2026 Week 31: building an audience

What's the most difficult part of making a game?

Finding people who want to play it.

Seems to be the problem the world over. There's so much stuff out there these days that even big companies find it hard marketing their work. So indie teams have it even harder.

And whilst you can easily flood the market with small, cheap, throw-away games — to increase your profile and find more people. That's not something Spiraldust Games will ever entertain.

We are strictly against in-game purchases, or the other tricks that mainly mobile games entertain. E.g. free games that only allow a short play time and ask for money to continue playing on every session, we're looking at you Lemmings (mobile app). Or, loot box and other dark patterns. The fact that these were ever entertained by so called game creators chills the blood.

We've been through this before

We're a small team of one developer, one designer/animator. Our developer published a book last year, fiction, and nothing to do with online games or development. But they had to go through a similar process of finding their audience —which is actually helping us now in terms of experience.

We know we have to start small, and keep building. Every day, every week, every month.

If we keep going, we'll get there eventually.

And hopefully we'll be able to bring everyone who enjoys escaping to a different world along with us.