How I went from a solo dev to having a top 50 most wishlisted game on Steam

I always hate trying to dig through a post to find out the game the OP is talking about, so here it is: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2109770/Kingmakers/

I have never really seen a discussion about how to go from nothing to owning a studio and making a game with huge traction, so here it goes.

I always wanted to make games from a young age, and it drove me to learn to program and to learn a lot of math and physics in high school. I then went to college to study computer science, and I thought the classes were dumb. The information felt dated, and I didn’t want to write code with paper and pencil(on exams and quizzes). So I bailed out and got a degree in psychology, and I was basically aimless during college.

Then I graduated and needed a job. I already knew how to program so it was pretty obvious that I should get a job doing that as opposed to…I don’t even know what else I could’ve done really. So I did web dev for around 2-3 years. It was monotonous, and also my hands started hurting from coding so much so I went to grad school for Biomedical Engineering. I pretty much immediately hated Biomedical Engineering. I had some experience working full time doing something I didn’t want to do so I had a lot of fear to drive me. So when the summer started I used that fear to make me spend literally every waking minute making an indie game in XNA for the xbox 360 indie store.

My brother did the run cycle for the main character(he really phoned it in though) and I had another friend find free music, but it was pretty much a solo dev project.

I released it on the xbox indie store and it made maybe $50. I was pretty much giving up at that point. This was before Steam greenlight so you couldn’t even put your game on Steam, but my friend who picked the music for the game emailed Gabe Newell and asked him to put the game on Steam. Gabe responded and said yes. This email changed the course of my entire life. The game is here(https://store.steampowered.com/app/96100/Defy_Gravity_Extended/)

At this point Steam had basically no competition because there was no path to put your game on Steam so my game immediately started making thousands of dollars. Defy Gravity does not have great art, but the music is great and the gameplay is unique and very fun in my opinion.

More than anything else this gave me the confidence to pursue owning my own studio. After graduating I started a software dev business with a friend. Initially we were just doing regular app development contracts to keep the lights on(barely). Around this time kickstarter became a thing. My brother joined us and we started prototyping some ideas in Unity. While we had some cool prototypes gameplay wise, there was no reason for anyone to support them on kickstarter so they were pretty much a dead end.

This actually became a big thrust of what we do as a company due to the necessity of working on kickstarter to get funding: focusing heavily on marketing, market research and the marketability of games.

At this point we had 4 programmers(me, my brother and 2 friends), no artists and no name recognition credibility for kickstarter, so we did research. On reddit we could see that there was a big undercurrent of support that existed to revive two game franchises. Road Rash and Magic Carpet. We had always liked Road Rash as kids so that is what we decided to make. My brother knew some artists he had worked with in the past and we hired them with our very limited funds to make a trailer for what became Road Redemption(https://store.steampowered.com/app/300380/Road_Redemption/)

The kickstarter succeeded and we pushed for an alpha we could sell through Humble Bundle asap and then early access on Steam to fund the development of the game. I wouldn’t say Road Redemption was a massive hit, because it was always targeted towards the small niche gamers that wanted more Road Rash or just happened to want the tiny genre of racing while fighting on motorcycles games. That said it has sold well over 1 million copies(it is basically an evergreen title because there is so little competition). It also did really well with influencers because the gameplay is well suited to reaction videos and playthroughs.

After that we had some forays that were gaming adjacent that I won’t bore you with, the next big thing we did was Kingmakers(https://store.steampowered.com/app/2109770/Kingmakers/). It has been in development for 4-5 years at this point.

Kingmakers is the first game we have ever made where we weren’t restricted to marketing specifically to a niche group of gamers. We spent a long time prototyping game ideas to make sure we had one that can be marketed well with even just a single image.

This image is what made us all want to move forward with the concept. When we started prototyping we quickly realized a true medieval battle has to have the scale of thousands of soldiers, and to really do it right it would also need PvE multiplayer while maintaining that massive scale.

Luckily, our team is very programmer heavy, so we are in a strong position to push those technical boundaries as far as we can.

So with a smaller team we spent years making all of that possible. We even switched to unreal to get the speed and visual fidelity we needed(There is a prototype in Unity and it runs very poorly. I know you can do all kinds of hacks to speed up unity but at the end of the day when you are pushing really hard on the tech it is not easy to make C# as fast as C++. We don’t use blueprints either for the same reason.)

After all that time we ended up with a vertical slice and started pitching like crazy. We pitched to a lot of the big players and the smaller ones. We ultimately went with the company that best shared our vision of what Kingmakers could be, and that was tinyBuild.

tinyBuild allowed us to scale up to massively increase our production speed, and they have been invaluable partners in too many ways to list here.

How Kingmakers made it into the top 50 most wishlisted in ~30 days I think deserves its own separate post. I will try to write that as a follow up in a few days.

The main point about this post is that game development is a journey. Pretty much no one hits it big overnight. I have been doing game development for over a decade, and I have been lucky, but a lot of luck you make yourself by constantly going up to bat. There are other projects we have done that I left out, failed prototypes and canceled games. There have also been other successful non-gaming projects I left out. We are always working on something. Sharpening our development skills and our marketing instincts.

If you want to keep following our journey I’m on twitter here: https://twitter.com/PaulFisch1