My Indie Game Launched On Steam Today #3 - Ghost In The Barn House Steam Launch

I have recently released a new indie game called Ghost in The Barn House, a 2D Survival Horror game. It is now available on Steam. I hope some players will enjoy the game. 

Watch The Video Below:

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Creating My First Zombie Shooter Game And Releasing on Steam

Hey guys,

Developer here! I am going to share my experience, my whole journey of making games. I thought blogging about my game development progress with some screenshots will be really good for those who follows and reads development blogs.
From today onward, I will share what I am working on, my game development progress alongside posting about making money online and various other stuff as frequently as possible on my blog.  

Don't forget to wishlist the game on Steam.

So, I have been in this industry for more than 9 years and 8 years as a professional indie developer. I will turn 24 this year(2020) so it is kind of heartbreaking for me because I have not been able to create a viral game. Well, that was a joke. I did not manage to make a successful game. But I thought there are some games which got lots of positive reviews than negative ones. I have other games which did get more negative reviews. The result, that is, whether the audience will like it is upto them and this is something which is out of my control. However, the fact that I have not given up after 23 failures in a row should give someone going through an acute depression a little hope to come out of it and see the world from a unique angle. There is nothing to be ashamed of in failing. You know, I love to fail countless times because I think that I am learning new stuff. Failure actually teaches you more than your successes can.

  Another thing is, I am playing a long game here. I have never thought of making a hit game but I thought about sustaining my game company. It is a one-man dev studio located in Kolkata, India. Yes, game development is not a short-term game but a long term game. Those who play longer will win eventually. I hope someday I will have a successful game which will be accepted by the people globally. 

So, this would be my 24th attempt at making a PC game. I create short and simple casual games. I love sharing my creations with people over the internet and the best platform for that is Steam, as everyone knows. Steam is one of the best platforms even now for indie game developers. I have got used to their back-end system for publishing games and I am really glad to be able to get my games there.

The first and foremost thing I focus on is the Graphics, Gameplay and Testing. I never release something which is broken especially at the launch day. So, I keep testing my builds before I send my games for approval by Steam. 

Currently, there is a pandemic going on around the globe and I thought it would be a perfect timing for creating a zombie shooter game. Yes, I wanted to create a game like that for a long time. It is a Sci-Fi themed zombie shooter game and is called Axizon Labs: Zombies.

Check out the Official Trailer of Axizon Labs: Zombies:

Development Time:

It took me around a month and a half to finish the game. Yes, I am fast game developer. I have created all of the graphical assets, animation, character design, programming, except for the music. I am quite proud of what I have done. 

I will share sales data for my games too in the following articles only after a month or two of release. Since, Steam allows developers to share their sales data it has become easier for me to publish sales data in my personal blog. 

You can subscribe to my newsletter too if you wish. I will send awesome goodies, game discounts, launch discounts and stuff like that.

Release Date:
Axizon Labs: Zombies will be released on 8th May, 2020. I have never missed my launch date whatsoever. This is because I am punctual and serious about what I do. I make sure I finish the game before I put it out there and within the given time frame. Be assured, I have never missed a launch date. 

Pricing:
As always, it will be available at a low price, that is, $0.99. There is no special reason for pricing lower. From my personal experience, more people buy my games when I price it lower. So, my target has always been to get my games in the hands of as many people as possible. I currently have more than 100,000 customer base on Steam. Although most of them came from doing bundles but still the numbers are pretty large. The lower the price, the more people would try. It is simple. This is right if I am not spending any marketing budget or if I have little marketing budget. 

Verdict:
It was hard, and rough road. But every developer goes through it and it is inevitable. However, the only thing that we, the developers, want is to create a great product. Axizon Labs Zombies is a game with various mission objectives, lots of zombies to kill, and collecting antidotes and stuff. It is a simple game based on a story. I hope a few people would like it.

I really have no expectation from my game. I don't think it will sell millions or even thousands of copies on Steam but whatever it sells is more than enough for me. The fact I was able to get it on Steam is considered success at least for me. I want to keep doing what I love. You know, I went full time after I graduated from college and since then I have been doing what I love and at the same time, supporting my family as far as possible. It is hard to be a game developer and it always will. 

I hope you have enjoyed reading the article. And if you have not wishlisted the game yet I request you to check it out and wishlist it. I really hope you will enjoy the game.

Thank you!

