Twenty Minutes Per Demo Is All Next Fest Gets From Me
Steam's demo week is on again, and my rule is blunt: twenty minutes per demo or the folder gets closed. Most festival builds spend the first ten minutes on a cinematic and a tutorial, so I check whether the opening two minutes already show the actual loop. That one question kills nine out of ten.
What survives is usually small and a little ugly but confident – a builder that lets you break something, a roguelike that trusts you to die fast. The very polished pages can wait for release; their store page is not going anywhere.
I keep one line per demo in a text file: what I did, what surprised me, whether I would pay for more. After a week of hype that file is the only note I trust.