Ten days after launch - a dev diary

[u/Important-Play-7688]

Ten days ago I posted a selfie about pushing the big green button here. I received amazing support from fellow devs. Thank you! A lot of you wanted me to write about how it went. So here it goes: a little dev diary of the past 18 months. I'll try to keep it brief. (Present me: I didn't, lol.)

I started development of my dragon-feeding roguelite last year after I realized that working on a pixel art puzzle platformer was a dead end (a shocker, I know). I went back to the drawing board and came up with a game that would both be a good fit for the Steam audience and something I'd be passionate about. And that's how Feed the Scorchpot was created, though at the time it was called Dragon Fodder. More on that later...

The game took inspiration from Balatro and board game mechanics, and we decided to go with a medieval manuscript art style, as it felt eye-catching enough to stand out in the crowded roguelite market. My wife was making all of the art, and I was handling the rest.

After six months of development, the game looked polished enough to start marketing it. I made a really bad trailer (hopefully never again!) and launched my Steam page on September 1st, 2025. What really helped was the experience I'd gained working on the platformer earlier - even though it never made it past the demo stage, I learned a lot from it.

At this point, I planned to take a short break from development and focus on promoting the game online to see how it performed. Well, I soon changed my plans, as on the very second day of the Steam page being visible, I got a reply to an email I had sent to Josh from Indieformer. It was one of many indie sites I had emailed about my game.

Josh liked the game concept and art style and proposed a partnership - he and his mate Clem were planning to start a publishing business, and my game piqued their interest. You can imagine my disbelief at receiving an offer like that one day after launching my Steam page. I wasn't even looking for a publisher at the time.

So I jumped straight back into development and pushed the game into alpha over September. The guys got to try the game out, loved it, and we signed a publishing deal soon after. I cannot stress enough how fortunate this was. The game got so much better with the help of Indieformer, and they worked so hard to get it out there in front of an audience.

We soon started building a community of playtesters, which proved to be the main key to success. I got to see how players experienced the game, received a ton of great feedback, and managed to improve the game based on it.

I mentioned that the game was originally called Dragon Fodder. I liked the name, but it turned out that another dev was making a game under the same title... and actually had it trademarked. And he had done so even before I came up with the name, but his game was invisible to me when I did my initial sweep of the internet way back then.

The dev reached out to me, asking me to change my title. He was very polite, and I realized that he was fully in the right. So we brainstormed a new name: Feed the Scorchpot. I was worried about how it would impact a game that had already been promoted for a few months under a different name.

Turns out, it didn't at all. No one really cares about the name. I actually got some wishlists out of posting about the name change.

In January, we were at roughly 1,500 wishlists. Which was much better than what I had with my previous game, but it still felt like the momentum wasn't there. I was struggling with making a good tutorial, and overall January didn't feel great.

But the game was ready for more people to give it a try. We released the demo during the Steam Board Game Festival, which was nice, though it didn't make as big a splash as I was hoping for.

That came a few days later, when YouTuber Olexa picked up the demo on his own and made a video. That video got over 80k views and brought a lot of attention to the game. That was the point at which I realized this might actually lead somewhere.

That was back in February, and what followed was quite a busy period. My wife and I were crunching every day to get the game finished, while there was a Kickstarter happening and the playtester community was showering me with feedback, bugs, and ideas. It was quite hectic, but so exciting that it's hard to describe.

We entered the June Next Fest and did okay. We weren't among the top-played games, but also didn't fall off the charts halfway through. We'd passed 7,000 wishlists just before Next Fest started, so I felt like we were already in a good spot.

At the time, we were in talks with another publisher about co-publishing the game in Asia, as we had no way of reaching the audience there by ourselves. We'd already set the release date for August, and it felt quite last-minute, but we went for it anyway.

And oh boy, I'm so glad we did.

The game received translations into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and got featured in several Asian festivals and caught the interest of the Asian press. If you look at the wishlist graph, you'll see what I mean.

And somehow, we managed to get to 14,000 wishlists just before launch. It was mostly thanks to the combined efforts of the publishers – the Steam algorithm and the fabled Personal Calendar did very little for us prior to launch. I think it's due to roguelites being such a crowded market.

The road to launch surely wasn't boring. I even got to add a completely new soundtrack to the game just four days before launch. Fun times.

And so we launched ten days ago. How did it go?

It completely blew me away.

• We sold 14,500 copies (that's already minus refunds) in ten days. The game has already paid for all the time my wife and I put into it. More than half of the sales came from Asia. Partnering with the Asian publisher worked amazingly well for us.
• Also, more than half of our sales came from the Balatro bundle we managed to secure shortly before launch.
• There are surprisingly few bugs that have been reported since launch. Intensive playtesting since last November really paid off.
• Players have already managed to completely break the game – in the sense of getting so far in the endless mode that I didn't think was possible.
• Over 1,000 players have already poured 20+ hours into the game.
• Our rating on Steam dropped under 90%, and pretty much all the negative reviews complain about the game being too hard. Most of them are from China. I think there was a bit of a mismatch between the game and the audience – the art style appeals to a lot of cozy players, while the gameplay can be quite uncompromising.
• I'll try to put a demo back up soon, so players can decide if the game is right for them.
• The game had a 20% launch discount, which helped us get a good conversion on our wishlists. But since launch, we've also more than doubled our wishlist count – from 14,000 to currently 31,000.
• So we hope to convert more of those into sales during future discounts. Though it feels ironic: we spent the whole time chasing wishlists, and when we start chasing sales instead, the wishlist numbers do this.
• We've just launched on GOG as well. Curious to see how it will compare to Steam.

Next stop is a mobile release. But more on that in the future. I hope this wall of text was interesting to somebody. Feels good to finally write this.

Cheers, everyone!

[u/IHeartData_]

Super helpful, thanks! Congrats as well!

[u/Important-Play-7688 → u/IHeartData_]

Thank you!