The Valley of Super Flowers - My Another 2D Platform Action Game Coming Soon on Steam

Hey guys,

Developer here! I have been working on a new indie game called The Valley of Super Flowers which is a small 2D Action platformer coming soon on Steam. The Release date has been officially announced and it will be launched on 27th March, 2019. 

Wishlist The Valley of Super Flowers on Steam: 

Watch Official Trailer

 

I hope you will enjoy the game and if you are a fan of Action Platform games you can follow this game on Steam. The release day is right around the corner. So, stay tuned! I will post here as soon as the game gets launched on Steam.

It took me 2 months to finish the game. All of the graphical assets, character design, animation, programming are done by me. Play and Enjoy! 

Chills - A 2D Top Down Survival Horror Indie Game - Devlog

Project Started: 5th December, 2018
Project End: -
Project Name: The Chills
Developer: Anamik Majumdar

5th February, 2018:
I have almost done most part of the game. Here is the official trailer of the game. You can wishlist the game on Steam right now.
Store page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1008140/The_Chills/

28th December, 2018:
I made a lot of progress within these weeks. I will post little by little every single day to let you know how things are progressing. I have added some of the features mentioned below:
1. Added lighting effects in the game.
2. Added more furniture, lights and lots of props.

I am currently working on new characters which I will show later. For the time being, here is an image:

7th December, 2018:
I have started working on a new indie game which is a 2D Top down Survival horror game. The game is just started and I am currently designing the very first level of the game. After creating so many platformers I have decided to make a game of different genre which is based on the dark theme. I am going to make it as good as I can. Wish me luck guys! :D

Here is a raw image of the level I am currently building. It looks pretty amateurish but well, it will take some good amount of work to make it look great. I will show it anyway.

 More updates coming soon! I will try my best to post every day.

The Making of Smash Halloween Pumpkins - The Challenge Indie Game - Developer Story And Postmortem

Hey guys,

After releasing Captain The Runner game, I set out with another interesting platform action game, the genre which I love the most, called Smash Halloween Pumpkins: The Challenge. Yes, it is a Halloween themed platform action game which is released on Steam.

I can still recall when I got an idea of making a Halloween themed game. It was when I watched a GDC talk presented by Jake Birkett and his story of surviving 11 years in the game industry without a hit. He presented some of his games in that video where he had a Halloween themed game as well. At that moment, I made my mind. I said to myself, " Hey! I wanna make a 2D Action Platform based on Halloween theme." Why not? There are obviously not many Halloween Themed games on Steam and the world needs more great Halloween themed game. Finally, I successfully finished making the game within a month. Yes, it took me a month to finish the game.

I have created all the assets of the game myself except for the music. My art style is kind of different from all sorts of pixel art and I am proud of being different. 

The game got released on Steam on 14th September 2018. Today on 28th September, I am writing this article and I can say there is a few weeks sales data which I can show here. But I will not expose the numbers because of the Steam NDA(Non-Disclosure Agreement). A small graph can be more than enough for you to even show that it has sold some copies. 

I have been working on many project all at once and I am trying to get them out to the public within a month or two months or six months. Well, I am no longer working on a year long project because it is too risky for me at this moment. So, I am focusing on small scoped projects. As I have always said that I am a fast game designer, artist and programmer, working around 10 to 12 hours a day including Saturday and Sunday. Well, holidays are not for me to be honest although I sometimes get overwhelmed by the amount of work left.  

POSTMORTEM:

The Release: 
The game got released on 14th September 2018 on Steam with a pricetag of $0.99. The reason behind putting such a pricetag for my game is that it works for me but that does not mean it will work for you. Being an unknown indie developer, having a higher price tag might not be the best option. It depends upon lots of things like development budget, timing etc.

It was released with an introductory discount of 30% that means it sold for $0.69 at the time of launch which lasted for a week. After that, it was still selling at a full price. However, people usually don't buy an unknown title from an unknown indie developer at a full price.   

I indeed got some traffic directly from Steam and I used Google Analytics to take a look at some numbers. Here is the information given below:

Here is an interesting data. I did not get much traffic at the time of launch. But as soon as it got a positive review from a Steam customer, the visibility increased by two times than what it got during the launch week.

So, how did the game do on Steam? Well, You have heard about lots of successes but the developers usually don't want to discuss about their failure. I am kind of different person. I have failed so many times in life that I don't have a fear of failure but I just never stop making games. I am madly in love with my work, trust me. I can't live without making games for a single day. 

The sales did not go well. That's given because I am hardly doing any marketing outside Steam and without marketing it is impossible to sell many copies. As an indie developer, Tim Ruswick said, "You sell zero copies of your game by default." That's true.

