Blog #1 - Lyca Development Log

The ~4 month development journey of making Lyca

Note: Future blog posts will NOT come with an email notification like this one, I'm only sending an email for the first blog to make everyone aware that I'm starting one! Poll at the bottom

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. :)

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


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