News

JikGuard
Indie Insights: Hooks and Anchors
A brief overview of a marketing exercise we find useful in narrowing down a game's core messaging.
Dec. 9, 2020
JikGuard
Do betas & demos right, the Monster Train way! 2
Are you using demos solely as a marketing tool, or are you actually engaging your community, iterating, and improving the game using demos or betas? If the latter, we’re way more of a fan. Which is where Monster Train comes in...
Dec. 7, 2020
JikGuard
Presenting Owlcat Mono Profiler for Unity
Presenting a new real-time external memory profiler for Mono heap in Unity engine. The tool is open source and free for everyone to use, and here I detail the story of its creation.
Dec. 7, 2020
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Four in five consumers don't know what cloud gaming can offer, Omdia's research reveals
Omdia polled over 5,000 consumers to gain insight into consumers' awareness and uptake of cloud gaming services in the US, UK, Germany, Japan and China.
Dec. 7, 2020
JikGuard
King of Cards: Joustus Deep Dive - Part 2
When we last left off, we had created a self-contained card game on paper! In this part, we'll talk about how the initial design of Joustus was implemented and how we extended it to accommodate the expanding scope of the platforming game.
Dec. 7, 2020
JikGuard
Case study: making Core Defense a solo dev success 2
A few months ago I released Core Defense on Steam and grossed $20,186 in the first week. Good enough for a solo indie developer – especially if you take into account that you can expect to make 2-5x your first week's revenue during your first year.
Dec. 3, 2020
JikGuard
Understanding Pain Points in Game Design
Pain Points are often the understated killer of many games, and we're going to discuss how to spot them and some common mistakes for developers to avoid.
Dec. 3, 2020
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Using luck to your advantage, a marketing strategy for developers
6 months ago I released my first game, Before We Leave and (for a first time developer) it's been a great success! This is a discussion of the things I did that helped make all the luck involved in releasing a game more likely to turn out my way.
Dec. 3, 2020
JikGuard
What's your first week revenue per game platform? 2
You see relatively little discussion of multi-platform revenue, including console. So I was delighted when The First Tree dev David Wehle went public with the following week 1 revenue percentages for his third-person exploration game starring a fox.
Dec. 2, 2020
JikGuard
Intel View in Mafia III
Technical implementation of Intel View feature in Mafia III.
Dec. 1, 2020
JikGuard
How to Fix Miscommunication Issues in Your Team
Good communication is important in all game development studios, even the smallest ones. Here I explain some of the issues I've had in our team and how we (sort of) solved them.
Nov. 30, 2020
JikGuard
Data deep dive: what's the 'long tail' like for Steam games? 2
Data deep dive: game devs, if you have X,000 dollars at the end of Week 1 on Steam, how much do you have after Month 1, or Year 1? Survey results within...
Nov. 16, 2020