A little over a year ago, Steam players were tasked with a simple order—slay the princess. They took up the call to action in droves, diving into the depths of one of the most branching and intertwined visual novels to release in years and pushing it to well over 12,000 reviews. Now, a year later, Slay the Princess has received a massive expansion called The Pristine Cut, bringing it well past 16,000 positive reviews on Steam.
Today I’ll be talking to Tony Howard-Arias and Abby Howard, the developer duo at Black Tabby Games about their work on Slay the Princess and Scarlet Hollow!
Arimia: Hi Tony and Abby, thank you for sitting down with me to talk about Slay the Princess! It’s not your first visual novel, so I’m wondering what got you two into visual novels, and if you have any favorite VNs?
Tony: A lot of my influences come more from the point and click and adventure game genre than full-on visual novels. So things like Telltale’s The Walking Dead and Life is Strange were big initial inspiration points of what people can do with interactive narratives. As well as a lot of Bioware RPGs from back in the day — Knights of the Old Republic was a formative experience for me, as was Dragon Age: Origins and the Mass Effect Series. In terms of more contemporary influences there, Disco Elysium is huge huge huge for me, and I really enjoyed The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide when they first released.
That’s not to say that I haven’t read many VNs though! I want to say Hatoful Boyfriend was my first one, and I’ve also really enjoyed South Scrimshaw, Eliza, If Found, and Song of Saya and Long Live the Queen are standouts for me personally.
Working in visual novels felt like a good medium to use to bridge my interest in interactive narratives and Abby’s already formidable skillset as a graphic novelist. There’s a huge overlap, IMO between comics and VNs as mediums that really take advantage of the intersection of art and writing.
Abby: So I first got into working on visual novels because of their similarity to the work I was already doing in comics. It’s certainly different in a lot of ways, but it felt like something I would be able to branch out into with the skills I’d built in my time in the comics mines.
As for my favorites…. honestly the one that stuck with me the most was Saya no Uta. The ability of visual novels and games in general to place the player in the shoes of a protagonist means that even games where there are only one or two major branching points still feel highly impactful, which is really interesting and beautiful to me!
We first got talking about working together on something like this when chatting with a friend at NYC Comic-Con about a demon dating simulator. It reminded me of a horror visual novel I’d wanted to make years and years earlier, and Tony and I both kind of turned to each other and said “Why don’t we….?” And in a few hours we’d outlined the start of Scarlet Hollow!
Arimia: I can definitely see the inspiration from some of these in your works, with the meshing of psychological horror and extremely branching narratives.
Your first visual novel, Scarlet Hollow, is an episodic early access release while your most recent game, Slay the Princess, is a self-contained story, albeit with a lot of branching paths. What made you want to try something so branching? Is there a release style you prefer?
Tony: So much of Slay the Princess came out of the constraints we put on ourselves so it would minimally slow down Scarlet Hollow’s development. Art is a real bottleneck for us, since Abby personally hand-draws EVERYTHING in our games, so when we started playing around with the ideas that eventually would become StP, we knew we wanted to limit the scale of the environment as well as how many characters Abby would have to draw.
This has a really fun side effect where because things were minimized so much, we could very thoroughly explore a broad and complete set of possible choices. Scarlet Hollow already has a ton of branching in it, but it’s much harder there to, say, have the player reject the call to adventure in episode one of seven, while in Slay the Princess, we’re able to give players that choice and run with it! Very fun from a writing perspective, even if it’s also very challenging.
Abby: As for which release style we prefer, I definitely prefer being able to give people everything at once, as it’s just a cleaner experience and there’s less waiting involved for the players—however, I do think both have their merits!
Scarlet Hollow is a particular kind of mystery game where it benefits from an audience that has time between episodes to speculate. I know this is something Tony enjoyed about episodic mystery games in the past, being able to speculate with other fans and explore a story as it unfolded, and was part of why we decided to go with an episodic release schedule in the first place. It also helped a lot with initial funding, as a release would give us a bit of a boost so we could keep our studio going until the next episode was done.
I, on the other hand, am someone who likes to be able to read/play something in one big obsessive burst, so we differ in that way!
Arimia: Yeah, there’s definitely pros and cons to episodic releases from even just a community aspect – getting that feedback and player insight in stages is valuable, but you’re also essentially rereleasing the game with every episode.
In a similar vein, is there any marketing lessons you learned during Scarlet Hollow that better prepared you for Slay the Princess?
Tony: Oh, so many! A lot of early work we did on Slay the Princess was specifically taking away lessons from what did (and mostly didn’t) work for Scarlet Hollow.
The biggest lesson we learned was that we really needed a tight pitch. Something we noticed with Scarlet Hollow was that once they started playing it, people tended to like it a lot — Episode 4 has a 60% completion rate according to Steam achievements. And that meant we had a ton of good word of mouth. But at the same time, getting people into the door was hard, and a lot of that came down to the pitch.
