I started building Double Skunk in mid-May. The plan was to release in August.
I could still hit that. It boots, it plays, and my friends beat me at it more often than I would like to admit. Nothing on the shelf feels like filler.
I am pushing the release back anyway. Six to eight weeks past that original plan, at minimum, so the demo lands at Steam Next Fest instead of shipping quietly and hoping people notice.
So what is Next Fest
Steam Next Fest is a week where Steam clears space on the store for unreleased games, all of them with free playable demos, and lets people try things they have never heard of. Thousands of games take part. The June edition this year had more than four thousand demos in it.
The October edition runs October 19 to October 26.
To get in, the rules are short. Your game has to be unreleased with a published public store page. You need a demo anyone can download by the time the fest starts. Your release date has to be after the fest ends. Prologues and chapter one releases do not count as demos.
The dates that actually matter are earlier than the fest itself. Registration closes August 31. A demo build has to be in Steam’s hands by September 21 so press can look at it during the preview window that opens October 8. Everything else is due October 5.
The fest is in October. The work is in September. Signing up for an October event really means having a shippable demo in about five weeks.
The rule that makes it a real decision
A game may only ever be in one Next Fest.
Not one per year. One. You pick an edition, you get that edition, and then you never get another one for that game. There is no trying it to see how it goes.
That single rule is why I have been going back and forth for weeks. If I could enter twice I would have entered already and learned something cheap. Instead I have to guess, once, which week in the life of this game is the week most worth spending. Guess early and I burn my one shot on a demo that is not good enough. Guess late and I launch to the same few hundred people who already know me.
There is no version of this where I get to know the answer in advance. That is the actual shape of the decision, and I think a lot of solo devs would be better served hearing that plainly instead of reading another checklist about wishlist conversion.
Steam moved my release date for me
Small story that explains a lot about why I am leaning into Steam’s events at all.
When I set up the store page I put in a release date, and I managed to set it to a day that had already passed. I still do not fully understand that screen. There is the date you specify and there is the date the public sees, and I could not tell you today why those are different things. What I can tell you is that once mine was wrong, I could not fix it myself.
So I wrote to Steam support expecting a form letter and a two week wait. They read it, understood what I had done, and moved the date to November 16 for me. Done. No lecture.
A small thing, and it changed how I think about the whole launch. I could spend the next three months inventing my own marketing motion from scratch, badly, alone. Or I could use the machinery of a company that has run this a hundred times and has actually been good to me. Their store, their events, their calendar, their audience.
November 16 is the date on the page right now. I may move it up. I would rather leave myself room to respond to what people say in October than defend a date nobody is holding me to.
What six to eight weeks actually buys
The plan was August. Now it is six to eight weeks later than that, at minimum, and a demo I still have to build.
Against that, a few real things.
A demo, first of all, which I need regardless of whether I do the fest. Cutting a demo forces a real decision about what the first twenty minutes of this game should be, and I have been avoiding that decision because the game currently opens the way a game opens when nobody has ever had to be convinced by it.
Localization and accessibility, which were never going to fit before an August ship and now have a real slot. Neither is glamorous. Both are the kind of work a solo dev skips when the deadline is close, and never quite comes back to.
Strangers finding my bugs before launch rather than after. Right now every hour of playtesting on Double Skunk comes from me and a small number of generous friends. That is not a sample. Next Fest would put it in front of people who have no reason to be nice to me, at a moment when I can still act on what they say. Feedback before you ship is design. Feedback after you ship is damage control.
And the reason that apparently matters most for games specifically. An audience before launch. A lot of a Steam release’s momentum on day one comes from how many people already have it wishlisted, and I did not know that until I started asking people who ship games for a living. Shipping quietly in August reaches the same few hundred people who already know me. Next Fest is a run at everyone else.
Put together, that is not six to eight weeks lost. It is a demo that gets tested before launch instead of after, two features that actually ship instead of getting cut for time, and a wider room to launch into than the one I would have had in August.
What I actually want out of it
Not wishlists. I mean, yes, wishlists, I am not made of stone. But that is not the thing I am hoping for.
I want to talk to somebody.
I have built this entire game alone. Every design argument I have had about it has been with myself, in my head, at a desk, and I have written a few of them into this dev log to get them out. The single best thing that has happened to the game this year was a stranger on r/Cribbage telling me the mode I invented had existed since 1905. One conversation moved the design further than a month of my own thinking.
Next Fest is a week when developers are expected to be visible. You can stream, you can sit in your own store page chat, you can talk to whoever wanders in. If any of that turns into an actual conversation with a streamer or a serious cribbage player or another solo dev, that is worth more to me than the traffic.
There is a specific conversation I want to have. I built this game with AI tools, I have been open about it, and I wrote a whole post about what I think that means and what I intend to do about it. The reaction split in a way I found genuinely interesting. People are furious about AI replacing artists and mostly quiet about AI replacing twelve months of my engineering labor, and I do not think anyone has a clean account of why the line sits there.
I have opinions about that. I have opinions about most things, which is an occupational hazard of being a software engineer, and roughly a third of them have historically turned out to be wrong. I would like to be told which third by people who make games for a living rather than find out by shipping.
So I signed up
Double Skunk is registered for the October fest. That is done.
It is a long shot. Thousands of games will be in that week, and plenty of them will be more visually striking than a cribbage board. I know that. But the thing about long shots is that they are the only lottery tickets that also teach you something when they lose. If nothing comes of October, I will still come out of it with a demo, a first twenty minutes I have actually defended, and weeks of notes from strangers.
The plan was always to ship this. It ships later than I first meant it to, with a demo behind it, some accessibility and language work that would not have made an August cut, and a date on the calendar instead of a vague sense of soon.
Come find me
Two asks.
If you want to play this before the world does, get on the list. The earlier your notes reach me, the more they still change.
And if you want to talk indie game development, come talk. On a stream, in a call, in an email, whatever suits you. Especially if you want to argue about using AI as a solo developer, because I would rather have that argument out loud with someone who disagrees with me than keep having it by myself. I have a lot of opinions and I am fully expecting to lose a few of them.
October is close. The demo comes first.
Double Skunk is in development, built by one person figuring it out as he goes. It is a cribbage game with powerups, deck tells, and rivals who cheat. Join the playtest or wishlist it on Steam. The patch notes track what changes build to build.
