Today, I’m super excited to share that I’ve partnered with Future Friends Games for Starvester, who will help make sure the game is the best it can be and fully ready for launch!

For those of you who don’t know, Future Friends are the publishers of amazing indie games like Cloverpit and Slots & Daggers, and have helped market some juggernauts like Vampire Survivors and Content Warning! They’re one of my favorite publishers, and I’ve wanted to work with them for years now.

https://store.steampowered.com/publisher/futurefriendsgames

We’ve already been working together for a bit and they’ve set up accounts for Starvester on socials, so please follow them here!

https://www.instagram.com/starvestergame/

https://x.com/syphono4

https://www.tiktok.com/@star.vester

https://bsky.app/profile/syphono4.com

As for Starvester’s development, it’s still proceeding smoothly and has my full focus. We’re cooking some exciting things leading up to launch so stay tuned!

————

Hear The Bell Toll Update: Hey everyone! I have an update to share: I’m currently putting development for Hear The Bell Toll on hold until Starvester releases. Originally, the plan was to release HTBT late last year, but the demo build wasn’t good enough to participate in the October Next Fest, so we pushed it to enter the February Next Fest instead. However, despite multiple updates and months of work, the reception of the game hasn’t changed. It has some fundamental problems that I don’t think I can currently work through, and I don’t feel good about releasing a game that is not set up for a fair shot. Starvester is still on track (still not locking in the exact date until very close to release!). It’s also significantly more anticipated and well received than HTBT, so I feel like I should focus on it and make it the best it possibly can be for now. So, now what? Well it’s actually all good news. Thankfully I can survive even with putting HTBT on hold for now. Pretty Soon have been super supportive of the process and together, we have decided to void our publishing arrangement for HTBT. This allows me to again do anything I want with the game’s IP, assets and code, and release it on my terms! So my plan is: After taking a couple of weeks break after Starvester is wrapped up, I will try prototyping and putting together a new demo (maybe another incremental?) using the HTBT assets and code!

Anyways, a bit unfortunate, but I guess that’s how it goes in game dev sometimes. I definitely think this is the right decision to make, and I feel a lot less stressed and more motivated after putting my focus fully on Starvester.

See you all soon,

- Shaun (dev)

Firstly, Starvester (play here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4194800/Starvester/):

• Along with a bunch of requested fixes, the demo finally has Ultra-wide compatible UI, resizeable windows, and a new ending!! (basically a teaser for the full game)

Hear The Bell Toll (play here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3903610/Hear_The_Bell_Toll/):

• This is a large overhaul of the demo, with new tutorials, rebalancing and lots of QOL features and fixes!

Full changelog for both demos is posted on the Discord!

Excited to hear your feedback, and super excited to bring you more!

• Shaun (dev)

This demo (v0.5.0) is the playtest demo with all the fixes, optimizations, QOL implementations and balancing changes that were added during the playtest. Other than those changes, I’ve also added translated text into the following languages: Simplified Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian, French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese! (Korean translation also coming soon!). The option to change language is available in the settings menu in-game (press ‘English’ button to toggle between languages). I’m aware that there are still some bugs related to the translations (the alignment and line-breaks are a bit wonky in the UI), and these will be fixed ASAP!

The playtest has now been taken down. Again, thank you to the 23,670 people who played and all the feedback you’ve given me! Since the load game function has been rewritten for the demo, the save progress from the playtest unfortunately won’t carry over to the demo.

Alright, please keep providing me with feedback for the demo as well, and expect some more updates to the demo leading up to the February Next Fest!

See you all soon,

• Shaun (dev)

Today, I’m really excited to announce Starvester: A short incremental game about expanding a star-system wide factory to build giant megastructures in space. 🚀🛰️🪐

1. Deploy drones to automate mining
2. Gather various resources and unlock upgrades
3. Expand your factory and build megastructures.
4. Harvest the power of stars and other celestial bodies!

Features in the full game:
- Active incremental progression through resource gathering
- Tons of upgrades with prestige system and unique mechanics
- Approximately ~5 hours of gameplay to complete the campaign
- Mesmerizing drones and relaxing soundscapes to get into a flow state
- Strictly NO AI was used in the making of this game

Wishlist now on Steam!: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4194800/Starvester/

Starvester is a more ambitious project than Lyca and a natural evolution of my game design. I’m really excited to get it into your hands, and will try to have a playtest up before the end of the year. You can expect a full demo release in January, and I’m aiming for a full release in May 2026!

Also, Hear the Bell Toll development is going well and will have an updated demo early next year as well!