Scarlet Hollow needs time to describe to someone — the shortest pitch we have (other than “made by the devs of Slay the Princess”) is still a few sentences long, and even then, you still don’t have a super good idea what the game is about. Players have very short attention span when they browse markets like Steam, and that’s by necessity. Some 14,000 games have already released this year! So of course players only have a few seconds to decide if they’re interested in something.
Slay the Princess has a much quicker pitch — just the capsule art/title/one sentence description on Steam is enough for most people to get at least a little interested.
The other unfortunate lesson we learned from Scarlet Hollow is that early access is hard. It’s a turnoff for a lot of people, or, if we want to use softer language, a TON of people would rather wait until a game is finished before they pick it up. Which is totally fair and understandable! But you need to be able to keep the lights on until your full release. We initially imagined Slay the Princess to be quite a bit shorter than Scarlet Hollow so we could skip early access. Originally it was scoped at around 60,000 words (vs the first 4 episodes of SH coming in at 580,000.) On release that had crept up to 140k, and now it’s at 194k with the Pristine Cut, but once we got into the meat of development we knew we already had a hit on our hands so we were able to put those extra resources into the game.
The last lesson we learned was that visual novels are just… hard to market on social media. They’re very static, which makes their trailers feel bad compared to other games, especially with how important video has become for promoting things. This is part of the reason we added more dynamic effects and animations to Slay the Princess, and this combined with the smaller scope of the game is why we decided to add voice acting, which was absolutely huge both in terms of the game picking up on platforms like Twitter and Tiktok, and for the overall quality of the full release.
Arimia: The smaller you can get your pitch down, the easier it becomes to market, but on the flip-side, you end up losing a lot of nuance and the essence of a story when you boil it down so much—it’s a tricky slope! And like you said, most visual novels are not really social media darlings, as they’re static and require you to read the dialogue/narration on screen (which can be very tiny depending on the resolution), so it’s great that you found a way around that.
Were there any parts of marketing Slay the Princess that made you realize you had to change course?
Tony: There wasn’t anything like that from the marketing side, but knowing when something isn’t working and not being precious with it is, I’d like to say, one of our strengths as a studio. There were quite a few story structures and routes in the demo that weren’t working for us for a variety of reasons once we switched to working on the full game, so we were quick to drop them and move on to new ideas.
Our general rule of thumb there is that if it isn’t fun or interesting for us to write, it won’t be fun or interesting to read/play!
Abby: I feel like it was a tight pitch from the start, and that pitch has been effective for us throughout the course of the game’s development! The first couple sentences of the game itself kind of do the work for us. It just intrigues people, I think!
Arimia: That makes sense – it feels like a very tight pitch from the beginning. Having such a clear vision of what you’re making makes marketing so much easier. I see a lot of people struggle with that because they’re trying to sell something they don’t full understand themselves.
Were there any games you took inspiration from?
Tony: For marketing, not really, and I think that’s a better way to operate. Every game is this unique thing, and the best marketing will always be bespoke for a given title. You have to figure out what’s special about yours that you want to communicate, and to figure out the best way to get that message across. I guess we took some inspiration from Scarlet Hollow, our other game, in terms of really drilling out what our points of friction were, and also understanding what about our work people connect with.
You have to figure out what’s special about yours that you want to communicate, and to figure out the best way to get that message across.
Tony Howard-Arias
Ultimately, you need to be your authentic self when you’re sharing something, and your work has to be an authentic extension of yourself as well. The further you get away from that, the harder it’s going to be to get things to pick up steam.
You see this a lot with game publishers, who, at least on social, often wind up floundering and not gaining a lot of traction, because they talk about their games stiffly. You can always tell when marketing language isn’t coming from the developer.
Arimia: Definitely. I see a lot of developers looking to hire marketing firms / people hoping it’ll be an easy solution, but the reality of it is that marketing is a much more complex, unique thing that needs to be tailored to the individual game – you wouldn’t just hire “an artist” for a game, as you’d want a specific art style that fits what you’re aiming for.
We discussed a bit about how visual novels can be hard to market on social media due to the nature of the medium, but what do you think was the least effective thing marketing-wise for Slay the Princess?
Tony: It’s hard to point to a single “least effective” marketing angle for Slay the Princess. I think one of the greatest challenges for both of our games is just how spoiler-heavy their most interesting imagery is. And because of this, there’s a LOT about Slay the Princess (and Scarlet Hollow) that we just can’t share on social.
With all games, there’s also just a baseline question of what platforms are going to work best for them — it’s important to try multiple different avenues when you try to reach fans, because it’s never one-size-fits all. A lot of people see marketing success on Instagram, while that’s never worked for us. Likewise, I know a lot of devs struggle to connect with fans (as opposed to devs) on Twitter, but Twitter has always had particularly strong returns.
Arimia: We talked previously about how Scarlet Hollow is bolstered by word of mouth. When I look at your social media, I see a lot of fan interaction, fan art, and more. For developers who are more introverted and shy, what advice would you give them about possibly interacting with fans?
