Idle Marbles
#steam-game #solo-dev
After many years of constant pitching and managing middle-sized to larger teams, I decided that after Auravale, I wanted to work on the simplest, funnest game possible.
My plan when I began this project was to focus on games where I could Discover the Fun within a few days, validate it publicly in about a month, and launch it on Steam in only 2-5 months.
Here is a 5 min overview of how things went (with a ton of gifs).
Day 1
After watching my son's eyes light up playing with his marble set, I thought to myself, "this could be a pretty fun game". So I fired up Unity later that day and started making balls and ramps, and a basic marble spawn a scoring feature.
While it wasn't fun, I did enjoy spawning marbles and watching them roll around.
Day 2
Around this time, I was playing a bunch of incremental games on r/incremental and decided that building a massive marble machine that earns more and more points was a fun direction, so I built an autospawner to generate marbles automatically.
Week 1
Camera instantly made it start to feel like a real game.
And by the end of week 1, with various level-ups for spawners, score gates, and marbles, I was legit actually having fun pushing the system to generate as many points as possible.
This was especially refreshing after spending 2 years on a game that rarely felt fun to play, even after large investments in time and resources.
Week 2
After validating (to myself at least) that this little demo was fun, I decided that I'd spend a month or two to build out a more polished and fully featured demo and post it on Itch.io with a goal to get a read on if the r/incremental group would find this game interesting.
I needed to find some better art and decided to grab some little guys from StickerPets and test out having anthropomorphic marbles.
Soon I was in love with this little guys and building massive machines with them.
My 8-year-old daughter got excited and drew some art that I had to get into the game for her. Even though they didn't make it into the final game, she did do some later designs that are probably going to make it in the final game.
I ended the week creating new gizmos such as trampolines, speed boosters, vertical launchers, and sticky walls.
Here is the last level built with basic primitives in Unity.
Week 3
After developing a lot of the systems for the core gameplay, I decided it was time to upgrade the art, so hit the asset store looking for good art.
I found a marble asset pack from Kenny.nl (thanks Kenny!) and after finagling some sizing issues, recoloring some assets, and making 9 slicing adjustments, everything was looking pretty good.
I thought I was a day or two away from launching the prototype on Itch.io, but boy was I wrong.
I won't go into too many details, but here is a quick overview:
- Save system that tracked every gizmo's position, level, and attributes.
- Support for multiple scenes, including a core scene that handled all core systems and content scenes for every level (and integrating all of that into the save system).
- A dynamically built store that pulled all gizmo prefabs and added them into the store
- A ghost gizmo system that would spawn a gizmo when you dragged it out of the store and then changed you for it when you let go of the button to drop it into the play space.
After a month of work, I was pretty happy with how the demo turned out. Even though it is pretty simple, the game still felt fun even after 100+ hours of playing the same 2-3 levels, so I felt like it had a pretty good shot.
Part II: Demo results on Reddit/Itch.io
It all ended with 2 simple gifs that served as a trailer when I posted it on Reddit, which ended up netting >30k hits on Reddit and a pretty successful demo on Itch.io.
Because this post ended up being much longer than I expected, I'm going to need to break this up into a part II post where share more about how it went and how I approached marketing on Reddit.