>>1495109 >fuckable playable characters

Make it gay and as anti-hetero as you can. Then watch the money flow.

>Open World Survival Crafting Make that and you will be a millionaire.

>>1495646 You forgot >procedural generation

Have connections to someone famous already, advertise exclusively to furries and zoomers, and make your game as insufferable as humanly possible. Simple.

>>1495729 Eh... V Rising and Enshrouded prove you don't actually need that.

>>1495109 Lets test your criteria on a few major indie games. The Binding of Isaac >🗹memorable soundtrack This might be debatable, I don't recall the OG Binding of Isaac soundtrack, I only recall the remake soundtrack <☒simple gameplay, low difficulty The gameplay is simple to understand, but difficult to master. >🗹heavy story/lore focus No debating this >🗹lots of characters Technically they are all Isaac <☒twitter art style Nope <☒one main gimmick This is debatable I suppose. It is a procedural generated game, but its also has the gimmick of being easy to pick up but hard to master >🗹obviously inspired by [insert retro game] This is 100% undeniable <☒short playtime (6-12 hours max) Isaac has got to be one of the most re-playable games I have every played. Hell, I never 100% the remake with all the DLC <☒waifu/husbando bait for twitter art Edmund may have a rather twisted creatitivty, but there is no way in hell that Isaac was husbando bait >>1495602 <☒ gay and as anti-hetero While there are some seemingly gay concepts explored in it, such as Isaac putting on a wig and walking around in a dress, that is specifically a reference to the childhood abuse of a friend of Edmund had to endure. >>1495646 <☒Open World Survival Crafting Nope >>1495729 <☒procedural generation Yup >>1495778 >🗹Have connections to someone famous already Kind of. Edmund was already a notable developer when he made Isaac, as Super Meat Bot was a notable indie success, but he didn't get as big as he is now until after Isaac. <☒ advertise exclusively to furries and zoomers I don't think he advertised it at all. There are no furry elements to it, and most of the game it references are far before zoomers time. >🗹make your game as insufferable as humanly possible If you define insufferable as difficult then yes.

>>1495826 Lets test your criteria on a few major indie games. Mouthwashing <memorable soundtrack I could not tell you anything about the sound track if you put a gun to my head >simple gameplay, low difficulty Yup, its mostly a walking sim <heavy story/lore focus While it is story driven, very little time is spent on fleshing out the world that Mouthwasing is set in. We no next to nothing about the Pony Express other then its creates a hostile work environment by design <lots of characters The game features a very small cast <twitter art style Nope. <one main gimmick I'd argue that it has at least two gimmicks, one being the bleakness of the game, and the other being the unreliability of its narration <obviously inspired by [insert retro game] Its inspired by the aesthetics of PS1 games, but I don't think you can pin it to a specific PS1 game. >short playtime (6-12 hours max) It only takes a few hours to beat and get the achievements. Less then 6 even. >waifu/husbando bait for twitter art Maybe? I don't know if it was their intent or not, but people really like the characters. <gay and as anti-hetero No gays on the ship, at least as far as I can tell. I have a hunch that Daisuke might be gay based on a single line, but I don't think its confirmed. As far being anti-hetero, while Jimmy is a rapist, it doesn't come across as a condemnation of heterosexuality <Open World Survival Crafting It has survival as a mechanic, but none of the others. <procedural generation Everything is hand crafted as far as I'm aware. The vent segment might not be, but that hardly counts. <Have connections to someone famous already As far as I'm aware, this is the dev's first notable game <advertise exclusively to furries and zoomers No furries, and no zoomer coded characters >make your game as insufferable as humanly possible Jimmy is as insufferable as humanly possible Once again, we can see that not all of the criteria are met.

>>1495826 >I don't recall the OG Binding of Isaac soundtrack, I only recall the remake soundtrack What are you, retarded? The remake didn't have a single good track.

>>1495851 Papers, Please <memorable soundtrack I don't even recall if it has music. <simple gameplay, low difficulty It starts out simple, but gets pretty hard as things progress <heavy story/lore focus I don't recall them going to far in depth about the geopolitics that the game is set in, but I never beat it >lots of characters If you define every single person who you have to check as a character certainly. <twitter art style Nope <one main gimmick I don't think its a one trick pony. There is a lot of depth to the constraints that the game places on the player. <obviously inspired by [insert retro game] Not that I'm aware of >short playtime (6-12 hours max) I never beat it, but I'd wager it could be beaten in the time frame <waifu/husbando bait for twitter art Nope <gay and as anti-hetero No gays as far as I'm aware <Open World Survival Crafting Not by a long shot >procedural generation I'm assuming. As far as I could know, the NPCs could be procedural geneated <Have connections to someone famous already Not to my knowledge <advertise exclusively to furries and zoomers Nope >make your game as insufferable as humanly possible If you define the difficulty as insufferable and the some of the moral choices you have to make then yes. Here we see a pattern emerging. Insufferably. That said, I'm not going to bother doing the full analysis of games, but I'd argue that games like Powerwashing Sim, and Slime rancher break that trend. >>1495892 I'm not saying that the remakes soundtrack is good. It was notably bad. The only thing I recall about the OG soundtrack is that it was better then the remake. It wasn't memorable.

