For the past few years, the common wisdom in game dev circles has been that X / Twitter isn’t great for driving sales of games.
It has always been tough to get people to click off of the platform, a trend that was worsened by algorithmic changes introduced since Elon Musk’s takeover of the app.
But most indie devs maintain X accounts and post gameplay clips anyway. The belief—or really the hope—is that there’s always a chance that a post could pop off and drive a bunch of awareness.
And sometimes it really does happen! The most striking recent example came two weeks ago, when Tokyo-based indie dev vidhvat posted a clip of his upcoming game, TAMASHIKA, with a caption that read simply “my indie game for 15 seconds.”
Click the image below to watch the clip on X.
Take 15 seconds to watch this. (Sorry I can’t embed it directly—blame Elon.)
There are plenty of obvious reasons this clip went viral. A few observations:
It would not have worked as well as a 30 second clip. 15 seconds was exactly enough.
We get to see basically the whole game loop: a lot of shooting, reflecting bullets using the knife, and the way the game rewinds when you get killed.1
Even though the art style is low-fidelity, the game’s doing incredibly cool things with colors and animations. (Look at that ridiculous reload anim.)
The ending is pure magic. The way the guns rewind into the player’s hands is unreal. Then we get a really wild psychedelic warp out to some sort of menu. And a HARD cut to the call-to-action: Wishlist TAMASHIKA on Steam.
This is a near-perfectly executed gameplay clip. But… that’s still a lot of likes and impressions.
Two additional extremely unusual factors were at play:
A ton of other game developers and creative types joined the trend and quote-tweeted the original TAMASHIKA post from vidhvat with their own 15-second gameplay clips. A lot of these went pretty viral as well.
The game also attracted a bizarre amount of haters.
I really don’t know why the country of India caught a stray on this one.
I mean, the game’s not going for a big-budget art style, but that’s clearly an artistic choice. Even if you don’t like how it looks, this level of vitriol is weird.
You won’t pirate it, but you will boost its visibility on social by quote-tweeting.
I’ve never really bought the idea that “all press is good press” but social media reactions to works of art are different. Any attempted dunk on a book or an indie game is functionally just free advertising for that media.2 If you’re an indie game developer and you’ve got a strong stomach, haters like these are the best enemies you could ask for.
A few people in the comments accused TAMASHIKA of being too heavily inspired by the gritty corridor shooter Post Void, but vidhvat has been open about how much Post Void inspired him.
This at least makes sense, if you love Post Void and see this game as derivative.
But other comments were stranger and even sort of threatening:
This is all really weird. What would compel a person to write this?
After the backlash kicked in, of course, we got the backlash to the backlash.
And thus the cycle was complete. The arguments raged on in the comments, and no one’s mind was changed.
One thing I noticed throughout was that the developer, vidhvat, seemed to be replying to everyone he could, and always with either a kind word or—when replying to someone being mean—a non sequitur meme.
A culture war minefield
I decided to reach out to vidhvat and ask where he thinks the bizarrely hateful posts were coming from. We connected over a call, and he offered a great theory: the colorful art style is triggering negative associations for culture-war obsessives. “I feel like it's more an American thing,” he says. “But there are certain cultural vectors to the visuals.”
Some unhinged posts in the Steam forums for TAMASHIKA seem to bear this theory out:
“Man, I just like colors,” vidhvat says. “I'm just going to do my thing with colors and, like, hearts and stars. I like that in-your-face kind of Hello Kitty style. That's just my jam.”
Each of vidhvat’s past games have used bright colors. His first game, Lovely Planet (2014), had a breakout moment when PewDiePie featured it in a YouTube video that described the game as “KAWAII3 OVERLOAD.” But why would using colors evoke such a strong negative reaction?
“Obviously these groups exist out there, and they're kind of, you know, always at each other. Because that's just what these memeplexes do. So when a post comes and pierces through it all, they kind of warp around it.”
“I've been making games since high school,” vidhvat says, “I've always wanted to be a game developer.” After shipping a number of sequels and remixes of Lovely Planet, vidhvat took a brief break from game development, but soon found himself wanting to get back into it. “I'm miserable and I make other people miserable when I'm not making games,” he says.
Work on TAMASHIKA began in 2023, after vidhvat encountered Post Void and felt what he describes as a “calling” to create something inspired by it. “It was like the universe was staring back at me and saying you know you want to make a game like this.”
Since then he’s assembled a team made up of a mixture of old friends and people he’s met online: an artist, an animator, and a small team to lead the sound design and create original music.
For the soundtrack, vidhvat says, “all of my friends who compose music are on it at the moment.” He expects to have a full OST when the game releases later this year.
But will it pop off?
Though vidhvat didn’t share specific numbers, he said the viral post did draw in a very large number of wishlists for TAMASHIKA on Steam. “It was a 1,000% increase,” he says. (GameDiscoverCo estimates the game ranks around 700th for most wishlists on Steam, which would mean it has tens of thousands of wishlists.)
Thinking back to the release of his first game, Lovely Planet, vidhvat recalls that he launched with very little attention. “But then two days later PewDiePie was playing it on stream, so I’ve seen this sort of line going up phenomenon before.”
But going viral once isn’t a guarantee it’ll happen again: “I'm sure there are people out there who want to play this game, and all I can do now is release it and hope they can find it.”
That’s it for this week. I’m probably never gonna look at the Steam forums again.
vidhvat confirmed this when I spoke with him. Of that 15 second clip, he says “Yeah, you just saw the whole game really, minus some mechanics that happen later. And that's what it's gonna feel like all the time when you're playing it. There's no complex system resource management thing that I have to show off. Here's the gun, here's the knife, here's the enemies, and then you restart. And if you press the escape button you go into the menu and that's what it's gonna look like. You know, it's plain and simple.”
Years ago on Old Twitter™ there was a trend where hip literary people would post parodies of Ayn Rand’s writing. Every time one of those dunks went viral you could watch Atlas Shrugged surge up the Amazon charts.
a16z should build a social network for gamers and game developers. Like the X for Steam or Twitch, but more for gaming fans. Like the Doximity for game developers and game of enthusiasts.
Awesome!
a16z should build a social network for gamers and game developers. Like the X for Steam or Twitch, but more for gaming fans. Like the Doximity for game developers and game of enthusiasts.