Tony: An unfortunate aspect of being a small developer is that you can’t be shy. If you don’t advocate for your work, it’s going to drown in the 200+ games that release on Steam every week. But ideally you’re doing more than just posting into the void about your work.
I always like to make sure that everything we do pushes people somewhere. That is, if they find our Steam page, maybe they play our demo. If they finish our demo, maybe the demo sends them to our discord or mailing list or social platforms. The more fans you’re able to collect in one place, the easier it is to get traction with each new announcement. And once you’re in a place where announcements start to gain more organic traction, it feels less bad to post!
Arimia: I think a lot of devs see marketing more as a means to an end rather than a pipeline or process—thinking of it in terms of a funnel (where did someone find my game? where will they go after that? how can I keep them interested in learning more?) helps shape a broader scope around release.
Since a lot of the game’s discoverability came from word of mouth, do you think press and streamers significantly helped share the game, or do you think it led to potential players getting spoiled about the narrative?
Tony: For both of our games, streamers have had an outsized impact in growing our audience. Gab Smolders did wonders for Scarlet Hollow’s early longevity, and ManlyBadassHero wound up really amplifying Slay the Princess’ first demo. And then a ton of other streamers helped at, and post launch.
There’s a very real concern that streamers picking up narrative games has a negative impact, and I do think that in most cases, that’s true. We’ve managed to sidestep this issue by having an absolutely huge amount of variation in our games, to the point where, unless you’re intentionally making the same decisions as someone you just watched, odds are your experience in Scarlet Hollow or Slay the Princess is going to be different than whatever experience you saw someone else have.
And the structure of our games make it obvious that this is the case, too! So if anything, seeing a streamer make different decisions than a given player might make pushes them to play on their own.
This also brings us to a very important question I ask a lot of VN devs who come to us for advice, which is “why are you making a VN?” (As opposed to a comic, a book, a movie, etc.) When you set out to tell a story, it’s important to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the medium you work in. I think VNs—and video games as a whole—are a fantastic medium if player agency or involvement is a vital part of your story. This doesn’t mean you have to make a choice-driven VN, but if you’re not, I immediately want to know the why of a project. Why is a VN the best way to tell your story?
When you set out to tell a story, it’s important to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the medium you work in. I think VNs—and video games as a whole—are a fantastic medium if player agency or involvement is a vital part of your story.
Tony Howard-Arias
On the press side of things… they can be helpful, but I think one of the most important things for you to do as a developer is to find a way to not be reliant on them. They’re so strapped for funds and employees that at this point, they’re all backwards looking. They might jump on a trend once it’s proving to be successful, but it’s very rare for them to stick their necks out for something new.
And if they do show up, the sales impact will probably be underwhelming. Scarlet Hollow being Game of the Year for an editor at Kotaku moved maybe 100 copies. Meanwhile, Markiplier playing Slay the Princess moved about 50,000 more copies than usual in a month. (Do not expect a streamer or YouTuber to do this for you, even if a big one plays your game. This is an outsized conversion rate.) To give a more reasonable metric, prior to Slay the Princess being announced, we could trace about 15% of Scarlet Hollow’s total playerbase to Gab Smolders.
Back to the press, I think a good way to look at the them is that if they show up for you, it’s a sign you’re doing something right, but if they don’t show up for you, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done anything wrong. Especially as the media landscape’s drought gets worse, and especially when it comes to VNs.
Slay the Princess has performed exceptionally well for an indie game, and it took us nearly three weeks following The Pristine Cut’s release to get enough reviews on a single platform to get a metacritic score. It’s hard and getting coverage won’t necessarily change your trajectory.
Arimia: Definitely, streamers can help games more than hurt them in my opinion. A lot of our most vocal fans are streamers and their audiences come to love the characters in the stories by experiencing it together with the streamers – it’s a connection for both parties.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to fellow VN devs?
Tony: I think the main piece of advice I’d have is just re-iterating something from my previous answer: ask yourself why you’re making a VN. If you don’t have a strong answer, then you’re going to struggle to market your game to people.
Likewise, you need to ask yourself “why would someone read my VN?” As opposed to reading a different VN, or playing a different game, or watching TV or going on a walk. So much of marketing is just finding a way to connect with people who are going to connect with your work, and you need to find a succinct way to explain what you’re offering them. Time is finite, and there are so many ways to spend it these days. Convincing people to give that time to you is the toughest ask you’re going to make — it’s even tougher than getting people to give you money.
Arimia: Finally, my most important question—which princess do people like the most / are most vocal for?
Tony: Even after the new release, it’s gotta be the Thorn. There’s just something about her that speaks to people. Witch and Razor are a close second a third, though!
And there you go, an insight into the development process for Slay the Princess and how they approach marketing at Black Tabby Games! Be sure to check out Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut now that it’s released on Steam and itchio.