>>1495900 I think in order to make any sense you're going to have to separate games into two piles. Ones that got big because of streamers and other influencers and games that succeeded due to some other quality.

>>1495912 You would need to do far more then separate them into two piles if you wanted to make sense of this. You would need to do crazy high level multivariate regression analysis. The dependent variables being sales and popularity of the game, and the independent variables being all the different criteria that games can be listed as having. The results would basically show you the market segmentation of indie games, which you could then use to craft a game that appeals to a specific segment of the indie games market. Not unlike Howard Moskowitz's work on pasta sauce and pickles.

>>1495932 What I was getting at that there are some indie games that get popular because they get introduced to a ton of people because some content creator makes a series of youtube videos or twitch streams featuring the game and then other follow suit and all their audience gives it a try. Then there are other indies that get popular via much more organic means. It may not be that the first group of games are bad or undeserved per se but they become popular because of personalities rather than their own inherent merit.

>>1495109 Alternatively make a game in a neglected or abused (but typically popular) genre/niche that is starved for content. Some indie/smaller games succeed on the fact that normalfags usual triple gAAAy fix dropped the ball so hard and for so long. I guess good timing would be a second factor here as well. Another option is to just make something so unique that it becomes popular due to word of mouth. Being an oddity in terms of gameplay, visuals, or setting has been something I've seen my friends view positively when it comes to what indieshit they buy.

>>1495957 A multivariate regression analysis would be able to calculate the direction, the strengthen, and the statistical significance of the relationship between such a "streamer boost" variable. There are countless indie games being stream by popular streamers; some streamers get paid to play indie games as part of the marketing strategy of the developers, but not all games streamed get big. You would need to create not just a variable for if the game is streamed by a large content creator, but also if it is paid content, and even if the content creator appears to enjoy it, which would be a nightmare to quantify. I'm assuming you don't know what I'm talking about so I'm going to break down a few terms. >direction Is the relationship positive or negative. Do they both go up a the same time, or does one go up as the other goes down? If sales go up when the more streamers stream it then the relationship is positive, and expressed by a positive number. If sales go down the more characters that a game has then the relationship would be negative, and expressed as a negative number. >strengthen Also known as the magnitude. It measures how much the relationship appears to influence the variable. If sales go up very much the more memorable a soundtrack is then it would be a positive number with a large absolute value. If sales go up very little the more a game advertises to furries, the the relationship would be a positive number with a low absolute value If sales go down significantly the more Open World Survival Crafting a game is then the relationship would be negative number with a large absolute value. If sales down very little the longer the game is then the relationship would be negative with a low absolute value. >statistical significance This is a statistical test to determine the likelihood that the observed relationship could in fact just be the result of random chance. This is known as the p-value or a confidence interval. A p-value of less then 0.05 depending on the field of study, indicated that the observed relationship is not likely the result of random chance. It is impossible for there to be a p-value of 0 because there is always a possibility with statistics that the data could be the result of chance. This is arguably the most important thing to look at, as even there is a strong positive or negative relationship, if the p-value is above 0.05 then the data is just the result of random chance.

>>1496009 Ultimately, you won't get accurate results because of selection bias. No one cares about failed indie games.

>>1496071 True.

>"unique" selling point >accessible for new players >initial audience to hype your game up for you That's all there is to it.

Aren't there a few camps of indie game? You've got "satisfying"/comfy games like Powerwashing Simulator and Slime Rancher / Stardew Valley, but then you also have "challenging"/difficult games like Getting Over It, Celeste and Binding of Isaac. Most games in both formulas seem to have some metric of "thinking about it" as what attracts an audience- what "it" is being nebulous and adaptable to the game. >Slime Rancher, slime combinations / money >Powerwash sim, a complete job / money >SDV, again, completeness / money >Celeste, speed and collectibles >Isaac, completeness and challenges imposed >Getting Over It, not fucking it up and losing progress If you want to "break the code", maybe try to make an "it" that players will gravitate and obsess around.

>>1495109 these two are noise, I think. >simple gameplay >short playtime because this is the default. it's harder to make complex gameplay or more content. you should expect most games to have simple gameplay and little content. this was already true in 7th gen 3D games because studios ran into real issues producing more content or creating something complex when the tech side of things was itself too complex to deal with. I don't believe there is ANY demand to simplify the gameplay any more than it typically is already. I don't believe there is ANY demand to shorten games. long games are typically just a bunch of filler. it's not that people don't want longer games. you're just more likely to find QUALITY in short games because 1) there are more short games in general and 2) most long games get there via filler, not work hours.