My game has sold pretty less, that is, < 200 copies. Most of you will consider it as a brutal failure. Trust me, you can sell around 100 to 500 copies a week on Steam now-a-days due to increased number of releases without external marketing. There is also an article written on Gamasutra about it.

Conclusion:

It does not matter even if it fails because I am very proud of the game I made and I am really glad to be able to publish it on Steam and get it out to the public. You should always remember that Launch day is not the end of the life cycle of the game. You can use many post-marketing strategies to keep selling the games you make. I love launching and shipping games. I am honestly less embarrassed to put my work out to the public. People often get annoyed by negative reviews but it really does not matter if it gets bad reviews or good reviews as long as you learn something from them. 
You can check out Smash Halloween Pumpkins: The Challenge game on Steam:  http://store.steampowered.com/app/886010/
   
I am currently working on a new game called The Christmas Gifts and I hope it does well on Steam but I highly doubt it though. 

Thanks for reading the article and I hope you found it useful.

The Mystery of Devils House - A 2D Horror Action Platformer got a Release Date - PC Windows/ Linux

The waiting time is over! The Mystery of Devils House, a new 2D Horror Action Platformer has got a release date. This game is created by Anamik, a solo indie game developer, who has been working on this game for more than 6 months. 

The Mystery of Devils House is a 2D Action Platformer based on the story of the Haunted House located in Massachusetts. The owner of the house called The Ghostbusters Crew: International to investigate the whole building to prove the existence of evil spirits and the Devil. There was a dark history associated with the William House which is a popular Haunted location in America. The Ghostbuster crew consists of four team members like Ankush, Annie, Tomoko and Steve. 

The Mystery of Devils House is scheduled for release on 11th of May, 2018 on Steam and will be available for both Windows PC and Linux. It also has Steam Achievements which can be collected as you play the game.

The Official trailer of The Mystery of Devils House is given below:

 

Are you looking forward to the release? Cool! 

Wishlist the game on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/825970/The_Mystery_of_Devils_House/ 

Want to be a fan of this game? Subscribe to the mailing list to get notified about indie game discounts, new releases and some goodies here: http://www.amaxang-games.com/2018/03/the-mystery-of-devils-house-indie-game.html 

 

Keatz The Lonely Bird Indie 2D Platform Action Game - Destroy The Water Turret - Septerber 19 2017

September 19, 2017:
Development Progress: 50%

Game Page: http://www.amaxang-games.com/2017/05/keatz-lonely-bird-indie-pc-game.html

Subscribe to our newsletter: CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE

Hello world,

Today, I have introduced some important features in the game, Keatz: The Lonely Bird. When I was working on the level design, some features were missing like there were no instructions available, nor there was a screen shake effect implemented at that time. So, I had to modify code and got it to work readily. 

Designing the level was fun and it was a great experience. When I started working on designing level, it was like an empty world with only placeholder images and non-animated character sprites. But later, I replaced them with actual textures, character art and so on. I have also added some lighting effect to the level to make it look as attractive as possible. 

In the previous post I had mentioned that I had added parallax motion effect which has drastically improved the visuals of the game. There are also some jumping woods where the player can jump over with an aim of jumping higher than player's normal jumping abilities. Besides, there are saws, thorns and water areas. However, one must be very careful as the player will die if immersed in water since it is a bit deeper. 

Now, I would like to add a gameplay video showing the level which I have explained above. The visuals are more meaningful than the writing itself and it is quite natural and a great idea to have a video linked in this blog post. Here you go:

Keatz The Lonely Bird Indie Game Development Update September 16-2017 - Introducing Parallax Effect

 

Hello world,

From today, I, the developer of Keatz: The Lonely Bird game, will continuously post new topics instead of posting in the same page which becomes hard to scroll down and see all the updates again and again. There will be different kinds of blog posts at least once per week with new content, updates and patches. Since, I am the only one operating both anamikmajumdar.net and amaxang-games.com websites, it becomes hard to get some time to keep them updated but I try my best to find out an ideal time for this. 

September 16, 2017:

Development Progress: 50%

Game Page: http://www.amaxang-games.com/2017/05/keatz-lonely-bird-indie-pc-game.html

Subscribe to our newsletter: CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE

Today, I have introduced Parallax Motion effect which seems to be one of the best feature of a platformer. I actually got this suggestion from one of the Facebook groups which let me to believe that it would be a cool feature to have especially in outdoor levels. 

