Articles

Cutting Visual Novel Scope – Examples

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

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 ร‰lan. 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

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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Social Media Marketing for Indie Games – Twitter 2021 Guide

As of 2019 Twitter has over 81.7 million users, according to Statista. Over 55% of Twitter users as of July 2020 are between 18-34 years old. This is the site you’ll see recommended again and again to indie devs, and for good reason- it’s easy to pick up, there’s a wide array of indie devs on the site, and you can easily link things.

Today we’re going to look at how to compose your tweets and different tips & tricks for indie game marketing on Twitter.

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Social Media Marketing for Indie Games – Instagram 2021 Guide

Instagram is a visual-first social media platform owned by Facebook. It has one of the highest userbases out of any social media platform with over 1 billion monthly active users as over 2021.

Statistic: Most popular social networks worldwide as of January 2021, ranked by number of active users (in millions) | Statista
Find more statistics at Statista


Instagram can be hard for indie games to get a foothold on, but its massive userbase and ease of uploading can be a very useful asset in your marketing plan, especially with its move towards video.

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Articles

Social Media Marketing for Indie Games – 2021 Guide

Hi, I’m Arimia. I’ve been learning digital marketing ever since my first commercial game, That Which Binds Us, didn’t sell as well as I expected. Nowadays I do social media management at Studio ร‰lan as well as my own studio Crystal Game Works. I get asked a lot how new devs can promote their indie game and the short answer is “post interesting images consistently” but the long answer is, well, much longer. When does a new dev start posting? Where do they post? How do they post?

This series will be long. Treat it as a guide book. An advice list. Take some parts as solid rules and others as ideas you can mold into your own style. Figure out what works best for you and your game as you learn. Let’s get started.

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