Indie dev (WoollyOne Games). Built Game Market Atlas to help you see where your game idea fits on Steam with data. 🇻🇦 Matthew 28:20
North Carolina, USA
Joined August 2016
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Here’s the hard truth:
There is no known meta for indie game dev with the rise of AI. Nobody knows what will end up being the smart play. Everyone’s experimenting.
I, for one, find that incredibly exciting. So, these are my personal guiding principles going into 2027. 👇
Why do AAA game studios love fantasy RPGs? Just look at Baldur's Gate 3. It had a 88% chance of massive success before it even released (according to gamemarketatlas.com). There's a HUGE appetite for massive RPGs, very little supply.
Before #indiedev's get too excited: there is a fair amount of survivorship bias. In order to even remotely resemble an RPG like Baldur's Gate you need a huge game that most won't attempt.
The games AAA studios are releasing vs the ones players are playing... not a perfect overlap!
They are straight up allergic to cozy games and stick to genres that already have more historical hits.
Instead of making a 2D platformer, make a... "Hidden Cats" game?
Absolutely insane demand in this niche!
I mapped every single #indiegame and the results are fascinating.
Every blue dot is a game with <10 reviews. A bunch of blue/green dots in a single region means devs keep making attempts in this genre with no success. Can you guess what genre is in this circle?
Interesting trend revealed by my tool Game Market Atlas. When a game defines a genre and has a strong style, copycat games are mostly similar by core loop, fantasy, and hook.
They avoid copying the art style, which I suppose makes sense.
I wish I'd had Game Market Atlas when I released my game Smiglee's Statues. Instead, I just dropped it on Steam without marketing and it flopped.
If you want a quiet niche that is ripe for the taking, consider narrative atmospheric horror!
I checked in on ToonSouls Maker, the subject of lots of viral marketing, using my new tool Game Market Atlas.
The game's less-than-stellar performance is surprising (56 reviews after all that viral marketing), until you look at the numbers. Competition was very rough on Steam.
Introducing my humble model, QURSE-1-0.2b!
QURSE is a classifier head paired with the Qwen3-ASR-0.6b audio encoder. It catches stumbles and repetitions in tongue twisters 99.57% of the time on just 1.8GB of RAM, trained locally. Details in🧵
Weights are available on HF. huggingface.co/woollyone/QUR…
Play the tongue twister game here: woolly.one/qurse-demo
Performance: In my testing, Qwen and QURSE achieved 99.57% accuracy in detecting the stumbles while not falsely flagging valid speech variance.
Crucially, it also runs on roughly 1.8GB of RAM, and thanks to the ONNYX architecture, relatively platform-independent (the WebGPU demo ran on my M2 Pro Mac and my NVIDIA RTX 5080 Windows rig. This is important because I wanted it to run on as low of a footprint as possible on most players' platforms.
Caveats and notes:
- My use-case was narrow, so I chose to synthetically generate all my training data. I found pre-existing datasets to be insufficient. For instance, the stuttering dataset SEP-28k had mislabels, multiple speakers, and incomplete sentences. The tradeoff is I don't have great authentic human speech evals (yet).
- The model runs locally I haven't tested it on a wide variety of architectures.
- Weights are open, but non-commercial for now. When I release my full game, I will de-restrict the license. However, I'm not making any guarantees this will work for many other use cases. Like I said, it's a proof of concept!
I did my best to get some traction on my flying roguelike demo. I reached out to content creators, promoted on socials…
…and I’m sitting around 38 plays, 0 ratings and 0 comments. Safe to say it’s not getting the market validation I need to bring it to Steam, so that likely brings us to the end of this game’s story.
Hopshot: Arenas is a "hare-raising" arena roguelike.
- Zip and chain hits as a flying bunny
- Upgrade stats and purchase absurd ranged weapons to keep up with the increasing madness
- Fight a snake boss at in arena 10
#godot #indiegame #roguelike