Short-Form
What makes an indie game work in short-form
Short-form does not require horror, shock or co-op. It requires a readable reason to keep watching.
Strong hooks usually fall into a few families: a mechanic the viewer understands instantly, a surprising outcome, a challenge with clear stakes, a transformation, a failure/recovery moment or a visual escalation.
Test the same game from multiple angles instead of judging the whole game from one post. A mechanic-first edit can fail while a challenge-first version of the same footage succeeds.
The goal of a short experiment is not to prove that TikTok works. It is to learn which part of the game travels.