Articles

Marketing Visual Novels FAQ

arimia

Yesterday (June 25th) was the 3rd anniversary of my first commercial game, That Which Binds Us, which was a commercial failure. After it released to little fanfare, I realized I was missing something- marketing. Yadda yadda, 3 years later I’m sitting here trying to teach others how to market their visual novels. Over those 3 years, I’ve been asked a lot of questions on marketing VNs. Today I want to answer some of those for future VN devs.

Some of these questions are ones I’ve heard over and over while others are questions I’ve received in my VN marketing channel (feel free to join us and ask any questions or share insights!).

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Articles

Cutting Visual Novel Scope – Examples

arimia

I’ve talked before about cutting the scope in indie games and how important is. If you haven’t seen my last rant on it, you can read it here. For those unfamiliar, scope is the entirety of a project. The scope of a project comprises everything from the artwork, the writing, the amount of characters, the features, and more. Keeping your visual novel’s scope is important for several reasons.

The main reason to keep the scope small is it helps a project get finished. You have less work to do that’s frivolous which speeds up production. Keeping the scope small also narrows in on the project’s vision. By getting rid of extra stuff that can bog down the project, the core of the project is more visible. Most importantly, though, a scope that’s too large can kill a project.

However, saying “cut scope” and “keep scope small” can be too vague for new developers. Today I want to give some specific examples on places you can cut scope.

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Articles

How to Market Visual Novels

arimia

Visual novels are a great form of media- they combine game mechanics with an emphasis on narratives and strong visuals. They can be used to tell horror stories, high school slice of life, and so much more. But how do you market visual novels?

I’m Arimia, the lead developer at Crystal Game Works and marketing lead at Studio Élan. Marketing visual novels is a bit of a passion project for me- I like learning more about what people like and how they think. I’ve compiled a bunch of concepts I’ve learned over the years while marketing visual novels so you can get more eyes on your games.

Last updated November 2024.

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Articles

How to Find Game Jam Teams

arimia

It feels like every couple of months I’m either entering a game jam or hosting one. Well, it’s probably true- after all, game jams are going on at every moment nowadays! A couple years ago there were around 20 or so jams happening at any given time. Now, it seems like there’s 50+ happening concurrently.

If you’re newer to game jams and want to see what I’m talking about, you can see a comprehensive list of basically every online game jam happening on itch.io’s calendar here. Finding a game jam to enter has never been easier, but finding a team is still a struggle for some. Today we’re going to talk through the process of finding a team.

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Blog

The Road Ahead

arimia

NaNoRenO has finally wrapped up and we’ve survived another March. It was a lot less hectic than last March when we were grappling with the start of a pandemic. I’ve known since before NaNo started that this would be my last big team project that I’d lead, but I didn’t fully know why I felt that way. I assumed it was burnout, but I continued on. Just one last project, it’d be fine.

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