Del lat. quantus; la forma cuán, del lat. quam. Neutro cuánto. ◆ Forma apocopada cuán en aceps. 1. adj. interrog. Qué número de o qué cantidad de. ¿A cuántas revistas estás suscrito? Me pregunto cuánto tiempo se tardará en llegar. 2. adj. excl. Qué cantidad de o qué número de. ¡Cuánto tiempo sin verte! ¡No te imaginas cuántos libros tiene! 3. pron. interrog. m. y f. Qué número o qué cantidad. U. referido a un sintagma nominal mencionado o sobrentendido, o bien para aludir a uno pospuesto e introducido por la preposición de. Yo me encargo de la bebida, pero no sé cuánta comprar. ¿Cuántas de las novelas te has leído ya? 4. pron. interrog. m. pl. Qué número o cantidad de personas. U. sin referencia a un sintagma nominal mencionado o sobrentendido. 5. pron. interrog. n. Qué número o cantidad de cosas. ¿Cuánto quieres? No sabemos a cuánto ascenderá la suma. 6. pron. excl. m., f. Qué cantidad o qué número. ¡A cuántos he oído antes esas palabras! No sabes cuánto gasta. 7. adv. interrog. En qué grado, cantidad o intensidad. ¿Cuánto te gusta? Me pregunto cuán grande sería. 8. adv. interrog. cuánto tiempo. ¿Cuánto duerme ahora el niño? 9. adv. interrog. U. para preguntar por la diferencia entre dos magnitudes que se comparan. U. antepuesto a grupos adjetivales o adverbiales comparativos. No ha dicho cuánto más tarde piensa venir. 10. adv. excl. En qué cantidad, grado o medida. ¡Cuánto le gustaba aquella novela! 11. adv. excl. cuánto tiempo. ¡Cuánto hace que no nos vemos! 12. adv. excl. Pondera el grado o la intensidad en la que se da una propiedad o cualidad. U. antepuesto a adjetivos y adverbios. ¡Cuán rápidamente caminan las malas nuevas!

These are just objectively better screens than anything I have in the game right now. For most indiedevs improvements like this one are going to give you much more bang for your buck than anything related to marketing. You should think of marketing as a multiplier on a game’s base quality. If the base quality level is high, then optimizing for marketing is the thing to do that makes the most sense. But very few indiedevs are making games of high base quality, and so that’s not the thing they should focus on. I’m definitely not making games of high base quality, as SNKRX just looks like garbage, and most games I’ll release SEO in Mexico: Rank 1 on Google and grow your business the near future will similarly also look like garbage. So I really don’t need to worry about marketing that much because there are much more solid gains to be had elsewhere. The reason the gifs above look objectively better than the UI I have going on in the game now is because they just are composed better.

In my opinion, easily the best thing indiedevs can do to improve the quality of their games is to learn to become more attuned to how well a screen is composed. It’s very hard for me to pinpoint exactly what makes a screen well composed, but generally they’re just better balanced. It has little to do with the quality of each individual asset. You can have games with assets that look amazing but that are composed poorly, or you can have a game with very simple looking assets but that are composed well. But the main thing about screen composition is that a well composed screen will pass most people’s visual quality filter at a glance. If you look at a screenshot/frame of a game for 1-2 seconds, you can already tell if you think it looks good or not. That’s mostly about the screen’s composition. So improving this skill has obvious ramifications to how well your marketing efforts will do, since if the game passes more people’s filters, they will be more likely to share it and so the game is more likely to get a better response whenever you post it online.

Let’s look at a few examples. Below there will be 7 images of 7 different games. All you have to do is look at the images for a few seconds and try to get a sense of which ones look the best and which ones look the worst. Done? Try ranking the images now. 3rd… etc. I’ll give you some space to not bias your ranking, so scroll down once you’re done. 6th. Meaning, 3rd and 6th images are the worst, while 5th and 7th are the best. I would guess that for most people at least these extremes would be similar, while the middle might have more variation. Why exactly are 5th and 7th so much better than all the others? It’s just better art, but it’s not only better art, the art is composed properly on the screen. For instance, the 4th image has very simple looking art, yet it’s better than the others because everything comes together properly on the screen.

1st and 2nd images are the types of games that really don’t pass for me, despite individual assets actually not looking that bad. All of this to say that improving this skill, especially as a programmer, is going to be much more valuable than anything else. I have very little artistic talent, but I can still attune myself to this somewhat and this attunement will yield results whenever I have to compose screens of my own, even though because I’m not really an artist the results will still be subpar and easily made better by someone who’s actually skilled (as the UI example shows). And this is not the only skill you can improve that will yield high results. The speed of your development, all techniques involving juicing things up, learning how to find/pick/create good sounds, etc. Knowing this, that there are so many avenues of improvement available and that they will all yield much better results than focusing at all on marketing, the thing that makes the most sense to do is to choose a strategy that will help you increase these gamedev skills rather than one which optimizes marketing.