Happy holidays and thank you for all your support ❤️

- Shaun

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Lyca - Analysis and Learnings

Link to Steam Page

TLDR: ⏰

• Content Creators and Steam Next Fest were the 2 major sources of Wishlists for Lyca pre-release (got ~12000 WLs at launch)

• Demo stats were great, significantly above average, which helped a ton with Wishlists and validation

• Follower to Wishlister ratio for Lyca was very very low pre-launch (~1:24), most likely because it’s a tiny game in a more cozy/wholesome tone

• I think I managed to hit a sweet spot with the price of the game, with frequent discounts and regional pricing

• Launch was very successful, Monday launch strategy paid off strongly

• Bundles account for ~37% of gross revenue. 2 best bundles are: Nodebuster (~14%) and Digseum (~9%)

• Post launch - biggest sales drivers are: Discounts (20% or higher), Bundles, Festivals (especially Wholesome Fest) and Daily Deal

• Reviews to Sales ratio for Lyca is extremely low (~1:63) and therefore misleading. A typical game with as many sales as Lyca would have over 1300 reviews on Steam by now. Not sure why this is the case.

• Daily Deal was extremely good (~60% of Launch day)

• As of 9 October 2025, Lyca is at 40,299 units sold and $148,629 Gross Revenue

• North America and Europe are the biggest audiences for Lyca, but Asia region is not insignificant. Definitely recommend localization to various languages.

• Incremental games seem to be in demand for both players and content creators (at least when Lyca released). Not sure if it’s getting crowded quickly or slowing down now.

Part 1: Pre-launch numbers 📆

Let’s dive right into the pre-launch Wishlist (WL) chart:

As you can see, my entire strategy for building WLs was through Content Creators and Festivals. I also posted on r/incremental_games which helped to a decent degree (got maybe around 800-900 WLs total from the 4 posts I made)
Here is a YouTube playlist with all the major incremental game YouTubers that covered Lyca: Playlist

I reached out to ~40 content creators with my demo in January, which led to 6 videos of sizeable impact. My publisher (Pretty Soon) did a creator outreach round right before launch, which led to a good tail of videos as well (ImCade, Blitz, RCE, etc.). Pretty Soon was also able to get the launch trailer on the main IGN channel.

At launch, Lyca had ~12,000 outstanding WLs, which was much higher than my goal of 7000. I had set 7000 as a goal since that was the approximate number for getting into Popular Upcoming (PU) list on Steam. However, Lyca got into the PU list with just ~5500 WLs during the February Next Fest.
I’m not sure if having a tight 3 month marketing timeline helped or hurt the game overall. On one hand, it feels like it could’ve gotten more coverage and built more WLs but on the other hand, looking at the stretch of time after Steam Next Fest, WLs are pretty stagnant.

Demo was a key part of the marketing, and especially because of the genre. The artwork in game is quite basic (I did it all myself), so the appeal of the game comes from actually playing it. Demos are also the key that unlock Fests and Creators for marketing.

The demo stats for Lyca are quite strong, with a Median playtime of 48 mins with 12,709 players. According to Chris Zukowski’s benchmarks, Lyca falls under the Gold tier. Not quite Diamond because the demo itself is about 45-50 mins to finish, and is not endlessly playable. If it was, I’m assuming the demo playtimes would be even higher. Also, I must note that Median playtime is a much more important stat than Average playtime (since average can be skewed by outliers).
I was unfortunately not able to get into Trending Free during the Demo Launch, despite using the email Wishlisters button (with around ~1800 WLs at demo launch). From what I’ve seen after observing the Trending Free tab for a few months is that you need ~100 CCUs (Concurrent Users) in your demo to hit the tab.

Next Fest went pretty much as expected, WL growth wise. I entered Next Fest with around ~4950 WLs and ended with around ~7350. Overall, I was happy with the result. This was a slightly updated build as well, but save functionality was added after Next Fest. The spike on 3/2 is partly due to the DangerouslyFunny video in my opinion. I think Steam looks at the demo plays and WL adds within this time and adjusts visibility, but it’s possible to influence it with external traffic (unlike the Discovery Queue).

A very large part of the success of Lyca was because of the Steam Page itself. The capsule, descriptions, trailer and screenshots are well optimized, and the tags are very carefully picked to make sure the Steam Algorithm shows the game to the correct audience (incremental game fans).

At launch, Lyca had 499 followers on Steam (11,999 WLs) which gives it a follower to WL ratio of 1:24. This is much much lower than the expected 1:10 range. I’m not very sure what this is supposed to indicate; I’ve read that having very low follower count can indicate low quality WLs or poor conversion, but that didn’t turn out to be the case for Lyca. My guess is that for a short, cozy, incremental game, players are much more likely to just wishlist the game and not bother following it, since they don’t expect much in terms of regular updates or significant changes.

