Game and Business Update

It's been a long time since I wrote one of these, but what a year and change it's been. I've managed to release another game within a year and it's seen a lot of success. While I'm not quitting my day job any time soon, I'm pretty proud of selling over 100 copies in 6 months and getting a ton of positive reviews for that sales figure. I've got an average play time over 5 hours and plenty of people have played it for 20+ hours. That's crazy for me as my second game on my experiment to release 1 game every year for 5 years. More on that in a bit, lets talk about the game!

Ruina, a match 3, balatro inspired, rogue-lite, deckbuilder hybrid. Its is available on Steam for $9.99. It's a twist on an idea that I've had floating around in my head for a long time. A long time ago I remember playing a flash game where you matched colored tiles and tried to just get the highest score you could before there were no possible moves left. The tiles would always fall down in verticle lines and any gaps in columns would get shoved to the left. I cannot for the life of me remember what that game's name was, but it's always stuck with me. More recently - Balatro took hold of my free time in a way most things never do. And from that, Ruina's concepts started to form. Beating a score with a limited number of moves to advance was such an obvious choice and it turns out - its really addicting.

The goal for 2025 was to build a game that would port to mobile extremely easily. So all of the controls are mouse based. This was so that I could rely on Godot's buttons to work with touch screens as well. I haven't yet gotten around to releasing a mobile version, but I have played this on my Steam Deck and it works pretty well with the touch screen without any changes. Also to support a mobile release I ensured that my starting viewport was relatively small, 640x360. This scales nicely for larger screens but still works on small screens too. Working on that small of a scale really forced me to be efficient with my screen space. That constraint, I think, really helped me plan out an effective UX that looks nice and works well.

I used the funds I got from Space Duck to purchase some sound, and I really think that payed off. The looped background music is a good vibe, though I may still add some additional tracks. I've found myself muting it after a run or two. The sound effects in the game also give a layer of polish that I don't think I'd have pulled off otherwise.

To give a nod to Balatro, I chose the name Ruina. Much like Balatro is Latin for jester, Ruina is Latin for collapse. Collapse is yet another puzzle game that Ruina shares concepts with. The single word game name also seemed appealing from a marketing perspective.

I participated in the Steam Next Fest in October, and was already starting to see a larger turn out than I did for Space Duck. This was great news. I even had some folks who played the demo start steam community threads and point out a few bugs along the way. This felt pretty surreal. Here are people I definitely do not know, who care enough about my game to leave real feedback. Of course I addressed this right away as best I could. Then Ruina Launched on November 18th and I nearly immediately sold 30 copies. This blew me away. I outsold all of Space Duck in under a month. At this point I started to realize I may actually have something worth marketing and supporting for a while. So I started to draw up some plans to do a few content patches. I launched with "only" 50 scrolls, when I intended to have 100. So I thought, why not just release patch with 25 more scrolls and a few more things thrown in.

The Prismatic Update for Ruina was released a little over a month ago on March 18th. This update included 25 new scrolls, 2 new bags to play with, 2 more boons to choose at the start, and a new mechanic: Wild Gems. Since Ruina is all about matching the same color gems, I've added a way to "Paint" the gems to the wild color. Wild gems match any color, letting you make huge matches and crazy combos. I released this in tandem with the Steam Spring sale to drum up some extra sales, and it worked. The spring sale pushed me over 100 sales which was my goal for the first year.

With that, I've got my first "profitable" (if you count my time as free) game under my belt. So what's next?

What's Next

Well - it's nearly May and I haven't started on my project for 2026 yet. And I don't think I'm going to. I've got one more content patch planned for Ruina before the summer sale that's going to take up some time. Plus - I'd like a victory lap for my second game ever - on a short time line - actually getting some traction. I feel like I've already accomplished my goal of learning how to make and publish video games, and now all that's left is to keep improving my ideas and creating higher quality games.

The other thing I'd like to do this year is get Ruina published to both the Apple Store and the Play Store for mobile. Thankfully Godot seems to make that pretty easy. I've already got a test build on my personal phone that seems to work pretty well. I'm excited to give that a shot and see if I can gain any traction in the mobile space where there's presumably way more potential customers.

I'll likely get back to making a new game in 2027, there's a few ideas that I've been toying with, but I'll hold on divulging any more info than that.

Sign Off

That's it for now.

Thanks again for reading and following along!

Lee