Keely (Chicken Scratch)

A colorful Mario Paint portrait of The King of All Cosmos from the Katamari Damacy game series

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!
My Mario Paint portrait of The King is complete!
Sooo regal~~! ✨

random thing, but
@kennysun.com, I just wanted to inform you that your game has 1337 reviews right now which seemed like a pretty cool achievement.

In the flip drawing mode - the drawing that you have to copy gets flipped upside down. Players were having some trouble understanding it.

I added this little effect to help make that a bit clearer (rather than just showing the flipped image immediately).

#gamedev #indiegames

AI is so good and cool and definitely good at understanding what is true and correct.

I am so glad that it is plugged into every single fucking thing that I have to interact with against my will.

As a game, it feels like I have most of my features locked down at a core level, but it also feels like I could spend a bunch more time polishing/stabilizing things before committing to NextFest. Bahhhhhh. I should probably just do it but it feels like I also could have a better shot by slowrolling

There's a lot to do right now and I have no time to do any of it.

The prospect of kicking the can again on NextFest feels pretty awful. But I need to make a new trailer and I need to start doing a ton of outreach. Do I wait in order to start building momentum in the winter? This shit is hard man.

BIRDBUCKS GO BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

#gamedev #indiegames

behold - a MACHINE

#gamedev #indiegames

.. not that it's a ton of people, but it does feel like it's a non-trivial number.

And again, I can't stress it enough, even if the content is being engaged with - it's not yielding anything in terms of wishlists. But I'm also not actively trying to make that happen yet with the content, so 🤷

I also feel like consistently posting content on a near day-to-day basis is being rewarded with better general results? Which isn't surprising.

In general, I think once I started captioning shorts, adding hashtags and posting consistently - youtube started putting it in front of more people.

Another reason for doing a lot of low effort investigation posts with your content: if you aren't thinking and put a word like "shooting" in your title - youtube won't propagate it to anyone.

Now I'm also taking time to censor swearing 🙃
www.youtube.com/shorts/X230D...

#gamedev #indiegames

It does need better sound effects but also
uh
it needs to actually be hooked up to do something too so that's probably important.

New submit juice - look at it do the thing! Look at it! It's cool!

#gamedev #indiegames

Thanks for the feedback! (:

Super helpful input! I think you're right that it should be clearer what the source of the deductions are/the modifier stuff is a bit too visually small. I probably need to make everything a bit bigger and give that section more visual priority.

The penalties come from taking too long on a drawing.

Been working on upgrading the scoring machine to have a bit more juice and feel more grounded.

Any input on anything in terms of how it works right now?

#gamedev #indiegames

Love that colour palette/aesthetic - it looks great!

YouTube video by ChickenScratchGame NO PANTS #gamingshorts

A short from the playtest we did last night for Chicken Scratch where I struggled to understand how a pair of pants could actually be a vest:
www.youtube.com/shorts/QyO3s...

#indiegames #gamedev

Sounds like I might have put you onto a bad API originally lol. Glad that you managed to figure it out!

Our game got third place in the game jam! Here's a post mortem post about it, link is contained within if you wanna give it a try :) bluepinstudio.com/blog/2025-08... #indiegame #gamedev #gamejam #indiedev

Picture of a pair of tired and unkempt game developers at a conference. One of them is holding up an angry crocheted business chicken.

Yesterday we ran a table at the Toronto Expo for Chicken Scratch! Went in with very low expectations and ended up spending 11 hours straight showing the game to people. 🤯

Lots of notes for improvements to make and got a lot of positive reception! Super rewarding experience. 😄

#gamedev

I think that one might be too distracting (even if I agree that it would be very funny :P)

The version of it that I ended up getting working has a pretty similar idea/feel (just less.. motion lol):

The most messed up part about this is that I wasted time debugging things to get this working.

Honestly, now that you say it, totally agree. How about now? Does this seem more clear that the player is running out of time?

#gamedev #indiegames

yeah 100% agree. It definitely feels like I'm trying out different kinds of bait right now like a fisher trying to see what hooks them in :P

And then sometimes also the algorithm decides one of the videos you worked hard on isn't worth distributing for no discernible reason (and obviously they're not going to give you any insight as to why). 🫠

I definitely relate though, it's like you solve one element of the problem, but it doesn't mean anything unless you can solve the other 4-5 other big problems (engagement, followthrough, etc) and figure out how to fit them all together simultaneously lol.

yeah I feel like it also takes a lot out of me mentally to consistently be trying to find things to post and then also the attention span it eats up when monitoring how things are going after posting.

it probably isn't worth it, but I've been having a bit of fun approaching it like a design problem

Or, at least, I should try it on a few videos and see how it does.

I've been finding that whenever I make the effort to try an idea - it's always worth it just to get more information about how these things land - regardless of whether it's successful or not. The data points are always useful.

It might be as simple as adding a thing to the end of the short being like "if you liked this post wishlist Chicken Scratch on Steam!" but I always kind of hate doing stuff like that because it feels more explicitly market-y. I probably should just do it though lol.