Alright bear with me for the log rolling, but somehow the HTMAG discord has the best moderators. A high percentage of our mods end up releasing successful games. Maybe moderating all these developers’ posts gives them a deeper understanding of the industry? Maybe it is osmosis? Maybe good karma for helping out indies?

A couple years ago I profiled former HTMAG discord moderator Dylan from Red Nexus Games for his hit game Peglin. This week I am profiling another successful HTMAG moderator Tommy and his hit Tower Defense (TD) game Gnomes..

In today’s blog I will be looking at how he successfully launched a Tower Defense game with a short dev time.

SINCE this is HTMAG Discord moderator month, I am seeking feedback about the HTMAG discord (and accepting applications for more moderators ((no guarantee that you will be as successful as these folks)).

So if you want to tell me what you think of the Discord, or want to be a moderator, please complete this survey: 

Discord Survey (+mod application)

What is Gnomes and why did it take off?

Gnomes is a pixel-art tower-defense-roguelike with a twist where the gnomes act as towers, but they can be moved after every wave. 

What makes this a roguelike? Every game the maps are randomly generated, and there are random perks that you can buy called “relics.” You can combine multiple relics per run to have builds that can optimize different strategies. There is also a neat planting mechanic where you can plant various crops and objects on the map which give adjacency bonuses. Also there are gnome guilds that give you additional bonuses and change your strategy.

Tommy said that other than Tower Defense games his specific influences were the shop of Brotato, the adjacency perk system came straight out of Loop Hero, and Tiny Rogues also was an important influence.

The numbers

  • Development time: ~10 months
  • Gross pre Steam cut revenue: $367,484
  • Wishlists at launch 14,510
  • English only language at launch
  • Team size: 2
    • Tommy responsible for art, game design, music, playtesting, QA 
    • Patrick responsible for coding the game engine and game design

Both of them have been creating hobbyist level projects with great prototypes, modding (Warcraft 3) and part time development.

Total budget spent was about $700US. $100 for the Steam fee, $600 for our capsule art. Labor not included.

Timeline

  • June 2024: Development starts
  • Aug 5, 2024 Steam page created (2 months after dev started)
  • Nov 2024: Demo released (6 months after dev started)
  • Feb 2025: Steam Next Fest (last one before launch) (2,000 wishlists earned)
  • Mar 24 2025: 850 followers Popular upcoming spike
  • April 4 2025: Full release 1.0 with 1605 followers and only English (no translations)
  • June 10, 2025: First discount 2700 units sold because of it
  • July 28 2025: Update with language support
  • Aug 5 2025: Daily deal paired with new language support.

Tommy said the only reason they launched when they did was because they needed money 🙂

And YES his demo is still live post launch. Tommy said that he has heard from players that after 5 minutes of the demo they KNEW they were going to love the game and immediately bought it.

Fast market research and product validation

Gnomes is Tommy’s second commercial game. In 2023 he released Sea of Survivors which was a Vampire-Survivors-like sea battler. So he has a sense of the types of games Steam wants. But he goes further by creating quick vertical slices and seeing if they are fun.

Signs that Gnomes was going to work even in prototype phase?

  • The first prototype was fun with just a few elements in place: placing and moving Gnomes, goblin pathing, and planting a crop. All the advanced mechanics like relics and guilds came later. It was fun with just those early pieces.
  • Tommy playtested with strangers (reddit) early and even after the playtest he would receive screenshots from them after they played 2 more hours on their own. If someone continues to play your vertical slice game past playtest, that is a good sign. 

How did he find playtesters? Posting to relevant reddits.

Tommy’s playtest advice: “If you have a hard time getting playtesters for a free game you will have a hard time when it is a paid game.”

Tommy also said that in his original pitch to his partner Patrick he mocked up what the game would look like. Most of the art in that original pitch made it into the final game. Tommy didn’t fiddle around and keep hemming and hawing on the art style. He stuck to his original plan.

