For context, there are three of us and we’ve been making game assets for years.

(Emace 20+.)

Mostly 3D stuff — environments, characters, vehicles, props, buildings, nature packs — plus animations, shaders, VFX and a bunch of Unity tools.

At some point we thought:

“Why not just put a huge chunk of all that work into one bundle and keep giving devs new assets every month?”

So we did our first season of From Artists, For Developers.

It ended up being 79 asset packs and a lot of 3D models, animations, shaders, tools, etc.

We made the first mistake immediately.

We launched it way too fast.

Basically we finished the bundle, looked at it and went:

“Yeah, should be fine.”

It was not fine.

For the first 3 days after launch we were still making GIFs, banners, screenshots, videos and all the other stuff that probably should have existed before launch.

We even have our own little tool for quickly making promo GIFs from our footage.

Great tool.

Would’ve been even better if we had prepared the GIFs before pressing launch.

Then Godot happened.

I’m mostly a Unity guy, so for a lot of my packs I thought:

“There’s GLTF. Good enough.”

Apparently not :D

We kept getting questions about Godot.

A lot of them.

From people asking about formats and engine support, probably around 30–35% were Godot users.

That honestly surprised me.

EmaceArt actually moved his ass and started exporting his packs as proper Godot projects.

The rest of us mostly had GLTF and good intentions.

(It’s time-consuming.)

So yeah, proper Godot support is definitely going on the list for next time.

Then we started doing giveaways.

That worked really well.

Not for me. I was the one handling it.

We’ve already given away 160+ keys in different gamedev communities.

What I didn’t really think about was what happens after 120 people comment.

Someone has to answer them.

Someone has to check DMs.

Someone has to ask which pack they want.

Someone has to send the keys.

Someone has to explain that:

“Pick one asset pack”

does not mean:

“Can I have this category with 9 asset packs in it?”

Someone = me.

For the first 3 days, pretty much 24/7, every few minutes my phone would start buzzing again.

I probably spent a dozen hours or more just replying to people and sending keys.

Next time I’m not doing it by myself.

So technically the giveaway was free.

For them.

Another thing we learned:

People really don’t read descriptions.

We had people buying a single asset pack for around $15 while inside the description of that exact pack there was a link to the bundle with a giant:

21,000+ MODELS FOR $12

And they still bought the $15 pack.

Thanks, I guess :D

But that was actually a useful lesson.

You can have a stupid amount of content.

You can make it cheap.

You can put the information right in front of people.

And they can still completely miss it.

Same with traffic.

Our conversion rate is around 3%, which I think is pretty good.

We kind of assumed that putting years of work together would naturally get some attention.

Nope.

You still have to get people to actually see the damn thing.

And every community reacts completely differently.

One post does great somewhere.

Same post somewhere else gets nothing.

A GIF you spend an hour on dies.

A random screenshot works.

You spend time writing a proper post and nobody cares.

Then you write something half asleep in 3 minutes and somehow that’s the one people like.

Marketing is weird.

We’re also updating some of the packs while all of this is going on.

Some of them are a few years old now.

So apart from promotion, giveaways and answering messages, we’re also opening old projects and looking at folder structures made by our younger selves.

That’s a good way to lose respect for yourself.

The original idea behind the whole thing was pretty simple though.

We already had years of work sitting around, so instead of a solo dev or small team having to hunt separately for characters, environments, cars, props, animations, tools and everything else, we wanted to put a big chunk of it in one place.

This first edition has basically turned into a test for us.

We’re collecting everything we can from it:

What works.

What doesn’t.

Where people come from.

Which communities react well.

What formats people actually want.

What kind of posts work.

What media works.

What we wasted time on.

And what we really should’ve done before launch.

Main lesson so far:

Maybe prepare the launch before launching.

Big discovery…

What’s the dumbest thing you only realized after releasing your game, tool or asset?