ByerN writes games after hours — 2–5 hours on an average work day, alongside a Java backend job — in an unusual stack of libGDX and Scala. Over three years he shipped three node-based games solo and self-published on Steam, and then published the actual numbers rather than just the lessons.

  • Node Farm — ~12 months, released Nov 2024, 16,504 units, $102,222 net lifetime
  • Node Math — ~8 months, released Oct 2025, 12,661 units, $60,535 net
  • Node Crown — ~8-9 months, finished, unreleased, 676 wishlists

The plan behind them is a franchise bet: one shared codebase, one new experimental mechanic per game, features backported across games. Node Math took eight months partly because nothing had to be reinvented.

What worked:

  • Genre choice did most of the marketing — a cozy factory game fit enough Steam fests, influencer videos and Reddit ad placements that promotion got much easier
  • Bundling Node Farm and Node Math: most buyers purchased both
  • A Discord server as the real feedback loop, a public todo list, and a reply to every negative review — several flipped to positive
  • Regional pricing adjustments, and code reuse that cut development time

What broke:

  • Node Farm was too hard and too unintuitive for the cozy audience it was pitched at, and the core mechanics could not be fixed without a rewrite
  • Balancing a factory game was “a nightmare”; the same problem returned in both later games
  • Launching at $15 with no regional adjustments, then cutting to $12 — he now argues a post-launch price cut is worse than deeper discounts
  • A translation-free game turned out to be a hard UI/UX design problem, not a shortcut
  • Node Crown’s deckbuilder genre brought one relevant festival, few influencers, weak Reddit ad performance and almost no cross-sell

His sharpest point is about how hard the ceiling on self-diagnosis is. Node Math’s wishlists looked bad enough that he nearly dropped it; then one influencer found it by accident and a wave followed.

“Sometimes it is not the game that is bad, but that it didn’t reach the audience who would like to play it,” he writes, adding that this is the exception and not the rule. The rest is unglamorous: prototype before committing, playtest with strangers, keep scope small enough for one person to finish, set up a Discord server, read the room before posting, and don’t make games for the money.