Marketing 

The marketing plan was very straight forward meta from the HTMAG playbook:

  1. Minimal social media other than Reddit.
  2. Steam page live early in development
  3. Demo released as soon as possible. 
  4. Steam Next Fest at the last possible one before release. 
  5. Reliance on content creators (Gnomes didn’t get into any festivals, but they tried).

If you want to hear Tommy talk about marketing, check out his 5 minute micro talk about how he marketed Gnomes:

Note Tommy is pretty good at creating posts that actually convert on Reddit and managed to collect 3000 wishlists before he even launched a demo. Here are some of his best posts. Note none of them went super viral, he just kind of ground out wishlists.

The demo launch was good but Tommy said it didn’t really get that big of an increase in wishlists until Splattercat played it. Tommy said he emailed Splattercat a pitch but got no response but a few weeks later Splattercat uploaded this video of his game:

That was the first domino that encouraged other content creators to play it too. Tommy says after Splattercat and Wonderbots played the game, Gnomes hit the necessary 7000 wishlists and knew he was a lock to launch the game. 

Btw watch this video where Olexa says it is the best Tower Defense Roguelike of 2025.

Tommy said he reached out to over 1000 content creators with a simple 1 on 1 email that just explained what Gnomes was. He used his regular email address to send them (not Mailchimp or some mass mail service). The emails didn’t go to spam. It was just hard work and persistence.

Lesson here: If you reached out to content creators and they didn’t respond, it didn’t go to spam, they just weren’t interested. They either play the game if they think their viewers will like it or they don’t. The content creators liked Gnomes.

Launch

Smart developers use the weekend trick to extend their visibility on the “launch widgets” of Popular Upcoming (PU) or New & Trending (N&T).

The weekend trick relies on the fact that Steam generally doesn’t allow games to release on a Saturday or Sunday. Therefore the two “launch widgets” are frozen starting Friday afternoon and extending into Monday morning. 

Important! A lot of people get this wrong: The amount of time a game spends on the “launch widgets” is not a ranked list based on sales. Instead, it is just a queue of “qualified games” listed by release time. When new games enter the list, the oldest game is bumped off. So the fewer number of games that are released, the longer games will stay on the lists. Sometimes a game’s sales fall very fast and it gets kicked off the lists but for the most part, once you are on you are there until you age off the list.

So, the big question is: do you want to stay frozen on Popular Upcoming or New and Trending?

If you want to maximize wishlists, set your release date for Monday morning. The game will likely enter Popular Upcoming Friday afternoon and spend all weekend earning around 1000+ wishlists per day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. But this requires having at least ~7000 wishlists on that Friday. (For more info on Popular Upcoming, see this blog post)

If you want to maximize sales, set your release date for Friday afternoon so you can enter New & Trending that day and spend Saturday and Sunday and some of Monday on the list. I estimate you need $5000-$10,000 gross revenue pre Steam cut within the first 48 hours to earn enough to earn a N&T rank.

Wouldn’t everyone want to maximize sales? Well, if your wishlist count is just BARELY 7000 I think you should try for Popular Upcoming because the game might not earn enough to appear on New & Trending. If you have a bunch of wishlists, and are confident you can convert, try to maximize N&T exposure. 

Also, if you are doing an EA launch you can actually do both because you can’t appear in N&T until you 1.0. BUT that is not enough of a reason to do EA alone. More on that in a minute.

Tommy opted for the New & Trending strategy so launched Friday April 4th. Gnomes earned $10,000 in 24 hours which secured his N&T spot for the weekend. 

As you can see, home page traffic (the orange line) peaked on Saturday, April 5th and then took a sharp drop once he was moved off the list a few days later. 

Discovery Queue

In a previous blog I explained that the 3rd Day of the Discovery Queue tells you how your game will do.

Here is Gnome’s Discovery Queue at launch (green) matched to the benchmarks I have collected. 

Gnome’s DQ numbers almost perfectly match the Diamond tier DQ behavior for the first 4 days but settled in above the Gold tier for the rest of the week. These are very strong numbers and indicate that this game is going to do well.

I love looking at DQ numbers because it strips away all questions you might have had about whether you did enough marketing or not. DQ lives beyond tactics. It is just your game, random Steam shoppers, and the algorithm. You cannot artificially juice your DQ numbers. If the game does well, you stay, if the game does poorly, the DQ cuts your visibility. 

