My Game Just Got 100,000 Wishlists... Here's How To Do It

Hey guys, this is going to be a bit of a kind of a a oneoff sort of free flow video. [sighs and gasps] Uh, and I'm going to be kind of I haven't written any notes for it because frankly I don't have a lot of time to do videos right now because I'm I'm wrapping up I've got like a month left to wrap up the development of my game Twisted Tower, which by the way, big huge announcement here and it's a it's what this video is about. hit 100,000 wish lists over the weekend. Huge, huge thank you for all of you who wishlist. Thank you so much. And if you want to wish list, click the link below uh to wishlist this game. Do not wishlist, and this is a big part of what we're going to talk about in this video. Do not wishlist if Twisted Tower does not look interesting to you. So, if this if this doesn't interest you, don't wish list. Don't wishlist the game. Why? Because you never want a wish list full of sympathy wish lists because they

don't convert. They don't convert. And we don't want wish lists that don't convert cuz then steam gets confused, right? So only wish list it [snorts] if it looks interesting to you. What I want to do in this video is and again I I don't have any notes here so I might make some mistakes and I I might sort of ramble a little bit. But what I want to do in this video is give you the three ways the the the three ways that I could best think of and put together in some kind of framework for you of how Twisted Tower got 100,000 wish lists. Um, the third one I think is going to surprise you and I think it's my favorite one, my third sort of tip or trick on how to get 100,000 wish lists and I think it'll surprise you and it's gonna help you a lot. Okay. So, be sure to stick around for the third one um at the end of this video cuz that one is going to be the most important one um for sure. And by the way, just really quickly, if you like my teaching style, if you like kind of how I talk and and you want to learn from an actual indie

game developer who has been in the trenches making his commercial games um fulltime, including this game called Neverong, this game called Pinstripe, and then obviously my third game here, Twisted Tower. And by the way, I went full-time with all of these games with just a demo. And what I mean by that is whether it's publishers, Kickstarter, or just, you know, getting wish list and selling your game and hitting the Steamfront page. Um, I've done that on three separate occasions. The Steam, this is the summer sale. I'm rambling here, but [laughter] the summer sale for Full-Time GameDev is 50% off. You've got a week left to join and learn how an indie game developer like me, and perhaps you can do it. Um, you're going to learn about publishers, you're going to learn about Kickstarter, you're going to learn about how to do 2D art, 3D art, how to make a 2D game or a 3D game in Unity, GDAU, or Unreal. And if you don't believe me, that's totally fine. There are some students here who left some reviews, super generous reviews about how the course helped them actually go

full-time as an indie game developer, which is super duper cool. Okay, let's so click the link below to take advantage of that. Um, let's jump into I want to jump into how the the the first way that I was able to get 100,000 wish lists um for my game Twisted Tower. Uh it it's just about posting posting posting posting posting posting posting and and it's it's over the course of five years of posting. So this is in my opinion I think one of the most it it's not that it's ineffective it's the most ineffective of the three. Okay [snorts] the three ways to get wish list. This is like the most ineffective way. And what I mean by that is it's just you're not going to get likeund [laughter] 100,000 wish lists just by posting constantly. Now you might get a viral post. Okay? you might get some big viral post where it just helps um really move the needle. So, for example, um this

post here, look at this. 84,000 views on X. Okay, this is viral for me, right? It doesn't have like a million views, but it's viral for me. It's one of my top performing tweets. I posted this on July 8th, so maybe a little almost a week ago. How much did it move the needle? 2 3,000 wish lists, right? Not 20,000, not 30,000. Now, obviously, I'm super grateful for 4,000 wish lists. That's incredible, right? I know that's a big deal, and I'm super super grateful for it, but getting a ton of views on a tweet moves the needle a little bit. I know. And I know
[laughter]
I know people wa all of you watching right now would love 4,000 wish lists. Um but I'm just saying that it's not you