Part 2: Launch 🚀

There are generally 2 strategies I was considering for the launch on Steam. If I had a lot of WLs and the game was hot, I might’ve tried launching on Friday, since the game would’ve probably stayed on New and Trending (N+T) over the weekend. The other strategy (that I used for Lyca) was to launch on Monday if I was not sure I’d get into New and Trending. I entered PU on the front page on Friday and stayed there for 3 days getting ~1000 WLs per day, and launched on Monday. Immediately, the game entered New and Trending, and stayed there for almost 5 full days, giving a huge boost to sales. My guess is that the momentum from the long PU converted really well, and the Steam Algorithm kept the game up on N+T since it kept selling well. A 14-day 20% launch discount also probably helped, combined with the $4.99 base price ($3.99 on Discount) that falls in the impulse-buy range.

The game entered N+T almost exactly at ~$8000 gross revenue, and the Discovery Queue (DQ) when it got 10 reviews.
For the pricing strategy, I looked at about 10 of the most similar games to Lyca (all incrementals) and their prices, and took the average price. I also made sure the amount of content is proportional to the price (for example, Lyca is priced slightly higher than Digseum but has a slightly longer playtime. It’s priced lower than To The Core, but is also shorter). It’s hard to estimate whether a lower price would’ve led to a lot more sales, or whether a higher price would’ve tanked sales.

The week 1 and month 1 sales were consistently ~80% higher than my projections. My goal for Lyca was to recoup $30,000 net (after Steam cut and publisher cut) and I was able to reach that in less than 1 month.

As expected, Discovery Queue was a huge driver of visibility during launch week. The curve looks like a typical Silver-Gold tier launch on Steam. I don’t know if Diamond tier would be achievable for a tiny incremental game with basic pixel artwork. Steam also shows the game in DQ to players of similar genre, which is probably why Lyca had a good DQ week. Tags are probably super critical for making sure the game is shown to people who would be interested in it.

By Day 3, Lyca had crossed 100 reviews and by Day 7, 200 reviews. The reviews fluctuated between 76-82%, but stabilized at 81% after a couple of quick patches addressing performance issues. Currently, the game is sitting at 638 reviews at 84% positive.

While Steam doesn’t cut visibility for games based on review score (as long as it’s Mixed or above), I’ve noticed that similar games with higher review scores do significantly better, which makes me think that having a high Steam score really affects how likely players are to buy the game. It also probably affects how likely content creators are to cover the game.

Lyca has 638 reviews currently, which gives a review to sales ratio of 1:63. For some reason, this is significantly lower than the average 1:30 ratio. I have no idea why this is the case, but Lyca should have over 1300 reviews for the number of units sold so far. I’ve noticed that Lyca has much stronger long-tail sales compared to other games with similar review count (this was pointed out to me by several other devs as well). My guess is that while the review count for Lyca is low, the gross sales are much higher, so it is promoted by the Steam algorithm on a similar level as games with ~1300 reviews (at $5 price). I have no explanation for why the review count is so low though.

Part 3: Bundles 🎁

At launch, having bundles with some already-successful incremental games like Nodebuster and Digseum helped a lot.
I’ve also consistently bundled with other incremental game devs around their game launch, which helps both them as well as me.
Currently, the bundles account for ~37% of gross revenue of Lyca, with the 2 largest coming from Nodebuster (~14% of gross revenue) and Digseum (~9% of gross revenue). I’m not sure exactly how to determine how much higher the revenue is because of the bundles though. Would those people have bought the game if it wasn’t part of the bundle? And what percent of those people would have?

Overall, I’ve concluded 3 things from the bundles:

1. Games that have a ton of sales (like Nodebuster, Digseum) will have a lot of traffic on their store page at all times, and having a bundle with them means a long tail of impressions and sales.

2. Games that I bundled with at their launch (Minutescape, Pinata Go Boom, Astro Prospector, etc) gave a good boost to Lyca’s sales, but also helped their launch numbers.

3. Fans of a genre are always hungry for more similar games. It’s a good idea to bundle up with a small discount. Works especially well for tiny games with an impulse-buy price range.

Part 4: Daily Deal 🏆

After crossing $100,000 gross revenue, My publisher and I decided to reach out to Steam (with a support ticket) to see if we can get a Daily Deal, and they agreed.

Lyca had a Daily Deal on September 15, 2025. My estimate for sales on the day was $10,000, which Lyca hit almost exactly ($10,290). We did a slightly steeper discount (40%), and extended it by a full 2 weeks. The Steam Autumn sale was starting exactly on the day the 2 week discount ended, and Steam let us extend by another week into the Autumn sale. This 3 week period (including the Daily Deal) grossed the game over $25,000.

