How I Pick What to Play on I.G.C. Playtest Streams (Patreon)

Hi folks. In this months Newsletter I started explaining how the stream scheduling system works, and then realised it would take too long to explain, so here it is in a little more detail for anyone interested.

The purpose of this is post is two-fold

1. to provide transparency to channel backers about how decisions are made.2. to provide a bit of insight to anyone looking so that you understand some of the factors which might go into myself or other content creators noticing your game/emails or not.

The System Has Changed... Slightly

From an audience perspective, the process hasn't really changed much in the last year.

Members of the public submit games in the usual public form.

Patrons submit games on the separate form in the playtesting_and_qa channel on our Discord.

Patrons usually get a Discord ping to let them know the game is going to be shown.

In the old system, we had one regular stream for public games, and a separate stream for patrons' games. I could "theme" the former easier because there are so many games submitted on the public form. In contrast, the patrons' stream was cramped and rushed because I wanted to make sure they all got shown together. So in the new system, we mix together patron and public games.

This allows us to have patrons' games and publicly-submitted games together in a way which makes sense, matching them based on genre/appeal/tone/setting etc. This, in turn, helps to ensure that the upcoming streams are more likely to have a specific audience, and this is especially important if you want actual gamers to see your games, and not just fellow indie devs and hobbyists.

I pair patrons' games up with publicly-submitted games, to find things with a similar genre/appeal/tone/setting, so that the upcoming streams can be themed around something which is more likely to have an audience as a piece of standalone stream, verses a random collection of games. In the example below, I saw that two patrons had submitted games which were doing something different with the incremental format, so I went back into the publicly submitted games and pulled out Slots & Diapers to make it three games for the Interesting Incrementals stream.

Basically, if you're a patron, and you submit stuff - whether it's nearly released or a very early prototype, I will find a time to stream it in 99% of cases. I even recently had a member contact me that they were worried about submitting their art game Who's Afraid of Uno because it contained discussion of disturbing topics. But because the game wasn't visually obscene we found a way to make it work.

How I Pick Non-Patrons' Games...

What about those games which are submitted to the public form?

Well, the bad news is that there are >250 games currently in that queue, and I can only play somewhere between 10 and 20 of them in any given month.

The good news is that I have a scoring system which makes it much easier to work out which games to prioritize, based on the ethos of the channel. This allows me to just glance at a few pieces of information in the application, and then add a few emoji tags which in turn generate a priority score. This score doesn't necessarily automatically schedule a game, but it does push it to the top of the priority queue so that I can see it more easily when looking to fill the schedule. It also makes it clear which games I haven't given a "quick look" to.

This system now helps me quickly see what's been scheduled, seen, or unseen, and I dip into it every few weeks and update unseen games with emoji tags.

If you want the cheat-sheet for how to make sure your games get selected, here it is. This won't necessarily apply to other creators, but it should at least show channel patrons how I try to operate within the ethos of the community we've been building here and on the Discord Server.

⭐ games are highly prioritized if...

the dev has written a personal message explaining why they sent the game.

the dev has done some playtesting already (I shouldn't be your first play tester!)

the game "looks cool" to me. this is subjective, obviously.

👍🏻games are slightly prioritized if...

the description/premise of the game sounds interesting.

the game fits into an under-represented niche of games.

the dev/team comes from an under-represented group (women, LGBTQ+, global south developers). more on that later.

👎🏻 games are deprioritized if...

the game has had a large public playtest (time to use your reviews, not me).

the dev has made it difficult for me to see the game at a glance (e.g. only giving me a steam key to activate, but not a link to the game page).

the game seems so "low effort" that the developer is unlikely to take on board any feedback about it.

⛔ games are often immediately excluded if...

the game is already commercially released and people are expected to buy it.

the game uses AI-gen in a way which seems particularly lazy or gratuitous.

the developer or publisher has sent me a bunch of marketing spiel for the game, showing they don't understand the purpose of Indies Under the Knife.

there is something rude or socially off about the application. this happens more often that you would think. (Pro-tip, if someone asks you what you preferred pronouns are, don't use it as an opportunity to make snide remarks about pronouns).

The public form is, to say the least, a little bit long. Part of this is on purpose; a form of weaponized bureaucracy intended to make sure I don't just get sent loads of low-effort spam.

But it's also got longer over the past two years as I add more clarifying questions to it. The most recent one of this is "roughly how many people have played your game?" Zero is too few, because you should be putting your game through its paces with friends and family before submitting it to any sort of "expert". 1000 is probably too many, because at that point you're dealing with Steam and itch.io users in very large quantities, and their feedback should already be telling you the most pressing issues with your game. Asking me to look at your game just so I can repeat what dozens of people have already told you in reviews is not a good use of anyone's time, and its disrespectful to the gamers who already took the time to tell you what about your game didn't work for them!

Despite the form being deliberately long, there are still folks who use it just to dump a bunch of pre-written marketing copy my way, for games they consider as "already finished" and have no intention of improving based on feedback from myself or anyone else. The form is set up to weed out these kinds of folks, but they keep throwing stuff my way regardless.

The takeaway here is very similar to what I'd tell students about applying for jobs; if you're polite to people and show a direct reciprocal interest in what they're doing and why they're doing it, they're more likely to give you the opportunity you're after. If you take a low-effort scattergun approach, well, that's not a good way to try to start off any kind of relationship, business or otherwise.

Project Stage, Game "Quality", and Seeking Feedback

One question I've been asked a few times on Streams and in the Discord is this: "can I submit a prototype?"

The answer is resoundingly YES. But remember what I said about playtesting numbers. You do not need a senior game designer with a PhD to tell you basic things your housemate or classmate could've told you.

