I'm Vladimir, pixel artist. I'm making games with my friend Azamat, who is gamedesigner and coder on Game Maker. We're true indie devs with no big budgets and publisher support. We've been making games together more then for 9 years. But our own experiences in gamedev are much longer.
Tradesman: Deal to Dealer is the fantasy merchant simulator, where goods you transport affect danger of roads. It's also auto battler with rpg and management elements.
We've wanted to make a game about regular guy, not a savior of the world (or worlds). Then we've come up with the idea of a game about merchant where enemies you meet on the roads depend on what you're carrying. For example, you can meet a lot of bears when you have a big amount of honey.
Our previous games were making us money for the development of TRADESMAN. It was taken 2.5 years to make Early Access. And for now we are still making the game almost a year. Because of interest in the game from the players we've decided to make the game bigger then we've planned, and of course fix some aspects of the game based on players feedback.
We've chosen Game Maker Studio because it's a well known engine by us, and it totally covers all our needs. The development was fun because we're making our dream game.
To collect enough wishlists to make the game appear in Steam Top Sellers. For us, we've collected a lot of wishlists, but it still wasn't enough. It's really hard to reach a top between AAA titles and a thousand NSFW Visual novels ;)
The second big challenge is to localize the game to many languages, it's expensive and you need to wait for translations before releasing any patches. We were lucky to get some fan localizations.
Listen to your players. It may be strange but sometimes they know your game better than your. At the end all we make is for our players.
For good and actual feedback, release DEMO asap.
We've released game in Steam EA, it's a big step, but the next big step is release and it's really important for us to not let down our players and create really great game that they want and waiting for. Hope we'll make it.
Vladimir
❤️