The Daily Deal was the 2nd biggest day for Concurrent Users (CCUs), and sales, and the single biggest day for WL adds.

I also used a visibility round and released an update at the same time as the Daily Deal. I bundled up with Pinata Go Boom, which launched on the same day as Lyca’s Daily Deal, which I think helped both games a lot. The Lyca bundle is the strongest performing bundle for Pinata Go Boom (as far as I know, from what the dev told me).

Part 5: Visibility 👁️

To no surprise, the vast majority of traffic for Lyca comes from Steam itself. The home page and DQ comprise almost 50% of all visibility for the game. External traffic contributes to only ~4% of total visits for the game. I’ve already done a breakdown of the DQ traffic above so I’ll more on to the Home Page traffic more here.

Again unsurprisingly, N+T and Daily Deal are the biggest 2 sources of visibility for Lyca. An interesting thing to note here though is that while Lyca was on N+T for almost 5 days, it got more than twice the total impressions of N+T from the Daily Deal (in a single day). However, the click-through rate on N+T is much higher, which contributed to higher visits to my game’s page. I’m guessing that this is because people who check the N+T tab are a lot more likely to buy more games and try it out than people who just check the front page deals. They’re probably a lot more regular users, and being on N+T also means the game has the novelty factor that pulls people in.
Another interesting thing to note is that PU tab has less than a third of the impressions of N+T, despite Lyca being on it for 3 days. N+T tab is already visible on the front page of Steam, whereas PU is 1 click away. That 1 click is probably a huge factor in the lower impressions, combined with the fact that N+T games are a little more proven and are already available to purchase.

These last stats are not really that important, but it’s cool knowing where most visits for Lyca are coming from. Also, looking at the total impressions and visits is pretty humbling. Steam is unfathomably huge, considering the fact that only a minuscule fraction of total Steam users have bought and played my game, and I’m still able to make a living from it.

Part 6: Today (6 months since launch) ⌛

In this section I’m going to just highlight trends for the lifetime of the game and highlight key moments. I’ll also have some comments about the overall performance of the game.

UPDATE: Lyca has crossed $150,000 gross revenue as of 15 October 2025! 🥳

Immediately, I have to acknowledge again that Lyca has seriously overperformed my expectations. It’s smashed our 1 year sales projections in less than 6 months.

Steam net revenue is about 85.3% of the gross revenue. Out of the 14.7% taken out, 5.4% are returns, so 9.3% seems to be chargebacks and taxes. 5.4% returns is below average (according to Chris’s benchmarks) so I’m pretty happy about that. The low price also probably helps with that, since people would be more inclined to return a more expensive game if they didn’t like it.

By country, the US has the vast majority of sales for Lyca (38.6%). Region wise, North America and Europe are the biggest chunks of contributors to sales.
Japan has been a large audience that we managed to tap into, but the game hasn’t been able to grab hold of people in China despite some outreach efforts. I’ve noticed other incremental games recently like Keep On Mining! that have managed to really capture huge audiences in Asia. I’ll have to look into how to do that for my next game.

Regardless, based on the returns, localization was more than worthwhile of an effort.

Quick comments about lifetime WLs:

Unsurprisingly, the two major WL spikes are at release and Daily Deal. The thing to note here is that WLs grow in spikes, especially pre-release, from things like announcement, demo release, content creators and festivals. The resting WL rate post release is also much higher than pre-release (seen in the graph below)

Cool thing to see is how steadily total purchases have risen over time, instead of plateauing out like I expected it to.
The total outstanding wishlists only have had a couple of dips (due to points of high conversion) during sales, but they have also mostly been rising. Looking closely, there are tiny bumps in the total purchases line (lime green), which correspond to the sales for Lyca. Steam emails wishlisters of the game if it’s on sale for more than 20% off, which causes conversion and little spikes in purchases. Turns out that these sales are quite effective, but still don’t cause that much of an impact to conversion. It’s not like half of my wishlisters suddenly decided to buy the game because it’s 40% off.

Not much to see here except the WL lifetime conversion rate, which is nice to know that it’s above average. I wonder how much the high conversion rate simply is due to the genre. I’d somehow like to find out how the conversion rate compares to other incremental games.

The game’s retention stats seem decent, although they’re significantly less than some of my reference games like Nodebuster and Digseum, at least based on the achievement completion %.

