one week after no signal

It's been one week since no signal was released.

If you're not familiar with no signal (Steam, itch.io), it's a thoughtful hard sci-fi adventure game about loneliness made in Godot. You explore an abandoned space station orbiting a black hole, follow messages left by the long-gone staff, and discover what happened and the secrets they left behind. The game was made primarily by me and Tanuki, although we did have some brief help from several individuals with different aspects of the game (QA, logo, physics homework).

The 20% off one-week release sale for no signal has ended and I wanted to spend some time reflecting upon how the outreach, sales, and reception of the game have gone so far.

outreach

I reserved one month before the release of no signal to exclusively work on marketing. With marketing, I've tried to stay true to my guiding principles and build meaningful relationships. For this reason, I eschewed key mailing services in favor of reaching out to as many influencers and press with personalized messages as I could.

To find contacts, I asked my friends and my audience for help, looked for people who had covered the demo of no signal or Gender Dysphoria with the help of SullyGnome and the game category feature on Youtube, and reached out to people I already know through streaming. I also gave keys through Steam's Curator Connect to people that solicited them from me.

As usual, mental health made it difficult to do anything... especially after uprooting my life to escape Texas. So, I only managed to reach out to 63 people before the release of the game despite reserving 22 weekdays to do this. I mostly did this work in spurts over the course of only four days: 4 on the first day, 21 on the second, 19 on the third, and another 19 on the fourth.

Supposedly, at a rate of 19 per day, the limit for how many people I could contact in this time could be as high as 418 people. However, it would have been hard for us to do this due to our choosiness. The list Tanuki and I made of all contacts we wanted to consider reaching out to only had about 183 people on it.

Streamers: Streamer friends and acquaintances had the highest engagement of all the groups. This makes sense, as I've spent a lot of time on Twitch, gotten to know a lot of people, and have shared my work with them. Many of them have known about my game for a while. However, I don't expect this group to help me that much with selling the game since they're largely game developers and many of them share a lot of audience overlap. If I want this to work better for me in the future, I think I need to make more friends with different groups of streamers who have audiences that would be more inclined to buy indie games.

Played Before: Not very many people have covered my previous work before. Unfortunately, all of the contacts that covered Gender Dysphoria no longer seem to maintain an active presence online and none of them covered no signal. On the other hand, one person who had played the demo before was very enthusiastic about being able to play the full game before release. I was able to make a great connection here that I hope will grow more.

New Contacts: It took a lot of time to look into each person's content, figure out if they would be genuinely interested and why, and write the message. Of course, I had some standard copy I sent everyone, but each message had a personalized part. I took care to only send messages to people I genuinely believed might be interested in the game, regardless of how big or small they were. I feel a little sad that the engagement here wasn't as good as I would have liked. Though, it's not terribly surprising since all of these were essentially cold-calls.

Solicitors: After release I got plenty of emails from Steam Curators asking for keys. I didn't really have a great experience with this since it felt hard to get to know the people on the other side -- and a lot of them seem like they're trying to bait me into sending keys so they can resell them. Many of these curators that asked for a key didn't even activate the copy they were sent through Curator Connect, so it makes me even more suspicious that they were just fishing for free keys to resell.

Overall, we only had a coverage rate of 12% (rounded down). I have no idea if this is good or bad, but it's certainly much, much better than my job hunt.

Actually, due to my circumstances, I'll have to start looking for work again instead of continuing full time indie dev as I had originally planned when I quit my last job (unless no signal sales get drastically better). I'm sure you know this, but I'm not looking forward to finding a job given the state of... everything. But hey, if you are looking for someone to hire, check out my resume and reach out!

That said, I could have certainly reached out to more people. I also should have done more outreach during the development of the game instead of only at the end. I plan to be better about this next time.

sales

One of the strategies I'm trying to employ is making a catalog of multiple games that people can buy, so that every time I release a game, more people who like the stuff I make can buy older stuff in my catalog. The hope here is that I want to focus on the long-tail nature of sales, much like Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software (who is someone I look up to very much).

I now have two products that I have fully self-published, so this is the first time multiple games show up on my developer profile on stores. I was also able to offer a catalog bundle where customers can buy all of my games. Right now, the effect is not very pronounced, but I did end up selling a few copies of Gender Dysphoria on Steam, largely thanks to bundles. Though, a few people did buy Gender Dysphoria a la carte, without going through bundles, as well.

In order to avoid complete disappointment, I had hoped no signal would make at least 100 sales in the first week. To my surprise, that sale target was met in only 12 hours.

Thankfully, I made just enough money to cover the amount I paid Tanuki for making the art in no signal. However, that also means I'm still burning money -- this doesn't even cover the cost of living for even a single week I spent making the game. This is not surprising. I expected this kind of result, but it is still disappointing.