The benefit of adding Parallax motion effect to the levels is that it makes the motion effect realistic and gives it a 3D feel. I have also noticed this effect in the old school games like Mario, Sonic and it was an important feature which I missed when I had worked on my first game.  

Here is an example of a gif without parallax effect and another one with parallax effect demonstrating one of the levels in Keatz: The Lonely Bird indie game:

Without Parallax effect:

With Parallax effect:

 

According to gif images shown above, the differences are distinctively visible. Besides, the second one looks realistic and far better than the first one. This concludes that the feedback which I had received from one of the users on Facebook was really helpful and at the same time, I have learned something awesome and it will be helpful for my future projects also. 

Game development process is all about learning new stuffs, experimenting with new features and game mechanics. The parallax motion effect was initially introduced in cut scenes way before I received any feedback and I was not ready to introduce that feature in levels that time. To be honest, I introduced it at the later stage of development when I was going through the feedback/bugs list.

Here is a gif showing the parallax effect in one of the cut scenes of the game. This might look better because I have introduced three different layers of parallax motion effect in the background:

Finally, the parallax motion effect has changed the look and feel of the game completely. I will keep this feature in mind while making my next platformer with outdoor levels or even in some weird levels. Who knows? I make weird games too.

I hope that you have enjoyed this article and if you really like it please consider subscribing to the newsletter HERE and I will send you special discount coupons and news regarding new game releases or you can try out my other games HERE.

More updates will be available in the next #screenshotsaturday and before that too . Until then, stay tuned and see you next time. See ya!

NightmareZ A 2D side-scrolling platformer is now on Steam!

I have created this blog in order to provide the latest updates about the releases, news and various other things related to the development of my future projects. I have found Blogging to be the best way of communicating with my fans and followers who are interested to play new great games. 

I am really glad to say that after struggling for about 2 months on Steam Greenlight, NightmareZ has been successfully accepted on Steam store, that means, NightmareZ will get a greater visibility all around the world. I have poured my heart and soul into making NightmareZ, which was in development for more than a year. This game is a part of my life and moreover, this is a game which I had once dreamed about and finally managed to convert my dream into the reality. 

NightmareZ has got a very few attention from Press sites and YouTubers. It is obvious because my game is pretty new to the Game industry and I had never thought of putting this game in front of millions of gamers.  However, it needs more attention and it deserves it. 

Wanna check out the game on Steam?
Here you go: http://store.steampowered.com/app/509930

About The Game:
NightmareZ is a side-scrolling platform action game with lots of fancy features, multiple enemies and retro visuals. This is a retro styled platform and action game which will immerse you in a unique world full of good and evil demons and there are also different scenarios to pass through including Mountain cave, The Land of Flora, The Land of the Hell, The Core of the Hell, The land of Snow, The Dark City and The Cave of The Hell with deadly traps, formidable enemies, power ups, and secrets. 

 If you like 2D platform retro games, you can watch the trailer below.

Conclusion: 

NightmareZ is finally on Steam store, the largest PC gaming platform in the world. If you have been waiting for a long time for its release or if you did not know about this game, now is the time to take a look at this new indie game on Steam. You might enjoy this game. Who knows? I will keep you updated with new upcoming posts! Please subscribe to my blog for latest updates if you are interested to keep in touch with me. Feel free to ask me in comments. 

NightmareZ 2D Platform Action Retro Indie Game - Screenshotsaturday

NightmareZ is a side-scrolling platform action game with lots of fancy features, multiple enemies and retro visuals.

You can get NightmareZ game here:
1. Buy on my site(Direct through my site) = http://www.amaxang-games.com/nightmarez.html

2. Buy on Itchio( A indie game store) = https://amaxang-games.itch.io/nightmarez 

Screenshot Saturdays:

Saturday Post - 15th October, 2016:
This is the first #screenshotsaturday post of NightmareZ game.

"Multiple mode of the Player"
Description: The gif given below shows the multiple firing mode of the player named as Razor in NightmareZ indie game. The player kills multiple enemies at once but it requires the enemy positions to be accurate. Otherwise, the bullets will be useless. It is quite effective against Bosses and other formidable enemies.

via GIPHY


Saturday Post - 8th October, 2016:
This is the first #screenshotsaturday post of NightmareZ game.

"Single Firing mode of the Player"
Description: The gif given below shows the single firing mode of the player named as Razor in NightmareZ indie game. The player kills the enemies one after another. However, the player can use other firing modes to kill Bosses and multiple enemies at once!

via GIPHY