For Lyca, the Monsoon achievement happens right before the credits roll, so I can safely assume that ~60% of players rolled credits on the game. Maybe the number is a bit higher due to the fact that not everyone has achievements enabled or is connected to the internet while playing the game. However, only ~32% have completed all achievements, which doesn’t take much longer after you reach credits (maybe ~20 mins more). I have gotten a few reviews/comments talking about it being tedious to get all achievements. I think a big part of this is because I locked the endless upgrades behind the milestones/challenges, which not everyone did. There were a few tricky challenges in there as well, so only the people that completed them found it easy to get all achievements. For everyone else, it became a slog. I definitely need to avoid this for the next game.

Quick note: Median playtime is 3 hours 41 mins which is approximately the amount of time it takes to beat the game. Accounting for the fact that some people can beat it even quicker, over half of the people that played the game probably beat it (which confirms the 60% Monsoon achievement stat).

Looking again at the CCU chart for Lyca, there’s a few conclusions I’ve drawn based on what I think (take with a grain of salt):

• A 400+ CCU launch is quite good, and most games that I’ve seen with similar or higher CCU do quite well in the long run (tiny indie games only)

• The game never flattened, and constantly has between 10-30 people playing the game, which is good to see. This either indicates a constant stream of sales, or people who like playing the game endlessly, or both.

• The CCU chart is somewhere in between a linear game that can be beaten in 1 sitting and an endlessly replayable game (although much much closer to the linear 1 time play game). The incremental game genre is simply more conducive to higher CCUs, as people let them run in the background. However, I’d like the CCU graph of my next incremental game to look something like Ropuka. The idle + endless modes of Lyca are very basic and don’t really incentivize people to keep playing long after they’ve beaten the game. I want to try and figure out a way to make a really good endless mode if possible, although that might be a bit out of my scope for now.

Part 7: Key Learnings and Takeaways 💭

Keeping scope small really helped with making the game and sticking to the dev timeline. However, there were several other factors that synergized with this tiny game approach that led to the success of Lyca:

• Incremental games are a great genre for tiny games, with a pretty hungry player base, leading to high conversion rates and above average CCU/playtimes.

• The small price point and bundles helped tremendously with sales, along with frequent discounts (above 20%, which triggers steam to send an email to wishlisters)

• Content Creators are a huge part of the success of Lyca, and incremental games in general seem to be doing quite well currently among content creators. I need to grow my database of content creators for outreach, it’s at about ~120 creators currently (which is tiny compared to the 5,000-20,000 that most publishers have).

• Discovery Queue is a huge driver of visibility on Steam, and getting to 10 reviews ASAP is super important. Once you’re on it though, there’s nothing you can do to influence it, other than just having a good game. However, having good tags meant Lyca was probably shown to more people who already like those type of game (casual incrementals like Nodebuster, or tiny cozy games) and the conversion was good. Note to self: Make sure the tags are good!

• Capsule + Logo is quite important for visits, but also to set expectations for players. It’s obviously good to have a nice illustrated capsule made by a professional, but I’m also glad I kept it simple and representative of the game so people weren’t expecting a something of a larger scope like The First Tree or Okami. A lot of much simpler capsules have worked for other incremental games (Digseum, Tower Wizard, etc). Speaking of setting expectations, having very clear expected playtime in the description probably helped.

• Localization is a must, and the sooner I’ve set up systems in game for localization, the better, since it is a very long and tedious process.

• Daily Deals are obviously amazing, and I should reach out to Steam when I’m around $100,000 gross revenue to request one.

• Demos are the most important thing pre-release. I need to get one out ASAP, since that’s what kickstarts content creator coverage and eligibility in festivals. However, getting into Trending Free seems to be quite difficult (~100 CCUs). I’ll try to get into it but I don’t know if it’s worth delaying the demo launch significantly for it (since the impact is probably still far lower than just getting it out and having creators play it).

• I want to try to make my next incremental game a lot more endlessly playable, or have a game mode that incentivizes replays to boost CCUs and median playtimes. Maybe these modes can be added later in an update?

• The main complaints I’ve gotten for the game are its pacing, performance and short playtime. Having a super smooth progression curve (with no cheeky challenges or hurdles like snow) would be more appreciated by incremental game players. Having a score of 90+ on Steam seems to boost the conversion and word-of-mouth significantly, so that’s what I’ll be aiming for.

Overall, there’s a lot I can take from how Lyca went and try to replicate that in my next game(s). There are also a good number of changes/improvements to implement in my next game, so I’ll get to work on that!

In my next blog, I’ll give a detailed outline of my currently business plan and how it originated. This will be quite useful for me as I haven’t really written it down properly yet (although it’s been almost a year now since I’ve started on it).
Please stay tuned!