There's also a world of difference between a prototype for an unusual mechanic or system, verses a project which is just you learning how to do a set of features or mechanics which already exist in 100 games.

A greybox project where I press WASD to walk, and then use the mouse to point and aim a gun, is not testing a concept. That concept is already proven to work, and that's why it gets to be a genre.

A greybox project where we use the WASD+mouse control described above to do something slightly different; that's the sort of thing I'm more likely to be interested in, because there you are testing whether that new mechanic works for the player, rather than it being a technical test of whether the develop can code a particular thing.

With 250 games in the queue, I am more likely to prioritise mid-development projects with a bit of art and a full game loop. This is partly because they make for more interesting streams, but it's also really hard to judge a very bare-bones project from someone you don't know.

If you're submitting greybox prototypes via the public form, just keep the criteria above in mind.

In contrast, if you're a channel patron and you want to submit a greybox prototype, absolutely go ahead, because we will try to play everything you submit, anyway. You guys are why this channel exists, and I want to be generous and flexible with my time with you. That means submit your games, submit your day-1 prototypes, submit your marketing copy and trailers - anything goes if you're a patron.

But this isn't just because I want to reward patrons for supporting the channel. It's also because I spend more time with you guys in chat and on the Discord, and that means when you ask me questions, I understand the person those questions are coming from.

So often a complete stranger will ask me a "what should I do" type of question, and the answer is some variation on "I don't know you bro". What you should do is very dependent on who you are, your career stage, and skill level. So I'm more receptive to looking at very bare-bones ideas, documentation, or even just "discussing ideas" when its with more active community member, because when I know who you are and what you can do then we can have a more helpful conversation.

Let's take a simple sentence like "I want to make a cyberpunk deckbuilder". Now, you might hear that sentence from a total stranger, and think "sure, fine, I like both of those things". But put those words in the mouth of a bunch of different game developers you know, and imagine how it changes the response.

The statement is fundamentally different, because you know that person, what they can make, their strengths and weaknesses and you can better visualize what a "making a cyberpunk deckbuilder" is going to mean for them. Anyone who knows anything about any creative craft knows that execution trumps ideas, and this is why you cannot really have productive conversations about raw ideas when you do not know the speaker very well.

Below: a scene from the Cohen Brother's 1994 movie The Hudsucker Proxy. The main character invents the hoola hoop, but for a very long time no-one understands his idea, because he cannot communicate the idea without properly executing it.

This brings us back to a common theme which keeps coming up in recent conversations: advice is interpersonal. It's very difficult to answer something like "is this game idea a good idea" or "should I keep working on this prototype" if I don't know the person asking the question.

The idea might be unique or interesting, but whether it's worth pursuing depends on a lot of different factors; many of which are things we can't ascertain from the prototype. How will this developer approach the art and theming of this game? I don't know them, so if I encourage them, they could take a perfectly excellent idea and then "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" through poor execution. If two people send me the same very bare-bones prototype and one was made in a day and the other has had months of work put in, what does that say about the two developers and their ability to act upon advice given to them?

So, if you're an active community member in the Discord, and I can see what you generally make and have been making, then it's a lot easier for me to give helpful feedback on greybox/wireframe prototypes. But if you're a random stranger online and you send me something like that, unless it's a really experimental unusual concept, it's difficult to have a productive conversation around it. Does the game have no art or sound because you're following "best practices", or simply because you don't know how to do those things yet?

ADVICE IS INTERPERSONAL: remember this phrase every time you find yourself looking to others for questions about what you should do, "Advice is Interpersonal" means that people who don't know you can't give you situationally appropriate advice, and "best fit advice" for a large group of people is generally quite useless. This is why marriage counselors still exist, and the need for them doesn't magically disappear when enough books about relationships have been written. A book or a video can be a very very useful teacher, but it only works if you're incredibly self-aware about what it's telling you and how it relates to your situation (or doesn't).

Diversity & Inclusiveness

You might have seen some of the above and thought "why should a developer get priority based on who they are or where they come from?"

When it comes to nationality; it's very common for games coming out of countries with less mature games industries to not really be what the western indie games market is "looking for". This makes it very easy for someone like myself to automatically dismiss them out of hand when I look and see a slighly ropey attempt at making GTA with Synty assets.

Having a slight weighting toward games sent to me by developers in under-represented countries helps prevent me from dismissing those games straight off the bat just because they maybe don't match the taste profile for a western indie game. Doing the same for devs from gender minorities helps to ensure I'm not avoiding scheduling/playing games which are completely outside of my taste profile - which can happen quite easily if a game isn't to my taste, or if I feel too much like I need to fit the taste profile of the (majority male 20-40) audience of our niche on YouTube.

This is a common issue with gamedev channels. Arguably part of the reason for the recent phenomenon of indie dev guys only just learning about casual game audiences in 2026 is because of this. We are biased toward out own tastes and what we've historically enjoyed playing, and that's why not enough people who watch IGC also know about Cute Games Club, despite it being one of the better, more creative gamedev channels on YouTube.

The main thing here is that the "score" doesn't actually assure the games get shown. It just helps me to avoid avoiding them entirely when deciding what to show. Systems like this are imperfect, but they're there to try to acknowledge some subconscious bias and address it without overcorrecting.

There will always be some people who think that any attempt at correction is an overcorrection, and they love to troll discussions and pretend they are more moderate than they are! If you think any of this is unfair or unnecessary, then please take a moment to consider how indie dev wunderkind Jonathan Blow thinks women are biologically predisposed to not be interested in computing, and then follow that up with a fun little game of "How Many Women Has This YouTuber Interviewed?".

You don't have to agree with me on whether something is an issue, but I'm being transparent about it here so you can go elsewhere if it bothers you.

So there it is, that's how the system works, and why it is the way it is.