wishvane Hi, I'm Yuri. Most people online know me as Flagrare.
I write fiction, I build tools for people who make things, and I'm currently doing the most statistically reckless thing you can do with both skills: making an indie game. It's a co-op horror thing where two players guard opposite walls of an abyss. The abyss is doing fine. The market research was the scary part.
Where wishvane comes from
wishvane exists because I caught myself doing the ritual: fifteen SteamDB tabs, a spreadsheet, and a feeling. Before betting years of nights and weekends on a game, I wanted one sentence nobody would sell me at a price a solo dev can pay: games like yours usually land here.
The tools I could afford handed me dashboards and wished me luck. But the honest answer was sitting in public the whole time: every game like mine had already run my experiment and published the results. wishvane just reads them back, out loud, in plain sentences.
"Why should anyone trust you to build this?" Fair question. My answer is that you shouldn't have to: every number here is a labeled range with its method printed next to it, and when the honest answer is "we don't know," wishvane says that instead of inventing a confident-sounding stat. I write horror. I know exactly how scary a spreadsheet that flatters you can be.
Tested on my own dreams first
wishvane's first user is me. It read my own game's genre before it read anyone else's, and it told me things I didn't love hearing. That's the product working as intended. If it says something uncomfortable about your idea, we're even.
The rest of my week: a day job as a software engineer, two published books, more flash fiction than is medically advisable, and Storylight, the small ecosystem of tools I build for people who live by stories, portfolios that understand narrative work, a game-design curriculum, a resume builder for creatives. wishvane is the newest room in that house.
I'm taking it slow. Listening to feedback. Building in public: the whole journey, including the parts where the ignition fails, is documented at The Ignition Blueprint.
This is the beginning, not the product
What's live today is the first question of many: should I build this at all? The plan is to follow a game through its whole life. Before you have a Steam page: the reality check you're looking at now. Once you have one: whether your marketing actually moves wishlists, or just feels like it does. At launch: what drove the spike. After: which of your efforts keeps selling copies years later, because for indie games, most of the money arrives long after launch day.
The long-term heart is attribution, being able to say "your Reddit devlog drove about 340 wishlists; stop burning weekends on Twitter" with a straight face and the receipts to back it. Nobody offers that to indies at a price indies can pay. That's the mountain. What you're standing on is base camp, and I'd rather show you base camp honestly than sell you a rendering of the summit.