itch.io

I think as a developer you have to look away from your own opinion of what your game is worth because it's irrelevant, instead look at what people pay for games like yours as well as how much they sold (using steam spy and similar services). You need to find games similar to yours and ideally with around the same marketing, you'll never be able to predict how your marketing will work out but it will give you a better idea. If you find a few of these games it should give you a rough estimate of the price elasticity of demand for games like yours. This shows you how many people are willing to pay what prices. For small casual games without a big budget you'll probably find the highest players*price at around 2-4usd (at least for the type of game I was looking at at the time). So take that number as highest predicted revenue and then also take into account if you would like to undercut the market to get more players with lower revenue.

If you are releasing a game semi-professionally I would recommend this route. Take it with a grain of salt though because the game I did this for didn't get made in the end because we didn't think we could make back what we would spend developing it and for the game I developed as a hobby I just wanted as many people as possible to play it so I released it for free.

For small hobby games I like the pay what you want model but I don't want to try and make people judge the worth of a game from screenshots before they try it so for my own game I left it free to let as many people as possible play it (I know people could enter 0 as the amount but personally I would rather not play a game than enter 0 in the amount field and download it. Just makes me feel guilty.). If it were possible I think the greatest option for short hobby games would be a message on the download page that says the game can be played for free but it will ask you to pay how much you think it was worth at the end. It might be idealistic but as a developer and a player I would love if the amount paid reflected how much the player enjoyed the game, not how much they expect to.

I can be a bit difficult to build up speed at first. Unlike most platformers the player moves directly in the direction you hold the left stick (or in the direction of the combination of arrow keys you hold down) so if you're on a flat surface you have to hold the stick at 90 degrees to get maximum acceleration, on a steep incline you need to hold the stick to match the steepness of the incline or else you will either move away from the surface or waste some of your force pushing yourself against the surface. So on that second obstacle for example you need to start out going left, change to an upwards direction about halfway through and then go a little to the right at the top.

It's a bit unintuitive but I'm not sure how to show it better.

Hey everybody, I just released my first game on itch.io for free, it's called Mechanism. It's been in progress for a long time on and off but it's a very short game centred around one mechanic. This has been the game I've focused on whenever I didn't feel much like programming and wanted to level design. Unfortunately it requires a controller to play so I hope lots of people have controllers handy. It's a little rough around the edges as a hobby project (no menu transitions, no level progress saves) but it works.

This game has been really fun to make and I think to play so I hope people enjoy it. Each level has a sort of boss battle at the end with a custom coded challenge you'll have to figure out how to beat. There are checkpoints often because I don't think you should be punished too hard for dying in a game like this. The controls are basic but responsive, once you get the hang of it it feels pretty second nature.

http://alexstv.itch.io/mechanism

Any feed back would be appreciated, especially about the itch.io page since I haven't done that before.

I'm Alex (@stv_alex) and I program games as a hobby with Unity - I work as a software dev right now working with js, c# and ruby. I moved to Glasgow from Norway a year ago. I maintain Voxelmetric which is an open source voxel framework for unity because I figured if I can't get my act together and release a game with the stuff I'm developing I might as well make it easier for other people to make voxel games. I have a ton of prototype projects some of which I hope to release eventually.

I think that would be the best option, it keeps the newest stuff at the top with all the discussion grouped by update.