>>1495177 None of these 3 are fuckable. The spider MILF in Onirism, on the other hand...

Giant women.

>>1499169 Josh if you don't actually make a Viv and Gilda Rampage clone I'm going to be devastated. It's not even a particularly difficult thing to do I think once you've the the player character's sprite sheets done. You can reuse a ton of building and background assets for each city. You could probably even randomize it if you wanted.

Put a chick in it and make her gay

Incest. Heterosexual.

>>1495109 It's all in the shades. Give your cat a pair too to double your odds of success.

>>1499311 I'd love to but my cup overflows with projects, I have too many gamedev projects already to take on another one, I'm not a fucking octopus. I was thinking of making some kind of city destroying game with these two bimbos (one's a dragon and one's a snail) but Viv and Gilda would be fun too.

>Decent looking characters >Streamlined but unique gameplay loop >Psychological horror >Autistic mechanics Pretty much

There must be an element of degeneracy in it or at least the possibility of it through mods/fanwork. See: the coffin of dogshit

>>1495602 >>1495826 Just making your character nonbinary and/or ""ambiguous"" is all you need. That and >>1495177

>>1495109 none of those explain Palworld really, the only thing that matters for indies is getting e-celebs to shill your game, and that's true for non-indie games as well Palworld for example, is just a shitty ARK copy paste, literally started out as a pokemon skin pack for ARK, the only reason it exploded for a month like that was because people were mad at Pokemon for SwSh and SV FFXIV:Shadowbringers is the same, the actual expansion was fucking trash, it had half the content of the previous expansion and it was clear they were preparing for a slow sunset, but because Blizzard pissed people off so much all the e-celebs coordinated an exodus campaign to it (and ironically killed it by showing SE suits that cutting XIV budget actually increases sales, they're never getting any funds for that game again) it's really just advertising 2.0, you should see what AMD is doing to the PC market

>>1500915 Balatro is degenerate now?

>>1546206 >none of those explain Palworld High profile ripoff of Pokemon with guns. That formula for success is so retardedly simple it's barely even worth mentioning.

>>1546765 yes. gambling is a sin.

>>1546765 >Balatro is degenerate now? ye

I think all of you are just guessing at what makes a successful indie game. If you want a quick ride to the top, you need fat waifu tits and ass.

>>1594758 Do we have sales figures for any of those games?

>>1594758 >If you want a quick ride to the top, you need fat waifu tits and ass. Or a Cute Wholesome Loli with a good open mod ComUNNitY.

>>1499360 noelle

>>1546206 >>1547017 The whole reason why this game was (and still is) so infamous in the first place is because of Pokefags. And it's not out of "outrage" by some worthless tweeter loser. Since how it's similar to Scarlet and Violet but with many new features and had zero bugs that would ruin the experience, this was their refugee so to speak. The majority of Palworld players are Pokemon fans wanting a good game, since how SWSH to SV was such a disaster. That they would rather go to the alternatives. Tell me why there are PKMN mods in this game?

>>1546765 I mean, it's moddable. Plus:

>>1595360 Kek, pokefags will play the alternatives on the same platform you're just a degenerate falling into astroturfing marketing.

>>1595360 >it's similar to Scarlet and Violet but with many new features and had zero bugs that would ruin the experience 99% chance this is ragebait but first off, it isn't even the same genre as pokemon as others have said, and as you will find out if you play it for 5 minutes, it is a 1:1 ARK clone that replaces the taming mechanic with pokeballs and adds some mechanics from BotW the game was born as a pokemon skinpack for ARK it has fuck all to do with Scarlet and Violet, other than the designs it clearly plagiarized, and the BotW style pokeball second, idk about today, but on launch when everyone was raving about it was absolutely blasted up the ass with bugs and glitches, did you even play it? I don't even know if it ran any better than SV on a machine comparable to a switch the reason it was so infamous is because it's a soulless hodgepodge of all the highest selling games at the time Fortnite-like movement and bitches, gadgets from BotW, pokemon catching mechanics and creatures, factorio gameplay, all over ARK's basic structure it is a symptom of a dead industry addicted to remix culture

>>1495109 I'd say that a successful indie game also has to allow for infinite replayability in the form of customizing their difficulty or allowing for player expression (i.e. movement options, player choices affecting the game more than just on the base story etc.) I think Balatro is a great example of that because the basic rules are very simple but you can just add to them indefinitely until it's an unrecognizable mess from the original game. Also it has to have huge coomer bait like >>1594758 >>1546765 Have you looked at this semen demon, anon?