Until.dawn Steam
Tea Rochlitz
This is the story of a developer who turned a simple side project into a game that earned more than half-a-million dollars in less than a week. Not only that, he did this after just 2 months of marketing and development.
Many people who are just starting out wonder, how do you possibly get any success when you have 0 following, 0 dollars. It seems like to be popular you already have to be popular. This is an excellent test case on how a game can go from 0 to 100,000 very quickly.
The developer behind the game is Flanne who lives on the East Coast of the United States. He majored in Computer Science in college and worked as a programmer before working on his games. He had no real game dev experience other than a few Unity school projects in college.
He was years into development on an RPG Tactics game called Spiritlink Tactics but was feeling a bit burnt out on it. So he took a break and made a short side project to release a game quickly to get some experience. He read my blog on the success of Vampire Survivors and decided to make his own version.
The design of 20 Minutes Till Dawn is definitely inspired by Vampire Survivors: Top Down, hoards of enemies, experience is gained by collecting gems, every experience level leads to an upgrade the player selects, rogue-lite perma-death. But 20 Minutes Till Dawn has a number of design differences the most important of which is that the player does not auto fire and you must reload your gun. Here is Flanne on his design choices:
I honestly disliked the Vampire Survivors auto-shoot gameplay, so the decision to make it more active was mostly because of my personal preference. My philosophy designing this is that I think there is an audience that wants a game that has depth in mechanics but with short, casual play sessions.
On April 22nd he launched a Steam Coming Soon page and itch.io page for 20 Minutes Till Dawn. Both had the demo playable. Here is his original post on the official How To Market A Game Discord announcing his new game:
First, it warms my heart to a degree that I cannot describe that a silly little blog post I wrote could lead to someone having success like this. I now know what Highschool teachers feel when one of their former students becomes a Supreme Court Justice or a Nobel Prize Winner or something.
Also I think indies spend WAAAAAY Too long on their first game. I wish indies would put aside their own Spiritlink and do a fast release game to learn what a launch looks like with a low-stakes game. Here is a companion blog post that I wrote to address how you can pause your over-scoped game and make something small (and more profitable).
This is not a lot, but it is the first step in the ramp up to big numbers. The early (albeit small) signs were positive. The long play times and big (by itch standards) indicated he had picked the right genre, and had a good design.
On May 2nd Steam hosted the official Going Rogue Festival. Flanne opted in with the 20 Minutes Till Dawn demo. The early success from his demo being on itch.io helped push 20 Minutes Till Dawn up the trending charts:
Demos are executables that you attach to your main game. Prologues are a bit different. They are a slight hack in which you pay steam another $100 to have a separate depot and upload that same demo code and release it as a free game.
However, once 10 Minutes Till Dawn dropped off of New And Trending the wishlsits dropped down to a measly 6,000 wishlists a day and then down to 2000 per day. (I am kidding of course, these are insane numbers.)
The answer to this quandary actually has nothing to do about Streamers. 90% of your success depends on you having a good game that is in a genre that everyone is interested in. 20MTD is a great interpretation of a genre that is very hot right now (Top-down Hoard Rogue Games).
The median indie game here has a 12 minute median play time. The median indie game also fails. You will see that only the top 1% of games have a median play time longer than an hour. When people play your game a long time, it is a good sign.
I really was tired of working on Spiritlink Tactics for over 5 years (huge mistake to commit to an ambitious RPG as a inexperienced solo dev, in my opinion). And over the years, I felt like my skills have gotten so much better as a game dev, so I really wanted to take on a new project.
[Spiritlink Tactics] put on hold indefinitely. I feel bad about it since I had just done Steam Next Fest with it and it did quite well. It garnered a few fans on the Spiritlink Tactics discord that would leave me very detailed feedback regularly. I definitely want to finish the game for them eventually, but it makes too much financial sense for me to focus 100% on 20MTD right now.
The way to get real visibility is to leverage the visibility of other players who have big audiences. Streamers lend you their following when they cover your game. Entering festivals like Going Rouge is leveraging the millions of users of Steam.