- Shaun

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3914450/Hear_The_Bell_Toll_Demo/

This is an expanded version of the playtest, with a bunch of balancing changes, 2 new biomes and 2 new difficulty modifiers, as well as more polishing tweaks!

The demo content includes:
- 30 buildings across 8 classes to build your city and get synergies

- 50 unique game-changing modifiers in the form of Banners

- 3 Status Effects (Crime, Sickness, Unrest) to manage and 15 Calamities to survive

Any and all feedback is welcome :) (best place to give feedback and chat directly with me is the Discord!)
Thanks a lot for playing, and I hope you enjoy it!

Also, there is a shiny new trailer for the game, check it out!:

Please stay tuned for more news,

- Shaun (dev)

Hi everyone!

It's been a while since the last update, and I'm really excited to share that Lyca has surpassed over 30,000 players in its lifetime! It's been amazing to see how far this tiny game has come, and to celebrate, we're doing a few things:

- A new update (v 1.2.0) is live now with 4 new cat skins! The last one is Donuts, my own beloved cat who unfortunately crossed the rainbow bridge earlier this year... I really wanted to add him to the game :)

The update also includes a number of fixes, including a potential fix for a crash that a small number of players were experiencing when launching the game (related to loading the save file). If you were experiencing this issue, please download the update and let me know if it's working now (in the comments of this announcement)!

- The game is currently 40% off and we've partnered with Steam for a Daily Deal, which is live now! If you've not picked up the game yet, this is the best time to do that!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3421300/Lyca/

- We've partnered with the dev of a new amazing incremental game Piñata Go Boom, which released today, for a bundle! If you enjoyed Lyca, definitely give it a shot, and you can pick it up for an extra 10% off as part of the bundle:
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/59160/Lyca_x_Piata_Go_Boom/

- I wrote a little blog post about how I developed Lyca! If you're interested in reading about it, you can find it here:

- Lastly, in case you missed it, here's my new game Hear The Bell Toll! I'm working with Pretty Soon again to bring it to you, and you can wishlist it here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3903610/Hear_The_Bell_Toll/

I wanted to thank you all for being part of this journey, and for playing the game!
Until next time, see you all soon!

- Shaun (dev)

Welcome to my first blog post! I've been meaning to start it for a while, not for any other reason than to just have written documentation of my learnings on my game dev journey, so I can look back and remember everything. I've already forgotten quite a few details over the last months and years but better start late than never! Also, hopefully some other people can find these thoughts interesting or informative, so I'm keeping them open to everyone. :)

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Lyca - Development Log

Link to Steam page

TLDR: ⏰

• Inspired by Nodebuster and a variety of factors, but also due to desperation and lack of time and funds.

• I frantically brainstormed ideas and chose one without validating it. I was lucky it worked out!

• The development was smooth but hectic due to balancing multiple projects. Lyca was really fun to work on, and I managed to stick well to my timeline!

• Release went well with a couple of hiccups that I managed to scrape by. So far, the game has surpassed all my goals with over 30,000 copies sold!

Part 1: Concept and Inspiration 💡

In November 2024, I was deep in production on 2 different game projects: one was a contract dev job, and the other was a solo project. There was also a 3rd group project I was kind of dabbling in. My contract was ending in February, after which I had no source of income, and my savings were already drained from a very rough 2024. I was putting a lot of hopes and dreams into that solo project as my last chance of keeping the full time indie dream alive, but things were not looking great... That project was codenamed Project Boxworlds (there is a playable demo of it still up on itch.io: https://syphono4.itch.io/project-boxworlds-demo) and it's a world-hopping puzzle platformer, mostly inspired by Cocoon, which was my favorite game of 2024. Interest in that project from players was low, and feedback on the prototype wasn't promising...

It was around this time (late November) that Chris Zukowski was doing a bunch of media rounds and podcasts and the YouTube algorithm gods blessed me with one of his videos. Immediately, I dove into the rabbit hole that is howtomarketagame.com, and was pretty upset with myself that I hadn't known about it before. Regardless, I also stumbled across other influential people like Jonas Tyroller and Xalavier Nelson Jr., who also drastically changed my mentality towards game dev, and I ended up forming a new business model for my company (more on that in a future blog post).

It was around the same time that the YouTube algorithm blessed me again, this time with a video of Wanderbots playing the game Nodebuster. It's a small incremental game that I became quite mesmerized by and decided to try out. I immediately fell in love with it and was inspired, knowing that I could reasonably make a similar scoped game in about 4 months before my money ran out. Thanks to Chris Zukowski, I knew that incremental games were doing well on Steam, and the success of Nodebuster gave me a lot of hope!

