What a Weekend | Slow Rush Games

Woah, what a weekend.

In case you missed it, last week I announced Signs of Danger, so please wishlist my game now if you haven't already!

The reception has been way better than I expected.

What is Signs of Danger?

I wrote a few words about my hopes and dreams here.

And there's an updated FAQ over here.

Also we have a subreddit for Signs of Danger now: r/signsofdanger.

How has the announcement gone?

For a no-name first-time indie dev like myself, getting 150-300 wishlists on Steam within 2 weeks after the Steam page launch is "decent". ¹

150 wishlists! That would be pretty rad to get, right?

Well, about 48 hours after the Steam page launch, the game was up to...

Over One Thousand Wishlists. (wow you can really notice the chunking artifacts in the enormous explosions there, can't you?)

I am phenomenally happy with that, especially since "side-on platformer" is an over-saturated genre and the visuals in this game are still, err, "rough".

Of course extra wishlists always help, which reminds me...

Wishlist Signs of Danger on Steam now!

(By wishlisting you'll be notified by Steam when the full game comes out, for those new to this shindig.)

I wasn't paying attention - can I buy the game now?

No, sadly not! Still gotta make the rest of the game, friendo!

The way everybody has agreed that game marketing works is:

Tease the game - with gifs & devlogs, or building a big statue in the desert. ²
Announce the game's name & (usually) Steam page with a trailer - via social media, in a gaming festival, or via a set of multimillion-dollar acrobatics stunts as one of a long sequence of very-much-paid-for commercials masquerading as an awards ceremony. ³
(Optionally) Release a playable demo on Steam, often with a new trailer. ⁴
Announce the game's release date and ship the game.⁵
Profit. ⁶

I've now officially done step 2: here's the trailer for Signs of Danger in case you missed it! ⁷

What's next?

I'm gonna continue iterating on the roguelite gameplay loop and gun/ability customization mechanic: the current system is conceptually too similar to what Noita has, despite having a very different implementation under the hood.

That means it is powerful, but it is also not understood by anyone except ex-Noita players. And currently it only allows customizing guns; I would like players to be able to power up other abilities like dashes, grappling hooks, retaliatory armour, drones, etc too. Signs of Danger should let your abilities do crazier things than Noita allows with its wands. (that's a high bar - I know!)

After that I'll aim to get a playable build (for desktop!) up on itch.io, to get better feedback and start prepping for getting a demo up on Steam.

Regarding the Visuals

I've gotten a lot of mostly-constructive criticism on Reddit around the game being "hard to read" visually, and that the art direction needs work - thank you everyone, I hear you!

I plan to rework the lighting and visual FX to improve clarity - for example fixing the hazy overlay over the background, making it so things aren't backlit and making sure projectiles are easy to spot are all items on my list.

Lighting causes a haze over the background — Lighting On (Hazy)

With lighting off, the background is clearly visible — Lighting Off (Clear)

The background-haze is super obvious if you turn lighting off and look at the backgrounds: probably I am just blending colours in a stupid way.
There's also an optional CRT filter with adds further fuzziness, but I turned that off for these shots.

Please bear with me: for now this stuff is lower priority than figuring out the ability customization stuff mentioned above, and I am neither an artist nor a graphics programming wizard - but I will do my best.

On the other hand, if you wishlist Signs of Danger on Steam then maybe I can afford to hire one or more people to make that go faster and better :)

Tips for Launching A Steam Page

I'll just stick this long list at the end here because it's not interesting to players but I know I have a few fellow gamedevs reading:

Chris Z's Wishlist Masterclass sounds lame but is actually helpful and vaguely entertaining to boot. Don't buy it full price - it goes for 50% off at least twice a year.
If you are trying to announce your game via a video livestream showcase (like I did), submit your game with video footage!! ⁸
Make a spreadsheet tracking all your launch tasks - every subreddit/discord you plan to post to, and include every task for the day before, the day of, and the day after - mine had 100+ tasks. ⁹
I posted in about 20 Discord servers¹⁰ and didn't get many click-throughs from any of them, except the Rust Gamedev server. So... go learn Rust?¹¹
Prep everything beforehand. ¹²
Create a Reddit alt account¹³ and use it to practice posting your announcement posts to make sure they 'look right',¹⁴ and read the rules/wiki in detail for the subs you aim to target. ¹⁵
Do all the prep well beforehand. Like, be done a week ahead of time, so that you can be rested and focused on the big day. I got 4-5 hours sleep for 2 nights in a row, which I would not recommend.

By the way, have I mentioned? You should wishlist Signs of Danger on Steam!

⁸

Signs of Danger almost wasn't part of the Frosty Mini 2025 showcase because originally I only sent the Frosty Team a slide deck when I submitted my game.

But fortunately after some very frantic scrambling on my part to put together a rough trailer over a weekend, they decided to squeeze Signs of Danger in.

¹⁰

In the explicit self-promotion channels or otherwise with moderator permission! Don't be thinking I'm a spammer now.

¹³

An alternate account helps ensure that various subs don't kick you out for excessive self promotion.

⁹

Don't forget to update your Discord server's onboarding flow and make your "Bios" on all the platforms link to your game.

¹²

Update your website, make a subreddit for your game, make your teaser gifs, make your subreddit-specific gifs, write all your announcement posts for twitter/bsky/reddit/mastodon/tiktok/instagram/linkedin/any alumni communities you're part of and even frickin-facebook, write all your discord messages, your press release, your email to IGN's Gametrailers YouTube channel, your own email newsletters you'll send (with their gifs), your link shorteners, your UTM tracking links, the "we're live" Steam event, etc. I prepped a lot but still had to wing at least half of that.

¹⁴

For example if you upload a video but then "edit" it to tick "post as GIF" then it will autoplay and not have sound (even though Reddit still treats it as a video). Also I learned that in r/pcgaming you can't upload a video but you can upload a 100MB gif file which reddit will also convert to a video for you.

¹⁵

For example I wanted to post to r/pcgaming and only realized the night before that developers had to message mods to get a special flair assigned, otherwise their post would get removed. I got it in time, but it was stressful.

¹¹

I kid, the amount of clicks from the Rust gamedev server was still <100, which is quite small in the scheme of things.
But still, it was weird to see more clicks from the Rust gamedev server than my own (admittedly 100x smaller) Discord server - go Rust friends, go!

See https://howtomarketagame.com/benchmarks/ for more metrics.

Mystery statue.

Acrobatics stunts courtesy of Larian Studios.

(warning, trailer is potentially NSFW)

⁴

Sometimes preceded by releasing a rougher demo on itch.io, since itch.io folks are fine with things being rough but the expectation of Steam gamers is that demos be as polished and bug-free as the final game.

⁵

I can only imagine what Larian is planning for their game's actual release trailer.

But I bet the game is gonna be great either way.

⁶

If you are Larian Studios.

The rest of us are lucky if we break even :)

⁷

And unlike a lot of studios, I used real gameplay footage for basically all of it instead of fancy pre-rendered CGI.

Though of course I did do the usual trailer editing tricks - zoom in, freeze the camera, make custom levels, etc - and some of the enemies shown are only partly implemented ;)