Wishlists on Steam were a bit interesting:

There are now 2,591 outstanding wishes for no signal, making for a lifetime conversion rate of 5.6%. Gender Dysphoria has 1,729 outstanding wishes and a lifetime conversion rate of 13.3%. I was hoping that the lifetime conversion rate would be more similar to Gender Dysphoria, but that's clearly not the case yet.

reception

The reception to the game has generally been really good. I've lost a lot of sleep watching people play it and pushing out several bugfixes over the course of release weekend.

Of the 237 units sold and 25 key activations on Steam, 147 of them actually launched the game. On average, since release, 30 people played the game every day with a median playtime of 2 hours and 25 minutes. There was at least one person playing every hour for the first 80 hours. Honestly, I couldn't even believe it, especially for a quiet, pensive singleplayer indie game.

As a brief aside, lots of people have asked me how long the game takes to play. It's hard to say for sure, but -- now that I've watched a bunch of streamers play -- I would say that it seems to take anywhere from 6 to 12 hours, depending on how much that person likes to go for 100% completion as they play. If I had to pick something more specific, I would say it takes most people around 8 hours (or two to three sessions) to reach the end of the game.

Here are some of my more favorite comments on the game:

Ever boot up a game and suddenly forget the world around you? no signal hits like that — hard and quiet all at once. It’s not just another point and click adventure; this is a full-blown emotional gut-punch wrapped in hard sci-fi, built for people who like atmosphere, deep storytelling, and freedom to explore.

[...]

This isn’t just puzzle-solving—it’s emotional archaeology. You’re piecing together the lives of the station’s former crew, and the more you uncover, the more personal it gets. Their hopes, regrets, conflicts—it’s all there, buried in data logs and rooms left exactly as they were. The gameplay never shoves the story in your face; it trusts you to connect the dots. And when you do? It hits like a freight train of loneliness and meaning.

Todd B., Linux Game Consortium ¹

The quality is insane, a fantastic game with really solid puzzles and smooth mechanics.
Only for the themes to just, destroy me. The specifics are too personal for a public post but to wander in expecting to witness a life and story only to see a reflection got to me.
rot13:Vz bar yrff ybaryl crefba

Zeke Daminara (@gungancrab.bsky.social) ²

I won't say too much more, as it enters spoiler territory. What I will say is that this was a joy to play. The puzzles were fun and not frustrating, the music was lovely, and the dialogue struck a chord at a point and I did tear up for a moment.

tyumici ³

I've gotten some comments from people like "I was only going to play for 30 minutes but I got totally hooked." or "I don't normally like these kinds of games, but I really loved this". Seeing people's reactions to certain parts of the game has also been a complete joy. I've been spending so much time just hoping that certain parts would be as emotional -- and just hit -- as I wanted them to be, and it feels so great to finally see that pay off after thinking about these moments in the story for more than a year.

However, there have been some complaints about the game, including motion sickness, the steep difficulty curve, and the relatively unusual controls compared to other games in its genre. These were things I anticipated players complaining about, but there's only so much you can do mitigate these issues -- especially given the limited budget of an indie developer. Plus, I can't fix literally everything. Nothing is perfect and, at some point, I'm going to want to move on and work on a new piece of art.

What I wasn't expecting was players being really frustrated by the more difficult, but optional, collectibles and puzzles. In my mind, I was thinking that I was giving players the option to freely engage with harder content if they wanted to. This was never a problem in playtesting, but now that the game was complete and these optional tasks were classed as achievements, many players who love to 100% games got really frustrated. This made me feel bad because I, too, love to 100% games. In response, I posted a few comments to help players out with finding collectibles and I also pushed an update making the music puzzle significantly easier.

what's next

I'm looking forward to seeing how the game sells over the next few months, but aside from a few more bugfixes ⁴, I largely plan on moving on. Clearly, the game hasn't sold enough to allow me to continue doing this full-time (which was expected), and I need to find a job. I've also got quite a few more plans, too, like planning a VTuber debut with a new model and new projects that I have an eye on! But, I'll try to keep it easy for a little bit before doing a big project again.

That said, I'm still doing things for no signal, like:

• Tonight (in a few hours): I'll be showcasing no signal at the monthly MADE showcase in Oakland, CA.
• August 8th to August 10th: I'll be showing no signal at MAGWest in San Jose, CA.
• September 6th 17:00 UTC: I'll be continuing my in-depth developer commentary and "ask me anything" stream of no signal, now that people have had some time to play it. I will also be doing a key giveaway!
• In 3 or 6 months, maybe? Releasing an in-depth retrospective video of the development process, marketing, sales, and reception of no signal.

If you've played no signal, I am truly thankful. And if you haven't, consider playing the demo or buying the game on Steam or itch.io! Also, remember to write a review for no signal on Steam! It helps out a lot with the algorithm.