Part 2: Brainstorming and pre-production 🧠

It was already December 2024, and I had no time to waste. I already had a small Scotland trip planned with my girlfriend (now fiancée!) later in the month so I essentially only had 3.5 months to make this game. I started brainstorming, and interestingly, the first 2 ideas that came to my mind were an incremental Asteroids game and an incremental mining game inspired by the Pokemon Diamond mining mini-game. I was surprised to learn that both of these ideas were already taken by 2 devs who had Steam pages up for Deep Space Cache and Digseum (both great games). I eventually went with my 3rd idea, which came about organically while I was prototyping an interactive 2D grass shader in GameMaker. While taking a shower, I decided to try making a game about a white wolf that spreads nature to a wasteland, inspired by Okami. I didn't have time to validate the idea, so I just dove straight into it!

I prototyped the visuals and gameplay separately, making very quick progress with the simple game systems and upgrades. I made Lyca's sprite using a 3D wolf model from the internet as a reference and it was already resembling the game as it is today

Even at this early stage, it was quite fun to run around, gather resources and unlock upgrades, so I knew I was onto something. It was around this time that I realized how fast I had gotten with making prototypes and playable demos of games in GameMaker. I had made some ~15 odd game-jam games and prototypes, so I knew the engine quite well, and was able to make a solid alpha build of the demo in about a week!

Before leaving for Scotland, I formed a marketing and development plan, in which I outlined the major festivals I'd want to be a part of, my release timeline, the YouTubers/streamers I want to contact to play my game and the release of my demo. I outlined all the features and upgrades I thought were feasible in this timeline and didn't consider anything that I wasn't confident I could make easily. I was brainstorming names for the game, and Lyca kind of stuck with my and my girlfriend, so I went with it.

Part 3: Development 🔨

Lyca was a solo developed project by me, including the the design, programming, sound, and in-game art. The music however is royalty-free lofi music by one of my favorite lofi composers - Purrple Cat. I also asked one of my favorite artists Almir Gusic to do the Key Art, which is the artwork used in the Steam capsules and assets.

I set up a Steam Page in January when I was back in London. This was around the same time that a playable demo of Lyca was ready (made in about 2 weeks total). I machine translated it (I would later of course get it translated by professionals) and sent it to a bunch of YouTubers. I hadn't done any kind of external testing at this point, and had only done a day or two of testing myself for any critical bugs, so I was quite nervous but I didn't have a choice. I set the Steam page live and posted about it in r/incremental_games (which is the only place I posted). The next day though I was surprised to see that the game had already amassed over 500 wishlists! This gave me a huge boost in confidence and I kept testing and polishing the demo for the public release, which was about a week away. A couple of days later though, I noticed a very large spike in wishlists, bringing my total to something like 1600. I scraped through the list of YouTubers I sent the demo to, and found that InterndotGif had played the demo and made a video about it already! This was doubly surprising, as I had mentioned an embargo for the demo release day. But honestly, I was more than happy with the video and the influx of wishlists!

The wishlists then stagnated to about 1800, by the time I released the demo at the end of January. Luckily, Wanderbots and Idle Cub released videos at the same time, and brought in a good amount of traffic and wishlists to the game. The Steam Idle Fest began a few days later, and I was getting a solid daily wishlist rate throughout the fest.

After the Idle Fest, I had gathered a good amount of feedback about the game, especially with balancing, performance and ideas for future upgrades. I ended up disabling reviews for the demo, as I found it quite distracting and stressful at the time, but I've since realized that leaving demo reviews up is quite useful to gather feedback. The rest of February was unfortunately quite busy though with my other contract project, so I wasn't able to work much on Lyca, other than a few fixes and tweaks.

Steam Next Fest in February got me about 2300 wishlists, and soon after, my game got a "wishlist rank" on SteamDB, which means that it was eligible to appear in Popular Upcoming on steam. That was pretty much my wishlist goal before launch, so I considered it a success already and decided to focus all my efforts into making the best possible game within the last month I had. At the time, I had set March 31 as the tentative release date, but decided to push it by 1 week to April 7, since there were tons of other indie games releasing on March 31, which would lower my chances of appearing and staying on New and Trending.

The first couple of weeks of March were quite frantic, with me implementing the entire second half of the upgrade tree, skins, music, idle mode, etc. during that short timeframe. I was quite happy with my progress, and things were going quite well. I also managed to make a decent enough settings menu and put in some quality of life improvements to the game.