you would think you would get more but but you don't, right? Um so that's not really what's moving the needle for me. Okay. What about somebody else, right? Somebody else posting about the game. Well, if we take a look at Indiegame Joe, he posted about Twisted Tower last week and I'm super grateful for Indiegame Joe posting about it. He posted about it. Where are we? He posts so much good content from Indiegame Joe. 91,000 views, right? Again, probably 2,000 wish lists from it. Two or 3,000 wish lists. Okay. So, posting on social media, you know, hitting wish list Wednesday or whatever or posting about your game is great and it moves the needle slowly over time. What I've found is that you can maybe get to 10 20,000 wish lists just doing it this way. And again, I don't have notes on this or data on this. This is just based on my experience making games for 15 years, you know. Uh you're going

to get you're going to be able to move the needle fairly well, but you're not going to go gang busters and hit your 100,000, you know, wish list goal or whatever just by posting on social media. So that brings me to the second way. The second way that I feel like I got 100,000 wish lists was, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants. This one's a big one. Getting players to play your game, getting the Steam algorithm to push your game. So it's not you pushing it, it's other engines significantly pushing your game. And by engine I don't mean Unity or Unreal. I mean giants uh or systems or algorithms pushing your game, right? So [snorts] the first way is YouTube streamers. Okay, YouTube streamers are a big way to get wish lists. Whether it's your 1.0

launch or whether it's your demo launch uh hopefully hopefully during NextFest. And that's part of the second point here. We'll talk about NextFest in a second. Um, but getting streamers to play your demo is a big one. And the question is, how do you do that? Right? So, for all of my games, whether it's Pinstripe or Never Song or Twisted Tower, I've always taken it upon myself to not pay streamers. I think maybe I've paid a streamer once, like 400 bucks or something, um, to play my games, but for the most part, every streamer, and by the way, that's normal when your when your game is getting published. Publishers love to just pay streamers. It's not my favorite because you always get streamers who don't really care about the game, to be honest. Um, but what I do is I just email like 200 200 YouTubers or streamers and I I email them a couple weeks to a month before the game launches or the demo launches. In the case of Twisted Tower, I just blasted out emails to not random

YouTubers, but YouTubers who were in that genre uh or had played my previous games, right? So whether it was horror or shooters or, you know, streamers who loved Bioshock or HalfLife or something like that, you'd email them. Now, I I use something what I call the uh I think I call it the the the ladder approach. I can't remember what I I used to call it, but basically it's you start at the lowest rung of the ladder, the streaming ladder, and that is you find someone like who has say 10,000 uh subscribers on YouTube or Twitch. You email them or maybe you email five to 10 of those. And what you do is you get confirmation from at least one of them that they they like your game and they want to play it, right? And you say, "Sweet. So, can you play it, let's say, in two weeks when the demo launches or when the game itself launches? And once they get confirmation, what you do is then you

move on to the 50,000 mark, right? 25 to 50,000 subscriber mark. And in the subject line, you say, uh, Johnny Smokes, who has 10,000 subscribers, Johnny Smokes is gonna play my game. Would you like to play my game? And then you get confirmation from the next rung of streamers and you just move up and you're using other streamer names to provide credibility that other streamers are playing your game. Because when I find out, me personally, when I find out Jonas Tyroller is doing something on YouTube and he's my peer as a YouTuber in in our niche, when I find out he's doing something or he's interested in a podcast guest or whatever or he's making a certain kind of video as a YouTuber, I take note. So, that's just one approach you can do with YouTubers. Um, so yes, you want YouTubers to stream and play your game. That way you get hopefully exponential growth and

