my various projects and thoughts
Yeah so here’s my real article for February.
Time and time again, I’ll open up Twitter (already a bad move) and look through my feed- when I want to look for new visual novel projects, I look through Lemon’s feed, as she retweets stuff for visual novel developers.
Every so often, I’ll see something along these lines…
Or maybe something like this…
Or possibly even something like this…
To me, all of these tweets serve the same purpose—
Tuesday Morning has one of the most generic corporate newsletters I’ve ever had the displeasure of signing up for. However, Tuesday Morning is a more unique company than something like Olive Garden emailing you about endless pasta bowls coming back. Today I’d like to deviate from my normal articles and look into your brand and shaping your channels around it…
Continue reading “Tuesday Morning’s Newsletter Sucks”
Marketing is hard, but you don’t need me to tell you that. If you’ve attempted any kind of long-term project, whether it be a Kickstarter, a commercial game, or just a big undertaking, you’ve probably said this line:
I need a marketer.
every developer ever
I said that very line 5 years ago when I was making my very first commercial visual novel, That Which Binds Us. But when I said this, I didn’t really understand what I was saying.
We all need to do marketing for our projects if we’re making them for any reason that’s not just “I want to have fun”. But, the thing about marketing is that it’s a broad category encompassing several different fields…
Saying “I need a marketer” is equivalent to saying “I need an artist”. Pretty much anyone is going to tell you to be more specific! Do you need a background artist, a character artist, a concept designer, a GUI designer, something else? Just like there’s multiple fields of expertise in artists, there’s multiple areas of marketing.
So today, let’s get a better understanding of what these different marketing fields are.
Continue reading “what to know before hiring a marketer for your game”
There’s three things you can bet on in life- death, taxes, and social media sites fading into obscurity one after the other. Eventually, every social media site will have its sundown. People said MySpace would always be the biggest platform and that AOL would be the standard.
Things change. World events happen. Billionaires get greedy.
To preface this, I was already writing this article in regards to account termination on social media platforms, effectively shutting off that line of communication for you. But with Twitter teetering ever closer to the brink of collapse each day, I’ve changed this up a bit.
Continue reading “Volatility of Social Media”
I’ve published quite a few projects to itch.io and played hundreds more from the site. Over the years, the amount of games on the site has tripled- but, just like how the site has grown, the amount of customization developers have has grown.
So then, why do so many developers make bare minimal changes to their itch.io pages? There’s so many games vying for player’s attention, so why do they do the bare minimum to get their attention? Today I want to look at various ways to spruce up your itch.io page.
Continue reading “How to Make Your itch.io Page Stand Out”
Today I thought I’d write up a little case study on tagging games on itch.io with some examples, namely Crimson Waves on the Emerald Sea.
CWES is a Victorian-esque vampire visual novel that has always been an odd spot for me to market. CWES has a gay romance, but only between one of the protags and his adult counterpart and isn’t the focus; it’s a fully linear visual novel with no choices; it’s got hints of mystery, drama, and action, but at 2~ hours long it isn’t fully any of those; etc. It has received all positive reviews on Steam & itch.io but getting people to try it has been a challenge to say the least!
Compared to my previous games, CWES’ engagement on itch.io has been abysmal- but we’re not going to fully dissect that here today. Instead, we’re here to look at store pages!
Continue reading “Tagging Visual Novels on itch.io”