Around mid-March, a publisher named Pretty Soon contacted me, saying they were interested in partnering with me. I was always just planning to self-publish, but I decided to talk to them just in case they offered something interesting. Surprisingly, they were very eager and even completely encouraged sticking to my timeline of an April 7 release. I decided that I could use their help with marketing (especially in Asia), QA testing and localization. We negotiated for a co-publishing agreement and ended up signing in only a couple of days! In hindsight, having Pretty Soon with me was a HUGE help, as their testing, marketing and localization help look an immense load off my shoulders, making the week leading up to release breezy, smooth and stress-free.

I think I'm quite surprised at how well I was able to stick to my original timeline for the development and marketing for Lyca, pretty much exactly to the day! Keeping the scope manageable was key to achieving that.

Part 4: Release 🎯

In the week leading up to release, Pretty Soon negotiated an exclusive trailer deal with IGN, marketed the game in Asia, and sent out content creator pitches. We even had RCE write back to us, and I ended up putting his dog (Paddy) in the game, which prompted him to make another video a couple of months later! Despite the week before launch being smooth, launch itself was quite stressful... The first couple of days were challenging, review score wise and sales wise. The game was phasing in and out of New and Trending, and people were not happy about the game's frame-rate. I frantically pushed a couple of updates in the first few days, which definitely helped with the reviews as well as sales. A huge thing that helped with the launch was also launching on Monday, about which I will have an in-depth blog post in the future. At the moment I hit "Release My App" on Steam, Lyca had exactly 11,999 wishlists.

All in all, Lyca ended up having a successful launch, with multiple creators covering the game and the players decently satisfied. I read every comment on every YouTube video, Reddit post and every Steam review about the game. It's quite difficult to take some of the harsh comments on the chin, but it definitely helps to learn how to improve the next time. For a game I made part-time in less than 4 months of dev time, Lyca has saved my indie career. The sales for Lyca have been very surprisingly consistent, and the game has surpassed all my sales goals, with over 30,000 units sold as of today! I'm super grateful for the game and for everyone who played it and supported a small indie dev like me! :)

In the next blog, I will have a Post-Mortem on Lyca, showing all Wishlist and Sales numbers, as well as the journey post-release and any insights/learnings I took away from the development of the game.

Stay tuned!

- Shaun


Poll:

I’ve also set up a Discord server for you all to bounce off ideas, give feedback and send bug/crash reports to me directly :)
Use this link to join the Discord: https://discord.gg/6jnprbJMr9

There’s a feedback form for the demo (link in Discord as well as in the demo itself) if you wish to provide any feedback! It should take only a couple of mins to fill out.

Thanks, and stay tuned for more updates soon!
- Shaun

Coming 2025!

Wishlist on Steam now!: Steam Page

Also, here’s the Reveal Trailer!:

Stay tuned for more updates, and a demo coming soon as well!
- Shaun

Thank you for your patience, I'm excited to say that the first major update for the game is live now!

This update includes:

1. A substantial optimization patch: I was pretty much at my wits end trying to make fixes for weeks with no results, when I turned to Felix Borchert AKA BinaryCounter (the programmer of Backpack Hero) for help. With his wizard-like skills, he has reworked the grass shader in the game from scratch to look and run much better than before! He has also made a bunch of other changes and fixes that improve the performance. All of your feedback has been invaluable in making the game better!

2. Low-FPS mode has been removed: This is due to the new grass shader, as it no longer works the same way. The button still exists in the settings menu but won't do anything if enabled.

3. 5 new skins have been added to the game! These are all special doggos that I've wanted to put in the game since I came up with the game concept. I know there are a lot of skin requests, and I'll try to add more over time :) (A lot of people have asked for the DVD logo, but that's trademarked so I don't think I'll be able to put that in, sorry!)

4. A few smaller fixes and tweaks

To celebrate the release of the new update, the game is currently on sale for 20% off!

We are also bundling with the wonderful game Spirit City: Lofi Sessions, which is one of my favorite idle games to chill with while working! If you want even more incremental dopamine along with more chill lofi music, you can pick the game up through the bundle for an extra 10% off!

Please try out the game with the new update and continue to provide feedback so we can keep making the game better! :) Also, please keep giving suggestions for any future skins you would want in the game!
Link to the game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3421300/Lyca/

Talk to you all soon,

- Shaun (dev)

Btw did you know you can follow my developer account on Steam? Find it here: https://store.steampowered.com/developer/syphono4

There will be a few really cool bundles at launch as well, with some of my favorite incremental games that inspired me to make Lyca! So if you haven't tried them, pick them up as part of the bundles!

Another good news: There will be Polish translation in the game at launch!

Will keep you all updated with news about the game, leading up to release.
See you all soon, and can't wait to get the game in your hands!

- Shaun (dev)