streamers start playing your game, right? So for Twisted Tower, for the demo, which launched in February of last year, 2025, um that it it wasn't explosive necessarily just on the streaming side, okay? It's it's the package deal. When you have streamers playing playing games that other streamers are playing, it starts to build on itself. And so I think maybe I ended up getting a couple hundred,000 views or 300,000 views or something like that for the demo let's plays. But what happened? Here's what helped it. Okay, so like I said, it's a package deal here. And again, we're still on point number two, which is standing on the shoulders of giants. It's not that the streamers themselves got the wish lists for me. It's that the streamers drove traffic to Steam during NextFest and that continued to push my game up the charts during NextFest. So, at the end of the

day, this is a big one and this is going to move me on to the point number three. At the end of the day, in my opinion, Steam is the way to get wish lists. It's steam. You want Steam to the algorithm or whatever's going on in the back end. You want the algorithm to take note. People are playing this game. We're getting external traffic. People seem to enjoy the game. So, we're going to continue to promote this game during NextFest and push Twisted Tower up the charts. So, I think I think that the majority of my wish list came from NextFest. I launched the demo. I got streamers to play the demo. I pushed the demo as hard as I could during NextFest. Excuse me. And I think we ended up getting 60,000 or something. I I can't remember the exact numbers, but point

being the the 100,000 wish lists that I got, the majority of them came because of just the whole Next Fest demo thing, right? And then you just keep your demo up for like for me I I kept it up for more than a year and the wish list just trickle in over time. Aka Steam. Steam's your buddy. You could post on Tik Tok and Instagram and YouTube and wow, Thomas has 400,000 subscribers on YouTube. That's how he got 100,000 wish lists. Probably not. I mean, I'm sure it helped, but like the real help, the real help was the demo and NextFest and getting getting giants, giant streamers to drive traffic to Nexfest. Does that make sense? Now, the third way, the third way, this is the big one. This is the big one. The third way to get 100,000 wish lists is

what I call the Trinity hook. Okay? If you know about the Trinity hook, continue to stick around because it's going to help you as it pertains to we're going to focus specifically when we talk about this in just a sec. We're going to focus specifically on how it helps get wish lists because I've talked about how the Trinity Hook helps sell games. I've talked about how it helps you stay focused on what matters for your game, but I haven't really talked about how it helps wishlists. Okay, so the Trinity Hook is a device that helps me and and I I think I started talking about it two years ago or something. [snorts] And I think some people may have misinterpreted it because I I talked about it a lot two years ago. I think some people may have misinterpreted the Trinity Hook as being this thing that makes a great game. the Trinity Hook. And I'll tell you what it is in a second. It's not necessarily that it makes a great game. It's that it makes a game marketable from the from the very

beginning. From the very first idea, it helps the game be marketable. Aka capture attention, hook people, draw all people in, and help people want to what? Wishlist the game and buy the game. Okay. So, the trinity hook is three things. and and some publishers call it a USP. And a USP is a unique selling point. A Trinity hook is three hooks, aka three USPS, three unique selling points for your game. And it's important that you can articulate these very quickly. Not necessarily because you're trying to pitch anything to anybody with your mouth, but it's important to be able to say these quickly to yourself so that you can then translate them to your Steam page. So, what is the Trinity Hook? It's three it's three USPs or three hooks. And this these are marketing tools. They can translate to game the game itself um and make the game good, but they're mainly marketing

tools. Number one, what's your visual hook? Number two, what's your mechanical hook? And three, what's your story hook? Now, it might not be story. It might be uh a very simple narrative thread. It might be a player motivation or a mystery or some small thematic hook like in my case, this spooky Disney Disney tower that you climb. That's that's all it really needs, right, for the story to have a hook, right? So, the goal your goal in capturing uh or your goal is to capture wish lists, right? If you can clearly communicate all three of these things on your Steam page, it's so much easier to capture wish lists because people, the goal with Steam is to capture attention very, very quickly. And in order to capture attention, aka hook

