has logic. Clear inputs, clear outputs. Marketing? It’s storytelling, psychology, timing, luck — and most of it feels like shouting into a void.
The game is a 4-player family thing where kids can actually beat adults. Fully voiced so pre-readers can play. Built because I was tired of “educational” games that bored everyone.
But none of that matters if nobody sees it. So here I am. Shouting into the void, hoping the algorithm decides I’m worth showing you.
How do you discover new indie games? Steam browsing? TikTok clips? Word of mouth?
Only gaming news I read regularly is gamingonlinux.com and [email protected] (plus whatever pops up on All and is interesting, which is how I found this post). Based on a recent article about the then ongoing Steam Next Fest, I installed a bunch of demos, haven’t played most of them yet because one was so good I played the hell out of it and bought the game a couple of days after Next Fest (impeccable timing for that release). Though as a reasonably well-executed Disco Elysium-like, it kinda markets itself, or at least easier than the type of game you describe in your post. My guess would be that there’s not a lot of overlap between people who spend time on reading about and playing niche games and people who have children …
I also read gaming on lunux