Re-shaping my indie game repo (3)

Week 3 of 6: Circling back to one of my first projects, and making it better

Author

Gabriel Maldonado
May 18, 2025

As continuation of my previous posts (week 1, and week 2), this is week 3/6 of circling back to one of my first projects, and making it better. Some context:

I’ve recently read ShapeUp, a small book about shipping work that matters. This sort of shaped the strategy I want to follow for the next months, which is to circle back to some of the projects that I’ve launched recently, way too fast, which are not providing enough value.

One of my first projects was MoodToPlay, a indie game repository where you can find which game to play based on your mood, and if you’re a game developer yourself, you should be able to use different marketing and promotion tools to improve your game visibility, and ultimately generate more wish lists.

Last week I got a very basic MVP up and running:

  • Visitors can check out games based on the mood, game details like videos and blog posts about the game, as well as a direct link to Steam to know more and -perhaps- purchase it.

  • Game devs have access to a dashboard where they can analyze their steam page, re-purpose content based on reviews and news about the game, as well as submit new content (written and video) to be shared.

I’ve had ~230 games submitted to the repository since December 2024, some by me, some by their developers, some by random folks. So this week I’ve mostly invested the available time in cleaning up the flows a bit, and doing some initial reaching, as 99% of the game developers didn’t know the repository existed, or that their games were submitted to it.

Initial reach out

I’ve created a script to associate each game submitted to the repo to the developer email or support address, which worked for 70% of them. The other 30% remains unknown and will iterate on them in the future.

I added them to HubSpot (no clue if is good or bad compared to other options, neither what other options are out there, time will tell) and send a blast email telling them that their game has been submitted to the repo, but was uncategorized, so they’re welcome to join and categorize it appropriately.

Still very early to tell how this worked, but so far, 6 hours after sending the email on a Sunday, I got ~32% open rate and ~5% registered.

Initial users

At the moment all features in MoodToPlay are free to use, there’s a temporary credit system in place to avoid abuse, but I’m refilling those credits on demand no questions asked. I’m mostly interested to see how people use the tool, and with this initial reach out (and subsequent ones) I hope to get a small number of users that use the tool more recurrently, provide feedback, and help me make it better.

Until next one!

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