Kami Media

A lot of indie games start as prototypes. You make something small, it feels fun, someone plays it, and suddenly the idea appears: maybe this could become a real game. That is not a bad thing. My first Steam game, Frogo Jump, also started like this. It was a fun prototype first, and later I turned it into a full commercial game. But this article is not really about prototyping itself. It is about the moment after the prototype. The moment where you decide if this small idea should become a commercial release. In my opinion, this is where many beginner indie developers make the wrong decision, because they only ask if the prototype is fun. They do not ask if the game has a market. Jump to section Prototypes are easy. Commitment is hard. The platform is the market. Stop making platformers for Steam. If you make PC games, study Steam. Make your Steam page early and collect wishlists. Use festivals to get more wishlists. Also remember the cost of releasing....

When I was building Frogo Jump, my first released Unity game, I used PlayerPrefs for things that I probably should not have used PlayerPrefs for. At the time, it made sense to me. I was still learning Unity, and many beginner tutorials used PlayerPrefs whenever they needed to save something. So when I had a problem where I needed to remember a value, my beginner brain went: okay, PlayerPrefs saves things, so I will use PlayerPrefs. It worked, but it was messy. The bigger lesson I learned later is that not all game data is the same. Some data should only exist while the game is running. Some data should stay on the player's device as a setting. Some data is real save data and should be part of a proper save file. Mixing all of that into PlayerPrefs can work for a while, but it makes the project harder to understand and harder to clean up later. View Frogo Jump on Steam The Frogo Jump problem ...