people, you have to do it very effectively and quickly. Okay? And so for Twisted Tower, here's here's how the Trinity hook plays out with Twisted Tower. Okay? In my text here, in my capsule art here, in my trailer here, everything, my goal is everything is driving the Trinity Hook home quickly, very fast. And in fact, for me, my goal was in the first 5 seconds of the trailer, the Trinity hook is bam, there. Now, is it perfect? I don't think so. And frankly, there's not really a mechanical hook for this game, if I'm being completely honest. But let let's watch the first 5 seconds um of the trailer so that you can understand like how the hook or the Trinity hook is presented in the first 5 seconds. Okay, now you might. Now it's 9 seconds. Okay, so forgive me. 9 seconds. The

first nine seconds, my goal is the trinity hook is right there. Okay, so what's the trinity hook for this game? Number one, the story hook is you're rescuing your girlfriend in a creepy Disney park. That's the story hook. The visual hook, Bioshock meets Willy Wonka. I think it's there. I mean, we've got candy bubble gum shooting out of a chain gun. And we've got lighting and aesthetic that looks very much like Bioshock. So, that's Bioshock meets Willy Wonka. That's the visual hook. Mechanical hook. Wacky guns. Wacky wacky first-person shooter. It's not really a mechanical hook. Okay. Now, that brings me that brings me to an aster asterisk here, which is your goal should be to get the trinity hook, to get all three actually being hooks. Your visuals, your story, and your mechanics. Are those all a hook? That's the goal. Is it achievable? Probably not. Now, you

might think, and I'm the same way, you might think, "Yes, I have a mechanical hook. Let's go. For me, it was like, oh, the environment's twisting and kind of changing and halls are spinning and we have wacky guns and wacky enemies. That's my mechanical hook. Truth is is it doesn't people don't really care about that for this game. It's not really what's hooking them. What's hooking them is the visual and the story. Those are the the two things that are hooking people for this game. But your goal is to get all three. If you can't get all three, at least try and get one, right? a really interesting mechanical gimmick, a really interesting story, right? A a really interesting vibe or feel or visuals or audio, right? But the reason I call it the Trinity hook and the reason I have three is so that it's kind of like investing in stocks. You invest in 10 and hopefully one or two does really good. The same is

true with the Trinity hook. Hopefully you get one. If you can get all three, man, your game is going to be what? So much easier to get wish lists. That's the goal with the Trinity Hook. Yes, I want to sell games. Yes, I want to make a great game. But the Trinity Hook, the Trinity Hook helps generate wish lists because it's super clear what makes the game unique and special. Okay, so am I perfect? No. Should this game probably have more wish lists considering I have a fairly large YouTube audience. I've invested five years of my life into this game. There's part of me that thinks, yeah, it should probably have more. It should probably have more wish list. But at the end of the day, I'm really really proud. This game has 100,000 wish lists. And I I I think that I think I I accomplished what I set out to do with this game. So, those are the three ways to get wish lists. I hope that helped you. And just remember, if you're interested, check out Fulltime Gamedev

below. Why am I Why am I touting this? And why am I putting an ad in this video because this is going to help help uh Twisted Towers funding. I blew through funding. It's gone. I blew through the budget. Um and now this final month of development for Twisted Tower. Any support from you guys is amazing. And the truth is though, this will support you as well. Full-time gamedev will support you as well because hey, look at these amazing reviews of students who with the help of the course went full-time, which is so freaking cool. So, learn how to get publishing deals, uh how to get funding with just a demo, how to do a Kickstarter campaign, but also how to make a 2D game, how to make a 3D game, how to make a game in Unity, GDAU, or Unreal. You can take your pick. Uh how to hit the Steamfront page, how to get press coverage. Um also, I'll throw in my 2D and 3D art courses completely free. I'll throw in my YouTube course as well, completely free, but only for the next seven days. And hey, if you want to meet me, I'm going to do I'm going to throw in a oneh hour uh meeting with me um with a handful of other students who enroll during this sale event as well um for a private

mastermind group call. Um okay, thanks for hanging out, guys. Love you. Hope that was helpful. Cheers.