A couple of months ago I quit my job in crypto/gaming to dedicate myself to personal projects and/or find a more conventional and fulfilling game-dev job.
Since then I’ve been grinding day and night at my main solo project: Hooome. It’s a mobile game that mixes idle, life-sim, and pet-care genres in a bright and nostalgic pixel-art aesthetic. It’s aimed at being relaxing, extremely cute, and wholesome.
Why am I sharing this here?
Well, I’m at a stage where the dev side is going great, the game is a good 60% done with mostly art and content to be added. But I’m also at a stage where I’m supposed to share it, get people interested, and gain a base community. Which as opposed to dev has never been one of my skills
So I thought I would share it with the community I’m closest with and also ask for some feedback on my attempts at promoting it :
If you like the idea and can support I would greatly appreciate it but mostly if anyone has experience with promoting anything similar online: am I doing this right? It sometimes feels like I’m spending a bunch of time making videos that only a couple of friends will ever see and like…
This is awesome! I quit my job in 2018 and spent about a year working on a game with a similar idle / life sim / pet care mechanic. I said it was the Sims + Tamagatchi + Neko Atsume. I ended up getting a job offer I couldn’t refuse so it got sidelined and I never got to adding anything beyond placeholder art. My plan was to tie it in to the Live Wallpaper system on Android phones so you could have your little friend idling in the background of your phone all of the time. This meant that I couldn’t use any of the engines I was familiar with so I built it all from scratch.
I will definitely follow your progress over on Reddit! Thank you for sharing it here!
Wow that’s really cool! Also very Android dependent they tend to remove/change features left and right lately … (Like nfc stuff ).
I do have the same dilemma, I don’t want to send any CVs until it’s published so that I don’t find myself in this situation but I also don’t want to miss out on a great opportunity I keep telling myself that my CV is gonna look better with a solo published game anyway so I might as well wait…
Yeah, I’m an Android user and developer and I figured iOS users get a lot of stuff we don’t so I didn’t feel too bad about it.
Yeah, I didn’t send out any CVs, I had a recruiter reach out and was like, well, shit. LOL! I’m not in the games industry though so completing a game on my own wouldn’t really have made too much of a difference for me.
Yeah I will definitely do that as soon as I have a playable alpha! I’m more familiar with YouTube. Android gaming YouTubers are a bit more rare than PC but I’m still going to give it a try.
There are a bunch of review sites as well, afaik most of them are paid review and the rest are hard to get to but I’m going to try that too.
The ones I’m not too sure about is discord servers and TikTok both of which I’m not too familiar with and don’t like much
Prior to the release ( on Flipper Forum - I tried to find my post, It appears to have been deleted…weird)
I suggested Flipper Inc, bring back the casio boxing calculator game
I actually almost backed it very early on before it poped up on this forum but I didn’t really need it back then and it wasn’t worth the price to me. Now that I see what it can do I might order one (whenever I’m back in a country where you can get things delivered).
It’s going great, I plan on having a playable test alpha by the end of the month and may releasing a first version after Christmas. I will be doing a round of testing before release so I will probably drop a link here to get early access at some point
[I’m going to record a dev log today for the Youtubes]
On the side I’ve coded a fun little casual game called LazyLazer which is probably going online by next week.
attempts at promoting it :
they tend to remove/change features left and right lately … (Like nfc stuff 
).
I keep telling myself that my CV is gonna look better with a solo published game anyway so I might as well wait…