One of the bigger stories in 2024 is how Helldivers 2 exploded in popularity to such a degree that Arrowhead decided to postpone a pre-planned PSN login requirement on PC. When the developer eventually attempted to enforce the feature, the Internet imploded, leading to such a fierce review bombing campaign that PlayStation was forced to backtrack.
Its tough *****. EA, Steam, MS, xbox, Epic, google, Amazon, Netflix, Disney etc all do it. You want to view or play their content you need to abide by their terms and create an account. Either create an account or dont buy the game. Its that simple.
Taking a game away from people after they have paid for it and put time in to it is one thing i dont agree on but stating you need an account before a game is released is fair game.
Also forcing users who already have a launcher and an account to yet install another launcher and create another account is just stupid. Including with Sony's former lack of security / hacks on PSN. I absolutely agree that you wouldn't want that (forced) on PC.
Don't want to? Don't buy the games. Want to review bomb a single player game? You need to but the game first and don't return it LOL. If Sony was desperate for that money the requirement wouldn't be there and "bad" sales (people are going to buy this yes or yes cry rivers included) will help the current strat to not change.
@Solingo_Bill You don't get it.
Imagine you have Steam account your registered in your country. You invest money to buy games.. and then Sony releases great games and you are not allowed to buy them with your steam account.
Understandable that is small part of gaming community, but still those are 180+ countries/regions.
Single player - not sure i really agree with it (and not 100% sure Sony intend to include single player in this, tho I agree thats how it appeared, but if so they have been up front with it). If its true I only imagine sales for non PSN countries are expected to be very low.
Sony should stick to their guns this time and not give in to those over entitled PC bunch. They have to have accounts everywhere else. And if they want to play PlayStation games so bad as they scream about exclusivity then they'll suck it up or miss out. Put them to the test, how bad did they really want to play Sony's games? Because let's face it, they're the biggest whingers of the entire platforms combined.
I think the only issue is that they should make PSN more widely available. But other than that, it's perfectly okay to make it a requirement to do a PSN log-in. Weren't they going to start including trophies in their PC versions? I think that's worth it.
As an occasional PC player, all I can say is this is just a bunch of bo**ocks by frustrated people needing excuse to rage and youtubers making up a story to spike their channel viewership. There is no problem!
@Matthewnh Joining psn also means agreeing to their TOS, which means they can ban you from things that you can do on steam, but not from psn. Most pc gamers rather have not buying sony games (or getting it on high seas) rather than joining psn on their pc.
Fake outrage means people will eventually take nobody seriously and 'consumer power' will simply fritter away.
Requiring a PSN log-in is exactly the same as all the other publishers who also require a sign up to their service, no different at all. If you don't want to sign up, don't play the games, simple.
@sanderev I know it's not an official solution and annoying, but it's a functioning workaround until psn is supported in affected countries. And as far as I can see nobody has ever been penalized for doing so. I wouldn't see a reason why Sony would even bother. I'm EU based and have a Japanese account as well and it's always been alright.
In the case off Helldivers 2 i agreed with outrage,but this just ridicolous. We all have ea,ubi,acti-blizz,epic,rockstar. Valve literary made this a thing with Half-Life 2,download steam client or move along,lord Gaben start it all.
@Kienda i mean the " for the players " is just a marketing tag line. if the game was on ps5 , those people in those countries wouldn't be able to play those games either. i'm just guessing they want to require trophies for their games on pc , which means they would need to have a psn account. so at the end of the day they would have never had access to those games either way. i just feel like its just fake outrage to be upset over nothing. why isn't psn allowed there in the first place is my question?
@REALAIS @TheOfflineGamer @sanderev I live in one of those countries and I made a US PSN account years ago. It's not hard. I know 4 other friends in the Caribbean who did the same thing. There are tutorials online.
To be fair, the fact that a PSN account can be made in one of those 180 countries isn't the issue. The issue is that Valve and other launchers DO recognize that they're not in the correct region. That's why they're locked out. That's why people are upset
Most likely those people will turn to alternate methods to play the single player parts of those games - just because rules like "service access only in select countries" exist.
Where's the win in that, Sony ? Microsoft? Rest of y'all oyster heads in the same boat?