I think the strong hook, good genre (crafty buildy) TD, good early reviews, and unique graphics that show DEEP gameplay helped Gnomes on the DQ.

For more information see the Benchmarks data from my Discovery Queue report

No early access, full launch

The team decided against EA. He didn’t want to deal with the ongoing support expectations. He learned from his experience with Sea of Survivors which is still in EA and requires ongoing care. 

Also Tommy wanted to do the double punch of Popular Upcoming and New & Trending to increase sales. Early access delays New & Trending until you go to 1.0. 

The unique selling proposition

I think too mandy developers overdo their “hook.” You may think you are being clever by making a tower defense game where you have to date your towers and fire missiles using a rhythm game mechanic. That is definitely a hook, but it’s so strange that it could actually turn off their potential audience. 

Gnomes is different. The hook is unique but not ostentatious. 

For Gnomes, Tommy started with the mechanics of a Tower Defense game but added a small twist where you could move towers between turns PLUS a planting mechanic. A forest-themed game staring Surly Gnomes was born. The game’s hook isn’t that forward facing. The surly gnomes are what do most of the heavy lifting at first glance.

Tommy has a good perspective and technique on what makes a game “unique.” He said his strategy is to make a unique mechanic and then thinks of a theme that would support that twist. 

For his previous game, his team started with the idea “what if we had a Vampire-Survivors-Like but you couldn’t stop moving?” Tommy took that mechanic and proposed applying a nautical theme to it since sailing ships have a hard time stopping. And the idea of Sea of Survivors was born.

Deep deep mechanics

So no extravagant hook? How did this game take off? 

Gnomes did so well because its mechanics are refreshing to fans of the genre. You don’t know that the game is innovative until you try it out and it takes a true Tower Defense (TD) fan to see them. 

And this game is DEEP. This isn’t a casual approach to the genre, Gnomes is for people who have been playing TD for years. 

Look at this screenshot that a fan posted in the official Gnomes subreddit

Since TD is an established genre, going deep with complex variations is appealing. If you are making a TD, you are making it for the hardcore fan and you need to prove that you have the goods. 

Daily Deal

After launch, Gnomes had a long sustained high sales rate even post discount. Here is a graph of the Concurrent player count.

The first 2 weeks of Gnomes has an amazingly stable concurrent player count. Even outside the discount window. It could be due to the depth of the game (Crafty Buildy games always have high CCUs).

After the initial launch looked promising, Tommy asked for a Daily Deal using the support tool and Valve said “no, ask again in 3 months.” See Tommy didn’t die. It never hurts to ask. He just waited.  

Three months later, he tried again. This time his pitch to Valve was that they were adding more languages and additional relics to extend playtime. Valve accepted. On August 5th, they went live with a Daily Deal and 30% off discount.

The Daily Deal sold more units than the initial launch BUT because of the discount the gross revenue was a bit less. 

Here are the results of their Daily Deal. $35K for a DD is definitely on the upper end. Typically I see $10,000-$15,000 from a Daily Deal. There really is something great about Gnomes.

Bundles

In addition to regular sales and the Daily Deal, the team padded their revenue through Bundles. 

Remember how I mentioned Tiny Rogues was a huge influence? They bundled together and it was their #1 bundle by revenue. Selling over $27,000 worth. Again, bundles are huge and you should do them. Just by clicking a few menu items, Tommy and team earned an extra $27,000.

Gnome’s bundles

Summary

People often ask if Tower Defense is a viable genre. At first I didn’t think so because I saw too many “first time indies” try to replicate simplistic, casual-looking graphics that are common on mobile. I think the Bloons series has that market cornered. You can’t beat them there. 

But I do think TD is viable but you must go deeper and mix in a secondary strategic layer. 

The TD fans are on Steam but you must do more than a simple tower defense to satisfy their needs. 

Look at this Gnomes map one player posted on their Discord. THIS GAME IS DEEP:

Also don’t forget the survey

Discord Survey (+mod application)