my various projects and thoughts
Marketing is how you communicate to people what your game is about. Naturally, this means “spoiling” some of the meat of the game.
But how much is too much spoiling? How do you know what will hook the player and how much is too much information?
Today I want to look at why spoiling some of your game is a good thing and how to avoid spoiling too much.
Continue reading “Spoiling Content while Marketing”
At the end of the day as a dev, we want people to play our game. We want people to play it and preferably tell us they like it, maybe even recommend it to a friend. But today, more than ever, making a game and releasing it isn’t enough.
Marketing is one of the key aspects of game development, as it is with any product development, but understanding the components of marketing—the building blocks of why we do this—is more important than ever. Today I want to take a step back and talk about the fundamentals of marketing—what does it mean to “market a game”?
Continue reading “Marketing Fundamentals for indie game developers”
While I talk about concepts and ideas for marketing indie games a lot, I rarely see talks on what to use to market indie games. Today I want to briefly go over tools I use weekly for indie game marketing.
There’s also a brief bonus section on additional websites that are cool for social media marketing. Alright, let’s get started!
One problem I hear a lot is “I don’t have anything to post” or “I’m afraid I’ll run out of things to post”. You’ll never truly run out of things to say unless you’ve stopped development and stopped thinking about the game, but the fear is there nonetheless for many newer devs.
Today I want to give an example of how I take 1 piece of content (in this case, a quick drawing) and reuse it over several social media platforms.
Continue reading “How to reuse 1 piece of content for marketing”
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!).
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.
Continue reading “Cutting Visual Novel Scope – Examples”