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 ...

If your UI elements in Unity start looking stretched when you resize them, you probably ran into one of the most common beginner problems. You make a button, a panel, or a dialogue box, scale it up, and suddenly the corners look wrong. This happens because Unity normally treats the sprite like a regular image. When you make it wider or taller, the whole thing gets stretched. That is fine for some images, but it looks bad for UI elements with borders, corners, outlines, or pixel art details. I made a short video showing the problem and the fix. This post is basically the written version of that video, but with more notes about how I would set up simple UI art as a game developer. What the problem looks like Here is what happens when the UI element is resized normally. The corners and borders stretch together with the rest of the image, so the whole thing starts to look distorted. The actual fix is 9-slice The fix for this is called 9-slice. 9-slic...

Frogo Jump was my first finished and released game. It started as a small Unity prototype while I was learning how to build games, but over time it became a complete precision platformer that I eventually released on Steam. At first, I was not trying to make a commercial project. I was experimenting with movement, simple mechanics, and level design. But once the prototype became playable, I showed it to a few people on my phone, and they actually enjoyed it. That was the moment where I started thinking that this could become more than just a test project. That small prototype became Frogo Jump. What Frogo Jump is Frogo Jump is a precision platformer where you play as a frog that fell into a well and has to climb back out. The basic idea is simple: jump from platform to platform, avoid hazards, and keep climbing. The controls are intentionally minimal. You click or hold left or right, and the length of ...