my various projects and thoughts
When we decide to make a project, we typically don’t assume that the project will fail, that members will ghost us, that we’ll be hit by real life problems. But these things do happen, and quite frequently.
Whether you’re working solo or with a team, it’s important to sit down and make backup plans. Why and how? Let’s look at that today.
Continue reading “making game development backup plans”
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!
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!).
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.
Continue reading “How to Market Visual Novels”
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.
Continue reading “How to Find Game Jam Teams”